Buu's many forms: a different perspective

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Saturnine
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Buu's many forms: a different perspective

Post by Saturnine » Sat Jan 06, 2018 7:26 pm

I know this discussion has been had many times already, but recently I've been focusing on the Buu arc and have decided to publish my own perceptions on Buu's many forms, their nature and the reason behind each form's strength. I believe I've come to more logical explanations than some of the most prevalent ones among fans (especially on Youtube). I also won't be focusing much on Super Buu's absorptions, since it's been pretty well-established and isn't really debatable that they're simply additive. What I'd like to focus on more are the relationships between the Buu forms created by the Kaioshins' influence, as well as providing my own idea of explaining Super Buu's leap in strength, not reliant on as many assumptions as the circulating explanations do. For comparative numbers, I'll have Kid Buu - the purest form - represented as 100%, and all other forms in relation to this percentage. To make calculations easier, I'm going to assume Super Buu to be only 5x as strong as Kid Buu (500%), and I realize this might be lowballing it, but let's just use it for the sake of the argument. I do realize that depending on what multipliers for SSj you use, Super Buu could be even upwards of 30x stronger than Kid Buu, but let's keep things simple.

1) The Kaioshins' Influence

We've seen that the two absorptions that brought Kid Buu from his original state to the Innocent Buu state we first saw him in worked quite differently from the absorptions we saw from Super Buu. Super Buu's absorptions simply added the victim's powerlevel directly to Buu's own, while also affording him access to their mental faculties, but leaving his personality, or the nature of his entity largely unchanged. Kid Buu's absorptions brought about changes that were much more drastic. This could be due to either of two reasons, and we cannot know for sure:
a) The Kaioshins' essence intrinsically having a stronger and more transcendent influence, which explains why they changed Buu so drastically
b) Kid Buu is just more prone to changes than Super Buu - the latter's relative stability coming from being a fused entity already.
Whichever explanation you pick is up to your personal tastes, but the results will remain pretty much the same.

2) Buff Buu

So first Kid Buu absorbs South Kaioshin, becoming stronger by leaps and bounds. The Southern Kaioshin's defining traits were his burly physique and great strength, and absorbing him seemed to definitely give him a greater boost in power than just A+B. Even if we assumed Southern Kaioshin was close to Kid Buu's power (which I don't even think was the case), an additive absorption would only make Kid Buu around twice as strong as he was before. We know from the show that was not the case. Right here I'm placing Buff Buu at 700% Kid Buu, which is 1,4x stronger than Super Buu was, which is about right.

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3) Innocent Buu (Fatty)

The absorption of Dai Kaioshin came afterwards, and as we know the end effect was making Buu even weaker than his pure state, even though he had gained unbelievable power from absorbing the previous Kaioshin. It's quite difficult to explain logically, since once again the fusion behavior is quite different than with Super Buu - where the most powerful absorbee would constitute the "prime" that would dictate Buu's outward appearance. In this case, Dai Kaioshin seemed to be the "prime", rather than the much stronger South Kaioshin. Dai Kaioshin's influence was primarily based on kindness and benevolence - something that went in direct opposition to Buu's inherent malevolence. It therefore put a huge damper on Buu's power. What many seem to overlook though, is that this full power that was suppressed was the level he had achieved after absorbing the South Kaioshin (700% of the original for our purposes). Because the South Kaioshin's prime trait was "strength" rather than "kindness", his absorption reflected it perfectly, making Buu a body-builder version of his previous self, with all of his malevolence intact. Dai Kaioshin was the first and only absorption that limited Buu's power, by introducing into his being the antithesis of evil, which is benevolence.

However, Fat Buu's full power was not that much lower than Kid Buu's original power - with both being able to go toe to toe with SSj3 Goku, though clearly Fat Buu gave him much, much less of a challenge. I think it's fair to say that Fat Buu was around 1,2x weaker than Kid Buu was, which puts Fat Buu's full power at 84% of Kid Buu's. That means that Dai Kaioshin's influence reduced Buff Buu's power by a huge 88% (or even more if you like to have Super Buu even higher). If the same relationship were true had Kid Buu absorbed Dai Kaioshin straight away, Fat Buu would then be only at 12% of Kid Buu's full power, which would be just about the level of SSj Goku and Vegeta at that point in time (assuming SSj is 1/8th of SSj3).

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4) The Fission

While the three forms of Buu described above were single entities, a precedent was established when Fat Buu expelled all his evil, which then became Evil Buu. I would liken this very much to Kami doing the same, creating King Piccolo - they were originally the same being, but then they became forever separate and distinguishable (even after Piccolo absorbed Kami, distinction between the two would still be possible). The same happened with Evil Buu and the newly styled Mr. Buu. As we all know, the majority of power went to Evil Buu after the fission - opposite to what happened with Kami. This is probably because Kami was not intrinsically a malevolent creature, and Buu was - and not even Daikaioh's absorption could change that. We can assume that Evil Buu got 70% of the power, while Mr. Buu was left with 30%, which puts them at respectively at 60% and 25% of Kid Buu's power.

However the most important thing about this fission - and the key to understanding Super Buu - is realizing that the Kaioshin influence was split evenly between the two emergent Buus. If you pay attention you'll notice that Evil Buu still wears Dai Kaioshin's attire, even though he's skinny. Since before the fission, Buu was a singular being - albeit with absorptions altering his essence - this essence was shared between the two Buus. This is important to note because most people hypothesize that Super Buu's power has to do with a shift in the Kaioshins' influence once Super Buu is formed, and while at first glance this seems like a reasonable assumption, nothing really leads us to belive that is the case, which I'll explain in the following paragraphs.

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5) Super Buu

Most DB theorists are somewhat at a loss when it comes to explaining Super Buu's power (if they accept it's much bigger than Kid Buu's in the first place). Some say that since Super Buu's makeup is the same as Fat Buu's, he isn't stronger than Fat Buu bar a better body structure or something. Others say that Super Buu's stronger than Fat Buu because Daikaioh's influence is weaker and dampens less of his power (but still leaves less of it accessible than with Kid Buu, who's undampened by anyone). I believe these hypotheses are not the right way to go about things.

For one thing: all of these hypotheses conveniently ignore the South Kaioshin from the equation. Buff Buu was even stronger than Kid Buu. But if degrees of Kaioshin influence were really a factor, than what would really make Super Buu weaker than Buff Buu? Why does everyone go on assuming that Daikaioh's remaining influence was what consituted the difference? Super Buu was based on Evil Buu, which made him fully evil (though of course not as volatile and unreasonable as Kid Buu was - courtesy of the Kaioshins indeed).

That's why I think it's not the Kaioshin influence, or proportions thereof, that constitute Super Buu's strength, or that we're really at the stage of "more evil = stronger". Evil Buu and Fat Buu both share the essence of the Kaioshin, but are two separate entities. Super Buu is based on Evil Buu, since he's the base for the fusion, but it's precisely that which makes him so strong - FUSION. Super Buu isn't more evil than Fat Buu because Daikaioh's influence is weaker in him, it's because he's based on an entity spawned from Majin Buu's inner evil. That will always be evil, no matter what - even considering Dai Kaioshin's influence, which even Evil Buu clearly has (you can see it in his outfit). Super Buu was so powerful because the newly birthed Evil Buu fused with Mr. Buu. Just like when Piccolo fused with Kami the result was much more than A+B (considering Kami's pitiful power by that point), Evil Buu gained a huge power boost when he fused with Fat Buu. While the fusion was powerful enough to put Super Buu in a league of his own, it was still for some reason inferior to Buff Buu, showing just how staggering an influence South Kaioshin had on Kid Buu in terms of battle power. It's also consistent with the results of the similar Namekian fusion - while Nail made Piccolo many times more powerful, absorbing Kami yielded only a several-fold increase at best - compared to the wild, hundred-fold results we've seen with the fusion dance and Potara fusion. Considering Evil Buu was the base, the fusion with Mr. Buu made him leap from 60% of Kid Buu's power to 500% as Super Buu, a 8,33x increase. As discussed above, it could be more depending on your personal scaling.

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Why removing Mr. Buu from inside Super Buu made him regress back to Kid Buu instead of just Evil Buu is of course quite unclear and this particular thing is basically a matter of headcanon (I think). You could hypothesize that because the two Buus were so similar to each other, they had great fusing compatibility - therefure upon fusion all the Kaioshin influence was restricted to Mr. Buu, while before the fusion it was distributed evenly between the two Buus. Thus ripping out Mr. Buu left Buu with no Kaioshin influence whatsoever, regressing him to Kid Buu.

6) TL;DR

- Super Buu is so powerful because he's a fusion-type character, not because of any good/evil interplay.
- Evil Buu joining with Mr. Buu was no mere additive absorption, it was more ike Namekian fusion.
- He's so evil not because Dai Kaioshin's influence is more suppressed than it was with Fat Buu, but because his base is Evil Buu (known as "Pure Evil" in Japan), and good Mr. Buu only serves to augment this evil base. The degree of the Kaioshins' influence isn't any more consequential for Super Buu than it was for Fat Buu, and the source of his evil is not the lack of Dai Kaioshin's suppresion of evil, but the base fusee, Evil Buu, who was the embodiment of all Buu's evil at the time.
- The fusion was powerful enough to make Super Buu several to tens of times stronger than Kid Buu was, but its effect was weaker than just the absorption of the South Kaioshin by Kid Buu. The reason why Super Buu was weaker than Buff Buu was not Dai Kaioshin suppressing the remainder of Buu's power - because Buu's base was pure evil - but simply the fact that the fusion turned out weaker than South Kaioshin's absorption.

So this is my perspective on how to explain the power of Buu's different forms. Discuss and lemme know if you agree with my reasoning :)