Will the Real Super Saiyan Please Stand Up?
So to recap, we’ve seen that the series builds up the Super Saiyan as a legendary figure, then seems to either contradict or ignore most of the things said in the initial hype. While I think the extent to which the later series goes against the original idea of a Super Saiyan is exaggerated and not notably worse than the other loose ends created by Toriyama’s writing style, there’s no denying that it’s left many fans feeling dissatisfied. And seemingly in response to that, there have been several attempts to salvage the legend of the Super Saiyan. These fall into two categories: 1) introducing a new Super Saiyan form or character who’s supposed to
really be what the legend was talking about, or 2) trying to explain how the legend got started in the first place. These two approaches are not entirely disconnected. For instance, by claiming that Broli is the “legendary Super Saiyan”, DBZ movie 8 implies both that Broli rather than Goku is the one who truly fulfills the legend, and that the legend got its start in the first place due to Saiyans like Broli and not Goku. On the flipside, Episode of Bardock implies that time-travelling Super Saiyan Bardock is the source of the legend, and since Bardock’s Super Saiyan transformation there is in all manners similar to Goku’s transformation in the main series (too similar, you could say), this implies that Goku really does fulfill the legend. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start by looking at how the manga deals with this issue.
Candidate #0: Everyone
The manga is of course the original version of the story, and therefore where the term “legendary Super Saiyan” originates in the first place. However, in the manga the term is simply a synonym for Super Saiyan. The “legendary” is just added at times to show that the Super Saiyan is a concept from legend, and not to distinguish one particular “real” Super Saiyan from all the “regular” ones. Vegeta, Ginyu, and co. commonly affix “legendary” to the name “Super Saiyan”, but it doesn’t seem to be anything more than an adjective. Chapter 318, the one after Goku’s actual transformation, is titled “The Legendary Super Saiyan”. There is a drop-off in the use of “legendary” to describe the Super Saiyan after Trunks and the rest reach the form, but the idea of it as legendary never disappears entirely, and the ways in which the legend is contradicted is never taken by anyone as a sign that Goku et al aren’t
really what the legend was talking about. This is most clearly seen in chapter 429, when Vegeta learns that kid Trunks can transform into a Super Saiyan, and bemoans the fact that a little kid can so easily become the “legendary mightiest of warriors”. Here, even with the Super Saiyan concept at its most debased, it is still a thing of legend. The fact that even little kids can become it totally devalues the whole thing, hence Vegeta’s complaints, but there’s no sense that the form which kid Trunks so annoyingly achieves is in any way distinct from the thing which Vegeta/Ginyu/Freeza were going on and on about back in the Namek/Freeza story arc.
Sometimes you see fans speculate that maybe guys like Cell Games Gohan or Super Saiyan 3 Goku are the “real” legendary Super Saiyans. Super Saiyan 3, for instance, is about the closest thing we get to an exclusive Super Saiyan form in the manga, since only Goku and Gotenks reach it, and Gotenks is a Fusion character. But this is just fan speculation, and the manga itself does nothing to support the belief that any one particular Super Saiyan form is the real deal. It’s only in DBZ movie 8 and the introduction of Broli that we first get the idea of a capital-L “Legendary Super Saiyan” separate from the transformations Goku and the other heroes achieve. I should note that there’s no such thing as capital or lower case in Japanese, and therefore no difference between “legendary Super Saiyan” or “Legendary Super Saiyan”. With the way the term is used in the main series, there’s not much reason to capitalize “legendary”, since like I said it seems there to merely be an adjective often but not always applied to Super Saiyan. With Broli though, it starts being more of a title, and therefore worth capitalizing.
Before getting to Broli though, I want to jump outside of DB and take a brief look at the use of “Super Saiyan” in Toriyama’s self-parody manga Neko Majin Z. There, the stocky, buzzcut-sporting Saiyan Onio transforms into a Super Saiyan to fight the titular Neko Majin Z. Z wants to try that trick out too, but Onio says “only very few chosen Saiyans are capable of becoming legendary Super Saiyans.” Obviously this parody isn’t in continuity with the main DB series (at least not without lots and lots of fanwanks that suck the fun out of it all, defeating its whole purpose in the first place), but it’s still interesting to see Toriyama use the phrase “legendary Super Saiyan” explicitly in connection with multiple people. It’s only an elite chosen few, but it’s still more than one. Perhaps this was the definition of “Super Saiyan” he was working with during the Cell and Boo portion of the series, even if he never spelled it out there like he does here. Of course, the joke in NMZ is that Z really is able to turn into some sort of Super Saiyan, despite not even being a Saiyan at all. But Onio’s comment that only a select few Saiyans are capable of the transformation still seems like setup for the joke rather than part of the joke itself. And it’s more evidence that Toriyama never really considered “legendary Super Saiyan” to be an exclusive title designating some Real McCoy Super Saiyan.
It’s also worth noting that in NMZ, the “Super” in “Super Saiyan” is written simply in katakana, unlike in the DB manga.
Candidate #1: Broli
Alright, enough stalling, let’s talk Broli. His whole shtick is being the “Legendary Super Saiyan”, now redefined as something distinct from the “regular” Super Saiyans like Goku and co. Considering that the movie introduces this distinction out of nowhere, it’s slightly surprising how no real attempt is made to explain or define it (but not
that surprising, this being DB and all). Paragus simply shows up and tells Vegeta that the Legendary Super Saiyan is mucking about out in space, and Vegeta just seems to instantly accept the idea that for some reason there’s a Super Saiyan out there besides him, Goku, and the gang, and that this guy is somehow the “legendary” one while they are not. He does show some skepticism that Paragus is telling the truth, and later on has a minor mental breakdown when he finally sees that Broli is indeed the Legendary Super Saiyan, but he never questions the basic idea of the Legendary Super Saiyan as a distinct thing.
So what makes Broli “legendary”? The movie doesn’t flat-out say why, but establishes that Broli 1) is the archetypical savage and bloodthirsty Saiyan, 2) is ludicrously strong, and 3) became a Super Saiyan before Goku. And the implication of Broli’s title of “Legendary Super Saiyan” is that he fulfills the legend, while Goku and co. do not. Let’s once again take out that list of what we were told about the Super Saiyan in the buildup to Goku’s first transformation. According to this, the Super Saiyan:
---Is a legendary figure
---Appears once every thousand years.
---Is the mightiest warrior in the universe
---Overcomes the wall which no warrior, no matter how gifted, can overcome
---Loves blood and battle
---Acts ruthlessly
---Is the one thing Freeza fears
Ignoring the “legendary figure” bit for now, since that’s what we’re trying to establish, there’s the whole “one every 1,000 years” thing again. The movie’s idea seems to be to try and get around the prevalence of Super Saiyans post-Freeza but redefining Goku and co.’s Super Saiyan forms as somehow not what the legend was really talking about. Much like Scotsmen, Broli is a
true Super Saiyan, while Goku and the rest are…something. Bootleg Super Saiyans, I guess. That’s also why it becomes important for “Legendary Super Saiyan” to now be seen as a title, so that there can be only one
Legendary Super Saiyan once every 1,000 years, while all those other Super Saiyans don’t count. This is, again, not the way “legendary Super Saiyan” is used in the manga. Also notice that while Goku and Broli are born on the same day, Broli is shown in flashback as already being a Super Saiyan while a teenager, while Goku doesn’t transform until adulthood. Thus the movie shows Broli as really the first Super Saiyan to appear in the modern era.
Then we get the strongest-in-the-universe, overcomes-the-wall-nobody-else-can stuff. There have of course been many, many,
many arguments about how Broli stacks up against Cell/Super Saiyan 3 Goku/Boo/Vegetto/Dr. Manhattan/El Santo, but none of that need not concern us here. All that matters for this thread is that DBZ movie 8 portrays Broli as the strongest guy around, and notably stronger than the other Super Saiyans. He’s even given the deliciously absurd backstory of having a battle power of 10,000 while still a newborn. Being a villain, he’s allowed to be strong in ways that the heroes never really can, at least not for long. In a series like DB where the story revolves around people fighting to determine who’s strongest, having the hero be vastly stronger than the villain tends to stop the story dead in its tracks, while on the flipside having the villain be vastly stronger is what usually drives the story forward. Super Saiyan Goku is shown as ultimately superior to Freeza, but still needs to have a long battle with him to prove this. Cell Games Gohan gets to slaughter the Cell Juniors and knock Cell himself around for a bit, but in the end has to have a tough fight against a powered-up Cell. Vegetto is all-powerful, but if you blink you’ll miss him. Broli on the other hand, being the villain, is allowed to easily knock down Goku and the gang for the better part of an hour before being beaten in a rather unconvincing way.
Finally, there’s the idea that to completely become a Super Saiyan, one has to be merciless and love blood and battle. This sums up Broli pretty well, and again it’s a case where a villain is able to match the legend better than the heroes could. The Daizenhuu 7 technique dictionary’s entry on Super Saiyan backs up this idea, saying of Broli that “perhaps this instinct-driven form is the true Super Saiyan, which the legend says will ‘love destruction and slaughter’”. In a similar vein, Daizenshuu 6’s Memorial page for DBZ movies 8 and 9 says that “Broli was born from the initial concept that he was a preposterously strong guy who was evil through-and-through, and knew no pain. Different from Goku and the others, who became Super Saiyan through their own efforts, perhaps Broli is the legendary Super Saiyan from the original story, one of which appeared every thousand years…This is why Broli is called the ‘legendary Super Saiyan’”. Finally, the third TV animation daizenshuu’s Super Saiyan chart explains that Broli is “called the legendary Super Saiyan, since he loves destruction and slaughter, like the Super Saiyan of Saiyan legend”.
Speaking of the daizenshuu, this brings up the minor controversy of whether the term “Legendary Super Saiyan” refers to Broli as a whole or to his specific ultra-beefy form. The simple version is that Daizenshuu 6 and 7 use “Legendary Super Saiyan” as a name for his unique transformation, and this has been adopted in the modern fighting games, while DBZ movie 8 has people use the phrase to refer to Broli in general. However, the truth is a bit more complicated, and in fact both the movie and the guidebooks use the term in both ways. Sort of. In DBZ movie 8, after Broli breaks Paragus’ restraining device, transforms into his incredibly muscular form, and starts beating that tar out of everyone, Paragus tells Vegeta “now that Broli has gotten out of my control, and become the Legendary Saiyan, my plan to rule all the universe together with Broli-everything has come to an end.” OK, so he says “Legendary Saiyan” and not “Legendary
Super Saiyan”, but I think this must either be a goof or just them trying to vary the terminology a little after having tossed around the phrase “Legendary Super Saiyan” a million times by this point. Anyway, Paragus says that Broli has only
now become the Legendary (Super) Saiyan after breaking free from his restraints, making it sound more like something Broli can turn into rather than something he fully is at all times. On the flipside, while Daizenshuu 6 and 7 use “Legendary Super Saiyan” as a name for that particular form, they also refer to Broli in general as the “Legendary Super Saiyan” as well. Broli’s Daizenshuu 7 bio, for instance, begins by calling him the Legendary Super Saiyan, while also having pictures of Broli’s various forms, labeled as “normal”, “Super Saiyan”, and “Legendary Super Saiyan”. It’s also worth noting that Daizenshuu 6’s animation model gallery labels Broli’s huge form as “Super Saiyan Grade Two”, in contrast to his blue-haired “Super Saiyan Grade One” form (this naming scheme mirrors guidebook name for Super Vegeta’s ultra-buff form). Meanwhile, the third TV animation daizenshuu’s Super Saiyan chart labels Broli’s huge form as Type-B, with Type-A being his blue-haired form, and Type-C being his gold-haired skinny form seen in DBZ movie 10.
Anyway, I think this distinction between Broli in general and that specific form isn’t actually too meaningful. First off, I don’t think the guidebooks meant a whole lot by labeling that one form “Legendary Super Saiyan”. Broli is supposed to be the Legendary Super Saiyan, and he demonstrates a unique Super Saiyan form which no other character has. They needed to call this form
something, so why not “Legendary Super Saiyan”? It certainly sounds cooler than “Type-B”. What’s more, while Broli in general may be the Legendary Super Saiyan, it also makes sense to use that name for the form where he’s actually using his unique Super Saiyan power. After all, it seems absurd to say that Broli in his regular, black-haired form is equally the Legendary Super Saiyan as he is when he’s powered up into an actual, well,
Super Saiyan. Maybe it would have made sense if the movie had returned to the original idea of the Super Saiyan as being ultra-powerful but not visually distinct from regular Saiyans, and a permanent state. But the movie buys into the idea of Super Saiyan as a transformation, so they have to somehow combine Broli
being the Legendary Super Saiyan while at the same time having distinct regular and Super Saiyan forms like Goku and co. So this results in some confusion.
Oh yeah: while Freeza is long dead by the time period DBZ movie 8 is set, it seems safe to say that were he still around he’d be considerably frightened of Broli. Heck, one of Broli’s claims to fame is causing Vegeta to flat-out collapse in panic, which is arguably more impressive than scaring Freeza.
So, as far as DBZ movie 8 is concerned, Broli is the Legendary Super Saiyan. But, despite the character’s huge popularity, this has not quite stuck throughout the rest of the franchise. For one thing, Broli only appear in movies that have no real connection to the main continuity of the series. And while he’s the strongest around in DBZ movie 8, in typical DB fashion there are stronger and stronger characters introduced, so that Broli’s status as strongest in the universe (and by extension his claim to being the guy who
really fulfills the legend) seems questionable. There’s also the loose thread of, if Broli is the guy the legend was talking about, what the heck are Goku and co? Why would there be an alternate, non-legendary kind of Super Saiyan, and how does it relate to Broli’s version? For all these reasons, Broli has never been universally adopted as the “real” Legendary Super Saiyan, and other candidates have been proposed.
Candidate #2: The Previous Super Saiyan(s)
Going backwards in DB time but forwards in real-world chronology, we come to the issue of what the last Super Saiyan before Goku (or Broli, in the movies) was like. As I’ve gone over before, in the original manga such a person is a non-entity, and never talked about in any way. Vegeta says that a Super Saiyan appears once every 1,000 years, and this implies that there have been ones before Goku, but no information is given on any specific previous ones. It’s sort of like the Tenkaichi Budoukai: the first one we see in the series is the 21st, so we can safely assume there were 20 previous such tournaments, but we have no specific information on any of them, other than that Chapa and Akkuman were prior winners. So talking about the “last Super Saiyan” is as pointless as talking about the 20st Tenkaichi Budoukai. In the manga at least. In the anime, there’s that filler of a sort of quasi-Oozaru Super Saiyan rampaging around. But in the Japanese version there’s no narration for this section to provide any context or information on just what that thing is supposed to be, and there’s not even any reason to regard this as a flashback to an actual event. It just seems to be a general visual aid to demonstrate the concept of a Super Saiyan. It also doesn’t seem to be meant very literally, in as much as Vegeta pictures this huge golden monkey when thinking of the Super Saiyan but still wonders if non-huge non-golden non-monkey Goku is currently a Super Saiyan.
After the manga ended though, there were two things that finally established “the Super Saiyan prior to Goku” as a specific thing. First was Daizenshuu 7, whose timeline has this entry:
Around 239 Before Age: The appearance of the Super Saiyan, considered a legend among the Saiyans. He made the universe tremble with destruction and slaughter.
First it should be noted that Japanese does not have grammatical articles, so we don’t know if this entry is talking about the appearance of
the Super Saiyan or
a Super Saiyan. For that matter, we also don’t know for sure if the Super Saiyan talked about here was a “he” or not. So depending on how you want to translate it, the entry can come across as much more specific than it really is. Basically what this tells us is that Super Saiyan(s) is/are legendary among Saiyans, and one appeared at this point in time.
Why this date? Well, the time line establishes that Goku became a Super Saiyan on Namek in the year Age 762, and so this is roughly 1,000 years before that event (“Before Age” being the “Age” calendar’s equivalent of B.C. or B.C.E.). In other words, this entry is a pretty direct adaptation of Vegeta’s statement that a Super Saiyan appears once every 1,000 years. So this was the last one who appeared prior to Goku. This is also the only such entry in the timeline mentioning a prior Super Saiyan. Does this mean the one before Goku was also the first? Maybe, but not necessarily. The entry doesn’t mention that, and consider the pointlessness of listing every single prior Super Saiyan at 1,000-year intervals, all the way back to some starting point they’d have to eventually decide on arbitrarily. Much easier to just do one such entry. I suppose they could have specifically mentioned this Super Saiyan as being the latest in a long line, but at the same time they might purposefully be leaving things vague. Was there one Super Saiyan before Goku or many? You decide! At any rate, while this entry finally does mention a specific earlier Super Saiyan, it doesn’t say much about this person other than that he appeared and “made the universe tremble with destruction and slaughter”. Again, this seems to be based pretty directly on what’s said about the Super Saiyan in the manga. The only somewhat new thing is the idea that there was a universal scale to the Super Saiyan’s rampage, though this is arguably implied by the wide range of aliens who know the legend of the Super Saiyan in the series.
So Daizenshuu 7 finally said something about a pre-Goku Super Saiyan, but really didn’t say anything too specific. And the timeline in the first GT Perfect Files volume had a similar entry, taken almost word-for-word from Daizenshuu 7. The Perfect Files also had some things to say about what Super Saiyan form the legend was
really talking about (more on this later), but don’t directly connect this to any pre-Goku Super Saiyan.
It was the Funi dub that really built up the idea of the previous Super Saiyan, by turning Vegeta’s speech explaining the Super Saiyan concept into largely a monologue on what the last such being had been like. Here’s that quote again:
According to Legend, the last Super Saiyan could only maintain his status in the transformed state. His power was extraordinary, he had no equal in the universe. But he was too primitive to control it, his rage burned so intensely that it eventually consumed him. In the end, he was destroyed by his own power.
I already discussed this quote a good deal, so I’ll just say again that it has become “accepted wisdom” among English-speaking DB fandom, even among fans who don’t care for the dub. People just seem to have a vague idea that the previous Super Saiyan couldn’t control his own power and so ultimately destroyed himself, without necessarily knowing where this notion actually comes from. In the giant Telephone game of fandom, this dub quote and the Daizenshuu 7 timeline entry on the previous Super Saiyan have combined into a weird mutant notion of the “original Super Saiyan”. And so that’s how you get stuff like
this DB wikia page that we’ve discussed already. The DB wikia is sort of like a misinformation amplifier: it often collects spurious information already present in the fandom, and by enshrining them into an “encyclopedic” format, helps make them even more widespread. To briefly sum up the weird fan-invented version of this guy, the “original Super Saiyan” was:
--The original Super Saiyan (hence the name)
--the last Super Saiyan before Goku (implying a total of one previous Super Saiyan)
--A Golden Oozaru, and the figure from Vegeta’s Super Saiyan explanation in the anime
--Too primitive to control his own power, so in the end he destroyed himself
--The person who destroyed the Saiyan’s original home world
This is all a mix of things from the dub, GT, and the guidebooks, misremembered, misunderstood, and mixed together into a great big glob of confusion. Let’s look at this point by point.
First, the article calls this guy the “Original Super Saiyan”. They always capitalize “Original” even outside of the page title, implying that it’s an official term, which it’s not. They even provide a Japanese version of the name, オリジナル超サイヤ人, which they apparently made up and which is not quite an accurate translation. Not to repeat myself, but the term “original Super Saiyan” is not used anywhere in the original Japanese series or guidebooks, is not used anywhere in the original Japanese series or guidebooks, and is also not used anywhere in the original Japanese series or guidebooks. I don’t think it’s used in the Funi dub either, but I’m not an expert in that area. At any rate, the dub quote given above only refers to this figure as the “last Super Saiyan”, which arguably implies there were even earlier ones. At any rate, it gives no indication that this guy was the original. So where does that idea come from? I’d assume the Daizenshuu 7 timeline, which has only one entry detailing a prior Super Saiyan. But as I mentioned before, there’s nothing in the entry specifically identifying that Super Saiyan as the first.
On the other hand, the Daizenshuu 7 timeline does imply that the Super Saiyan of 239 Before Age was the last Super Saiyan before Goku, since the entire entry seems to be based directly off of Vegeta’s statement that one Super Saiyan appears every thousand years. However, there’s nothing in the daizenshuu to link this Super Saiyan with the figure from Vegeta’s anime monologue. Once again, it’s only in the dub that the shadowy Super Saiyan seen in the anime filler is identified as the last Super Saiyan. The Japanese anime offers no comment on the thing. It doesn’t seem to be intended as any more significant than the hulking, shadowy androids the anime uses to illustrate Trunks’ warning to Goku.
Is this shadowy Super Saiyan a Golden Oozaru, as seen in GT? It looks similar, but notably has no tail, and so might not be meant as a literal Oozaru. Even its golden color might just be a reflection of the fire surrounding it, rather than its own natural color. The GT Perfect Files do kinda-sorta suggest that the Golden Oozaru is the form that the legend was actually based on (more on this later), but don’t explicitly link this idea with the DBZ filler.
As we’ve said, the notion that this prior Super Saiyan destroyed himself comes straight from the dub. However, the idea that this Super Saiyan destroyed the original Saiyan home world (the place that they lived before invading Planet Plant) seems to just be fan speculation. Even the DB wikia seems to have removed mention of it, thankfully. The first GT Perfect Files volume does briefly mention the idea of an original Saiyan planet, but only says that it may still be out there.
So in short, the “original Super Saiyan” is more of a fan concept than anything else. Which is why I had to write over ten paragraphs about it. Apparently.
Candidate #3: Golden Oozaru/Super Saiyan 4
OK, enough over-analyzing silly nonsense; let’s talk about GT. Specifically the two new variations on Super Saiyan the series introduces: Golden Oozaru and Super Saiyan 4. There’s long been fan speculation about either of these forms being the “true” or “original” Super Saiyan form, due both to the supposed connection between them and the figure from Vegeta’s Super Saiyan monologue filler, and simply due to their status as the ultimate Super Saiyan forms, at least in the anime version of things. And this fan speculation is supported by the GT Perfect Files! Kind of. Anyway, I don’t know to what extent the material from the Perfect Files has influenced the fan ideas, but in my personal experience at least I’ve more often seen people propose Golden Oozaru and/or Super Saiyan 4 as the real source of the legend without referencing the Perfect Files.
Let’s start with Super Saiyan 4. Both Perfect File volumes mention that Super Saiyan 4 was designed based on the idea that it might be the true Super Saiyan of legend. Here’s the relevant part from
TripleRach’s translation of the Perfect Files Vol.1 Q&A:
Incidentally, it was designed with the concept that Super Saiyan 4 "might be the legendary Super Saiyan who appears once every 1,000 years"! Which is why 4 was not the traditional gold color, and became a warrior with a red body!!
Yes, those quotation marks in there are placed correctly. Super Saiyan 4 was designed from the idea that it “might be” the once-every-thousand-years-legendary-Super-Saiyan. They built a certain amount of uncertainty right into the concept. There’s a similar Q&A in volume 2 that says that same thing, again explaining that this concept was why Super Saiyan 4 did not feature golden hair like all previous Super Saiyan forms (volume 2 adds the suggestion that SSj4’s red color might have partially been inspired by monkeys’ red butts). But wait, there are actually
three Super Saiyan 4 characters in GT, counting Gogeta, so how could it really be the once-every-thousand-years form? Did they just change their minds midway through? Apparently not! In the same section, PF volume 2 notes that when the staff decided on the idea to transform Goku into Saiyan 4, there were already at that time plans to have Vegeta reach the form as well, and for the two to fuse. This may explain why they’re careful to point out that the concept for this form was that it “might be” what the legend was talking about. Anyway, despite them having this idea in mind, there’s nothing in the actual GT series connecting Super Saiyan 4 to the legend. PF volume 2 even calls the concept “secret background information not depicted in the main story”.
The actual way Super Saiyan 4 is introduced in the series is a bit weird. After Goku gets clobbered by Baby, he’s rescued by East Kaioshin and taken to the Kaioshin Realm. Elder Kaioshin begins training Goku to draw out his “dormant power”. Naturally, this involves Goku grinding lots and lots of coffee beans. Soon, as you might expect, Goku’s tail begins to regrow. Elder Kaioshin says Goku’s tail is the key to drawing out his dormant power. But the process isn’t fast enough, so Elder Kaioshin and the gang use a huge pair of pliers to pull the rest of it out. With that done Elder Kaioshin sends Goku off to fight Baby again, but Goku actually hasn’t gotten any stronger. Not even Elder Kaioshin knows what the problem is; apparently he expected simply pulling out Goku’s trail to do the trick. Fortunately Goku sees the Earth in the sky above, and it serves in place of a full moon, transforming Goku into an Oozaru. As an Oozaru Goku quickly turns into a Super Saiyan as well, becoming the “Golden Oozaru”, but rather than attack Baby he just rampages around destroying things indiscriminately. Elder Kaioshin says he was afraid this might happen: because they forcibly pulled out Goku’s tail, he’s not yet able to control his gigantic power. If Goku could only manage to control his power, then
that would be “Super Saiyan 4”. With Pan’s help Goku manages to do just that, turning into some red Oozaru-man thing, which Elder Kaioshin confidentially declares to be Super Saiyan 4.
So, you might ask, how does Elder Kaioshin know about Super Saiyan 4? I think the correct answer is that he really didn’t know. If you look at the above sequence of events, it seems that Elder Kaioshin only knew that to make Goku stronger they needed to regrow his tail. Beyond that he seems to have at best only a hazy idea of what to do. He expected Goku to already be strong enough to fight Baby just by having his tail back, and when he sees Goku as a Golden Oozaru he says he was “afraid” this might happen. Rather than a necessary step towards achieving a new transformation, he sees Golden Oozaru as a negative thing, the consequence of them pulling out Goku’s tail too soon, leaving him unable to fully control his power. So what exactly was Elder Kaioshin actually hoping for? All we really have to go on is, as noted, that he expected re-tailed Goku on his own to be a match for Baby. Perhaps if they hadn’t pulled his tail out so fast, Goku would have been able to fully control his power without the need for any transformation? On that note, it’s interesting to remember that the power-up Elder Kaioshin gave Gohan back in the Boo story arc involved drawing out Gohan’s dormant power so that he could utilize it all without needing any Super Saiyan transformations. Perhaps he was planning something similar for Goku?
But then what’s with Elder Kaioshin shouting about “Super Saiyan 4”? Well, the thing to remember is that in the Boo arc the terms “Super Saiyan 2” and “Super Saiyan 3” were depicted as terms Goku invented for convenience’s sake, so that he wouldn’t have to keep saying “a Super Saiyan that has surpassed Super Saiyan” or “a Super Saiyan that has surpassed a Super Saiyan that’s surpassed Super Saiyan”. They’re not part of any legend, they’re just descriptive labels which Goku made up and the other characters adopted. In that regard they’re similar to Kuririn coining the term “Super Namekian” to describe the re-merged Piccolo. So the simplest explanation for the Elder Kaioshin using the term “Super Saiyan 4” isn’t that he “knew about it”, but instead that he simply made the term up to describe whatever form Goku would have once he mastered his dormant power. In fact, when Elder Kaioshin tells Goku he needs to train, he points out how Goku as a Super Saiyan 3 couldn’t defeat Baby and he needs to get stronger. So in the same way that “Super Saiyan 3” is nothing more than arbitrary shorthand for “a Super Saiyan stronger than a Super Saiyan that’s stronger than Super Saiyan”, Elder Kaioshin could have just meant “Super Saiyan 4” as shorthand for “something stronger than Super Saiyan 3”.
This is backed up by the Perfect Files. The Super Saiyan section in volume 1 notes that the form “is called Super Saiyan 4 out of convenience, but due to it being a transformation from Golden Oozaru, it would be no exaggeration to call it a different species from all previous Super Saiyans!!” In other words, it’s not really the same thing as the previous Super Saiyans, but is called “Super Saiyan 4” because it’s a Saiyan form superior to Super Saiyan 3. Also, consider the moment near the end of GT where Bulma tells Vegeta that with her help, he might become Super Saiyan 4 or even
Super Saiyan 5. Does this mean Bulma has some specific knowledge of the structure of Super Saiyan evolution? Probably not. Like before, here “Super Saiyan 5” probably isn’t meant for any specific form, but merely anything that would be superior to Super Saiyan 4.
Getting back to the Perfect Files, the section on Super Saiyans in volume 1 ends with an attempt to reconcile the details of the Super Saiyan legend with what we see in the post-Freeza portion of the series:
Is that thing about “a single Super Saiyan every thousand years” really true?
A Super Saiyan is the “strongest of Saiyan warriors, who appears once in a thousand years”! However, after Goku’s transformation, Super Saiyans appeared one after the other, as shown in the chart to the left!! Because of this, the believability of the legend seems pretty low, but actually Goten, Trunks, and co. are Earthling and Saiyan half-bloods (possessing high battle power from birth)! If you limit it to pure Saiyans, only Goku and Vegeta transform! If you think of it as “a pure Saiyan will transform once in a thousand years”, then you can understand this legend!! It’s also interesting that Super Saiyans are only generated from Goku and Vegeta’s bloodlines. If you think about it, both of their fathers (Bardock and King Vegeta) also boasted high battle power. Saiyan society had a hereditary system where things were passed on from father to son, so maybe the father’s strength was also inherited!?
Incidentally, the Super Saiyan legend has a passage saying that they “love destruction and slaughter”, but in actuality everyone retains their reason. However, if you’ll remember, there was a form where even Goku became extremely violent!! That’s right, when he transformed into a Golden Oozaru!! Surely this brutality, destructive power, and large scale are a sign of the legend that tells that they will “love destruction and slaughter”!! One can think of the Golden Oozaru form (which includes Oozaru Baby too!!) as perhaps fit to be called the true Super Saiyan!!
This is notable for being one of the only times an official source tries to explain plot holes head-on like this. There are various things in the guidebooks that seem intended to reconcile contradictions in the main series, but they’re usually a little subtle about it, as if they don’t want to explicitly draw attention to these problems. But here they’re pretty straightforward in saying that we’re told one thing but shown another, so what gives?
That said, I’m not sure how successful their attempt at reconciling these things is. Their solution for why there are multiple Super Saiyans is that these includes Saiyan/Earthling hybrids. If you limit it to pure Saiyans, you’re left with…Goku and Vegeta. Two guys. Maybe the idea is that two Super Saiyans is still much closer to the legend than five, but that still seems like a considerable drop in exclusivity. “There can be only two” was never a movie slogan. Or perhaps the idea is that Goku is simply a freak, outside the natural order of things, and so doesn’t count? Ginyu calls him a mutant, and in GT Vegeta points out that Goku is unusual in being able to transform into Super Saiyan 4 through his own power, when as an Oozaru-based form you’re supposed to need Bruits Waves to do that. So perhaps Vegeta is really what the legend was predicting, and Goku is an unforeseen anomaly. But hey, what about Broli? The explanation doesn’t mention him at all! In fact, the entire PF section on Super Saiyans doesn’t mention Broli anywhere. They also don’t mention Gogeta, so apparently they’re just keeping the movies out of this. Note that PF volume 1 only covers GT up to the end of the Baby arc, so it doesn’t mention Super Saiyan 4 Vegeta or Gogeta.
Maybe the idea is that “once every thousand years” doesn’t mean that there will be a time gap of a thousand years separating the appearance of each new Super Saiyan, but rather that there will be one Super Saiyan for every thousand-year period, who can appear at any time during that era. Goku just happened to appear at the tail end of his thousand years, while Vegeta appeared right at the start of his, so in practice they were only separated by a few years. It’s like if I vowed to drink only one milkshake a week, then drank one on Saturday and another the next day. I don’t for a moment think this is what they were getting at, but it’s personally my favorite idea.
Then, after tossing out the idea that the legend never took into account the huge power of Saiyan/Earthling hybrids (or something; they never do explain precisely why hybrids wouldn’t count), the PF goes on to suggest that perhaps Golden Oozaru is the form that best fulfills the legend, and so is “perhaps fit to be called the true Super Saiyan”. Once again, there’s a lot of “maybes” thrown in. I suppose the anime staff might not be comfortable having their own creations flat-out identified as the real legendary Super Saiyan, perhaps seeing that as encroaching too much on Toriyama’s turf. It’s also amusing that they go out of their way to note that Baby also reaches this form. So if it is the true Super Saiyan, we’ve still got two of them.
We’ve also now seem to have two competing claims within the same book as to which form is the true legendary Super Saiyan: Golden Oozaru, or Super Saiyan 4? But one is just a further transformation of the other, so maybe it’s the same difference. Anyway, I’ll let you figure this one out.
So is the thing shown in Vegeta’s anime monologue a Golden Oozaru, and was that the form previous Super Saiyans took, rather than the humanoid form introduced in the Freeza arc? The PF doesn’t explicitly say that. It won’t even flat-out say that Golden Oozaru is the true legendary Super Saiyan, so it’s only natural it wouldn’t be making specific claims about the forms of the past Super Saiyans. But if we assume Golden Oozaru really is the form that fulfills the legend, logically the Super Saiyans that gave rise to the legend in the first place must have been Golden Oozarus. However, the PF notably doesn’t make any mention of the quasi-Oozaru Super Saiyan from the DBZ filler. It’s reasoning for saying that Golden Oozaru may be the true Super Saiyan is because its “brutality, destructive power, and large scale” fit the part of the legend saying the Super Saiyan will love destruction and slaughter. There’s nothing about it being the thing Vegeta was picturing in his mind when he explained about Super Saiyans in the first place. It’s possible that the filler did play a hand in inspiring the Golden Oozarus in GT, but nothing official confirms it, and the idea of an Oozaru with golden Super Saiyan hair seems simple enough for its inclusion in GT to be a coincidence. Also, no matter what the GT staff was thinking, it should be clear enough that the people who created the DBZ filler were not thinking of a Golden Oozaru in the GT sense of the term. At that point Toriyama hadn’t even solidified the regular idea of a Super Saiyan, so the anime staff couldn’t have been thinking of combining a Super Saiyan with an Oozaru. And the filler Super Saiyan has no tail and seems more metaphoric than literal and…well, I’m repeating myself again.
In short, it is officially 100% without a doubt certain that Golden Oozaru and/or Super Saiyan 4 may perhaps possibly be the real Super Saiyan of legend, in GT at least, unless it isn’t. Take that as you will.
Candidate #4: Bardock
The most recent addition to this mess is the three part side-story manga Episode of Bardock. Created by Naho Ooishi with supervision by Toriyama, the manga ties in with the game DB Heroes, which introduced Super Saiyan Bardock as a character, along with such other what-ifs as Super Saiyan 3 Vegeta and Broli. The story opens with a retelling of Bardock’s ill-fated showdown with Freeza, only this time instead of dying in the destruction of Planet Vegeta, Bardock suddenly finds himself hospitalized in some strange village. The village doctor explains that he discovered Bardock passed out nearby. Bardock learns that this place is called Planet Plant, the same name Planet Vegeta was supposed to have had before the Saiyans took it over. He wonders if he has somehow been transported into the past. Before he can get any answers though, Plant is attacked by a space pirate named “Chilled” who bears a striking resemblance to Freeza. Seeing Chilled causes Bardock to snap, but he’s no match for Chilled. In the nick of time though, Bardock gets so angry he transforms into a Super Saiyan and clobbers Chilled, who is sent flying into space. Out there, Chilled is picked up by his remaining henchmen. Before dying, Chilled tells them to warn his clan about the Saiyans, mysterious people who can become golden. The story concludes with a blurb in the margin noting that the legend of the Super Saiyan, mightiest of warriors, would be passed down through Freeza’s clan.
So simply put, while the story never comes right out and says it, the strong implication is that time-travelling Bardock was the source for the Super Saiyan legend. Chilled is presumably Freeza’s ancestor, and his dying warning was passed down to Freeza, inspiring Freeza’s paranoia in regards to the Saiyans. This makes the whole thing rather circular: Freeza destroys Planet Vegeta out of fear of a Super Saiyan arising, which sends Bardock back in time, where he inspires the legend that made Freeza so afraid in the first place. Not to mention the millennia-old legend Goku fulfills was really just about Goku’s own father.
In several ways though Bardock as depicted in this story seems a poor fit for the legend we hear in the Namek/Freeza story arc. He doesn’t act notably cruel or merciless, and doesn’t revel in destruction and slaughter. But then the story ends without us seeing what Super Saiyan Bardock did after defeating Chilled. Perhaps those happy Plant villagers are in for a nasty surprise. On the other hand, maybe Bardock inspired the legend, but over the years it got padded out with lots of stuff that had nothing to do with Bardock at all.
It also seems a little hasty to label Bardock the strongest in the universe simply because he defeated Chilled, but I suppose this just illustrates the problem inherent in the legend claiming the Super Saiyan is stronger than anyone else could ever be. How could you ever establish such a thing for sure? Chilled says he’s the strongest space pirate in the universe, but we’ve only got his word for it, and there’s no reason to assume he knows everything the universe contains. He didn’t know about Super Saiyans, after all. So saying that Super Saiyan Bardock’s the strongest because he beat Chilled and then building a whole legend around that seems pretty flimsy. For that matter, are we supposed to assume Chilled is roughly as strong as Freeza? Otherwise the fact that Super Saiyan Goku happened to be strong enough to defeat Freeza really seems more like luck than anything else.
It’s not clear precisely how far back in time Bardock was sent. Perhaps he’s 1,000 years in the past, but maybe he’s even farther back and is only the first in a line of Super Saiyans. Though this raises the question of where the other Super Saiyans would have come from. Did Bardock find a mate? Perhaps that’s where the Saiyans really originated from in the first place, just to make the whole thing even more circular than before.
Speaking of Bardock being all on his own, this touches on the biggest oddity of the story’s explanation for the Super Saiyan legend, namely that it explains the origin of the legend completely independent of Saiyan society. We see how
Freeza learns of the Super Saiyan, but not how the Saiyans themselves did. Which is funny, because in the original series Freeza’s knowledge of the Super Saiyan legend never seemed to require any explanation. He works with the Saiyans, and it is their legend, so it seems only natural he would hear it. Plus, diverse folk like the Great Elder of Namek, Kaio, and Ginyu all know the legend too, so even if working with the Saiyans wasn’t enough, we could just assume Freeza knows it the same way all those guys do. But now, if we accept Episode of Bardock’s explanation of the legend, we have to wonder how
Vegeta knew the legend. Did he hear it from Freeza? Or did Bardock eventually hook up with other Saiyans and let them in on his golden haired power-up?
On that note, Chilled’s warning to his clan explicitly mentions Saiyans turning gold, but in the main series Freeza is baffled when Goku’s hair becomes that color. Rather than see this as confirmation of all his fears, he doesn’t even know what’s happening. Apparently Chilled’s minions didn’t take good notes. Also amusing is that Chilled doesn’t mention the term “Super Saiyan”. Rather, he says his clan should be warned to watch out merely for “Saiyans”, people who can turn gold. So how did Freeza know to watch out for Super Saiyans in particular, rather than Saiyans as a whole? Especially since he apparently didn’t get the memo about being on guard for golden hair?
So on the whole Episode of Bardock muddles things even more, rather than clarifying things. But at least it wasn’t Episode of SSj3 Broli.
"Origin" does not set anything.