When Did The "Legendary" Super Saiyan Form Become A Joke?

[PerhapsTheOtherOne]

I think super saiyan became a "joke" mainly in Boo arc, first because of how easily Goten and Trunks could do it and then how quickly super saiyan 2 was surpassed, by both Boo and the super saiyan 3 form.

In the Artificial Humans arc, despite the nonsense of technology surpassing a legendary transformation, it still feels palpable or at least credible at some extent, as the arc itself presents the reasoning for it. The necessity of aiming to improve the super saiyan form is something that aligns with the story. In Boo arc I felt the form was cheapened by Goku and Vegeta fighting each other as ss2, after Goten and Trunks revealing their lack of difficulty to attain regular ss, culminating with presenting ss3 - and by extention, the introduction of equally cheap naming scheme.

I think this post sums up the major turning point.

In the arc preceding the last arc of the original series, Super Saiyan was still treated as a big deal, and thought went into exploring its depths of power as the original iteration started to lose out to stronger opponents. It still felt like being a Super Saiyan was a major part of the overall story, and Gohan's ascension into the next level solidified this evolution into this new level of the form, the culmination of the Saiyans' exploration of perfecting the legendary transformation.

But after that? No particular narrative focus was paid to Super Saiyan as a form and how it could be made better.

[Lord Beerus]

It was a combination of Vegeta attaining it offscreen in the Android/Cell arc and Goten and Trunks attaining it like it was nothing in the Majin Boo arc.

I say combination, as in, Vegeta attaining the form the way he did was dumb because It flew right in the face of everything that happened on Namek -- with regards ats why he could become a SSJ in the first place -- and retroactively ruined all of the symbolism with regards to how Goku became a SSJ in the first place.

Goten and Trunks are all magnitudes of worse, not just because of how nonchalant them attaining SSJ is treated, but because Toriyama tried to play it off as a joke... only for the story to backpedal on that and treat Goten and Trunks' insane SSJ power as something to be treated seriously. So SSJ is treated as a gag in the Majin Boo arc that ultimately has no punchline. It's isn't just a joke, it's a bad joke.