Does anyone else think that Vegeta joining the Dragon team was ridiculous in retrospect?

[Cure Dragon 255]

I am getting really impressed here. People are really squeezing lots of juice out of this and none of this ever ocurred to me.

[tonysoprano300]

Well its just a thought anyway, I will say that I loved how the chapter was drawn and the visceral emotions that some of the imagery elicits. Vegeta becoming a statue might not make sense but its a fantastic visual. I think Toriyama even included a poem at the beginning but I forget exactly what it said.

Fundamentally, I just don’t believe that a grown man throwing a temper tantrum is a compelling motivation for a redemption story and thats probably where our foundational disagreement lies. The story can tell me that he’s a changed man but I just saw him nearly eviscerate his own wife, so all i can really say is “what is Goku talking about”

The whole point of the arc is that he had changed and grown to care about Bulma and Trunks, but being reminded of Goku's superiority brought back all of his unresolved anger and obsession to the point that he was now questioning the path he was walking down. Everything is wrapped up in his broken ideals of what a Saiyan should be and how much Goku's shaken his entire identity to the core.

Him firing a blast with no regard for his wife being in the crowd was him slipping back into his old ways and trying to be as evil as he could again, only to eventually face the reality that he's not that guy anymore. Essentially, he's acting out and trying to push everybody away because he thinks that's what he wants.

Now I think there should've been a confrontation between Vegeta and Bulma after he came back to life, but whelp, Toriyama zoomed past everything and skipped straight to the end, so we can only imagine it.

Imagine for a second, a reformed criminal who used to sit on piles and piles of ill-gotten riches throws that all away and becomes a family man. But then that guy from his old neighborhood that he thought was a square comes through and is sitting on wealth and reputation from legitimate means that dwarfs anything he did on the street. And even though he's gone legit and tried doing things the "right" way, he still can't measure up to that square and he now feels like a soft ass shell of himself. He's an average nobody and gets to live the rest of his life as a shnook.

Sure, he's got a hot wife, a great kid, and lives pretty comfortably. But he's just another guy now. Back when he was selling dope, he was the man.

The only time he ever felt alive was when he was running the streets, so he thinks quadrupling down on his old glory days is the only way to reclaim his self-worth.

I should articulate myself better when it comes to this because I'm probably giving the impression that I hate everything about it. I actually agree with a lot of what you’re saying, it works on paper and its a completely natural direction to take Vegeta’s character despite my reservations about his Cell arc integration. I have no doubt that this is absolutely what Toriyama was going for and it is the right call to complete Vegeta’s character arc.

Some of the issues that we have is partially a by product of what came before it and what came after it, in context the idea that Vegeta has changed as a result of his stay on earth may be a reasonable assumption but we as an audience are given zero insight into why that is. This has been the case for almost every development angle that directly involves Vegeta, whether it his training in ROSAT with Trunks or his choice to have a child with Bulma, the one constant is that the reader will never see the sorts of dynamics that led to Vegeta’s softening as a character. If I'm not shown something, and the story is just asking me to assume that real character development took place but never actually goes into any sort of detail as to what happened then as a reader I have nothing to really latch onto. All I ever see is Vegeta acting like an asshole, almost every time he’s on screen he’s an asshole who does horrible things so despite the story telling me that Vegeta has changed I can only look at his lashing out as being more of the same from him. His conscious choice to kill all those people doesn’t feel a sober addict crashing out to me, because you never get the impression that Vegeta wants to be Sober. It feels more like a guy desperately looking for his next hit, and finally finding it.

When I say that he’s a toddler, I mean it in the framework that this is a man who lashes out because he’s not getting what he wants when he wants it, and after he’s had his fill by getting the adults to give in to him then he’s willing to play nice. To me that’s a description of a toddler, Vegeta doesn’t change because he comes to some great understanding of what his purpose in life is supposed to be, there is no deep relationship with a character that he identifies with like Piccolo in the saiyan arc and we don’t really get the impression that anything meaningful took place to finally bring him to accept his life on Earth. Once he gets bored fighting Goku, he literally just stops and moves on to fight Buu. I feel as though there is a conflict between what I'm shown and what I'm told. Vegeta’s lucidity throughout the entire process makes his actions unforgivable, and without the necessary character work to redeem him I never fully buy into what Toriyama is selling.

Vegeta’s sacrifice is incredibly powerful, that part I'm a huge fan of. Was the journey there actually a result of strong character development and deep introspection/insight? I mean some of its good but as a whole I just don’t believe so

We both agree that Vegeta being accepted back with open arms after Buu’s defeat wasn’t handled well so nothing much to say there, other than the idea that Toriyama probably thought that Vegeta was a good guy now

[ABED]

Do you just want it all spelled out for you, like have Vegeta give some grand speech about some important moment where he realized why he liked living on Earth? Time spent together or in one place alone is often enough to create a bond. For a guy, whose ENTIRE life had been spent going from place to place, being stationary is a new experience for him. That would be profound and life altering for anyone. He lost his home, and for the first time in decades he had one. He found comfort in it. He explicitly states this. You keep going back to thinking the arc is that he's turned good.

His conscious choice to kill. It feels more like a guy desperately looking for his next hit, and finally finding it. doesn’t feel a sober addict crashing out to me, because you never get the impression that Vegeta wants to be Sober

Because he didn't know he did. His drug of choice was gone and only came back temporarily, hence his desperation. In the meantime, he had grown accustomed to his life on Earth. He wasn't sober by choice, but he was sober all the same. That doesn't really change what is going on here. Your entire argument amounts to you having wanted him to make the explicit choice to change prior. But that's not his journey. His journey is one of finally finding a place to call home even though he didn't know that's what he wanted, and this is when he makes the choice to protect it.

[tonysoprano300]

Do you just want it all spelled out for you, like have Vegeta give some grand speech about some important moment where he realized why he liked living on Earth? Time spent together or in one place alone is often enough to create a bond. For a guy, whose ENTIRE life had been spent going from place to place, being stationary is a new experience for him. That would be profound and life altering for anyone. He lost his home, and for the first time in decades he had one. He found comfort in it. He explicitly states this. You keep going back to thinking the arc is that he's turned good.

His conscious choice to kill. It feels more like a guy desperately looking for his next hit, and finally finding it. doesn’t feel a sober addict crashing out to me, because you never get the impression that Vegeta wants to be Sober

Because he didn't know he did. His drug of choice was gone and only came back temporarily, hence his desperation. In the meantime, he had grown accustomed to his life on Earth. He wasn't sober by choice, but he was sober all the same. That doesn't really change what is going on here. Your entire argument amounts to you having wanted him to make the explicit choice to change prior. But that's not his journey. His journey is one of finally finding a place to call home even though he didn't know that's what he wanted, and this is when he makes the choice to protect it.

What do you mean by that? Showing me how a character changes and taking me through that journey with them is not spoon feeding me. That’s generally a thing that’s done in many great character driven dramas. Breaking Bad showed me the relationship between Walt&Jesse develop organically, they didn’t just skip over it and expect you to be deeply invested because one character decided to monologue about it.

If you’re saying that you shouldn’t have to see any of the ground work laid out for Majin Vegeta then we just have a fundamental disagreement that cannot be reconciled. Like I said, I know what Toriyama is trying to do.

[ABED]

Do you just want it all spelled out for you, like have Vegeta give some grand speech about some important moment where he realized why he liked living on Earth? Time spent together or in one place alone is often enough to create a bond. For a guy, whose ENTIRE life had been spent going from place to place, being stationary is a new experience for him. That would be profound and life altering for anyone. He lost his home, and for the first time in decades he had one. He found comfort in it. He explicitly states this. You keep going back to thinking the arc is that he's turned good.

His conscious choice to kill. It feels more like a guy desperately looking for his next hit, and finally finding it. doesn’t feel a sober addict crashing out to me, because you never get the impression that Vegeta wants to be Sober

Because he didn't know he did. His drug of choice was gone and only came back temporarily, hence his desperation. In the meantime, he had grown accustomed to his life on Earth. He wasn't sober by choice, but he was sober all the same. That doesn't really change what is going on here. Your entire argument amounts to you having wanted him to make the explicit choice to change prior. But that's not his journey. His journey is one of finally finding a place to call home even though he didn't know that's what he wanted, and this is when he makes the choice to protect it.

What do you mean by that? Showing me how a character changes and taking me through that journey with them is not spoon feeding me. That’s generally a thing that’s done in many great character driven dramas. Breaking Bad showed me the relationship between Walt&Jesse develop organically, they didn’t just skip over it and expect you to be deeply invested because one character decided to monologue about it.

If you’re saying that you shouldn’t have to see any of the ground work laid out for Majin Vegeta then we just have a fundamental disagreement that cannot be reconciled. Like I said, I know what Toriyama is trying to do.

We do see it. We see him spend time on Earth. I'm saying we did see it and that it's not just the one speech. The only thing we don't see is his relationship with Bulma. That is the one thing that should have been dramatized, but the rest of it is showing how he changes. He's spent a significant amount of time on Earth and didn't cause trouble. That in itself shows a significant shift in what we knew of him prior. And no I didn't say that we shouldn't have to see the ground work laid. We did. Vegeta living on Earth is enough. Spending time with Trunks, even if most of it isn't spent talking or even training together. They're still in proximity to each other, eating the same foods, sleeping next to each other. The bond is slow to form, which is why the most he can muster is a polite hand gesture to say goodbye. It's an incremental step, but significant for a guy who at the beginning of the arc didn't care for his wellbeing.

You keep thinking we're saying he's become good. We're saying he's changing. I don't think we're making any movement, so I'll bid adieu.

[Cure Dragon 255]

Telefuturo is airing the episode where Cells blows up Kaio's world, killing Goku, Kaio and his friends. Vegeta, in an astounding moment of not being a raging moron, suggests killing 18 as soon as Cell "dies" and now its Krillin who has zero common sense and suggests sparing her.

Also, Goku's sacrifice is so amazingly sad. I cant believe it was that sad.


EDIT: VEGETA ACTUALLY lamented he was a moron who only made things worse, whoa was that in the manga? I think its filler. It cant possibly be canon.

[MasenkoHA]

, suggests killing 18 as soon as Cell "dies" and now its Krillin who has zero common sense and suggests sparing her.

How does that make Krillin have zero common sense? So far her crimes were shoplifting, accessory to grand theft auto, and kicking Vegeta's ass. "We shouldn't kill her especially now that Cell is gone" is hardly some lapse in judgment.

[Cure Dragon 255]

, suggests killing 18 as soon as Cell "dies" and now its Krillin who has zero common sense and suggests sparing her.

How does that make Krillin have zero common sense? So far her crimes were shoplifting, accessory to grand theft auto, and kicking Vegeta's ass. "We shouldn't kill her especially now that Cell is gone" is hardly some lapse in judgment.

I know, but we are using the "Super Smart Squad Super Secret Strategy" to minimize every single threat becuase conflict is bad.

I am strawmanning basically, but readily admit is THAT against conflict.

EDIT:OOPS! I meant to say NO ONE IS THAT against conflict. Just exaggerating for humor. I know everyone here is reasonable.

[tonysoprano300]

, suggests killing 18 as soon as Cell "dies" and now its Krillin who has zero common sense and suggests sparing her.

How does that make Krillin have zero common sense? So far her crimes were shoplifting, accessory to grand theft auto, and kicking Vegeta's ass. "We shouldn't kill her especially now that Cell is gone" is hardly some lapse in judgment.

I know, but we are using the "Super Smart Squad Super Secret Strategy" to minimize every single threat becuase conflict is bad.

I am strawmanning basically, but readily admit is THAT against conflict.

Human mistakes that are completely understandable have always been fine with me, although I wouldn’t even say this qualifies as a mistake. Killing 18 isn’t necessarily good strategy given that God himself didn’t really see them as evil and she came across more like a spoiled teenager than anything else. They did just see 16 sacrifice himself for the earth so they have reason to trust the androids.

Who said that the Dragon team needs to minimize every possible risk no matter the size?

[Cure Dragon 255]

OOPS! I meant to say NO ONE IS THAT against conflict. Just exaggerating for humor. I know everyone here is reasonable.