precita wrote: Tue Sep 29, 2020 12:00 am
I think there's a big difference here though. Piccolo had already spent 4 years on Earth not causing any trouble between the end of Dragonball and start of DBZ, and although he was obviously still going to be Goku's enemy, they were able to put it aside a lot easier. His father King Piccolo was already the truly evil one and he was dead.
Vegeta again is a bit of a different story. Nappa killed all of Goku's friends and the innocents on Earth, and he paid for it. By the time Goku had fought Freeza, Vegeta was already reluctantly fighting alongside them. Besides that there's the year or so Vegeta stayed on Earth between the end of the Freeza arc and before Cyborg Freeza/Future Trunks happened.
Freeza had come back two times before intending to kill everyone. First time in the Cell saga and again in Movie 15. They knew he could never be redeemed.
The *five year time-skip in Piccolo's case is an in-universe fact, but never felt for the reader. Having recently been over both parts on sequential reads, I can easily say the speed with which non-Gohan characters accept Piccolo as an ally feels more jarring than the way Freeza fits into the ToP.
I haven't gotten to Vegeta's joining the group on this spin through yet, but after being a decided villain, responsible for the deaths of half the cast, let's not forget that he shows up at a barbeque with Yamcha and Bulma at the start of the very next arc.
Vegeta, of course, has endeared himself to the rest of the cast, to whatever extent, due to their shared trials on Namek. But within those shared trials, I don't feel he's treated all that differently from the way Freeza is at the ToP--both remain wildcards held at arm's length, making pragmatic moves outside the capacity of the more traditionally moral cast.
There's also the fact that by the time both Piccolo and Vegeta undergo the shared trials through which they buddy up to the cast, they've already been through some sparks of change. Piccolo has teamed up with Goku and been humbled by Raditz; he's begun to bond with Gohan. On Namek, Vegeta has accepted his losses and room for growth--even before he teams up with the others, he's no longer the arrogant elitist he was the previous arc.
But the same is true of Freeza. By the start of the ToP, he's already shifted from the pod-riding mafioso of the Namek arc to a martial artist who is willing to put in the mental and physical effort on top of his natural talent, from someone for whom defeat was unthinkable to someone who has come to accept and pragmatically react to the idea of no longer being on top. It is this Freeza alongside whom the characters ally in the ToP, and I don't find the way those interactions play out remotely hard to accept.
Frankly, I don't see Freeza's treatment as differing much, if any, from Vegeta's in the original run. It's unremoved from Vegeta's beats up through the Cell arc--and it's not like Freeza ever becomes great friends with the cast, even if Goku, being Goku, considers him something of a frenemy from then on--and actually less jarring in its context than Piccolo (in terms of how quickly non-Gohan characters flip his estimation from arch-enemy to valued friend).
