#years later the one woman in the tournament will be chichi who came to lose round 1 and become the mc's stay at home wife | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

toooldforthis76 · 7 years

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In regards to Vegeta being “Father of the year”

I came across someone else’s blog who was really pretty disgusted that some people feel that Goku is unable to feel love with any depth beyond companionship and that so many people paint Vegeta as “father of the year” after spending so much time pushing Trunks away, verbally abusing him, disavowing him as a son until he demonstrated his power against Cell. I don’t mean to do the passive aggressive thing by not answering someone directly, but I don’t really know anyone out here on tumblr and it’s not my place to barge into someone else’s conversation—I’m not some dbz expert, hell I only started watching the show and reading the manga within the last year or so, but I want to make a point about why *I* feel, just me, just a fan, that she is RIGHT but is maybe still skipping over the primary reason why Vegeta’s eventual *turn* to father-of-the-year was so utterly satisfying to fans. Let’s be clear: 1. To Goku’s defense, he and ChiChi have a very traditional love. They met as children. They had a courtship. They married. They cohabitated. Then they had kids.

Guys, this seriously did not happen with Vegeta & Bulma.

Placing my head cannon aside and placing the generally accepted headcannon aside, the manga and the anime both make it pretty clear that Trunks came about as a result of physical passion. It could have been a one night stand, it could have been a friends-with-benefits type situation, either way we will never really know for sure unless Toriyama decides to pen that side of the story, but in any case, Trunks is what Vegeta accuses Gohan of being during the Saiyan saga: a half breed welp by an insignificant human female . . . a bastard.

2. Vegeta does not acknowledge Trunks as his son because he is, emotionally speaking, a narcissist. Even after seeing what Future is capable of, and realizing that Future is the grown-up version of his bastard child with this earth woman, he refuses to acknowledge either the baby or the teen until the teen had something worthy of taking credit for—which is exactly what a narcissistic parent does, you are not worth until you achieve something that strokes their pride. We see a toxic kind of companionship between father & son during the semi-perfect Cell saga because Trunks is so desperate for his father’s love that he plays along with this idea of being little more than an extension of his father. He does this to such an extreme that although he has the ability to jump in and help his father while he’s getting his ass thoroughly kicked by cell, he waits until his father is knocked out before taking action. He says it is because he knows how important pride is to his father and wants to protect it, but ultimately I think Trunks does not want to lose what precious little love he’s gained from his emotionally dysfunctional father.

3. the chains of narcissm could have very easily have continued had both Future and Goku not been killed by Cell at the end of the Cell games. Future getting killed by Cell was shattering, but the fact that Goku was also killed by the monster that Vegeta willingly allowed to grow perhaps hit that soul-wound a little deeper because not only had Vegeta lost his direct bloodline legacy, he had also lost the last of what would have been one of his “subjects” had they still lived on their home planet. I don’t really want to say much more about this because it may undermine what I’m trying to do with my own fanfiction, but when you think about the way King Vegeta lost the planet to Frieza, you get a real sense that Prince Vegeta must have really resented his father on some level for allowing Frieza to fester until he was damn near impossible to kill . . . Prince Vegeta did the exact same thing with Cell, only, he has to suffer to live with the aftermath.

I am no warrior, and I will never fight again

4. So we reach the Buu saga . . . and Vegeta, Bulma and Trunks are now living together as a family. We don’t know that they have a healthy family relationship, but they are living together. There is a scene where Trunks is in the gravity room with his father, who is very much annoyed by his presence until Trunks demonstrates that he is able to go Super Saiyan. Vegeta is so surprised by this that he pauses his training to acknowledge his child and levels him a challenge. If you land one punch on me I’ll take you to that park you’re always going on about. –still very narcissistic, right? But there’s a humbled quality to it as well . . . keep with me on this point . . . Trunks DOES manage to land a blow, and Vegeta promptly strikes back. He HITS his CHILD in the face—I never said I wouldn’t strike back—but Trunks is still happy because he’s going to get to go to this park with his dad. Guys, this is EXACTLY how people with specific emotional dysfuctions such as narcissim and sado maschoism are formed in life. When your source of love always comes with conditions or your source of love is deceptive to you or your source of love is manipulative, then it becomes greatly unsatisfying to receive love WITHOUT those twisted caveots later in life. But I digress. My point is that Vegeta hasn’t bee “cured”, but BUT because he is perhaps still traumatized by the loss of his adult son by the actions of his own pride, he dials it down a notch and doesn’t take delight in having shown his dominance over this bastard that has caused him so much loss of pride in life, but agrees to do something “fatherly”. And when Trunks is named jr champion of the world martial arts tournament, we see just for a second in the Anime a look of acknowledgement and pride as Vegeta pauses eating just long enough to listen carefully to what’s being said about the fight.

Then Bidibi happens.

Bidibi knows . . . that the old Vegeta is just beneath the surface, and here’s the thing about psychological dysfuction: it feels GOOD sometimes, to slide back into old patterns of thinking . . . because it’s very vindicating. Those old demons don’t like being told that they were no good. Nobody really wants to have a past that they’re ashamed of—they want to be justified in the way that they are, and when you think about how hard it is for a narcissist to admit their faults, it must be doubly true for them because they have such a deep need to be perfect. It’s funny how, when Bidibi casts this spell to turn Vegeta Maijin, Vegeta isn’t under Bidibi’s complete control as Bidibi anticipated, probably because Vegeta’s old demons have a score to settle against those that tried to prove them wrong. It feels GOOD to be evil, it feels good to be VINDICATED in your evil, but here the whole planet is starting to suffer . . . and Vegeta perhaps starts to see that pattern happening all over again with this planet he has come to call home. Is he going to let earth be destroyed the same way his father allowed their Planet to become destroyed? Could he do this in front of the son that he let down as an adult ? Can he let go of all those life lessons so easily over his love for power? He could have . . . he owes no real allegence to the earth . . . but he’s also nothing and no one’s slave, including to that of his own pride. His pride wants this power, but his soul wants freedom (as most souls do), so he holds the child who has been such a catalyst for so much healing in his life. He protects him by knocking him out, knowing that Trunks, in that exact moment, is really wrestling with his own pride [dad knock it off, you’re embarrassing me], he asks piccolo if he’ll have a 2nd chance in the afterlife and piccolo flatly tells him no, that he’s going to hell for all the horrible things he’s done, and Vegeta. Does. It. Anyway. – because he has finally conquered that one thing in life that was his true adversary: himself.

5. Potara fusion happens . . . and there’s a very interesting article that you can find here http://www.kanzenshuu.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27546 that really illustrates the point that Vegeta changes after fusion with Goku , but I think this is also a kind of “spiritual cementing” of the fact that Vegeta is in fact in the process of being forgiven for his past transgressions. He is still “in the bardo” during this time, and if you notice, this sequence where they are inside of Buu and the earth is gone and everyone they love is gone, is actually kind of light-hearted compared to the rest of the saga. In buddhism there is this concept that we create a lot of our own suffering by taking out lives so seriously—we all walk around like WE are Goku and that WE have to save the world . . . well here is Vegeta, who has fused with the big dumb oaf, and maybe begins to see him as not being so frustratingly flawless afterwards. He still has anger towards Goku but he also has some modicum of pity, probably because so many people have so many expectations of Kakarot, yet he really is just this free spirit with no real intentions of being a savior.

6. And then we get to super, where father-of-the-year Vegeta is really in full swing, because he’s not just a father figure to Trunks, he’s a father figure to EVERYONE including Goku at a certain level, which is extraordinarily sweet because Goku never had a Saiyan father [I’m excluding the movies here guys, sorry]. Vegeta had a Saiyan father. And because he was brought up as royalty, he has a memory of what it means to be a Saiyan in the highest sense of their culture, their fashion, their cultures, their customs . . . Now that he LITERALLY knows Goku inside and out, and he has conquered his pride AND he no longers harbors a serious need to prove himself better, Vegeta can be that fatherly figure that Goku maybe subconsciously needs him to be. It’s very telling that Vegeta was the one that Whis chose to be an apprentice *first*. It’s very telling that Bulla came along during Vegeta’s apprenticeship because he is not done with his mission here on earth. The thing that frightens me a great deal, however, is that Whis and Beerus are grooming him to be what they want him to be, and as these new “boogie back” credits seem to be indicating, I believe that he is going to leave that baby and go off to war by their command. I guess we will have to leave that up to speculation for the time being, but he has such a sharp sense of “protection” now that he may not be satisfied until all threats to his little Eschallotte are obliterated . . . because he can’t depend on Goku’s dumb ass to do it <jk> sorry Goku-peeps

So this is kind of my take on the whole why-is-Vegeta-suddenly-father-of-the-year argument going around Tumblr this week. Feel free to leave a comment and read my Fan Fiction “Earth Vermin” on AO3 :) [Shamless self promotion I know but what the hell] http://archiveofourown.org/works/9672212/chapters/21847091

#Vegebul #vegeta and trunks #dbz #father of the year

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