I've connected the dots...?

[fitia]

Finished the Namek Arc yesterday! I have... many thoughts on Vegeta, and honestly on how Toriyama's been writing villains so far in general:

• There's never been much depth in the actual character- or thematic-writing in Dragon Ball, and the conflict is about as black-and-white and protagonist-centred as it gets. Given that it's primarily a story about martial arts and self-improvement, the story pulls its conception of virtue from there, and "good" means humility, means discipline, means understanding that there's always room to be better than you are and that there will always be others that are better than you; which means that as a counterpart to all that, the villains are caricatures of arrogance, egoism and cowardice. The protagonists are earnestly emotionally attached to one another, the villains team up for convenience and eventual personal gain, or else they rule over people they mean to control.


• I mention all that because this is how Vegeta is consistently written throughout the arc: there were many opportunities to soften him a bit in the eyes of the audience, give him a drive that reads more human and emotionally vulnerable in a way that evokes sympathy, but he sidesteps them over and over! The destruction of his planet isn't a tragedy to him, he never develops any sense of conscience when he's forced to work with our heroes, he's a self-interested megalomaniac obsessed with power to the bitter end. You have to wonder if Toriyama wrote him that way so he wouldn't do a complete repeat of Piccolo's character arc and have some distinction between his recurring characters.

• Despite all this I'm still very compelled, because aside from being an unkillable dick whose purpose is to cause enough problems to drive the plot along, Vegeta's most consistent traits in this arc are his desire to see Freeza killed, and his insistence that a saiyan should be the one to do it.

Obviously Vegeta takes pride in the fact that he's a saiyan, and in the fact that the saiyans were destroyed because Freeza feared something in them, but there's nothing especially... communal about it. It's as if his relationship to his race is divorced from an actual relationship to his race: he doesn't grieve them, he was completely fine with letting Raditz die and killing Nappa off himself, there's no recognizable sympathetic attachment in Vegeta's relationship to the saiyans, and yet he brings it up constantly, he clearly has a strong relationship to them that he makes it his entire identity, and convinces Goku that Freeza should be killed by a saiyan as he dies.

The explanation the manga gives for why Vegeta's really upset over Freeza is that it's a matter of pride, and that he hated having to be used his entire life. He's clearly of the belief that the saiyans should be the strongest in the universe, and as someone at the top of their defunct hierarchy, that he should be their representative. Which is interesting to think about on the psychological level: the saiyans as a representation of superiority and strength is ingrained in him, regardless of their actual position in the universe or in Freeza's empire of space real estate, and he identifies so strongly with the superior position he was born into that he's insanely possessive over the saiyan identity itself.

Vegeta's whole thing is not just that he's a saiyan: he's the saiyan. Which is why Goku reaching anywhere close to his level is so deeply offensive to him (his whole train of thought in the Namek Arc is that Goku's still a lower class amateur, lmfao), and only something he manages to get over when he's dying.

Though I also think it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to assume he's lying a bit about how unaffected he is over losing his entire planet and community, seeing as that at his most vulnerable he does insist strongly on it being avenged. How does that square with his treatment of Raditz, Nappa and Goku though? Well, you got me there. No wonder Toriyama said Vegeta was his least favourite character, he really had no idea what to do with him until the Buu Saga, did he.


• Another thing that makes this all a bit weird is the unfortunate fact that DBZ logic is very race sciencey as a whole. The saiyans were clearly originally written as an "evil race", so much that even in installments far off in the future, the most that can be done with them is to mention that "pure-hearted" saiyans are a rare occurrence. Even in Goku's battle with Freeza, a battle in which half of Goku's motivation is to avenge Freeza's destruction of his home planet, this exchange happens:

Freeza: Awfully noble, aren't you...? Are you saying the saiyans never killed an innocent?

Goku: They died because of it.


(Chapter 124)



With the obvious implication that an entire race did, at the end of the day, deserve to die off, which... lol. See the above on how DBZ doesn't actually give moral questions depth. It's very difficult to retroactively make the saiyans sympathetic, because at the end of the day, they are written as inherently bloodthirsty conquerors who existed in an inescapable power caste system and had no issue getting rid of their own if they stepped out of line. Not the most considered writing decision, I'm not gonna lie!

 

Anyways. I'm taking a break from reading the manga because while I'm excited to get to the Android and Cell Arcs, I do know this story by heart at this point and want to read some new things first. But, all of the above has made me interested in revisiting Vegeta's relationship with Trunks, seeing as that Trunks represents a bit of a genre shift in the series-- or at least, his story and background feel a bit out of place in the martial arts and constant self-improvement manga. In contrast to his father, he's a character whose tragedy actually is of grief, and he experiences actually human and sympathetic emotions over his whole world being destroyed. It's interesting that it's for this kid that Vegeta actually stops thinking about himself for once for the very first time.