The one thing that stopped my original obsession with DBZ from being a single continuum through to this next era was the airing of Rurouni Kenshin on Toonami during a huge chunk of 2003. Like DB, I don’t know what drew me to start watching it in the first place, but I was consumed by it from then to when I returned to DB sometime in 2004 (though based on DB games I definitely had and played that were released in 2003, it’s likely that DB remained a background interest through the Kenshin era, in addition to there seeming to be some overlap in early 2004). This second DB era ended abruptly when I got my first boyfriend in high school in the spring of 2005.
Unlike the previous era, a decent amount of 2004-2005’s era of DB fixation is actually preserved. Most of what is lost is art that wasn’t scanned that I simply don’t have access to, timing/chronology of various things, online interactions on a forum (and AIM) that has been deleted from the internet and is poorly archived, and a Quizilla account that is lost to time, as it suffered a similar fate as the forum.
A buddy icon I made is all that survives of AIM
2004 was such a catalyst year for a lot of things. I gained access to new tools for art in the form of Paint Shop Pro 8, our first scanner (unless that was before, but clues point to August ‘04 as the birth of scanning), and possibly my first pen tablet, an Intuos3 (unless that was 2005). This was also my first real introduction to online communities and posting art in the form of forums, and in meatspace I met my best friend, got a car, and started to learn to drive - my first step toward adult-like freedom.
Though I don’t know exactly when, 2004 was also the year of inception for both my first OC (then called Pooka) and the Vegeta dragon. More about them are detailed on their own pages, but suffice to say there was a lot of art during this span of time - from drawings to wallpapers to forum icons and banners to random GIFs and sprite edits.
A somewhat standard art process of the time featuring the two aforementioned subjects - a traditionally inked drawing scanned and rudimentally colored in PSP
Some animated graphics I'm not sure what they were for, except that they're avatars according to filename
This era was smack in the middle of the period of time where I was making wallpapers left and right, whether from my own art or composites with images found online
Most likely because of the presence of a scanner, there are many drawings from this era that have survived, but definitely not all. Though there are certainly outliers (especially in the crafting department), a lot of the art I was doing was pencil drawings that got inked with felt-tip pens if I liked them enough. Some of these would even get colored in Paint Shop Pro with fill and pattern bucket tools, maybe burn/dodge shading if I was feeling spicy. This was my first step outside of MS Paint/Word in terms of digital art. Any animated GIFs were almost certainly made with online tools, though I no longer know what those might have been.
Few things I have done scream "ostracized autistic teenage girl identifies with 'otherness'" quite like this image
Rare it has always been that I've ever had it in me to draw ship art, but when I did, it was them (and Vegeta always has his tail back)
Being on forums also led me to try figuring out how to make avatars and signature banners like everyone else was doing. For future reference, said forums also left a mark that led to future choices in education, as it was part of why I wanted to go into web design in my late teens, though spoiler alert: I did not do that. But this site would probably not exist if I hadn’t been jealous of other forum kids knowing HTML/CSS in 2005.
Of course, I wasn’t just drawing pictures - I collected them, too. Somehow, a few image collections from the aughts are still preserved. One of these is a DB collection from August 2004 to April 2005 which is 99% pictures of Vegeta (about 270 of them), scraped from around the internet in various unknown corners. I know I was collecting pictures from the ‘net in general before this (I had an entire sun conure pic collection from earlier in the ‘00s which was lost), which very likely included DB pics, but nothing other than Pokémon and Kenshin stuff survives to this day that predates 2004. A lot of the images have a very 15/16-year-old fangirl flavoring to their filenames, and live in a subfolder called My Darling Prince. There are also a couple of documents I grabbed off the internet and added my own thoughts to in places.
My laptop from sometime in the first half of 2005, its desktop plastered with images from my collection (including the GIF on the front page of this shrine)
I also have two video clips that were collected back then (again from who knows where in the pre-YouTube, dial-up era) - one was a segment featuring child Vegeta from I think the Bardock special and the other in a folder called The Saddest Moment in History which contains Vegeta’s death on Namek. Don’t ask me why I have something in my archives that I know I took psychic damage from (and still do, to be frank - it’s extremely hard to watch even in my 30s) - I don’t even know myself! There is also a folder called Slave Drivers which just has a picture each of Frieza, Bulma, and Bulla/Bra. Though my feelings about them are mostly the same (albeit more nuanced and meta-analyzed now), I was a very salty fangirl 20 years ago (or more, it’s hard to say since older records are gone) - which will be detailed elsewhere.
This era was also when I first got my mitts on the means to attempt game development, though I use that term very loosely at this point. I don’t know what led me to it, but I obtained Game Maker, and in January 2005 I went to town trying to make several DB game projects happen in spite of knowing absolutely nothing and not being smart enough to understand the instructions/tutorials.
These included an attempt at DB-ifying the example Pac-Man clone in the form of Hungry Hungry Goku, some kind of top-down adventure game called Pooka’s Adventure, and something called Kill Bulma. Absolutely none of these things got very far, let alone finished. Interestingly, there is a little cutscene clip that was made for Pooka’s Adventure, and while I remember having made it, I have no idea with what tool - it was certainly one of the first things I ever animated (and the first that wasn’t a GIF). The character sprites that weren’t just taken from game rips found online were done with Charas. I'm currently working on finding a setup that will allow me to actually run and screenshot these "games" (Windows XP VMs aren't playing nice).
The cutscene from Pooka's Adventure.
The title screen for the original version of Hungry Hungry Goku
Of course, I didn’t just try in vain to make DB games - I was definitely playing real ones (and, as before, putting DB into games where it wasn’t). The real DB games I was playing during this era were mostly more of the same - the rest of the Budokai series and Legacy of Goku 2. I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t get around to Buu’s Fury at the time of its release, as that would have been smack in the middle of this era (I played it for the first time on my streams in spring 2024). What I can say is that I remember pre-ordering Budokai 3 and still have a photo of the cool box it came in. I also got Sagas on the GameCube but other than being hype for another non-fighter DB game, I guess it ended up being forgettable because I don’t really remember it.
The photo of my limited edition Budokai 3 box
In addition to the continuing habits in previous games (naming Pokémon, etc.), some new non-DB games were added to the roster of things I tried to shoehorn DB themes into. I didn’t play many games on the PS2 outside of the Budokai series, but we did have a few Tony Hawk games that I played a lot in spite of being terrible at them (not unlike Budokai games, though - I’ll only really try a fighter if it’s DB, since I know I’ll never be good). In particular, Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 was a game where not only did I try to recreate my OC, there were new customizations that led to more opportunities for DB referencing.
2024 approximations of what I was doing with Tony Hawk's Underground 2 20 years ago - I distinctly remember making this symbol and choosing that yellow monkey as my sticker - the rest, I'm not sure what I chose but I would have been trying to make Pooka in her original incarnation
In late October of 2004, I joined my first forum - the PokéCommunity forums - under the name ShadowCharizard. Though the earliest posts were to do with the Gen 3 Pokémon games, a bit of art, and sprite requests, it eventually devolved into being a little freak about DBZ/Vegeta and learning some of baby’s first lessons on forum etiquette. This first account’s activity ended in early December 2004. Oddly enough, in the account’s profile, I listed “writing fanfics” among my favorite activities, but I have no particular reason to believe any fanfic ideas I may have had at the time ever got written down. I don’t even remember what they could have been. It’s possible that Pooka’s Adventure actually had a somewhat-thought-of story, but no record exists of any DB fanfic between Dragon Ball Z Frogs and my current fanfic world that started in 2020.
A trainer card I got from someone's thread and a graphic I made, presumably for one of my earliest signatures, some of the first sprite editing I tried
A Super Saiyan Charizard drawn on some oekaki - I don't remember if it was PC's or a different (likely Pokémon related) one. Based on the spelling it's from sometime prior to spring '05
The other forum from this early time was one called MyFavoriteGames, or MFG. Like most other forums I’ve joined except PC, it’s gone, existing now only as scant snapshots on the Wayback Machine with no user profiles. In spite of the name, this was in fact a DB-focused community. There is no longer any way of knowing when I first joined, but must have been in late 2004 or early 2005. I don’t even know what exactly my first username was, though it may have been ~SAIYAN_LOVE~ since that name appears in two of the graphics I made during that time.
The graphics (a possible avatar and a signature) which point to this having been my original MFG username
I don’t remember any specifics about my posts (though I was probably still experiencing the growing pains of netiquette, to put it politely), but I do remember having made friends there, in spite of the rowdier and more edgy nature of that community compared to PC. I remember having made graphics for a couple of people. I remember befriending a mod, talking to him on AIM, and drawing my OC with his and my best friend’s OCs. I remember having a huge crush on him (this will become relevant later), but he had a girlfriend at the time.
A drawing I did of my bestie's, that forum mod's, and my OC as pals
Then, I presumably left the forum shortly after getting my own first boyfriend and drifting away from DB. Interestingly, I rejoined PC again shortly after this occurred, and in my first art post on the new account (DragonHeart), I reference MFG’s harshness in comparison to PC. There is, however, no trace of DB to be found any more aside from the use of the name “Puka” in a trainer card shop thread (I don’t believe that one ever got made).
One other thing online that was pretty much guaranteed to have been during this era was Quizilla. I think my bestie introduced me to it but neither of us are really quite sure how we got started on there. In any case, we were doing what any teenage fangirls would be doing on there at the time, albeit for different fandoms (in between other, normal, non-fandom quizzes). If you know, you know.
Other than this, I had no actual interest in reading anything that one might consider fanfiction, as the main appeal of the story quizzes was that they were ReaderXCharacter. I don’t remember the username for whatever this account would have been, as the only account name I have a record of was definitely from later on. And of course, the entire site in the form it took back in the day is as gone as MFG - no profiles and a smattering of irrelevant snapshots.
Something else that I definitely did with my best friend was attend a small local anime convention in April 2005. It wasn’t my first con ever - I had been to a much bigger one out of state once, but I can’t remember what year that was nor whether I got anything DB-related (it might have been the source of some of the items whose origin is unknown, but it’s hard to say since all details are forgotten and no record has been found), so it’s currently not mentioned anywhere else on this shrine. In any case, for this new con, I decorated the back of a shirt with iron-on rhinestone letters that spelled out “Saiyan Princess” and made myself a tail. I wore a pendant I’d made of polymer clay and beads that featured the royal Saiyan symbol. Unlike the previous con, there are photos that were taken and still exist.
The surviving photos of what I wore to that convention and what I bought there
Of note, while I definitely owned GT-related things (the above figure, another base Vegeta figure, and a DVD containing the episode wherein Vegeta attains SSJ4), I’m not terribly sure how much of GT I ever actually saw. Some of my thoughts on it came through and survived time - I was a huge SSJ4 fan and I did not like Bra/Bulla at all - but other than that and vague recollections of Giru and a couple of shadow dragons, I don’t really remember much about GT. It’s unlikely I saw most of it, for one reason or another - perhaps the way it aired, perhaps timing, perhaps my own engagement or lack thereof. It doesn’t help that unlike DBZ, it was never revisited, so whatever memory I had was never rekindled.
For lack of a better segue, one thing I did have for a very long time was the car I got in late 2004. It was painted a familiarly-themed blue sometime in 2005, and in the beginning I had a Chinese dragon license plate frame. Before this, though (and before I understood how car graphics worked), I had lofty ideas about flames and the Vegeta dragon being put on it. Anything that is mine gets themed after things that I like, after all, and DB was where it was at when I got a car. In spite of my first job out of high school a couple years later being an intern at a sign/vehicle wrap shop, I never ended up pursuing any kind of wrap. I had that car until 2021, when a tree fell on it in the middle of a sunny afternoon.
A photo of my car with the paint job and the plate frame, and the GIF I had made with silly little ideas that never were