For organizational and geist purposes, I’m going to be including 2009 as a guest star of a year on this page, as it shares more with the 2010s than it does with previous years. This is also the section that isn’t really defined as one continual (or even split) bout of DB hyperfixation, as it absolutely was not something I was focused on at all for a lot of that decade, if I ever even was. Rather, it was simply a span of time punctuated with the consumption of DB-related materials from time to time for fun and nostalgia more than it was anything else.

Part of the reason I’m including 2009 in here is because it may have been when I was introduced to DBZ Abridged (and even if I did see it from its beginning in 2008, it still feels more like it belongs, as a topic, to the 2010s pattern of fandom), something that made a strong mark on all future fandom, distinguishing it from that of the past. The rest is that, in general, a lot of what made 2010 what it was came from the year prior. 2009 belongs to 2010 more than it belongs to the ‘00s. It’s also a lone year in which any DB revisiting wasn’t in the same vein as 2007-08 anymore.

In 2010 proper, I made an attempt at rebooting one of those old game projects from 2005, specifically Hungry Hungry Goku. It wasn’t exactly any less broken than the previous iteration, but I had fun revamping the graphics and audio with mostly stuff I grabbed from Newgrounds. I also made a new splash screen and logo for the game, and added level selecting and a secret playable character with typed in codes.

Unbeknownst to me until I went to dig around for old things probably a year or so later, 2010 was also the year MFG forums were wiped from the internet. Apparently the owner had given the userbase less than a day’s warning before he decided to shut it all down. Even if I had still been active and heard about this in time, the odds of being able to properly preserve everything for posterity would have been slim. It is things like this that are why I’m documenting as much as I can now.

Beyond the bout of Game Maker nostalgia, this era doesn’t really feature any more DB-related creative endeavors on my part. I may have watched the show once (in its normal form) and later in 2014 watched the Kai version for the first and only time. I remember feeling mixed about Kai, since a lot of the removed filler and cheesy original English dub lines were nostalgic to me, and it felt weird without them. Kai’s musical score was also not really my thing, but I’d have to see it again to give it another go. I still need to see the original with its original Japanese score - even as someone who grew up with the Faulkner score, I have a hunch that I’d enjoy Kikuchi’s as well. Dragon Ball Super and a few DB movies also premiered during this decade, but aside from watching a couple of episodes of Super and losing interest, I didn't watch any new DB content from this decade until the next one.

As said previously, something that really did color the 2010s flavor of DB fandom was DBZ Abridged. It was a time of abridged anime series in general, but the true shining star of these was this one. The show evolved over the years from simply a funny and well-written (if sometimes a little of its time in the humor department) parody to a beautiful love letter to the series (while also being a hilarious parody). To this day, I quote and reference this series IRL and many songs that were featured in it have forever been associated in my brain with the parts they were in.

While DBZ Abridged proper ended in 2018, Team Four Star also had and still has related side projects and spin-offs. Some of the older ones I enjoyed the most were in-character let’s plays and their DBcember top 24 ranking series (an advent calendar-type series of short videos each December ranking things related to Dragon Ball). Later, they started doing original animated slice-of-life side stories featuring the characters from the abridged series in scenarios that aren’t covered in the main narrative of DBZ (though technically DragonShortZ started in 2019, most of the videos in that spin off and the entire HFIL spin off are from the 2020s).