Where does one even begin when writing a webpage about their single most beloved fictional entity of all time? The longest-standing blorbo and comfort character of their life? Perhaps I can begin with the fact that I don’t even know how it began. One does not choose what one latches onto, it chooses them. At some unknown point prior to 2002, a seed was planted in my brain, and grew as a part of me, even during the long stretches of time when it became dormant.
Goodness knows I can guess how - as with most other characters I’ve had attachments to, a deep sense of empathy lies at the root. A character means the most to me if I am able to get to know them well, and something in their story arc provokes a primal need to protect, look after, heal, or otherwise shower with kindness.
Even so, this is a very rare occurrence, and rarer still is the longevity with which this particular one stuck with me. Perhaps it was timing and my own age and media exposure at the time, perhaps he actually was that compellingly written (even twice removed from the source material, given that I grew up with the English dub). Probably some of both. Perhaps his fight with Frieza being one of the first times I may have ever seen an adult male character crying could have done something to me, too, but it’s all just speculation by this point (and TBH that’s saying more about 20th century media portrayals of emotion than it is about the character).
If you haven’t figured it out already, this page is gonna be long and rambly as I write an introspective monologue about a made up guy who frequently has introspective monologues.
One of the more wonderful things about being attached to a character for so long is the number of layers you continue to find that make said character even more interesting or appealing. In Vegeta’s case, a twelve-year-old girl watching DBZ for the first time might simply see a badass little pointy monkey dude just trying really hard. Something about him just makes her want to root for him and she isn’t sure why yet. He is very forward and confident and says funny things sometimes. What’s not to like about that? Also just look at that face! Though I have memories that point to one of those “tween girl in denial of attraction” kind of experiences in the beginning, even if I don’t remember when or much detail. I’d crushed on fictional characters my whole childhood, but this one just hit different.
Y’know how the movie Turning Red is about being a 13-year-old girl in 2002? Well guess who else was 13 for most of 2002? I was! This copy is the oldest drawing I still have. I'd also printed out that GIF and kept it in a folded over sheet in that same dayplanner.
Now the hypothetical-but-not-really girl in question gets a little older, well into puberty and, well, it gets a little zany before we get to the stage that involves more analysis and any actual media literacy and instead it’s more of the same from before, but extra - collecting pics from the internet, Reader x Canon story quizzes, being an excitable weirdo in the new frontier that is online communities. Bog standard autistic teen fangirl, sans the Canon x Canon shipping, anyway. I never did grok the idea of shipping as a general practice. Also I made a dragon, because everything was dragons in the mid ‘00s. And an OC, because the only shipping I did grok is OC x Canon, and never understood the strange stigma against it. If what’s available doesn’t do it for you, why not make your own?
Here be a dragon and the only shipping I’m interested in. From 2004.
Gee, I wonder how a teenage girl could be attracted to this man. Any ideas? But seriously, someone has actually done a study on people being attracted to Vegeta specifically. If I find it again I'll link it here. I didn't necessarily agree with the findings, but it's funny that someone actually did science about it LMAO.
We move eventually to proper adulthood and the now-woman gains some aforementioned media literacy and temporal distance from teenage indulgences. There’s a better understanding that though Vegeta is particularly cunning, observant, and analytical, most of his failures he brings upon himself because of his own blind spots. And yet he learns from them each time, thus becoming arguably the most developed character in the cast. Also just look at him! He is very pick-uppable shaped! That has nothing to do with media literacy. This is also a long period of mostly dormancy and not too deep of dives into fandom thought or DB fixation, just watching the show once or twice more and like, not being a teenager. Better appreciation for other previously overlooked characters also develops during this time a bit.
10/10 Would pick this dude up or curl up beside him. According to his apparent canon weight, I could pick him up no problem (how is he lighter than me, I am smaller than him lol)!
And now, we come to an era of the perfect storm of pandemic-induced hobbies and being in one’s thirties - a time of returning to roots with new wisdom, free from the hangups of earlier adulthood. Cringe is dead. Also, the woman has now begun to think even further beyond the character of Vegeta himself and include the context in which he came to be as he is at the start. It is a renaissance of fandom and a time of the dissection of the deepest and oldest sources of nostalgia to extract all that makes them interesting, y’know, for joymaxxing in this world full of fucked up things we mostly have very little control over.
In the twisted and corrupt version of Saiyan culture as it was after they had already been annexed by King Cold, then passed to Frieza, our favorite prince never knew Saiyan life or culture outside of the microcosm of being a royal-born Saiyan within the Frieza Force. Unless you count his exiled brother, he is the only one of the whole species’ history that fits this cultural category. He has no first-hand knowledge of anything culturally Saiyan that wasn’t filtered through the lens of either his father or Nappa. On these matters he is in fact an unreliable narrator, yet he is mostly the only link anyone else has to the ideas of what it means to be Saiyan.
His specific sense of pride can also be understood better within this context - he was singled out from birth as someone of importance, different and separate from other Saiyans. Thus, he self-isolates from the very beginning. Even after Frieza’s genocide, or at most any mention of it later, he claims to not care. Even at age five. The culture within the Frieza Force and almost certainly also the existing subculture of Saiyan elites was one that eschewed any concepts of camaraderie or a sense of collective. He is almost tragically self-isolating for most of his life, even within his original trio - we see when he learns of the dragonballs that while Nappa is still capable of empathy toward Raditz in spite of his own life trajectory, at this stage Vegeta had already locked his away long ago (also, poor Raditz!).
And so you have a character that, given another path, may have been doomed from birth to the life and ideologies laid before him by toxic indoctrination, but instead was given enough opportunities to learn and grow against all odds - helped along in part by his own tendency to observe and analyze things that happen around him or what other people are doing which yield different results than what he is doing. Being an opportunist was definitely to his advantage as an underdog up against the seemingly impossible goal of being freed from Frieza’s rule.
“Might makes right” was probably one of the deepest things to be ingrained and one of the hardest to unlearn along with notions of destiny and birthrights. And because of this, losing fights was probably the biggest teacher for a lot of Vegeta’s development because his initial belief system only allowed him to be open to something new if it’s coming from someone who can best him in combat or otherwise prove themself strong - the primary example being Goku, who table-flipped his entire worldview. Even so, it’s a long, gradual process of learning that things he once considered to be weaknesses can be instead considered strengths, and that people and things can have meaning and purpose outside of a strength/weakness valuation scale.
We have reached a point now where a fictional character has been growing as a person as long as many of his fans have been alive (or longer), and there’s something kind of beautiful about that, especially considering that he was originally going to just be killed off like Raditz, but the fans who loved him are part of the reason he was spared (at least until Frieza, who also owes his existence to this whole thing!) and allowed to grow in the first place.
As revealed in the 30th Anniversary Special manga!
And like real people, his growth is not linear. It’s a struggle. It’s ongoing. It’s a reminder that given grace and the right opportunities, people who have only known and believed awful things because of an unfortunate die roll of upbringing can unlearn them, but it’s not easy. It may be a little weird to say, but as much as one can be toward someone who does not exist, I am proud of him. I am happy to have gotten to learn of him in my life, happy it started when I was so young and didn’t know anything so I could grow along with him in a way. And though I am sad that Toriyama passed before it was all finished, with so much yet unknown and unanswered, I am glad my favorite character was still learning and experiencing new things right to the end.
That sounds like something one might end a page with, but I also want to get into more than just broad strokes of character and timeline (in-universe and in my own life). I want to poke at random little curiosities, mysteries, questions with no answers, and things that are hyperspecific to my experience of fangirldom.
As mentioned previously, I collected pics of Vegeta from around the internet in the mid-’00s. The first half of that decade, most of what I did on the internet was collecting pictures of whatever I was into at the time, especially before I was allowed into online communities. A lot are screenshots, some are cels, some are official art, but there are also some more unusual things like others’ fanart and out of context untranslated scans of random doujinshi pages. Are these artists still around after all this time? One of the doujin pages seems to be from 1991! There’s also pics of merch items and GIFs of video game sprites, too, like the one on the main page of this shrine. Many of the images on this page are from my old collection!
If anybody knows what doujinshi these are from, I'd like to know! All I have are these four ancient out-of-context JPEGs.
There are also a couple of text documents and video clips, as described in the Journey page for the era. Again, I don’t know where I got them from. The texts are things I found that I added bits of my own thoughts to. I also recall having had some sound clips (in particular, the dub exchange where Vegeta’s reacting to Trunks looking at him repeatedly, assuming it's about his pink shirt), but I don’t have them anymore. They may have been as part of a Windows desktop theme or something, since at the moment I’m considering those to have been lost to time, and there was probably more that was also lost - wallpapers, writing, who knows what else. I had a drawing I bought off a friend from a summer art class in the early ‘00s (I don’t remember what year, maybe 2002?) that now only exists as a scan.
The kid who drew this was basically the first fellow fan I probably ever met in my life. I also went to my first anime con (which was out of state) because he was going - however I managed to convince my folks of that!
Outside of a couple of video games, I don’t know that I had any merch until the mid-aughts, given that obtaining anime paraphernalia before that was hard to do where I lived without parents willing to spend money online or the ability to attend more than that one convention (and I didn’t know of a local one until 2005). Before that, I made do with staring at game box art, a printed out picture, and hugging my T. rex plushie that ended up as a “vessel” of sorts. But later I did end up with a few things, some of them from that local con, others of unknown origin - two figures, a wall scroll, a keychain, and a water bottle. I no longer have any of these, but over my adulthood I’ve gotten some other stuff - two pins, three shirts, and two figures (one I honestly have forgotten where or when). I also bought a batch of stuff from a friend who was selling off some things (plush/keychains).
Some of my old things from the mid-aughts.
Some of my current things from adulthood.
As for stuff I’ve made myself, there’s surprisingly not all that much given the huge span of time involved. I don’t know what it is, but there’s an inner critic that has always stayed my hand from drawing faves as much as I probably would otherwise have done. It has lessened finally in the last few years, but it’s still there. Even if something I draw is good, it never feels like it’s really him - an empty shell the soul will not occupy, in a sense. Like anything, if I want to get better at drawing Vegeta or figure out how I personally want to draw him, I need to just knuckle down and “train” at it. That said, I’ve definitely done some art of him, and made things that reference him.
These are things from the aughts, not counting the dragon stuff. There wasn't much, as I was a long way from finding my courage about it.
These are things from the 2020s. I'm still figuring it all out. There's also a comic I'm making as a prologue to a "what if Vegeta was in Majora's Mask" mod, which you can see on the games page.
It’s just a hunch, but I think some of what very little taste I bother to have in fashion/clothing aesthetic might just be attributable in part to Vegeta, specifically from GT (and end of Z), even though I never ended up seeing that much of it. He also joins Link and Ash Ketchum in the ranks of those who have given me a fondness specifically for fingerless gloves as a look. While I’m not a fan of the Super anime’s art style, I do like Vegeta’s casual outfits there, too. The “tryhard ‘80s bad boy” looks from the old stuff and the “guy in a button down shirt and slacks” looks from DBS both just work on him, or maybe in general! Also GT gave us Super Saiyan 4, which is “what if Vegeta, but fluffy and his tail is back” and it is glorious.
As for the more Vegeta-y Vegeta outfits, I think my favorites are the Saiyan Saga armor and the Buu Saga armorless look. I like the darker color of the later Frieza Saga suit, too. I enjoy the gradual shrinking of armor as a through-line of his arc, like he’s letting more of his guard down over time both in character and in his design. I’d like to think that was on purpose, but either way, it works! And then they kind of threw that out the window with Super, but alas…
Shoutout to the first couple of arcs for letting the characters' hair move. I miss that!
Speaking of Super, one of the best things about it is the extra little tidbits of lore we’ve gotten for Vegeta. Something as minor as referring to him a single time as “Vegeta IV” has big implications, at least to me for my headcanons/fanfic worldbuilding. What if the Saiyan-Tuffle War and annexation by King Cold weren’t the only massive table flips of Saiyan life in recent history? What if there was only the one dynasty of royalty, and the whole structure before that was completely different, and royalty/class was itself a huge upset? What does that legacy mean for our favorite prince?
And while I haven’t read the manga yet, I’m really interested in Vegeta’s personal growth in the Moro arc with the training on Yardrat and the Forced Spirit Fission and staunchly defending Namekians. I’ll have to see what I feel about Ultra Ego by reading that arc, too. I think there might be some interesting character building with Granolah and whatnot, with the idea of Vegeta having been carrying and now addressing the collective guilt of his species. I still only know of things from these manga-only arcs through other people talking about them on social media when they dropped so I’ll have to read for myself. I know very little about Daima, but I’m sure it has interesting offerings, too.
There's something really nice about seeing him at peace.
One thing that still eats at me ever since Toriyama’s death is that everything we don’t know about Vegeta that came from him will remain unknown. Everything Toriyama knew but hadn’t shared or came up with but forgot about died with him. Headcanons for me can only go so far before it actually just feels like making shit up. I can fill in some implied details, make logical leaps reading between the lines, maybe explore things that are at least mentioned, but I cannot invent a mother for him out of whole cloth.
I know it’s not addressed, but it’s interesting to note that Vegeta’s father starting the Saiyan-Tuffle War was basically the catalyst for absolutely everything that became of the Saiyans afterward. If they were not involved in a war during that full moon, King Cold may never have gotten wind of their capacity as a tool for genocide, and the Saiyans would not have spent the last ~6 years of their existence being known to the galaxy as some sort of marauding menace to all before Beerus gave Frieza his blessing to annihilate them. How aware is Vegeta of the role his own father played in setting in motion his own kind’s doom?
King Vegeta was a profoundly selfish man, even having the audacity to try to trick Beerus, which also helps seal the Saiyans’ fate even more directly. We see some of what our Vegeta had to work with in terms of upbringing, and yet there is also a glimmer of care that the prince was capable of even then. Perhaps it was innate and then buried later, or perhaps it was picked up from his mother, who of course we have no canon information on. Might she have been the reason his brother was kind and gentle? Perhaps she could be why, when you strip away all the indoctrination and shell of stoicism, Vegeta himself is a very introspective person and cares immensely about a lot of things.
Vegeta spends a lot of screen time pretending not to care about things until he’s pushed to the limit and the shell breaks, revealing even to himself how much he actually cared the whole time. Even though he’s very observant and analytical in general, there are still those blind spots. His obsession about not showing weakness and his blindness to his own emotional vulnerabilities is probably a product of necessity growing up the way he did. He would have had to pretend hard enough to have convinced himself he didn’t care about things he actually did, from a really young age, in order to keep up appearances - for both self-preservation and, of course, pride. By the time Frieza wipes out the Saiyans, this thick wall is already in place, when before, his instinct when he’d seen Beerus threatening his father was to react emotionally, to defend.
I guess I should also mention Majin Vegeta and my thoughts on all that. Aesthetically? Badass! Look at him go! Narratively? Poor guy has a lot of unexamined, unresolved wounds that had been swept under a rug in the 7 years since Goku’s death, and a bunch of salt got rubbed in them during the Buu arc, too. It sucks; it’s tragic. In my head, I feel like a personal crisis of this magnitude might have been avoidable if he’d had a partner who was willing to seek out and help him work through his mental scars rather than just domesticate him like some kind of animal and merely enable his singular hobby, but my distaste for the canon ship belongs on a different page. Vegeta’s second death, while it doesn’t hit the same as the first one, is a very solemn, heartbreaking moment. His talk with Piccolo beforehand really sets that tone, and of course hugging little Trunks.
Shoutout to old anime lighting, they just don't do it like they used to.
Even if it took until I was in my thirties to really sit down and analyze these things in detail (and some of the thoughts are based on far newer information that didn’t exist in the ‘00s), there has probably always been the intuitive understanding that Vegeta reads as the “guarded tough guy who has more emotions than he thinks he’s supposed to” archetype, and so perhaps it was a foregone conclusion that seeing DBZ as a tween was going to result in attachment to him. Or perhaps it’s because of him that I ended up gravitating mostly to guarded men/male characters or presenting myself as a safe space for vulnerability to significant others and male friends, and have a desire to see a cultural shift where men showing the same emotional range as any other gender is more accepted.
Indeed, how many ways can one character mold someone’s brain? Not just in the sense of personal tastes or spotlighting cultural norms to pay attention to, but even stranger things. There seems to be an old bundle of neurons up there somewhere in my skull cavity that acts like a sleeper agent cheat code of sorts. If an outside party brings up Vegeta unprompted or does something related to him (like ordering stickers at my work), there’s a high chance of it activating some kind of unlimited power source in my brain, at least for several hours’ time. I’m vibrating with energy as though I had three cups of coffee without any downsides, I’m far more tolerant of physical discomforts or things that would normally make me complain. I’m just so full of unbridled joy that at least for a while I’m unstoppable.
Music associated with Vegeta also has positive effects on its own - I know many people use DB music to work out to, and yes, it is very effective! When I deadlifted with 45 plates for the first time (whatever year that was, I forget), I had one of the good ol’ Faulconer Vegeta tracks playing. On the complete opposite end of the vibe spectrum, there are also songs that my brain specifically has associated with Vegeta that are just regular songs. And it’s not the kind of stuff most other people would do that with - my number one song for him has always been *NSYNC’s This I Promise You - but these mental links were created when I was a hopelessly sappy tween and persist still in this hopelessly sappy adult.
WELP I was gonna stick this in WebAmp with the old Winamp skin I used to have but that didn't work out for how I'm doing this page. Oh well.As I’ve said here and elsewhere in this shrine, probably one of the catalysts for my attachment to Vegeta and definitely still the most heart-wrenching part of his whole story is his fight with Frieza and his death on Namek. It’s part of why the aforementioned song is the one that stuck hardest. One of the timelines in my fanfic world is even based on the premise of Spina hypothetically going back in time to stop this death and heal Vegeta instead, allowing him to transform and kill Frieza himself.
I made this to test my rigs, and I also had some Namek assets already done. If I were to actually make this shot, there's definitely more I would want to do with it!
“A heart of stone can’t shed tears like you did.” Goku’s dub line after Vegeta’s death just hits like a freight train every time. 30 years of bottled-up pain had poured out from Vegeta as he lay dying and desperate for some glimmer of hope that Frieza could be taken down, even by his own hated rival. I don’t think anyone in the whole rest of the show just breaks down quite like this. And the respect and understanding that Goku shows here is just beautiful. My heart shatters into a million pieces. The whole episode and the one prior are the reason I feel so insulted by Resurrection F - no one deserves to defeat Frieza specifically more than Vegeta does. Goku can have all the other wins in the world, just give Vegeta this one!
Vegeta can also have his tail back, as a treat, because I said so. In the three timelines of my fic, two have it wished back, and the last one the story is derailed so early he doesn’t lose it in the first place. When I draw him, he has it back, with little exception, and this goes back 20 years. I sewed a tail for a figure of him in 2020. I’ve said it in a million places here but tails are such a key part of the distinctiveness of Saiyans. Plus, out of all the ones who had a tail and lost it, the only one that was truly involuntary was Vegeta.
To go back to that figure, ever since before I can remember, if I’ve had some kind of emotional attachment to a fictional character, I’d invariably have some kind of item that would serve as a sort of comfort vessel to represent them. It’s sort of like a security blanket type of thing (and yes, I have The Autism if you couldn’t tell lmao). Usually the item would actually be related to or in the image of the character, but not always, as is the case when there’s nothing available - in which case it falls on something somewhat arbitrary, like a random plushie. Vegeta is unique in that there have been multiple “vessels” for him over the very long span of time I’ve had recurring attachments.
The earliest one was a green T. rex plush which I’d put a bracelet with the words “Our Earth” around its neck. I’ve always been a tree-hugger type and a paleo nerd so those were things I had at the time when I first became attached to an arguably apex-predator-coded guy who helps save the Earth at least a couple of times. Merch would not be obtainable for a couple of years. In the mid-aughts, I had a base GT action figure that I carried around everywhere, and even when I got a few other things (another figure, a wall scroll, a Build-A-Bear monkey plush in a leather jacket, etc.), that one figure was the “real” one.
The only photos I have of the T. rex plush (2001?) and the original figure I had (2004).
Fast forward about fifteen years and all those things are long gone by the time a proper reattachment happens again. I got stuck on a rewatch of DBZ at just before the aforementioned death on Namek, and I needed a new “vessel” in order to deal with it because 2020 was already doing me enough psychic damage. Being an adult with income and spoiled for choice (and picky), it took a long time to choose one. This is the one I made a tail for. And once again, even though I have since acquired other Vegeta-shaped objects (mostly secondhand stuff I bought from a friend), this is my current vessel.
My current figure with his tail that I made.
One more thing from 2020 specifically is the discovery of my being on the ace spectrum, and that bleeding into my headcanons of all the Saiyan characters, including Vegeta. The irony of the guy who unlocked sexual attraction for me in the early ‘00s also playing a role in discovering that I’m a gray-ace in the 2020s is certainly something. But seeing the characters again in this new light, and yeah the Saiyan characters just flat out don’t show attraction like the human characters do, so in my head they’re various flavors of ace-spec. I will get more into that on the Saiyan headcanons page.
A doodle I did for Ace Day 2024.
I’ve mentioned video games a few times, mainly the box art for Budokai. But I have played all 3 from that series and unsurprisingly mained Vegeta most of the time. I don’t really play fighting games (which unfortunately most DB games are) but it was just about the only way to play as him in a video game at the time. Part of the appeal of the latter two games in the Legacy of Goku series was also being able to finally play as Vegeta. My Buu’s Fury playthrough that I streamed was a blast, and he was the only one I got to max level (that game has maybe way too high a cap, haha).
As an adult, I’m stingy with spending money on games which I know my skill level will prevent me from getting the full experience of (and I don’t have time to “git gud” as it were) even if you can be your blorbo in yet another game, so I skipped over most of the other DB game series. I got the Xenoverse games on sale way after they came out, but getting to team up with Vegeta (or several Vegetas) to mash buttons as some approximation of my OC is definitely worth the 8 bucks! At the time of this writing, I also have Kakarot which I’ve heard things about that I feel I’ll enjoy, but again I haven’t taken the time to play it yet. Because it’s a more “serious” fighter I wasn’t originally planning on getting DBFZ but I got it on sale to try with a friend before finding out that cross-OS online play is not really doable. Maybe someday I’ll do the single-player for those “link” things she told me about.
And yes, this is the same friend I’ve mentioned several times on this shrine. I simply can’t overstate how much it means to actually be able to be friends with another Vegeta fangirl. It took over 20 years to get there. Not that there aren’t tons of other fangirls around (or that I don’t have other friends I can gush at even if they aren’t fans themselves - I have some), but for a myriad of reasons I’ve never been able to spark a friendship with any until late 2023.
Some stickers I made and have sent to my friend, and a silly edit I made for her, too.
A lot of it is to do with how different I feel from other fans. In my first DB community in the mid-aughts, it was mostly rowdy boys arguing power levels and speculating about fight stuff. Decades later in the age of social media, there’s more variety, but now overwhelmingly people are much younger, super into shipping, or at least really like the canon ship or the things about it I can’t stand, or aspire to be Bulma-like in their expression. These are all perfectly fine, just not how I want to engage, personally! It’s just that the sheer commonness of it all still keeps me out of the Vegeta section of the fandom. Some of them are artists whose ability to capture and express emotions I really admire, but from afar. At least now I have a friend, and I suppose that’s all one really needs!
That, and seven pages of text. For the moment, that’s all, but there will surely be more in the future! There’s still more to dig into - manga, Daima, more games, even the original Japanese version of the DBZ anime, which I’ve recently started watching with my husband. I haven’t watched DBZ with someone properly before, so this will be fun!
