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You know when someone goes through your blog on a mass like-spree for a fandom? I love those like, 19 notifications in a row. it’s like “Ah, I see you’re well into a fixation. God bless.”

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Fun Fact: Goku fights smarter. Vegeta fights harder.

As a martial artist, Goku's developed and cultivated his skills over the course of his life, mastering a variety of creative techniques and, more importantly, honing his mind. A quick-thinking and analytical counter-fighter, Goku prides himself on a creative and clever dismantling of his adversary's capabilities.

This is where Goku excels as a fighter. He's a formidable martial artist in his own right but when pressured, he falls back on a generally high understanding of violence and a creative mind for opening solutions. He reads his opponent's style and abilities, finds its weaknesses, and exploits them.

This, incidentally, is part of what what made Majin Buu such an insurmountable hurdle for him.

Majin Buu is a taffy monster made of magic who defies even this universe's conventional physics. He has no fighting style; He just does things, and his infinitely regenerative body and supreme liquid flexibility leaves no weaknesses to exploit.

He cannot be fought the way Goku fights.

For his own style, Goku has one particular signature technique and a couple other moves he's picked up from others. His mainstay is the Kamehameha. But he's innovated a wide variety of ways in which the Kamehameha can be used, based on the needs of his situation.

Goku's used the technique in a variety of ways, such as using it for propulsion instead of as an attack.

Bending it around the opponent's defense for a surprise attack.

Making stationary torpedos that he can fire at will to startle and disorient his adversary.

The coolest attack in Dragon Ball history YES I SAID IT. Learning to teleport? Cool. Kamehameha? Cool. Teleporting in while charging the Kamehameha in order to throw it directly under your opponent's guard before he even has an instant to react? Top-tier.

Point is, this is who Goku is as a fighter. Brilliant and innovative, bringing a great deal of cleverness and creativity to his fights. He breaks down his opponent's technique and adapts himself to the needs of the situation at hand.

Vegeta is also highly observant and analytical. Do not mistake me for calling him stupid. He makes plans of his own, and his greatest asset is his ability to follow everything happening on the field at once. It is next to impossible to get the drop on this man.

Vegeta pays attention.

Vegeta is always paying attention. He splits his focus incredibly well and quickly interprets what he's seeing and hearing with a critical eye. He misses nothing.

He is. Always. Paying attention. The one time someone actually managed to get the drop on him - and I cannot stress this enough - it was a person Vegeta did not know existed because he had not been a part of this battle up to this point.

Am I saying that Yajirobe's cowardice saved the world by not revealing his presence to Vegeta until this fateful moment? Yes. Yes, I am saying that. We literally have a counter-example from someone Vegeta did know and account for to contrast it with.

Vegeta is always paying attention. Unless he doesn't know you exist.

So. Yeah. Vegeta is incredibly brilliant and observant. But what he's not is a martial artist. Vegeta, instead, is a soldier. He's comfortable in the realm that overwhelming power creates.

Vegeta hits hard.

He hits very hard.

He hits very, very, VERY hard.

In fact, Vegeta hits harder than Goku does. That's not to say that Vegeta is stronger than Goku; Vegeta and Goku go back and forth on who's stronger in the given moment over the course of the series. But Vegeta's attacks are stronger than Goku's.

To understand what that means, you need to understand that certain kinds of ki attacks have a multiplying effects on their user's strength. Attacks such as the Kamehameha or the Makankosappo, which concentrate ki before firing it, produce a much greater level of ki than their user's standard power output.

When charging a Kamehameha, Goku's battle power reading on the Scouter rises dramatically. This is the secret of techniques like the Kamehameha: they concentrate ki into a point before releasing it all at once, like pulling the pin on a grenade.

As concentration moves go, the Kamehameha isn't actually that great. The versatility and creativity that Goku brings to it is what makes it so formidable. Pound for pound, it kinda sucks. Piccolo's Makankosappo here makes the Kamehameha look like noob shit.

This kind of ability is non-standard among ki attacks, which are typically like throwing long-range punches. In fact, it's super-rare among the Planet Trade to be able to do this. Raditz had never even heard of a move like this.

Vegeta had. He knew of exactly one.

I am so sorry to do this to you but we're going to have to talk about battle power numbers here for a moment. Vegeta's clocked at 18,000 BP as of his battle with Goku on Earth; it's brought up a few times in the Namek arc.

Goku, iconically, is OVER 9000 8000!!!

At the moment Vegeta and Goku's attacks meet, Goku is channeling the Kaio-ken x3 which is exactly what it sounds like. He's inflated the ki inside his body to 300% capacity. The drawback is that his body is now an overinflated balloon ready to pop at any moment from all this swelled and bloated ki inside of him. But the gain is that he's outputting 300% power.

At this point in time, Vegeta has a battle power of 18,000. Goku, formerly >8,000 is now >>>24,000. Goku, further, is using the Super Kamehameha rather than the regular one he used against Raditz, which brings with it a higher level of power multiplication.

Nonetheless, the Galick Gun is winning against the Super Kamehameha. Goku is forced to resort to a x4 Kaio-ken - which does leave his body utterly destroyed and incapable of continuing the fight - in order to have enough power to overcome a superior magnification from a weaker opponent.

We see another direct comparison between the two in the Cell arc. That killer Warp Kamehameha fired point-blank into Cell when he least suspects it, which hits him dead-on and unloads its absolute maximum power into him? It does this.

Brutal. If Cell didn't have both Frieza's ability to survive ludicrous levels of harm and Piccolo's regeneration, it would have been over right here. Meanwhile, a glancing blow from Vegeta's Final Flash left him looking like this.

Despite Vegeta being far less powerful than Goku was when he fired that move, the effect is about the same - With implication that if Vegeta hadn't pulled the Final Flash back at the last second to avoid destroying the Earth, he would have erased Cell completely.

Goku's shot hit Cell point-blank and full-on to do about as much damage, albeit with deadlier aim in terms of killing a humanoid being.

This is the distinction between Goku and Vegeta as fighters. Vegeta is very smart, and Goku is very strong. Neither of them is lacking in intelligence or power. But they are philosophically very different fighters.

Pound for pound, Vegeta's moves hit harder than Goku's. He is the unparalleled master in taking the power he has and channeling it into as much destructive force as humanly possible.

On the flipside of that coin, when backed into a corner, Vegeta falls back on outputting as much direct force as he can. Goku gets to thinking his way around the problem at hand and devising a creative answer.

Goku is a surgical scalpel. Vegeta is a warhammer.

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remember that time that all the unova gym leaders gathered to take down team plasma with their pokemon and brycen opted for hand to hand combat instead

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Recently met what I think would be considered my step niece?? My father remarried years back and I guess that's technically my step mother even though I was already an adult, and she has an adult daughter who just married a guy with a little girl, is that a step niece??? Well that's not the point of this post the point is the very first thing she said to me (she's 6) is that she "built an H" and I could see it in the basement. I forgot about this until days later but wow she sure did!

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By the way, this isn't meant to be metaphorical. This is "What if Luffy had Kanjuro's Devil Fruit?"

luffy drawing the strawhats

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PAIN AND TORTURE AND MISERY AND AGONY AND SUFFERING AND TORMENT AND HORROR AND DESPAIR AND

they thought they were soooooo funny for this didn't they. what the fuck. they really just showed me this scene and expected me to stay normal for the rest of my life. wa haht thef uck

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This is why the 22nd Tenkaichi Budokai is my favorite arc in Dragon Ball.

The 22nd Tenkaichi Budokai is a master class in setup and payoff.

We all know how tournament arcs go. The final round is going to be the arc's hero versus the arc's villain. Everything before that point exists to provide character work and spectacle moments, but there's rarely any ambiguity about where the tournament is going.

Poorly done, the lead-in matches can end up feeling like filler. Like the story's just spinning its wheels. Decently done, they give characters a chance to stand in a spotlight they wouldn't normally receive by the rest of the story, and let them shine in individual moments even if they aren't going the distance.

But a well-written tournament uses those lead-in matches to lay groundwork, planting seeds that will eventually sprout into the finale.

The final match of the 22nd Tenkaichi Budokai comes in hot. This tournament had previously been a sports movie arc about the rival schools of Kame-senryu or Turtle Style and Tsuru-senryu or Crane Style.

Ten thought he'd vanquished the star athlete of Kame-senryu, Yamcha, in the opening round. In fact, he rigged the ballots to ensure that he could face Yamcha right off the bat. But things took a turn when he found out that one of Yamcha's juniors, holy shit, killed his master's brother, a legendary assassin and a top-tier master of Tsuru-senryu.

It's at this point that the story stops being about the school rivalry. Instead, it becomes a mission of avenging Tsuru-senryu's lost honor by vanquishing Taopaipai's killer. Ten isn't playing by tournament rules anymore; He wants to kill Goku in the ring.

Only. He doesn't, really. Locked in the fight of his life with Goku, Ten falls in love with the competitive atmosphere itself. He loses interest in avenging Taopaipai and becomes more enthralled by the prospect of simply proving his worth in the tournament itself.

It's at this point that the fight stops being about either of those things it was before. It's no longer a contest between Kame-senryu and Tsuru-senryu. Neither is it about revenge.

It's just about these two martial artists standing on the world stage, ambitions blazing as they reach for the lofty title of Strongest Under the Heavens. The only thing that matters anymore is the pure sport of it.

And what a sport it is. This fight is an incredible summation of everything that led into it. Throughout the arc, we get to watch Goku and Ten take each others' measure. We see the special care and attention they're paying to each others' matches, and we watch them grow from their own.

In Goku's semifinal match with Krillin, we see him break out an incredible vanishing technique.

Special attention is drawn to Ten's ability to follow Goku's movements, as he explains to the reader exactly what Goku is doing.

Setup.

By introducing this move here, we're ready for its faster-paced return in the final round - and we're already primed for Ten to counter it.

Payoff.

But Ten wasn't the only one paying attention during the semifinals. When Ten fought the Muten-Roshi in his guise of Jackie Chun, Goku got to see Ten's signature move: The Taiyoken or Solar Flare.

Incidentally, he refers to this as a Shin Tsuru-senryu or "New Crane School" technique, implying this isn't part of the standard Tsuru-senryu playbook; He created it on his own.

As with Goku's semifinal, getting to see Ten's semifinal gives Goku a leg up on the competition, as this advance preview of Ten's signature move gives him a chance to glean both how it works and how to counter it. We get to see Goku and Krillin discuss the limitations of Ten's technique.

Setup.

This gives Goku the forewarning he needs to be ready for this technique when Ten breaks it out in their match.

Turning Ten's attempt to capitalize on Goku's blindness and vulnerability, into an opening for a counterattack - through a little bit of sneaky-handed filching.

Payoff.

Neither of these guys is winning this tournament with the same tricks that carried them through the semifinal, that's for damn sure. But it's not only their matches that play into this finale. Krillin's fight in the quarterfinals with Chiaotzu - the only real fight Chiaotzu's ever had in this entire series - serves to establish Chiaotzu's psychic abilities.

Setup.

Chiaotzu can telekinetically bind a person, leaving them helpless to attack. It doesn't win him the match, but it briefly allows Tsuru-sennin to rig the finals in Ten's favor.

Payoff.

This ability, set up in the quarterfinals, is what gives Ten the opportunity to realize he doesn't feel right winning like this, and to choose fair competition and sportsmanship instead.

It's easy to keep focus on how Goku and Ten are feeling about this move, because we've already been introduced to the ability itself. What is happening here doesn't need to be freshly explained, allowing the pace of the fight to be maintained.

Speaking of strange abilities we don't need explained, the preliminary rounds of the tournament, typically an easy wash, have one character introduced with surprising gravitas.

In the preliminaries, Goku faces King Chapa. One P, Viz. It's Chapa-O, named for the Italian dish chapati 'cause Toriyama likes his name puns.

Despite not happening on the world stage, this match is nonetheless treated as a serious tournament fight. Goku still wins the fight handily, but not before Chapa has a chance to show off his signature technique: The Hasshuken or 8-Armed Fist.

Hasshuken is a speed technique, built around moving your arms so quickly that it blurs visibility and creates the illusion that you have eight. Chapa hits Goku with this technique, but we see that Goku's fast enough to see through his moves and counter them anyway.

Setup.

In the finals, once he gets serious about competition, Tenshinhan unveils another esoteric ability: Shiyoken, the Four-Armed Fist.

No optical illusion this time. Tenshinhan's devised an ability to physically sprout two extra arms to enhance his fighting.

But four arms are for suckers. Hasshuken can give you eight.

Payoff.

We've already seen Goku face down and defeat Hasshuken and we know he's a quick learner. So it's no surprise when he whips out the technique on his own, much later in the tournament, to counter Ten's Shiyoken.

Nearly every move of this final match stands on the shoulders of the material that came before it - Right down to the final blow. By this point, it's been long established that Ten and Chiaotzu can fly.

It may seem odd these days when everyone who is anyone has mastered it, but the levitation technique Bukujutsu was originally a signature technique for Tsuru-senryu. Everyone else cribbed it off of Ten.

They stole his Bukujutsu/Levitation. They stole his Taiyoken/Solar Flare. Fucking thieves, the lot of Kame-senryu. Turtles be stealin', yo.

In his desperation to win the finals, this becomes Ten's final ace in the hole. By destroying the tournament stage itself so there's nowhere to stand that isn't out-of-bounds, Ten can remain suspended in levitation and force Goku into a ringout.

The best Goku can do is take a huge jump, but that will only carry him so far. He needs to know Ten down to the ground before the ticking clock of gravity ends this match. He only has one option to reach with.

But it's useless.

During Ten's quarterfinal fight with Yamcha, it's established that Ten has the ability to cancel and reflect the Kamehameha.

Setup

This was the first official fight of the tournament. It's a piece of context that has sat on the characters' shoulders for everything up to this point, and we even see Goku attempt a Kamehameha earlier in the final round before thinking better of it.

Payoff (Kinda)

He remembers that Ten can cancel his Kamehameha. It would be a waste of his energy to try for it. Instead, he saves his strength for the longer fight ahead.

This, in turn, is what makes it so suspenseful when Goku is forced to resort to it in this very last exchange. Having no other option, Goku is forced to fall back on a move that cannot work. The outcome of the tournament now depends on an attack proven to fail at the very start.

And then it hits.

Payoff (For Real). Deflect that, asshole.

Though Ten still wins the tournament by sheer dumb luck of Goku hitting the ground a second before he did, this is nonetheless a thrilling solution to a problem created by the opening match of the arc.

This is what the entire final round of the 22nd Tenkaichi Budokai is: A series of payoffs fired off in rapid succession to plot points and abilities and ideas that had been sprinkled throughout the entire arc to that point. A fast-paced frenzy of a fight that rarely needs to stop to explain itself because everything was already layered out in advance.

This is top-tier tournament writing, and anyone seeking to write a tournament arc would do well to study what it has to teach.

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Kind of hilarious to me how poorly the title "Mob Psycho 100" localized to English-speaking areas. To someone whose first language is English, it scans as:

Mob (Yakuza, Mafia)

Psycho (violent person with "crazy" behaviors)

Thus: a particularly violent member of organized crime.

But in Japanese it scans as:

Mob (background characters in crowd scenes in manga or anime)

Psycho (short for psychic)

Thus: a psychic who looks/acts like someone you'd never pick out of a crowd scene in a comic.

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My thought was always that 16 was a holdover from the original plan with 19 and 20, considering his resemblance to the Terminator and the plot similarities between the two.

I was thinking that 19 and 20 were going to be the main villains for a while, until they lost and had to retreat and activate 16 (who might not have been number 16 in the original, maybe he was going to be 18 or 21). And 16 wasn't in Trunks' future, because he wasn't needed. 16 was then going to be an unstoppable killing machine and the true final boss of the arc.

Toriyama's plan with the 17 and 18 retcon was probably to stick to that schedule and have 16 be the ultimate final boss once 17 and 18 were defeated, until he had to change again and introduce Cell.

Genuinely curious what the original plan for Android 16 was.

It's widely known that the plot of the Android arc changed multiple times over the course of the series. 19 and 20 were originally intended to be the arc's true villains. In fact, Trunks calls them out by serial number when he's first giving the infodump about his future.

This isn't a Viz-ism, either. He says "19 and 20" specifically in the original Japanese.

Those two Androids, not 17 and 18, are the ones ravaging his future. However, as is commonly known, Toriyama's editor former editor and currently a trusted friend Kazuhiko Torishima was unimpressed by the Androids' design.

The funny thing is, this isn't the only glaring plot hole that the abrupt shift in plot created. It's easy to pin down 20's flight to his lab as the moment Toriyama switched gears, because he's forced to bring in Bulma to rerail it onto the new story - creating another massive plot hole in the process regarding what Bulma knows.

See. In addition to Trunks clearly identifying 19 and 20 as the Androids, this scene three years in the past had another moment that becomes an issue later on. It's when Bulma says this:

See, Trunks has explained that Dr. Gero is creating the Androids as we speak and will set them upon everyone in three years' time. Bulma suggests having Shenron reveal the location of Gero's lab, and then they can all run off and gank him.

She gets voted down because Goku, Vegeta, and Tenshinhan are all super interested in fighting these Androids.

Goku tries to spin some guff about a moral reservation but he adds that in as an afterthought. His kneejerk is that he wants to fight. It's Krillin who ultimately succeeds in talking Bulma down, via some 4-D chess maneuvers against Vegeta.

Krillin's planning on using the Androids as a common cause to trick Vegeta into becoming one of the gang.

Which. Y'know. Goes off without a hitch, honestly. Krillin is a tactical genius and all-a y'all owe him respect. He manipulated Vegeta straight into that redemption arc.

In any case, this is where Trunks's warning leaves us: In three years' time, Dr. Gero will unleash 19 and 20 who will kill us all. If we knew where he was, we could do something about it, but the will to actually do that isn't there.

So.

Three years later, during the fight with 20, he uses Bulma as a distraction to make his escape. Upon rescuing her, Bulma's able to positively ID 20 as the doctor himself.

More than that, she knows exactly where he lives because he's a famous celebrity whose personal information gets talked about in the scientific community.

She just never brought it up before because no one ever said Dr. Gero was involved in any of this.

This is an even bigger HOOOOOOLY SHIT than the clear identification of the Androids' serial numbers. What Bulma knows flipped between these chapters.

So we make our way to Gero's lab to meet the arc's Actual Villains For Realsies, 17 and 18.

As a sidenote, not to be outdone in jankiness by Goku dropping the Senzu into a pocket dimension earlier, Toei has Dr. Gero's broken-off right hand occasionally regenerate by magic in this scene.

This arc is rough for everyone.

In any case, this brings us to the awakening of 16.

At this point in time, the retcon has finished taking effect; 17 and 18 are now retroactively the Androids from Trunks's future, but 16 is something different. Another Android that Trunks has never heard of before.

Dr. Gero practically pisses himself with terror when the prospect of 16 being awakened comes up.

In the same breath that Toriyama rewrites 17 and 18 to be the True Actual Villains For Realsies of the arc, he also introduces the enigmatic 16. All we know of him is that Gero believed he was a malfunctioning, uncontrollable failure whose awakening would threaten the whole planet.

The Twins question 16 about the true threat he represents.

But all he has to offer in response is this... eerie smile, as if he knows something he isn't sharing.

Answering "Are you going to kill us all" with a smug grin is fucking ominous. Shortly after, we learn that whatever 16's malfunction is, it scared Gero so much that he never made another of the same kind of thing that 16 is again.

What went so horribly wrong that it spooked Gero into trying out human base models and? It's worth noting that while Gero did go back to the mechanical design for 19, he considered the subsequent failures of 17 and 18 following whatever happened with 16 to be sufficient reason to can the Infinite Energy design entirely.

Android 16 is the most formidable design Gero ever created to kill Goku with. And he refused to ever make another like him again.

Current Dragon Ball lore, per interviews with Toriyama, say that he didn't want 16 released because 16 has sentimental value to him. But that doesn't explain why he didn't make other Androids like 16, and these panels themselves are telling a very different story. They're hyping up the mystery of 16 to be the true ultimate threat of this arc - At least, once he finally gets a chance to meet his one true adversary.

However, this doesn't last. Torishima didn't like the Twins as villains either so Cell was created instead. It was later revealed that 16 was very strong and also has a bomb in his chest that would wipe out a small portion of the countryside.

But the nature of this terrifying and enigmatic threat to the planet sure to unfold if 16 awakens, something so terrible that Gero was afraid of ever making an Android like 16 again, would be lost to the cutting room floor.

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Do you know this Jewish character?

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the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy's way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn't expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.

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anybody else in the club feeling this one

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Do you like Yu Yu Hakusho?

Do you specifically like the anime version, and haven't read the manga? Do you know what the anime version changed?

One major thing was removing Atsuko (Yusuke's mom) from the Dark Tournament. In the manga, she's there, part of the gal squad, cheering Yusuke on the whole time, but the anime cut her entirely.

Here are my favorite moments of Atsuko in the Dark Tournament that the anime cut:

During Kuwabara vs Rinku:

During Yusuke vs Chu:

Between Rounds:

Hiei vs Bui:

And then she REALLY turns it up for Yusuke vs Toguro:

Post-Tournament:

She's so awesome, I hate that the anime cut her, I think she's my favorite of the Gal Squad.

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You know. I have to give Viz Media credit for not taking the easy route and just lazily copy/pasting iconic scenes directly into their manga. They did their own translation, their own way. But sometimes, man. Sometimes shit gets wild with their version.

I need. I need. You all to understand. There are two generally acceptable ways to describe Goku's position on the social hierarchy of Saiyans. Sometimes he's "low-class" and sometimes he's "third-rate". There are two sides to this coin.

But every coin has an edge.

I swear to Beerus that this is not edited.

I need you to understand that Goku is a bottom-tier boy now. This is canon. There's no going back.