So what was the reason a writer isn't supposed to give villains prosthetic limbs? It creates sympathy for them in the audience, or something else?
The problem is that it demonizes real people who have prosthetics. It’s a pretty common trope. Darth Vader and Captain Hook are familiar examples, but recently I was reading about how that new movie, “The Witches” stirred up some similar controversy because the titular witches have three-fingered hands and feet with no toes.
Critics said this was insensitive to disabled people, and it’s not hard to see why. The purpose of these physical differences seems to be to make Anne Hathaway look like some kind of monster to emphasize her villainous character, but that’s kind of shitty, because some people really do have limb differences, and the movie is implying that they’re bad, and all the normal-limbed people in the movie are good.
Now, I don’t think they set out to send that message, but that’s how these tropes take root. If no one objects, everyone assumes that makes it okay, but if someone does stand up and says “Hey, that’s not cool,” then people get defensive and go “Oh, you’re just being too sensitive. If it was a problem, how come no one ever complained before?”
And I don’t know where you draw the line on something like this. I think Darth Vader has gotten a free pass because his cybernetics were pure fantasy in the 80′s, though medical technology has been catching up. I remember watching Return of the Jedi as a kid, and being confused by the scene where Luke cuts off Vader’s hand, and he sees the wires sticking out of his wrist, and then Luke looks at his own hand with a horrified expression. It’s not that confusing a moment, but I was just old enough to read into things and wonder if the dark side of the Force magically turns you into a machine, and Luke was worried the same thing would happen to him. But once I understood that Luke had a cyborg hand too, it all made sense.
Still, there’s a strong implication that “mechanical limbs” = “bad”. Fast forward to Revenge of the Sith in 2005, where we find out exactly how many body parts Anakin Skywalker lost before getting his Darth Vader suit, and there’s this whole scene where he gets rebuilt and it echoes the old Frankenstein movies. You’re supposed to think “Oh, now he’s turning into a monster,” except no, he was already a monster when he killed all those kids and choked out his own wife. The scene where he gets his Vader suit is really just for the sake of tying the prequels into the original movies, but the implication remains.
But, I think what saves the whole concept is that Luke Skywalker loses a hand in the story, and he’s the main hero, and he refuses to accept the idea that Vader is “more machine now than man.” So you could make the argument that Star Wars teases the idea of a physical disability as a sign of evil, and then rejects it.
I think that’s probably the key to the whole thing. If you’re considerate about these things, and you include some good guys with injuries or prosthetics different limbs or what-have-you, then it takes a lot of the sting out a bad guy with a robot arm or an eyepatch or a wheelchair. Writers and artists have an obligation to think about these things as more than just interesting visuals.
And I guess that could mean that really outrageous stuff, like Dr. Gero’s brain in a robot body, are totally fine, since there’s no real-world people in the same situation. I think that was the assumption “The Witches” made when they designed the witches’ bodies. They figured no one could possibly resemble the design, and I guess they were wrong enough that it got them in trouble.
Anyway, I saw someone say that you should think twice before doing that with your villain, and I took that advice to heart. And it probably worked out for the best anyway, since the story really didn’t go in a direction where mechanical body parts would have been important anyway.
Hey, have you kept up with the Super Manga at all? The newest chapter (released a few weeks back now), well... it seems like Toyotaro decided to take a page or so out of your fic 😂
First of all, thank you for reading my fic. I saw you working your way through the last twenty-odd chapters and I was impressed with how quickly you got through them.
I’ve never read the DBS manga, but I did look up Moro the other day to find out why people on Twitter were pissed at Goku, so I bet you’re talking about this:
From what I gather, Moro’s whole arc in DBS has been gathering and stealing other people’s powers through magic or whatever, and then Goku finally turned the tables on him, and I think he ended up in a situation where he recovered some power, but his body couldn’t contain it, so he had to merge himself with the Planet Earth to handle the load. I think this is a sign the arc is nearing the end, because this seems to be a desperation tactic, and the real cliffhanger isn’t “how will Goku beat Moro?” but “how can Goku beat Moro without destroying the Earth?” More of a hostage situation than a power-up.
I like the visual here, because something in Moro’s eyes makes it look like even he isn’t entirely sure of what he’s doing. I reminds me of the look on Cell’s face when he started swelling up for his self-destruct sequence.
I get the feeling they’ll settle this fairly soon and wrap up the arc, but honestly, what I’d much rather see is some sort of standoff, where Moro’s stuck like this and no one can do anything about it, so the world has to deal with Moro being merged with the planet, whatever that may entail. That’s how Toriyama would twist the plot in the original Dragon Ball manga. I was sure Cell would be defeated soon after reaching his perfect form, just because there didn’t seem to be any other way to end it, and then Cell beat Trunks and threw a tournament instead. And then I was sure Goku would beat him, but he didn’t, and so on.
This was kind of neat to see, because every once in a while I’ll write a fanfic with some idea or interpretation or something, and then the source material will put out a new story that sort of validates what I did. I guess Caulifla is the most recent example, since she resembles Luffa in a number of ways, so it was reassuring to see that my idea of a female Super Saiyan aren’t too far off from Shueisha’s. With Moro, I guess you could say Toyotaro had the same problem I did, where the bad guy needs to get a radical power-up. And we know planets are a big deal, because Goku beat Kid Buu with a Spirit Bomb made from all life on Earth. Buu destroyed the Earth easily, but that’s only because it couldn’t fight back.
I’m guessing that’s what Toyotaro is aiming for here, unless this is all a pathetic setup for another retcon about Goku not knowing how sex works. In the meantime, I can at least talk about my version, which I’ll do behind the cut...
Early on, I wanted the central conflict to be Luffa vs. the Saiyans, with the Saiyan King as the main villain. So the battle we see in Vegeta’s flashback, where the Super Saiyan fights a bunch of teeny guys with spears, I wanted those teeny guys to be Saiyans. Why are they fighting her? Because they’re jealous and salty, just like how Vegeta was jealous and salty towards Goku.
A lot of the fic was designed just to set up that moment. I wanted King Rehval to be a giant hypocrite. The Saiyans hate Luffa for being different, but Rehval is also different, and he’s trying to turn the Saiyans into something different as well. They’re so resentful of her that they’d follow him just because he promises to stop her. But by following him, they end up losing their freedom, and becoming little more than slaves. They’re so frightened of Luffa and her message that they just can’t see the danger they’re in.
So a big challenge was trying to figure out ways for Rehval and his followers to be much of a threat to Luffa. Early on, I imagined him as sort of a pastiche of all the big DBZ villains. The connection to Vegeta should be obvious, but he’d also be a wizard like Babidi, and a genteel monster like Frieza. I considered making him a cyborg to tie in with Dr. Gero, but then I read something somewhere about how it’s in bad taste to give a villain prosthetic limbs and such. So I dropped that idea because it would have been cliche. But the basic premise was still there. Rehval doesn’t train to get stronger, he uses magic, or biotechnology, or political maneuvering, or anything else that will serve his purpose. He doesn’t care if it’s dishonorable or if it makes him less of a Saiyan, because he doesn’t care about being a Saiyan, he only cares about ruling the Saiyans, and he’s willing to sacrifice his identity to secure his power.
I think I might have been inspired by the Darth Vader comic that was running in 2015, around the time I started getting serious about the fic. The main antagonist in that series was a scientist named Dr. Cylo, who came up with all these transhumanist and cybernetics experiments. He cloned multiple bodies for himself, so that if you killed one of them, another one would wake up with a backup of his memories. He had a Rodian eye instead of one of his human eyes, presumably because he found this useful. And other stuff like that. This was a guy who was willing to become anything to achieve his goals, which made him a worthy adversary for Darth Vader. So I tried something similar with my own villain. We know Luffa’s Super Saiyan form is totally natural, but everyone acted like it was unnatural, and then you have Rehval looking natural, when in fact he’s anything but.
The problem was, I still didn’t think he was quite powerful enough. I wanted the final showdown to be on that planet in Vegeta’s flashback, and I wanted Luffa to destroy it in order to stop the bad guy, but why would she need to go to that kind of trouble to kill one man? Why would she bother fighting on the planet’s surface, when she could blow it up from orbit, like Vegeta did with Arlia? Why wouldn’t the bad guys run away at the first sign of her? For that matter, why should Luffa bother fighting these guys at all? She can just hunt them down wherever they go. Or she could ignore them, since they’re no direct threat to her.
One way or another, I came up with the idea of Rehval using the planet itself as his power source. That would level the playing field, so that she would need to destroy it to finish him off. And once I had that in mind, I came up with the bit where he could send proxies of himself to other planets. So that way Luffa couldn’t just ignore him, or fend off all of his attacks, because they would just keep coming. She would have to take the fight to him, and blow up his planet, while standing on it, because that would be the only thing that would kill him.
And Rehval would never see that coming, because in his mind, everyone’s as cynical and unprincipled as he is, so he would never conceive of Luffa sacrificing her own life to defeat him. He would expect her to eventually accept defeat, and betray her principles to be part of his new order. But no, she’d rather die than let him win.
I guess that was what it was all about. In the Funimation dub, Vegeta said that she was “destroyed by her own power” because she was “too primitive to control it”, so I really wanted to flip that around and show that she blew herself up to achieve a strategic purpose, and that her “rage” was entirely justified. Hers was an act of stubborn, defiant heroism, rather than a caveman throwing a temper tantrum.
Maybe I lost track of the point I was going for. Moro’s power is pretty similar to Rehval’s, at least as far as I can tell, but the dramatic purposes are different. The cool thing about using the Earth as his body is that Moro can use Goku’s home against him. I don’t know if he’s strong enough to beat Goku this way, but it almost doesn’t matter, since Goku can’t hurt him without hurting his home. With Rehval, it was more about him creating an invincible stronghold. He can’t leave, but he can send his followers anywhere, and no one can defeat him. Luffa’s an irresistible force, but he’s an immovable object, or so he thinks.
So it’s a cool thing where a similar idea can be used in different ways.
Got a commission this week by the awesome FrauleinPflaume, and it rules. In the past I’ve only bought commissions of one character at a time (i.e. Luffa), but she was offering two, so I went with Zatte and it just turned out really well. Something about having multiple OC’s interacting really makes the whole thing feel more real.
Thank you. This is why I turned anon back on, right here.
I got this right after I wrote up the episode where Vegeta uses Final Explosion on Buu, and I quoted the line from the dub of Episode 66, where he remarked that the ancient Super Saiayan was “destroyed by his own power”. So I’m assuming this is what anon is referring to. I like to think that it is, because my head canon is that Vegeta picked that way to go out because he was inspired by his explodey ancestor.
“I’m touched, really, but it’s still gimmick infringement.”
“Tch! For your information, I got the idea from Chiaotzu.”
Since my whole longfic is a flashback, and there’s a few places where the story takes place out of sequence, I figured it would be helpful to date all the scenes in Luffa. It’s helped me out more than once, and I figured it might be useful for readers too.
A while back I summarized the story in a timeline, since it was getting too cumbersome to keep referring back to individual chapters for dates. Now I’m to the point where the story is so long that I need that chronology more than ever, so I figured I’d update it here, in case anyone else has need of it.
[Above: Our Hero.]
9238-237 Before Age: Backstory from Luffa
9238 Before Age: Super Saiyan Asparaj
8238-3238: Unnamed Super Saiyans appear every 1000 years.
2238 Before Age: Super Saiyan Darbock
1238 Before Age: Super Saiyan Chanisp
257 Before Age: Birth of Luffa
242 Before Age: Luffa’s family contracted to defend Dorlu Prime
239 Before Age: Luffa marries Kandai
238-233 Before Age: Events of Luffa: The Legendary Super Saiyan
238 Before Age: Super Saiyan Luffa [Luffa #2-10]
237 Before Age: [Luffa #11-21, #1, #22-23]
236 Before Age: [Luffa #24-69]
235 Before Age: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
234 Before Age: [Luffa #70-101]
233 Before Age: [Luffa #102-current]
Age 749-784: Events of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z
Age 749: Emperor Pilaf Saga
Age 750: 21st Tenakichi Budokai/Red Ribbon Army conflict
Age 753: 22nd Tenkaichi Budokai/King Piccolo conflict
Age 756: 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai
Age 761: Raditz invades earth.
Age 762: Super Saiyan Son Goku
Vegeta and Nappa invade Earth/Namek conflict
Age 763: Krillin, Yamcha, Tien, & Chiaotzu revived by Namekian Dragon Balls
Age 764 Future Trunks kills Frieza and King Cold
Age 767: Super Saiyan Vegeta
Androids conflict/Cell Games/2nd Death of Goku
Age 774: 25th Tenkaichi Budokai/Majin Buu conflict.
Age 778: Battle of Gods
Age 779: Resurrection F
Age 784: 28th Tenkaichi Budokai, End of DBZ
Age 850-852: Events of Dragon Ball Xenoverse 1 & 2
Age 850: Luffa recruited for Time Patrol. Demigra conflict.
Age 852: Towa & Miira conflict. Fu does some shit, but I haven’t played that part yet.
I forgot that part of the reason I went to all this trouble was that I had a lot of trouble dealing with a calendar system with the years counting down instead of up. It never bothered me much with real world ancient history, but when you’re the one making this stuff up it gets kind of tricky. One of the conceits with this fic was that I decided to have Luffa go super exactly 1,000 years before Goku, and that was a lot harder for me to calculate than it needed to be.
I was thinking about expanding this to break down each chapter, but I’m not sure that I need this as badly as I used to. The current arc takes place in 233 Before Age, and I plan to end it there, and things should proceed chronologically afterward. Besides, I was planning to write up some sort of chapter-by-chapter guide later anyway, so maybe it’s best if I keep those two things separate.
I’m trying to hit a 25,000 word goal this month, which I’m splitting up between Luffa and this Bardock story I came up with. I’m up to 7,731 right now, and I plan to clear 10k by tonight, so I think it’s going pretty well. I’ve even managed to read ahead on my X-Men reading list a little, which is kind of nice.
What I find interesting on the Bardock fic is that I’m basically having to characterize a lot of the cast from scratch, even though they’ve appeared in official material.
Bardock and Frieza are well-established, but that sort of works against them in a way. There’s been so many different retellings of the destruction of Planet Vegeta that I’m having trouble keeping it all straight. The other day I was thinking about what to do with Frieza, and I had to remember that I wanted to acknowledge that he was commanded by Beerus to destroy the planet. I was so focused on working the Bardock stories into this thing that I forgot there was lore from Movie 15 I wanted to use. Come to think of it, I should make sure Frieza recalls how his ancestor Chilled was killed by a Saiyan in Episode of Bardock.
Actually, yeah, back up. If I’m not mistaken, Toei and Toriyama have established at least five prevailing motivations for the destruction of Planet Vegeta. They don’t contradict each other, but they were sort of presented as independent backstories.
Frieza was concerned that a large population of Saiyans might grow strong enough to revolt against him (Namek Saga, Bardock: Father of Goku)
Frieza specifically feared the emergence of a new Legendary Super Saiyan. (Frieza Saga)
Frieza’s ancestor Chilled was killed by a blonde Saiyan, and his descendants have been mindful of this ever since. (Episode of Bardock)
Frieza learned of Saiyan folk tales of the Super Saiyan and Super Saiyan God, and decided that this, coupled with the Saiyans’ unruly nature, made them a liability. (Dragon Ball Minus)
Beerus ordered Frieza to destroy Planet Vegeta because he was too lazy to do it himself. (Battle of Gods, Resurrection F, Dragon Ball Super)
Back in the day, my personal canon from watching DBZ on Toonami was that Frieza was just super-duper racist about the Saiyans, and the only reason he didn’t destroy them sooner was because he wanted to groom Vegeta as one of his top aides. And the Ocean Dub had Frieza say that he despised bad haircuts, and that’s pretty much the entire Saiyan genome right there.
What I find interesting about this is that Frieza ruthlessly blowing up a planet of his own servants ought to be really simple to explain. He’s evil, duh. But each time someone explains it, a little more lore gets tacked on, until now it’s become this really complex decision he had to make. He probably should have destroyed them first thing, or spared them altogether. The act itself was very easy for him, but he still made up the story about the meteor hitting the planet, just to distance himself from the consequences.
Anyway, getting back to what I was saying, I have to keep all that in mind when I write Frieza. He can’t just go “Blah blah blah, terror greater than hell, blah blah, this isn’t even my final form, blah blah.”
On the other hand, Bardock’s crew and Gine are more or less blank slates. There’s material for me to work from, but it’s pretty slim pickings. I wanted to write a scene with Gine and Kid Raditz, because that seemed like a crowd-pleaser, but all I know about Gine is how she got along with Bardock, and all I know about Raditz is what he was like as an adult. Oh, there’s fan art of Gine and Kid Raditz, but it’s usually just her holding him or something cute like that. I can’t just have her cuddle him the whole time. So what I wound up with feels kind of out-of-character, but only because there’s not a hard-and-fast definition of what’s in-character.
I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not the same as that Goku fic I wrote last year. Piccolo practically wrote himself for that one. I’m not going to have the same advantage here, although this story does give me the chance to expound on Saiyan headcanons that I can only hint at in Luffa. So it’s a good experience all around. Also, it’s just nice to write some Saiyan characters who aren’t so friggin’ nettled all the time.
