Pretty sad that Gast was able to put up more of a fight than Goku.

I actually have a suspicion that the Saiyans aren't planning to exterminate humanity, but to conquer it. Vegeta is smart enough to have figured out that the Saiyans can reproduce here, and so probably is working out a plan to keep some of them alive (as breeding stock, if nothing else).

So basically, a Persona protagonist gone horribly wrong. "The World" is generally the final tarot unlocked by the one with "The Fool" tarot in those games, and they have nearly limitless power on top of their normal ability to gain power by making bonds with others.

Anyone wondering when Goku will show up? I mean, Baba can get permission to bring the dead back to the living world for a time. I mean, we saw it both in Dragonball (when Baba brought Grampa Gohan back temporarily so he could fight with Goku) and in DBZ (when Baba did the same service for Goku when Babidi arrived).

I'll bet Gohan has been bleaching or dyeing his hair regularly, in order to keep up his disguise (and the pretense of him being dead).

To those asking why Captain Chicken (Gohan) can beat multiple androids in basic Super Saiyan form, remember that in this timeline, Goku died early (and never reached Super Saiyan), Vegeta never came back to Earth even after he reached Super Saiyan, and neither Frieza nor Cold ever came to Earth either. So Gero never had anything stronger than Goku to base his models on for how strong the androids needed to be. The androids are only dangerous because of their power draining and power sensing abilities, not because of any inherent strength they might have.

Sure, he apparently has a version of Cell, but let's not forget that this version of Cell will also be considerably weaker since he's based primarily on the Saiyans and Piccolo. I wouldn't be surprised if he was able to defeat Gohan in Super Saiyan form, but Gast is considerably more powerful than that by now. 2 Resposta/es

Wouldn't be surprised if that were Trunks's time machine.

Not sure why people are assuming Bardock is bound to lose. Even assuming the power levels are accurate (which is not a good idea given how inconsistent they are in general), SSJ Bardock is roughly equivalent to Frieza in this form in terms of maximum power available (which is what power level is). And as Hunter x Hunter correctly teaches, motivation is a greater factor than power level. See Killua being forced to assume his opponents were at maximum strength (due to Illumi's needle trickery) and therefore assuming he couldn't win against them at all.

We all know Frieza can get much stronger, but Bardock is not here to test himself (Goku) or pridefully assume that he's the strongest and give Frieza time to transform (Vegeta). He's here to keep Frieza from massacring his people, and all it takes to win a fight is to kill the other person first. And this is his best chance to, given Frieza's obvious surprise.

Actually, there's a very simple reason you don't see that in scenes like this. Once physical exhaustion sets in, it's very difficult to do just about anything. Even lifting one arm becomes arduous, never mind throwing a punch with it that will do actual damage. And it's not just physical - focus narrows, too.

This doesn't look at all like Ultra Instinct to me. Ultra Instinct was basically letting the body act on its own. What it looks like is they're unifying the body and mind so that they act as one. Reducing the delay between something being sensed, the consciousness becoming aware of it, and then telling the body what to do. In short, it's a unification process rather than supercharging the body so it can respond automatically, bypassing the conscious mind's decision making process.

I also think it's premature to say that there won't be a spread on Sunday. This wasn't a transformation, just them opening their eyes and having them not be the usual black.

I don't think Buu is being very serious about this fight. I don't think he cares if they actually win, he just wants some entertainment.

Bet you anything that at the end he says "and wasn't that fun everyone?"

Your art is fine! I like your art style. 1 Resposta/es

It's no wonder the Saiyan race was wiped out in this universe.

Their children aren't being taught to seek out challenging fights, but to wipe out people who are little threat to them. Basically Space Mongols after they got in a position of power.

Even though we know Kami can't win against Raditz as it currently stands, he's still doing a phenomenal job against the Saiyan kids here.

This is why you don't rely on power-detection technology in a martial arts fight. It takes time for a sensor like that to properly lock on, triangulate the location, etc. While Raditz delays to get info from his scouter, Kami has taken out one of the Saiyan kids he was supposed to be watching and is about to take out another.

Also, we've seen plenty of people in DBZ get wrecked by someone firing an unfocused ki blast through their head like that. So I dunno how Kami will end up doing.

I actually really like this. Kami isn't going to be able to ultimately win (not with Raditz there and presumably as proportionally stronger as he was in the DBZ timeline), but this is DBZ at its best - no mindless chatter, no bluster, just actually focusing on winning.

Honestly, this was a pretty disappointing fight.

Not because of Uub's performance - that was excellent - but because one-sided curbstomps are just not interesting for me to watch.

I like the callback to the Goku/Jackie Chun fight, but at the same time - Goku was still able to get some good hits in on Jackie Chun. In this fight, he was treated like a rag doll - the only reason this is a "tie" is because of the sheer amount of damage Uub did to himself with his reckless Kaioken. By any other measure, Uub was the clear winner of that fight and should be treated as such.

You forgot one small thing here. Babidi could not remove the fighters who were in the apartments, as they counted as a separate dimension. Some of the competitors he did remove could have been beaten as is, such as either Pan.

Had Bra been outside her apartment, she would have been removed as well. He didn't leave her because she was exploitable, but because he couldn't reach her.

Honestly, this special was kind of a flop. The art was great, don't get me wrong, but...to be perfectly honest, there were so many missed opportunities here as to things they could have done with it, and things they shouldn't have done with it, that it was kind of painful to read.

It would take me entirely too long to really go into detail, so I'll just say "Broly had too much power and couldn't be restrained" after being swallowed by a galactic core black hole is simply not a workable anything. If Broly were that powerful, he never would have gotten dragged into the black hole's event horizon to begin with. Having Broly able to resist the black hole's gravity well even though Buu couldn't would have worked, and would have been a much better way to put the "he was just too powerful" idea. As it stands, having him get spaghettified and then somehow reconstitute himself is a pure deus ex machina, which is basically one of the worst things you can do in any story.

Damn, there's a missed opportunity if I ever saw one.

This should have been done at the start of the chapter - and then the two of them could have fought inside the event horizon, with all the screwy physics that would come about as a result (energy attacks getting pulled off course, battering each other to try to send them close to the singularity, etc).

Because Brolly was in the way, of course.

You know how air will rush around a large object and create a space at the back which is relatively calm? Same principle.

Yeah, that's my concern. Brolly was never a very interesting antagonist even in DBZ, and he's pretty much just utterly tiresome here.

I don't mind what-if stories where the villains win, but they have to be interesting to be worth it.

Honestly, this is an incredibly tedious chapter so far. We all know Brolly is 'destined' to win, but he's basically not struggling at all to do it. He's not even so much as been seriously threatened ever since it started at the beginning of the last chapter.

There really needs to be more dramatic tension in this special for it to work. There was in some of the previous special chapters where the villains won, but Brolly started out at an overwhelming position in the first place and it hasn't gotten any better. 3 Resposta/es

This is...kind of a weak story. Granted that it's harder to tell a story where the heroes all die, but the problem with this one is that Brolly is simply too overwhelmingly powerful. 1 Resposta/es

Aww. Now I want to see a picture of Majin Buu and Zagreus both giving Cerberus headpets.

It's pretty interesting seeing Goku's, Vegeta's, and Vegetto's reactions juxtaposed like that. Goku is excited, like usual when he runs across strong people and Vegeta is brooding a bit, also as usual since it stings his pride. But Vegetto is a mix of Goku's confidence and Vegeta's pride.

This also makes much more sense of Vegetto's reaction to Bra's rampage. He can't accept that Babidi was able to take over his daughter against her will, because of what that implies about him, so he assumes she must have voluntarily given in. 1 Resposta/es

I think it's less that Vegetto is actively abusive and more that he's negligent. He doesn't understand how to deal with Bra, and as a result, tends to veer between "lassez-faire parenting" (under normal circumstances) and "extreme discipline parenting" (such as when she blew up that star system).

There's also the fact that Vegetto is basically the benevolent tyrant of Universe 16. I mean, he is by far the most powerful person in that universe - nobody else could even hope to stand up to him for more than a few seconds, so people obey because that's the only choice if they want to survive. He's in the same position as Zen-oh in Dragon Ball Super - people obey him because the consequences for not doing so involve them no longer existing.

To put it another way, who would even so much as speak up against him, if they thought that doing so would result in getting killed? He doesn't have to threaten to do anything either. That's just the way it works when you're dealing with someone who can easily kill you. You tend to err very much on the side of caution when you interact with them.

Personally, I think Bra bounced back from her father wanting to kill her a little too quickly here.

It's obvious that Bra has lived at least a few years of her life in fear of Vegetto making good on his promise to kill her. And now, right after him basically trying to kill her, with Vegetto temporarily neutralized, she suddenly has the courage to speak her mind? I won't think that's bad writing (it was obvious that she was going to say something like this to Vegetto at some point), but I think the timing is off.

That being said? Vegetto is a tyrant. A benevolent one, for the most part, but still a tyrant. Nobody can call him to account, or even so much as restrain him. Pretty much everyone, even his allies, are scared out of their wits of him. That last U16 side-story? That was pretty much a desperation move on the part of the anti-Vegetto alliance; they weren't ready and they knew it, so they used that teleport trick to buy time. Little good it did them though.

I'm going to point out that she was under an actual form of mind control and was not in full control of her own actions. Remember, for better or for worse, she always felt as if she was in control of herself (even though she wasn't always) and as such this has to come as a drastic shock to her system to find out just how vulnerable she was to being mentally enslaved.

Does she deserve sympathy? Not really. What matters is what she does from this point on. The moment she wrenched herself free from Babidi's control was her literal starting line; before, she could always depend on having something available to bail her out, whether it was senzu beans in her gloves or someone coming to bail her out. But this time? She escaped being a 'willing' slave to Babidi for the rest of her life by the skin of her teeth. Everything external to her that could have stopped it was either neutralized or subverted.

Exactly. Amazing how many people forget that Vegetto could have stopped Gohan with virtually no effort. And would have.

In U18, Gohan is powerful enough to give both Goku and Vegeta pause. In U16, Gohan isn't even capable of putting up a meaningful fight against Vegetto.

She's in shock, I'll bet. Plus coming down off the high of going SSJ2 for the first time. It's a common thing for people who are suddenly faced with a reality they do not want anything to do with to do anything they can to deny it. Plus the threat her father just gave her is much, much more real to her than the abstract billions of people she just killed.

This scene isn't to evoke pity for her. It's to show that she literally can't cope with it and broke mentally, and we already know where she ends up as a result.

@Korin
That's a valid point, of course. Even at his worst, Bakugo had at least some standards he wasn't willing to stoop below. Can't say the same of Bra.

But my point was less to compare the two of them as to argue that in order to become a hero, you have to start at the psychological bottom. It just so happens that Bra had to go much, much lower to reach that point. And if she wants to start climbing that latter, she's gonna have to pull herself through muck and grime and who knows what else.

I think U16 Bra finally (and only) choking on the verbal smackdown from her counterpart was intentional. At the end of the day, all she had that was actually hers was pride. And not even all that much of it.

Sure, she's going to be seen as pathetic by just about everyone in the comic now. Which was the point. To borrow from My Hero Academia, this is her "starting line". Just like Bakugo was so stuck up over how awesome he was, and had to face his own inadequacy when he realized that he not only couldn't force Deku to use his true strength in their initial fight, but he was completely out-thought in the process.

U16 Bra failed every actual test that we've seen her take in this comic. Even this last couple of pages wasn't a 'success', because she couldn't even resist Babidi without having 'herself' throw her inadequacies and shortcomings in her face. If she was ever in real trouble before, she could just munch down a few senzu and it was like it didn't happen. Until now. Even the inevitable wish to the Dragonballs that will bring all the people who died back to life won't change how they see her now. 1 Resposta/es

Wow, are people actually having a discussion about logical fallacies on a webcomic messageboard?

It'd be nice if you two could take it to that English forum and hash this out in PMs or something.

Why are people worrying about the word used? Whether or not it's the best word matters much less than it coming reasonably close. As the saying goes, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Personally, I think it would have made sense for the Majin 'M' to have started degrading/deforming once U18 Bra had her on the ropes (verbally), rather than having her remove it via what amounts to an outburst of denial. Then it could have been shown to be working (and more importantly, due to the input of another person). Right now it just looks like she got pissed off about being called passive and somehow the Majin state vanished as a result. Having it start to unravel before her angry denial makes her breaking free much more believable than it just coming apart all at once. I mean, we don't have precedent for it coming apart like this (Vegeta never really was controlled to begin with and Dabura wasn't really rebelling), so there's no reason it couldn't have happened that way, especially without Babidi around to notice and reinforce the spell.

The scene a few pages ago with "You're weak! You're corrupt! You hurt your friends!" would have been a great time to kick that off. Might be worth looking at.

It takes more than a single out of context scene to make people feel sympathy for a character who just went on a murderous rampage (even if it was at least partially due to a mind control spell). That being said, this is at least a step in the right direction.

Of course there are reasons why a character would be vulnerable to the Majin spell. Doesn't mean showing them will make the character sympathetic. Sympathy comes from being able to envision yourself in the shoes of the character. For example, Vegeta had an awful personality, but he spent most of his adult life among people who would just as soon have killed him as looked at him. The glimpses we got of Vegeta when he wasn't acting the cocky brat helped build sympathy for the character because people could envision how he got the way he did.

We have had very little of that with Son Bra outside of specials. There was the "played for laughs" scene of her dealing with a "monster under her bed", and then there was her almost blowing up the planet to win a sparring match. Not to mention her behavior towards Zangya - she wanted to effectively torture a much weaker opponent - and would have if she hadn't been told flat out that she would be pulled from the tournament.

I personally would like to see what made Son Bra into the flawed person she has repeatedly shown herself to be in this comic. I just don't expect to feel much sympathy for her at this point.

I'll bet the specials are gonna tell us some of the things Bra went through. Saves us the time of having them clog up the main story.

No doubt some people won't care but I'm at least somewhat interested.

Actually, had a thought. Is there any way we could have a reading mode that only covers the main story, and a similar one that only covers specials?

I actually think these last three pages may have moved the plot more than the previous six chapters did.

@Lord Rime

I actually agree with you that the storytelling could have been condensed, incidentally. I made use of certain points you'd previously made in the latter part of my post.

You know what hit me yesterday regarding the Budokai Royale arc? It reminds me of how complicated the final part of Bleach got. I went back and reread the whole manga after it was completed (Viz making all chapters of many of its manga series available for $2 a month is just plain good), and the thing that hit me is that I could actually tell that it was going somewhere, but even being able to read it all at once, it still felt like it dragged a lot.

So I think the problem here is less that it took a long time - after all, much of the delay was due to specials and minicomics - and more that it created a rather tangled knot that ultimately needed a Gordian knife named "Majin Bra" to cut through. So I think the Majin rebellion could have easily been condensed down to two chapters, with Majin Bra appearing at the end, and then having two more chapters to deal with her storyline. It wouldn't have been difficult, for example, to cut away to someone else for a couple pages and then cut back to find that Majin Bra had wiped out several of the "good guys" she was fighting.

Well, c'est la vie. Hopefully Salagir has recognized that there was valid criticism of the way this arc was handled. 1 Resposta/es

@Lord Rime

Just figured I should point out that arguing for the length of time this has taken is not really a good angle. We've had more special chapter pages and minicomics than we have had main story pages. So far, there have been 168 main story pages, 179 special chapter pages, and 24 minicomic pages. When you get right down to it, we've had easily more than a year's worth of content other than the main story.

It would probably feel slow even if we just had the main story comics, because that's still 56 weeks worth of pages based on the current update schedule. But when you add in the 60-odd weeks worth of other content, it's gonna feel much slower. I'm not begrudging the bonus content - gotta give the main artist time to work. But at the same time, there's no denying the Budokai Royale storyline feels long, because it is. Seven chapters so far, with at least one more in order to properly resolve things and (hopefully) pick up with the tournament again, is a lot longer than any of the other arcs in the story have taken. I don't think a single one of them have been resolved in more than two main story chapters.

And on top of that, just when it was looking like they were gonna wrap up back in the fourth chapter, here comes Majin Bra, who singlehandedly demolished all the survivors of the battle royale in less than three full chapters. Given how divided people have been on the character, it's not surprising that adding her in made things feel like they were taking longer still (since there have been endless arguments since).

@general

Here's something to consider. When you get right down to it, people have been pointing out for a while now that no matter what, things will be reset after the arc concludes. All the people killed as a result of this - yes, even the ones who were controlled by Babidi - will be brought back to life. And at this point, that's mostly everyone except the fighters who were spirited away in the first place and the ones who stayed in their apartments. But if there's no point what's been happening here, then it's filler that can be safely skipped.

In other words, you have to have a thematic reason for why the fight was necessary to the plot. And that reason is Majin Bra. (I considered Mystic Raditz, but I think that one's still needing more setup) Honestly, aside from setting things up so that she was corrupted, there was really not a whole lot to the first four chapters of Budokai Royale that couldn't have been told in the equivalent of a montage. And it took another chapter and some after that for things to get ugly. But now we've gotten to see just how much of a monster she could really be when someone stronger wasn't around to stop her. After all this resolves, she'll have to live with well-deserved contempt and hatred from just about everyone else, possibly even her father. And, if things progress as I suspect they are, taking serious psychological damage from the tongue-lashing her AU 'twin' is giving her.

Just the fact that she hasn't taken Bra Briefs's head off already suggests that her ego is way more fragile than anyone suspected. She probably grew up believing that "power made right", because that's actually how things worked out with Vegetto - the most powerful person in their entire universe. I suspect part of the whole "I'm number one" business is her thinking that now that she's the "most powerful", she'll finally be able to do what she wants and be admired for it. Especially by her father, who I'm beginning to think has been deliberately taking it easy on her after she almost blew up their whole planet.

Hm, actually, I'm wondering if the fact that Bra Briefs is powerless is maybe what's keeping her alive. Majin Bra knows that she could destroy her counterpart without the slightest effort, and so feels she has to 'win' this battle of words. Everyone else she's actively killed or beaten has been able to put up a real fight and so she could fight them on her terms and win in her own mind. But since Bra Briefs literally has no fighting capability, killing her is actually beneath Majin Bra's contempt. Heck, we saw just a couple pages ago that as far as Majin Bra was concerned, this was all some kind of twisted game where she could 'prove' she was the strongest.

Majin Bra can kill Bra Briefs with no effort at all, and that's why she won't just yet. If you think you're the strongest in the world, and someone who can't fight you under any circumstances calls you on it, you have to put them in their place before you kill them. It's similar to how if you accuse someone of cheating in a contest, they won't challenge the accuser to that same contest most of the time, because they have to prove, even if only in their own mind, that their victory is untainted. And Majin Bra appears to be trying to intimidate Bra Briefs on this page - appearing right in front of her with a teleport and looming over her while talking about how powerless she is. She's won, as far as she's concerned, and I'll bet she feels she can take the time to put her counterpart in her place.

Which is a mistake. Majin Bra may think of herself as a genius in combat, but she clearly has no idea how to actually relate to people. Bra Briefs is just as far ahead of her in that field as she is ahead on fighting. But she's gonna try anyway.

U18 Bra actually won herself a bit of time with that. Disbelief warring with fury warring with humiliation can lock anyone up.

Speaking as a martial artist, I can only find Majin Bra's brag about being number one and 'complete' to be utterly silly. She basically started out ahead of pretty much every single fighter who Babidi left behind, even before the Majin boost. And even with it, she had enough trouble with the fight that she had to take senzu beans multiple times. She doesn't understand how actually being strong works, as evidenced by her basically murdering someone who was no threat whatsoever to her because she couldn't actually deal with his words.

Anyone can crush someone who's sufficiently weaker than them. In fact, if the strength difference is high enough, it's like squashing a bug. And that's basically all Majin Bra has been doing this entire fight. I'm far more impressed with the group who went up against her, knowing that she was way stronger, than I'd ever be with her for 'winning' by wiping them out one by one. Real strength comes from struggling with something and eventually overcoming it, or perhaps not in some cases, but we still respect people for trying to do things that are very difficult, even if they don't succeed, as long as they make the effort and progress.

And Majin Bra never did that, not as a kid, not earlier in the tournament, and certainly not now. She's always failed to meet any goal she set for herself, or that someone else set for her, if it required her to actually do anything other than what was already easy for her.. She never had to struggle with anything difficult. Not even SSJ2 - she had access to the power, but she never bothered to stop herself from doing what came easiest to her.

Hopefully she'll figure out how to be strong one of these years.

Honestly, this chapter is basically making me consider giving up on the webcomic. I hate to say that, because it's been pretty good overall, but I'm not interested in watching characters getting slaughtered like this, no matter how good the artwork is. It's one thing to have the occasional fight get bloody or brutal; that sort of thing happened even in DBZ. But most of the actual atrocities done by evil characters happened off-screen, with just enough stuff actually shown to demonstrate what actually happened.

This would be similar to if we had ten or more chapters of DBZ dedicated to watching first stage Cell go around and actually absorb all those humans while he was busy powering up to absorb the two androids, in all the gory and graphic details. Well, maybe not that bad. After all, there has been some rising and falling action through the tournament, but ever since Bra was turned into a Majin, it's been pretty much downhill (despite the silliness of that "you can't beat us all").

The point is, this wanton slaughter really doesn't need to take place on-screen like this. 2 Resposta/es

I'm sorry, but this is really just plain boring at this point.

Look, we get it. Majin Bra is more powerful than everyone here, yadda yadda yadda. The problem is, the pacing is pretty bad. This is worse than Spopovich pummeling Videl when she wasn't even able to fight back, and while it's been a bit since I read DBZ last, I'm pretty sure that was handled in a single chapter.

Look, we don't need to have more pages dedicated to Majin Bra basically killing off the remainder of the heroes here. We already had a full chapter where she basically cut their numbers in half, and at this point, they're scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of ability to actually do anything to even slow her down, never mind actually stopping her. I get that this is supposed to raise dramatic tension, but it's honestly having the opposite effect by now.

This is probably about as uneven as the fight against Nappa on Earth. The problem is, we had a reasonable expectation that Goku would be arriving sooner or later to turn things around (or at least make sure it wasn't a one-sided slaughter). We don't have that here. There's no sense that if they can just hold on long enough, help will arrive. Not with Zen Buu basically blocking everyone from being able to sense the arena. Plus that would basically resolve the conflict entirely - an injured Majin Bra couldn't even hope to stand up to most of the fighters there. She couldn't even stand up against just Zen Buu.

If Zen Buu attacking Babidi is going to have an effect on this battle, then it needs to do so soon. 2 Resposta/es