#vegetto

You’re not alone in there…

(zooms 👁🦷 under the cut)

In terms of personality, it's hard to really clock the manga's Vegetto. He's a cocky little shit like Gotenks who plays around and doesn't take Super Buu seriously, costing him the fight.

Except that he's not. This is the one and only time Vegetto ever appeared under Toriyama's pen and he is playing Buu to trick him into absorbing him.

Vegetto exists for only two chapters of the manga and he spends that time playing a fool as part of a calculated plan to enter Buu's body and save Piccolo and his three absorbed sons. He is faking his personality for the two chapters we know him and, consequently, we never really meet Vegetto.

Gogeta, meanwhile, gives absolutely zero fucks. He has two lines of dialogue in Fusion Reborn. His first is promising to get Janemba back for beating up Paikuhan. His second is this.

"I am neither Goku nor Vegeta. I am the one who will defeat you."

Janemba is dead two minutes later.

So we get less characterization on Gogeta than Vegetto but we get very stark characterization. Gogeta gives absolutely no fucks. He's here to do a job, he's on a time crunch (he'll only last 30 minutes before reverting), and he's going to fucking kill this guy right here and now.

DBS: Broly, on the other time, basically just makes Gogeta "Big Gotenks". As soon as he's formed, he promptly wastes time trying to think of a cool-sounding name.

Which is a weird moment because fretting about looking cool is Gotenks's thing. Gogeta's the Get Shit Done guy. He further wastes his limited time by explaining Fusion to Frieza for absolutely no conceivable reason whatsoever.

DBS: Broly is really good but it still has Toei problems.

He also does the Toei Thing where he starts out small and then gradually increases his stages rather than take the fight seriously from the get-go.

Which is already weird that Toei characters stall out their fights like this but it gets weirder with Gogeta who knows goddamn well that he's up against a clock. If he can't beat Broly before 30 minutes elapses, Broly wins by default.

But it's even weirder when it's the "I'm going to kill you in two minutes IT'S FUCKING DONE" guy.

Note that Fusion Reborn however isn't considered "canon" and this movie is. So. I guess Canon Gogeta is just a bigger Gotenks. Seems like a downgrade.

Moving back to Vegetto, although he spends the fight faking cocky, Goku's martial arts expertise can't help but bleed through. He is savagely condescending about what a dogshit martial artist Super Buu is.

Super Buu tries to create a smokescreen to blind Vegetto and give him the edge. Vegetto goes right into the smokescreen, rips him a new asshole, and then is just like

Vegetto: Oh my god, you don't use ki sensing to track your opponent's movements? The fuck is this, the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai!?

Conversely, Super Buu whips out one of the strongest attacks he's ever faced.

Seriously, a whole chapter is just about Super Buu's epic battle against the Super Ghost Kamikaze Attack. And it did not go well for him. Fucking wrecked his shit, and only by virtue of his intense regeneration was he able to bounce back from it.

But after absorbing Gotenks, Super Buu's able to take not just Gotenks's incredible power but also his brilliant creative mind and the savage library of techniques he has, and turn them on Vegetto.

The ghosts detonate on impact with a target so he just pops a handful of minimum power ki shots at them and detonates the whole lot. It's a goofy attack invented by his kids and he's a martial arts master. That was very stupid, Majin Buu. Be better.

So even though Vegetto is faking cocky, we see a lot of Goku's technical expertise on display nonetheless. He's not just beating Buu, he's revealing Buu for the rank amateur coasting by on raw power that so many late-series Dragon Ball villains are.

We don't really get to see this in Gogeta because....

...

Well, to be blunt, because Toei choreographed the fighting for Fusion Reborn and DBS: Broly, and their choreography is flash over substance. They're animators, not writers, so their stuff is designed to look really fucking good in motion rather than to produce interesting characterization.

GIF borrowed from a fandom wiki because it would take a lot of time to make my own. This is Gogeta's signature Stardust Breaker, which he uses to kill Janemba. I have absolutely no idea what happened here but it sure looked cool as shit.

For the life of me, I could not tell you what benefit firing all these beams down at once has over just hitting him really hard in the face with a Kamehameha. But it definitely looks fucking amazing.

Toei's action is flash over substance but there's a lot of flash.

Vegetto has one signature attack that we see him use during his brief manga appearance.

After depositing Buu into the rocks below, he makes a sword out of ki to pick him up and lift him back up into the sky.

Why does he do this? Because he's fake-goofing off and winking very hard at Super Buu to Don't Not Absorb Me. This is literally just him shitting around. The battle is piss-easy but he can't go all the way and win it or his kids will die, so this is how he picks Buu up and dusts him off for the next round.

But, like his personality, we get to see very little of what Vegetto's like in a serious fight because this is his only fight and it's not a serious fight.

His only other fights are the anime version of this and the two versions of the Vegetto vs. Fused Zamasu arc in Dragon Ball Super.

I can't really speak to the anime versions of the fights since I never got that far in the DBS anime and haven't seen that part of Z in ages. But the manga version of the Zamasu fight brings back the ki sword.

And he also attempts to do a chargeup beam he calls Final Kamehameha (the fusion of Final Flash and Kamehameha).

But, like with the Super Buu fight, he's only here for a very short time. In fact, IIRC he wasn't supposed to even be here at all.

This may be apocryphal but from what I've heard, the anime and manga were both adapting based off of Toriyama's notes, and the anime was ahead and they brought in Blue Vegetto because Vegetto is popular. Toyotaro was afraid fans would be disappointed if Blue Vegetto didn't happen in his version too so he dedicated a chapter to this, then broke the Fusion and went back to his plans.

But again, take that with a grain of salt.

Point is, Vegetto's moveset seems to be using all the technical prowess that Goku possesses to its fullest. He uses ki to the full extent of what we know it to be able to do, but he's a controlled and disciplined fighter who applies as much force as is needed to a given problem in front of him.

While Gogeta is lights and sound and fury, making the screen explode with color and not really stopping to explain himself. He either gets shit done or he's a goofy goofball, depending on the version, and his moveset is pure unabashed spectacle.