I mostly agree, I think, though I had to review the fight because, unlike DBZ powerscalers, I don't rewatch the Saiyan and Namek Sagas every weekend.
One thing that really stood out to me that I don't think I ever noted before is how much defeating Vegeta relied on collaboration, and not just a series of duels. Yeah, Yajirobi or whatever his name is cuts Vegeta's tail, and it's kind of cool how that happens after Gohan distracts Vegeta and then Krillin tries and fails, but the way that Goku "imparts" the Spirit Bomb to Krillin, then when Vegeta dodges it's actually Gohan deflecting it into him that most saliently beats him, it's way more involved than most of the later fights. idk, I just like little guys working together to beat a big guy, like I'm some kind of socialist ig.
Anyway, regarding the powerscaling bullshit
Yeah, if "planetbuster" means firing a beam of about Death Star level or greater, that immediately just reduces the whole planet to debris, I totally agree that Vegeta can't do that. At that point, the beam clash would logically make the planet uninhabitable (because a directed explosion of equal power would be occurring right on its surface) and I think Toriyama wouldn't pay attention to that, but would at least take the blowback a little more gravely than he does in the actual fight.
That said, I think Vegeta did mean it. His ship is still working and he still has the remote, since that's how he gets away later anyway. I can promise you his thinking is essentially "Fuck it, let's waste this asshole and blow up the planet. I don't care about possessing Earth, I want this stain on my pride erased." If the planet slowly collapses like we saw with Frieza, Vegeta would unquestionably have enough time to escape in his pod (assuming he actually defeated his opponents), and that's without factoring in that he seemed pretty confident in his psychological profiling of Goku and surely knew that letting the Earth die was not something Goku would view as an option in that scenario, meaning he didn't think the full force of the blast had even a chance of hitting the Earth anyway.
He isn't suicidal, but with a semi-coherent plan like I've mentioned and an absolutely seething level of rage, he is very likely to do something without thinking through all the caveats and confounding variables. That's sort of a major part of his character and gets him nearly killed multiple times with Zarbon, the Android twins, and Cell, and some version of that hastiness literally does kill him against Buu. The Saiyan Saga is Vegeta at his most shallow and unreasonable -- as made obvious by him killing Nappa just because -- so him making a ramshackle plan that is likely to kill him even if he got relatively lucky because he didn't think it through properly is perfectly in character. In fact, we could consider the Saiyan Saga another instance of almost getting killed along the same lines because, if he had just not killed Nappa he probably would have won, since even an injured Nappa could fight the small fries well enough and also become a Great Ape. If Goku's fading consciousness failed and he wasn't able to notice Krillin at the end, Vegeta would have probably died right there from being stabbed in the back.
Hell, if he had just not been such an asshole and done things like threaten to destroy the planet out of spite, he might have had a chance of at least stalling Krillin enough to find some method of escape (like resting enough to bat Krillin away just a single time and then flying out of there.
Anyway yeah, the manga is written semi-incoherently from the standpoint of feats or even just a little bit of scrutiny. Super is the worst fucking thing, though not for the reasons people complain about. In one of the last few chapters, someone tosses a Senzu Bean to Gohan, he fumbles it, and the bean falls in a crack in the Earth, and everyone is just like "that's gone now". These fuckers literally move so much faster than sight that it's condescending to even say that! There is nothing in the world that can convince me that Gohan could not have recovered the bean before it hit the ground, bounced, and fell into the fissure, to say nothing of the fact that it should still be totally possible to retrieve from the ground anyway. Like, nevermind what dumbass powerscalers say about faster-than-light speech during the Frieza Saga, the base manga even without the weird pseudoscience "calculating" falls apart so quickly if you look even a little closely at it as far as consistency goes.
He isn't suicidal, but with a semi-coherent plan like I've mentioned and an absolutely seething level of rage, he is very likely to do something without thinking through all the caveats and confounding variables.
Yeah I pretty much agree with everything you said here. I said I could accept Vegeta being capable of destroying a planet in the same way Frieza does because there's no feats to suggest he can wipe out a planet in one blast, and there's no way in my mind I could see Vegeta wanting to kill Goku so badly that he would intentionally explode the planet with his galick gun and kill himself in the process.
spoiler
I think that at that point in the series, reading it chronologically and witnessing Toriyama's escalation of events, his max power would only severely damage Earth. Before Nappa and Vegeta show up, the largest attack we witness (ignoring the Moon outliers that make no sense) is Piccolo Jr. nuking the World Tournament stage fighting Goku. We're not narratively supposed to believe that Toriyama's characters in this series are LITERALLY fast enough to outspeed light and LITERALLY powerful enough to erase planets and solar systems. Otherwise it would make no sense for Goku to tell his friends he doesn't think he can beat Frieza after hearing Frieza boast about blowing up Namek. If powerscalers were right and everybody 5x stronger than "moonbuster" Roshi or whatever can easily wipe a planet from existence, Goku should have laughed in Frieza's face when he said that because Goku should be well aware that he could annihilate Earth if he wanted to when he was 15 years old in that case. Whereas when Vegeta said he was going to turn Goku and his planet into space dust, Goku was well aware that he could at the very least match Vegeta's power output with Kaioken and didn't just give up hope after hearing him boast. But all of a sudden a couple weeks/months later he falters in the face of a planet-buster? Hmmmm
Anyway yeah, the manga is written semi-incoherently from the standpoint of feats or even just a little bit of scrutiny. Super is the worst fucking thing, though not for the reasons people complain about.
There's so many hilarious antifeats in the Buu Saga and in Super it's pretty funny hearing all the ways powerscalers try to cope by inventing an alternate reality. Like there's more antifeats than actual feats but they have to pretend that DBZ characters' abilities scale linearly upward infinitely because they can't bear the thought of Saitama or Superman or whatever having a feat that trounces them lol. Like when Piccolo is trying to reach them, Goten and Trunks fuse into Gotenks, and fly around the world for fun and then supposedly take a nap in the span of 30 minutes. This is used as evidence that DBZ characters are FTL or MFTL because the panel shows their ki-trails wrapping around the planet and they take that to mean they circumnavigated the Earth multiple times in a brief moment. Assuming they're correct and Gotenks did this very fast or nearly instantly and napped for 29 minutes or so, this is a Piccolo antifeat disguised as a Gotenks feat. You're telling me it took Piccolo more than 20 minutes to travel from his location to where Gotenks was napping and they were both on Earth?
Another funny one is after Buu absorbs Piccolo and Gotenks I believe, he fires a ki blast at Hercule. And Hercule, as a mundane human martial artist with no ki manipulation, is able to perceive Buu's ki blast and fire his M1911 three times in reaction before the blast reaches him. This same Hercule was both injured by a regular bullet, and also survived a fight with Tao Pai Pai. Makes no sense. Speaking of Tao, his power level is higher than moonbuster Roshi but was defeated by a hand grenade. Yajirobe has a higher power level than both Tao and Roshi lol.
Regarding Super, the funniest thing to me is the Tournament of Power where our heroes are at their strongest point yet in decades of Dragon Ball material, they get speedblitzed by somebody tracking them via soundwaves. Hit also gets speedblitzed by somebody else (Dyspo) intercepting his time skip technique by reacting to his sound.
I mostly agree, I think, though I had to review the fight because, unlike DBZ powerscalers, I don't rewatch the Saiyan and Namek Sagas every weekend.
One thing that really stood out to me that I don't think I ever noted before is how much defeating Vegeta relied on collaboration, and not just a series of duels. Yeah, Yajirobi or whatever his name is cuts Vegeta's tail, and it's kind of cool how that happens after Gohan distracts Vegeta and then Krillin tries and fails, but the way that Goku "imparts" the Spirit Bomb to Krillin, then when Vegeta dodges it's actually Gohan deflecting it into him that most saliently beats him, it's way more involved than most of the later fights. idk, I just like little guys working together to beat a big guy, like I'm some kind of socialist ig.
Anyway, regarding the powerscaling bullshit
Yeah, if "planetbuster" means firing a beam of about Death Star level or greater, that immediately just reduces the whole planet to debris, I totally agree that Vegeta can't do that. At that point, the beam clash would logically make the planet uninhabitable (because a directed explosion of equal power would be occurring right on its surface) and I think Toriyama wouldn't pay attention to that, but would at least take the blowback a little more gravely than he does in the actual fight.
That said, I think Vegeta did mean it. His ship is still working and he still has the remote, since that's how he gets away later anyway. I can promise you his thinking is essentially "Fuck it, let's waste this asshole and blow up the planet. I don't care about possessing Earth, I want this stain on my pride erased." If the planet slowly collapses like we saw with Frieza, Vegeta would unquestionably have enough time to escape in his pod (assuming he actually defeated his opponents), and that's without factoring in that he seemed pretty confident in his psychological profiling of Goku and surely knew that letting the Earth die was not something Goku would view as an option in that scenario, meaning he didn't think the full force of the blast had even a chance of hitting the Earth anyway.
He isn't suicidal, but with a semi-coherent plan like I've mentioned and an absolutely seething level of rage, he is very likely to do something without thinking through all the caveats and confounding variables. That's sort of a major part of his character and gets him nearly killed multiple times with Zarbon, the Android twins, and Cell, and some version of that hastiness literally does kill him against Buu. The Saiyan Saga is Vegeta at his most shallow and unreasonable -- as made obvious by him killing Nappa just because -- so him making a ramshackle plan that is likely to kill him even if he got relatively lucky because he didn't think it through properly is perfectly in character. In fact, we could consider the Saiyan Saga another instance of almost getting killed along the same lines because, if he had just not killed Nappa he probably would have won, since even an injured Nappa could fight the small fries well enough and also become a Great Ape. If Goku's fading consciousness failed and he wasn't able to notice Krillin at the end, Vegeta would have probably died right there from being stabbed in the back.
Hell, if he had just not been such an asshole and done things like threaten to destroy the planet out of spite, he might have had a chance of at least stalling Krillin enough to find some method of escape (like resting enough to bat Krillin away just a single time and then flying out of there.
Anyway yeah, the manga is written semi-incoherently from the standpoint of feats or even just a little bit of scrutiny. Super is the worst fucking thing, though not for the reasons people complain about. In one of the last few chapters, someone tosses a Senzu Bean to Gohan, he fumbles it, and the bean falls in a crack in the Earth, and everyone is just like "that's gone now". These fuckers literally move so much faster than sight that it's condescending to even say that! There is nothing in the world that can convince me that Gohan could not have recovered the bean before it hit the ground, bounced, and fell into the fissure, to say nothing of the fact that it should still be totally possible to retrieve from the ground anyway. Like, nevermind what dumbass powerscalers say about faster-than-light speech during the Frieza Saga, the base manga even without the weird pseudoscience "calculating" falls apart so quickly if you look even a little closely at it as far as consistency goes.
Yeah I pretty much agree with everything you said here. I said I could accept Vegeta being capable of destroying a planet in the same way Frieza does because there's no feats to suggest he can wipe out a planet in one blast, and there's no way in my mind I could see Vegeta wanting to kill Goku so badly that he would intentionally explode the planet with his galick gun and kill himself in the process.
spoiler
I think that at that point in the series, reading it chronologically and witnessing Toriyama's escalation of events, his max power would only severely damage Earth. Before Nappa and Vegeta show up, the largest attack we witness (ignoring the Moon outliers that make no sense) is Piccolo Jr. nuking the World Tournament stage fighting Goku. We're not narratively supposed to believe that Toriyama's characters in this series are LITERALLY fast enough to outspeed light and LITERALLY powerful enough to erase planets and solar systems. Otherwise it would make no sense for Goku to tell his friends he doesn't think he can beat Frieza after hearing Frieza boast about blowing up Namek. If powerscalers were right and everybody 5x stronger than "moonbuster" Roshi or whatever can easily wipe a planet from existence, Goku should have laughed in Frieza's face when he said that because Goku should be well aware that he could annihilate Earth if he wanted to when he was 15 years old in that case. Whereas when Vegeta said he was going to turn Goku and his planet into space dust, Goku was well aware that he could at the very least match Vegeta's power output with Kaioken and didn't just give up hope after hearing him boast. But all of a sudden a couple weeks/months later he falters in the face of a planet-buster? Hmmmm
There's so many hilarious antifeats in the Buu Saga and in Super it's pretty funny hearing all the ways powerscalers try to cope by inventing an alternate reality. Like there's more antifeats than actual feats but they have to pretend that DBZ characters' abilities scale linearly upward infinitely because they can't bear the thought of Saitama or Superman or whatever having a feat that trounces them lol. Like when Piccolo is trying to reach them, Goten and Trunks fuse into Gotenks, and fly around the world for fun and then supposedly take a nap in the span of 30 minutes. This is used as evidence that DBZ characters are FTL or MFTL because the panel shows their ki-trails wrapping around the planet and they take that to mean they circumnavigated the Earth multiple times in a brief moment. Assuming they're correct and Gotenks did this very fast or nearly instantly and napped for 29 minutes or so, this is a Piccolo antifeat disguised as a Gotenks feat. You're telling me it took Piccolo more than 20 minutes to travel from his location to where Gotenks was napping and they were both on Earth?
Another funny one is after Buu absorbs Piccolo and Gotenks I believe, he fires a ki blast at Hercule. And Hercule, as a mundane human martial artist with no ki manipulation, is able to perceive Buu's ki blast and fire his M1911 three times in reaction before the blast reaches him. This same Hercule was both injured by a regular bullet, and also survived a fight with Tao Pai Pai. Makes no sense. Speaking of Tao, his power level is higher than moonbuster Roshi but was defeated by a hand grenade. Yajirobe has a higher power level than both Tao and Roshi lol.
Regarding Super, the funniest thing to me is the Tournament of Power where our heroes are at their strongest point yet in decades of Dragon Ball material, they get speedblitzed by somebody tracking them via soundwaves. Hit also gets speedblitzed by somebody else (Dyspo) intercepting his time skip technique by reacting to his sound.