Me Every Morning

their marineford interaction in a nutshell

(still learning how to draw op characters in my art style)

Little comic which is a parody of a scene in Gintama (I completely forgot what episode) 🥹

Also: they were co-parents (oh my god they were co-parents)

more S2, EP10 again!! really wanted to talk about the bits with the monarch and the henchmen bc honestly this is what made the episode for me. we get a lot/a handful of good henchmen faces + bits. also i've never seen anyone actually talk about how really gay ("in the small way") monarch and the duo (24 + 21) are??

anyways, here's monarch sitting with one of his guys while 24 and 21 do some weird ted talk/weapons presentation thingy i always liked how on some occasions/bits monarch comes off as some sort of "ALMOST equal BUT NOT QUITE" thing with the henchies. like.. idk how to explain it, but it's rlly mostly seen in the bits where he's just standing/hanging around with them? rlly mostly seen without gf (my wife) around. like him just letting his guys talk and yap while also being a bitch and scrutinizing them. best way i can explain it is "group of nerds but one of the nerds is obvi the leader of the group" - kind of vaguely like bill from eltingville? i'm just talking to talk but YOU GUYS KNOW WHAT I MEANNNNNNN

oh! and two henchmen thumb wrestling in the back! just boy activities! you know!!!

and 24 introduces 21 to the presentation so cheerfully. like yesss that's your partner let your wife talk u guys r 2 cuteeeeeeeeeeeee agh

"gentlemen, i give you - thing that op is too incompetent to hear clearly or spell !" basically ice skates but slightly chipped at the tips. how much would you guys like to bet that they were just ice skating and something really fucked up happened and THAT'S how they got the idea lel

another cute henchman, part of their presentation thingy too. i can't remember: are 21 and 24 actually cool with the others? (i think so? maybe slightly in the "we're coworkers/work friends" way) or did they just pay this nerd to go along with their idea-presentation thingy? whatever. it's very cute to see.

"not the end of a skinny arm - but at the end of a long, fat, leg! :)" they are SO full of horseshit lmfao also reminder that the henchmen are kind of mildly/decently, competent enough in a one on one battle with an average guy (mister brock samson is NOT an average guy) i mean, THIS henchman just pulled off an arguably semi - lethal/pretty damaging kick on a dummy. it's kind of impressive, isn't it :\ ? to henchman standards, of course.

and they're still sitting together :) sorry for the res btw this site kind of makes it vomit inducing (but to be fair some episodes of venture bros just look like that, which is mega unfort yk?)

he is struggling..

please help him

oh and monarch is sometimes kind of scary/intimidating when a nerve is struck and he's EXTREMELY irked in this case : the mention of doctor girlfriend.

"i know i'm not dr. girl-" "𝗗𝗢. 𝗡𝗢𝗧. 𝗦𝗔𝗬. 𝗛𝗘𝗥. 𝗡𝗔𝗠𝗘." honestly, i love it when he's being bitter and single (totally not a bias because i am in love with sheila)

anyways, bugs under a rock

and more henchman faces i liked!!!

“…Insolent monkey…”

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12629619/1/Catch-22

Capture caption yadadad

He's having a bad day.

Like Frieza and Vegeta’s relationship was absolutely abusive and exploitative from start to finish but I think people write it wrong. Well not wrong, just in a way that I personally believe removes the deeper horror in favor of an easy depiction of what a relationship like that looks like. He’s not getting strung up and whipped or locked in a cell to cry, he’s getting his chin scratched by a person who uprooted him from everything he had ever known on a whim and destroyed the culture upon which he founded his most nascent sense of identity. And that person is only keeping him alive because despite it all, he’s useful, and kind of cute, especially now that all the other Saiyans are dead. Vegeta’s a small child being made to commit atrocities for profit an amusing little novelty, still using the honorifics & regurgitating the legends of a planet that’s been obliterated. DBS is not a perfect sequel by any means but it did this part so, so well. “All hail Vegeta, prince of no one.” “I always thought you shined the brightest when you were serving as my pet.”

Sickening, yes? And the intimacy is the worst part, the realization that Frieza seems to favor him; seems to like him. Who knows, maybe Vegeta reminded him of himself at some ancient, half-forgotten stage of life. King Cold did drop him like a hot potato as soon as he was proven weaker than Trunks. Maybe that’s the whole reason he made King Vegeta give up his kid in the first place. Frieza’s relationship with his father is shallow and dependent entirely on his value as a soldier, the underlying cruelty of which they’ve both silently agreed to use superfluous affection to cover up? Fine. He’s gonna make the Saiyan king give up his own militarized child prince. He’s gonna strip away the cultural justifications for what he’s doing to his son by making him treat it like the cold, spineless profiteering that it always was. He’s gonna rub it in.

But hey, he’s not mad at the kid. It was his dad who got too big for the barrel. Vegeta is still serving his purpose, Vegeta is still being good. Why wouldn’t Frieza treat him in accordance with his “station,” even after it’s been rendered an empty title because of him. All he has to do is keep spinning the wheel on the Cold Empire, vomiting out violence into the endless vacuum of space & never getting too uppity about his dead father or dead planet or about the fact that, even when reduced to the most baseline level of childish narcissism, the state which this arrangement has emotionally stunted him into maintaining well into adulthood, he never actually wanted any of this. He didn’t want to leave Planet Vegeta! He didn’t want to grow up surrounded by strangers! He didn’t want to have no claim over anything he ever achieved! He wanted to work for himself! It wasn’t his choice!!! For all of Vegeta’s dickswinging and hierarchy and “pride,” he is so, so helpless, “like a tiny insect glowing in a jar,” as Frieza so helpfully summarized for us. Overcorrection layered on overcorrection layered on overcorrection layered on desperate, screeching fear and sadness and shame. Blow up a planet. Nuke a city. Wipe out a village. Fix It Again, Tony.

And that viciously indulgent cruelty that Vegeta used to comfort himself as he grew into a man is only emphasized by how blasé Frieza appears to be about the whole thing. He’s calm. He’s secure. He spends half the arc sitting down, just watching. He’s what Vegeta was in the first part of the Saiyan saga, and he slowly turns into what Vegeta slowly turned into in the second part of the Saiyan saga. An addled, wounded, unthinking mess, trying to put their self image back together as someone else’s superior ability causes it to crumble. Frieza was scared of the super saiyan. Under all that collected ambivalence, that whole time, he was scared.

Vegeta is Frieza’s heir. As gross as that incongruent, unwanted warmth is to witness, Frieza succeeded in establishing influence over & connection between himself and the child he orphaned. And the process of healing from that relationship involves Vegeta going back to square one and having to acquiesce to another foreign, combat oriented culture populated by vaguely hostile strangers. He gets new clothes. He gets a new place to train. He gets new tasks to perform. He gets called cute.

Like. It’s not physical torture, at least not as we usually imagine it. It’s this slow poisoning of a person’s ability to trust and connect with others, a process which is gussied up by regular assertions of fondness, so casual & consistent that you have to actively remind yourself that the guy who’s doing it sees Vegeta as a literal subhuman, and is only being good to him the way you’d be good to a valued piece of property. He tortured him to death, but he still thinks he was a good pet. Vegeta’s life was Frieza’s to end, but his feats of wanton destruction were also his to be proud of.

That’s the whole reason why Vegeta’s character development was slow, ugly and recidivist. Because it was his knowledge of how to grow, of how to exist any other way, that Frieza intentionally eroded for his own selfish, petty gain. And for a relationship between a man with a monkey tail and his pink-skinned alien overlord, the most uncomfortable part about the dynamic is that it’s realistic. Common, even.

It was jus' gonna be one page. One panel.

HOW DID IT BECOME FIVE???

hes honest and thats all that matters