Goku/Kakarot

>His kindness is from him taking after his mother.
This is a retcon too. He just hit himself really hard on the head.

Assuming this translation is accurate, Goku just happened to be a prodigy despite having a dad who was nothing special by the standards of his species. And ultimately, that'd probably make the most sense, because even once Vegeta stopped coasting off his natural abilities and started training like a madman, he could never quite catch up with Goku (and if he did, it wasn't for long).

Still, I'd always figured it was a combination of a respectable level of talent, a pure and genuine love of fighting (i.e. he trains more often because he just enjoys it), training smart, and always seeking out the best teachers.

Even once Vegeta learns all that stuff, he's still only ever (debatably) stronger than Goku for one brief period that I can think of, which is against Androids 19 and 20.

His kindness coming from his mother is absolutely a retcon, and anybody who thinks it isn't needs to explain why she wasn't in heaven to greet her son when he died in Z. Why did Goku go train with King Kai, and not the seven righteous saiyans of Vegitan legend? Why weren't they there, in heaven, ready and willing to teach Goku how to access God ki to save his planet and loved ones from saiyan tyranny?

Answer: because it's a fucking retcon. Saiyans are all bastards, and every single one of them is in hell. Their entire race was sent to hell. Yes, even Goku's mom. If there were any good saiyans, we would have seen them in heaven by now with how often people keep dying and being sent there to train.

The entire concept of the righteous saiyan is a colossal retcon and an absolute joke. Saiyans are retards. Like every other alien species, they don't bother training. Only humans and one or two other obscure species train. You're born with X amount of power potential, and that's it. They had an entire class system built around this. Saiyans blew up entire planets full of sapient life for fun. They were not good people, and all of them were in hell as of Dragon Ball Z. Even the Super Saiyan transformation was initially portrayed as having a kind of psychotic break. It was not a good thing. Goku threated to KILL Gohan if he didn't shut up and run away back to the ship.

Dragon Ball Super gave you a video game that gave you a gumball fetish vore mommy. Accept it for what it is and move on.

The entire concept of Goku being some "Saiyan" race is a huge retcon by itself, I'm sure Vegeta and Co didn't exist in Toriyama's mind when he was doing OG Dragonball.
So I don't have any problem with Goku's mom being a retcon since DBZ as a whole is a retcon and that's OKAY.

You're right about "virtuous Saiyans" being a retarded retcon and nuBardock is extremely uncool and all that, but I'm pretty sure most people don't get to keep their bodies after death in the DB universe. You just sort of become a cloud of pure spirit (and maybe reincarnated or something), unless you were a galactic hero recognized by the gods. So that'd be another reason why Goku's mom wouldn't have been in heaven, even if she were a nice lady.

I think the big difference there is that Goku's origins were explicitly shrouded in mystery, so there was room for something like "He was actually an alien all along!" But everything we were told or shown about the Saiyans in the story made it very clear that they were supposed to be a bloodthirsty race of space pirates, and Goku was the only pureblooded Saiyan who wasn't a huge asshole (and even then, it's because he got brain damage). It wasn't until Super that Toriyama/Toei saw fit to soften their edges.

>Even once Vegeta learns all that stuff, he's still only ever (debatably) stronger than Goku for one brief period that I can think of, which is against Androids 19 and 20.
That's because Vegita, like everybody in Dragon Ball, is an idiot who doesn't bother learning the good techniques. The Kaioken is ABSOLUTELY BROKEN, it's basically an SSJ3 form that anyone can learn (burn stamina HARD and eat backlash to get REAL STRONG), but for some reason nobody ever asks Goku or King Kai to teach it to them. The Spirit Bomb is also OP, and again, Goku is pretty much the only one who uses it.

On top of that, Tien has literally THE BEST TECHNIQUES IN THE SERIES. His Crane School developed energy blast, the Dodonpa, is outright admitted by Master Roshi that it's better than the Kamehameha. It comes out faster, it hits harder, and it's more energy efficient to use. It's literally a straight upgrade on the Kamehameha. Tien also developed the Shiyoken, the trick where he grows two more arms. This is described as a technique, not a racial trait or anything, so anyone could learn this, and it's also said that it "doubles the strength" of the person who uses it. That's a free x2 power level boost that anyone can learn, that would stack with anything else they use. And the Kikoho is literally the strongest energy blast technique we have ever seen in the series. Bar none. When Roshi saw it in Dragon Ball, he shit his pants. He called it a forbidden move that's too strong to be used, because it can kill the user. Tien was able to use it to pin Semiperfect Cell down in a hole, and in order to do that, his Kikoho would have to MATCH Cell's power level in that form.

Do you understand that Goku, Trunks, or Vegita could have KILLED Cell, if any of them had known the Kikoho? Krillin is literally the only person smart enough to steal good techniques from other people, because he swiped the Solar Flare from Tien. Vegita developed all his moves himself. None of them are good.

>The Spirit Bomb is also OP, and again, Goku is pretty much the only one who uses it.
Uhhh no it's not, the drawbacks of the technique (extremely long cast time, makes you vulnerable, needs the proper environment and enough life force to gather, dumb let me throw a slow moving ball at you and hope you don't dodge) make it so ridiculously useless that it only works for narrative purposes.

But even without the Kaioken, Goku had a higher raw Battle Power than Vegeta starting with his arrival on Namek. I mean, the Kaioken doesn't matter at all after the Freeza fight, because you can't use it in tandem with any of the Super Saiyan forms until Super.

Yeah, Dragonball characters could stand to make better use of the techniques available to them, but that doesn't explain why Goku is stronger than Vegeta.

>I'm sure Vegeta and Co didn't exist in Toriyama's mind when he was doing OG Dragonball.
That's objectively true and known. Toriyama has outright admitted, repeatedly, in interviews that he does not actually plan ahead for anything, and he just writes each chapter "in the moment." There is no plan for Dragon Ball and there never was. That's why the quality of the plot can be tracked by the editors that Toriyama has hired and fired over the years, and not anything Toriyama himself does. Some of his editors were really good, and some of them were dimwitted assholes who gave Toriyama terrible advice, which he followed.

Example: Cell was never supposed to transform. The initial form was supposed to be his real form. This makes sense, because Cell was made to be the perfect life form, explicitly. That's canonically true. Why the fuck would Gero make a "perfect" life form, but do it IMPERFECTLY, and require Cell to actually cannibalize other things to "become" perfect? Gero made 17 and 18 from some random kids he kidnapped. Everything that makes them special came from Gero, which means what made them able to make Cell perfect ALSO came from Gero. So why not just make Cell perfect to start with?

Because his editor at the time advised him to give him a transformation, because he was an ugly bug man. So Toriyama winged it, and created a second Cell form. Then his editor told him that this Cell looked like a doofus that nobody would take seriously. So Toriyama shrugged his shoulders again and made YET ANOTHER form. Perfect and Semiperfect Cell were not planned. That was Toriyama's editor. Cell's transformations ARE a retcon, he was never supposed to transform at all.

He is the main character. That's why he is the strongest.

Spirit Bomb makes no sense whatsoever. It's fueled with a completely different type of ki than literally everything else in the series, and while explicitly meant to "target evil" or whatever, only does that against Buu. Against Vegeta and Frieza it amounted to "big boom".

Tien is on a whole other level and has been since his introduction. It's a shame he only gets bit roles here and there because he could have been an important player in every saga if he was written to do so.

>Yeah, Dragonball characters could stand to make better use of the techniques available to them, but that doesn't explain why Goku is stronger than Vegeta.
It doesn't, because the word limit stops me from going really into detail. The REAL reason Vegita isn't stronger than Goku is because Goku is the protagonist and Vegita is his rival, but we all understand that and we're choosing to ignore it, right? So there's an understanding here, that we're all just holding hands and pretending, in the sandbox, to come up with reasons for why Vegita is weaker.

There's quite a few reasons.
>Vegita never trained in his life before coming to earth, just like every other dumbass alien in space
But Goku has been training since he was a toddler, with the best martial arts masters in the universe, and being taught (some of) the very best techniques. Goku has a massive head-start on Vegita, for the same reason somebody that's been training in martial arts since they were a kid would whip the ass of somebody the same age who only just started.
>Vegita had to develop all of his techniques himself, on his own, without any help, and most of what he knows is probably derived from generic Freiza Force bullshit
But Goku has been learning techniques from gods and immortals since before he ever MET Vegita, and he's only continued to learn more techniques from the best people, while Vegita INSISTS on always going off on his own to try and develop his own thing. He's still doing it in fucking Super. He shunned the Kaioken and Ultra Instinct. He only wanted Super Saiyan because it's a legend of his people, and he also only wanted Saiyan God for the same reason.
>Vegita almost always trains alone, which is REPEATEDLY stated to be inferior
While Goku has been training with other people his whole life. Call it corny or the power of friendship, but Whis outright stated this is true. Training with others is far more effective.

Vegita causes most of his own problems.