IllegallySane Wrote:I'm surprised you forgot... Piccolo and Majin Buu (Uub). They were murderous beings too, but they became good. How is that any different from other anime/manga where a bad guy becomes a good guy?
Digimon: Ken Ichijouji enslaved pretty much the entire Digital World, yet became a major help after becoming good.
Magneto: Villian/Anti-hero/Hero
Chrono Trigger: Magus, who tried summoning Lavos and who waged war against the Kingdom of Guardia killed Frog's best friend and countless soldiers who tried to go against him, yet you can recruit him to your side later on.
Gurenn Lagann: Viral. Now I've mentioned too much.
Hell, even the JOKER, in another time and/or universe, was a hero known as Red Hood.
Megatron at one point, worked with Optimus Prime to destroy a greater evil: Unicron.
I haven't watched DBZ for a long time, and I played Chrono Trigger a long time ago.
The answer to all these questions is that humanity has a morbid fascination with evil and an unspoken wish to be able to do it. The answer to why is very long, but they are seen as "overmen," breaking society's rules, which makes them "cool" and "strong." More explicitly, there's a side to almost everyone that wishes to kill his enemies and trample the bonds society has over him. Ted Bundy, who raped and murdered a lot of women, got a lot of marriage proposals on death row. The character of Hannibal fascinates a lot of viewers of his movie, though the creator said the cahracter was meant to be distasteful, and the creator was horrified with the way the viewers came to see him. Bonnie and Clyde, who were robbers and murderers were regarded as a sort of folk heroes. During Hurricane Katrina, order broke down in New Orleans to be replaced by a dog-eat-dog caveman atmosphere. More ominously, in multiple societies complex factors change "normal" people into perpetrators of genocide. Look up Milgram Experiment or Stanford Prison Experiment for psychological test validation of that. When you're given orders by unethical leadership, when you are subjected to peer pressure to do unethical things, when you think you will be punished if you do not do unethical things or if you get rewards for doing unethical things -- and teh government itself is unethical, the enemies of the state are dehumanized, and then murdered. A variant on that explains every genocide in history. Of course nobody here thinks it could happen to them, but under the right circumstances it could. People have some differences between each other, but a lot of things are very similar, especially in teh basic functions of logic and emotion.
I think cheering for Vegeta or Magus (or any other bad guy) stems from all this stuff. I used to like the characters of Magus and Vegeta because they represented "redemption" from evil. In Magus's case this is borderline tenable, but Vegeta blew up a fuucking planet. I was a little kid fascinated by the big macho tough guy. Now I have enough confidence to realize that people like him should have bullets in their heads, and their corpses should be tossed in a ditch. I am sorry, but you cannot rehabilitate a Nazi concentration camp guard or a Khmer Rouge thug with a gun. Killing defenseless civilians defies teh laws of civilization; there's an appeal to breaking such rules... and often punishment. Very well deserved punishment.