100 days of enemy recs: 65: Bulma/Vegeta

[melannen]

Dragonball is one of those odd, rare fandoms where I know the canon far better than the fandom. I watched a fair amount of the cartoon on afternoon TV back in the 90s, and I relatively recently read the manga series up to volume 39 (which was as far as the 3-in-1 edition had gotten by the time I caught up - I should find those last three somewhere.) But the fandom is to me a vast and unmapped iceberg of which I have seen only the merest floating corner.

Bulma/Vegeta is a pairing that crossed barriers in enemyslash, though. Hatesex during a timeskip that resulted in a largely unexplained baby after the timeskip? Followed by Dad just kind of hanging around insisting he was still an enemy but also not leaving or doing anything even slightly enemy-like until by the time the kid was in school his parents were an old married couple and everyone knew it? Vegeta's slow yet inexorable acceptance that he is now part of Bulma's family and he can't do anything about it gets its own category in all discussions of redemption arcs. So I can't not include it! So here is one fic!

• Long Live The King (9562 words) by RC_McLachlan
  Fandom: Dragon Ball
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Bulma Briefs/Vegeta
  Characters: Bulma Briefs, Trunks Briefs, Vegeta (Dragon Ball), King Vegeta
  Additional Tags: Bulma Briefs is the queen we deserve, Trunks you little shit, Don't copy to another website
  
  Bulma meets the in-laws.

Comments

[superborb]

Gosh, I remember reading some really tropey DBZ stuff back in the day... I'm sure none of it stands up to the test of time though ^^;

[melannen]

When I first got onto the internet it was still one of the THE big fandoms, and
I had this general awareness of it hovering in the distance, but at this point I wouldn't even know where to start looking on wayback. (And I'm mostly in it for Bulma/Vegeta and I don't think that was a huge part of the fic.)

[dragoness_e]

As I remember it, Bulma/Vegeta was a big slice of the lemons, as we called them back then.

[unavee]

Their relationship arc is weird and amazing. I don't think I am ever going to watch any more Dragonball, but I might be tempted if it was just tropey Bulma/Vegeta.

[melannen]

Same! The manga actually had way tighter worldbuilding than I was expecting though! Given that it was also, of course, utterly silly.

[schneefink]

I enjoyed this, thanks for the rec :)
(AO3 tells me I had already left kudos on the fic but I didn't remember it at all.)

[brownbetty]

oh my god, this pairing. Thank you for punting me back to being fourteen years old.