▸ Column · Dragon Ball Z-era Earth — regional martial arts tournament circuit and training grounds; a world where combat is the shared language, warrior lineages matter, and food is sacred.
GOKU replies.
The letter
My boyfriend of eight months — a fighter I met at a regional tournament — has started loudly commenting on my sparring choices in front of other fighters at the training grounds. Things like calling out "she's going with the basic ki strike again" in a voice the whole group can hear. I told myself it was his odd sense of humor. But last week he messaged my older brother — who trained under Master Roshi — asking unprompted whether I had "always been this uncommitted to real conditioning." My brother forwarded it to me the same day. When I raised it with my boyfriend, he spent nearly an hour explaining that his family always speaks "plainly about a warrior's discipline" and that I was taking it wrong — and somehow I ended up apologizing. The rest of our time together feels warm and genuine, and I do care about him. But I keep replaying these moments and wondering if I'm letting something slide that's only going to get worse.
Goku replies
The move to your brother — that's what's bugging me. Going to someone's family out of nowhere, asking if they've "always been like this" — that's not fighting direct. That's scouting someone's blind spots without ever telling them you're doing it. I've been in a lot of fights, pal, and nobody who pulls a move like that calls it honest. They don't, because it isn't.
And forty minutes of explaining after you named it? In a real fight, if you throw a cheap shot, you own it fast. You don't spend forty minutes explaining why the shot was fine and your opponent just took the damage wrong. That whole thing is weird to me. And the part where you ended up apologizing? No. You called the move right.
Say it to him plain — not angry, just plain: these things are landing on me wrong, and I need you to actually hear that instead of explaining why I shouldn't feel it. That's the whole match right there. What he does with that one honest shot — whether he hears you or just runs the same forty-minute explanation again — that's your answer.
I'm not saying give up on him. I've handed senzu beans to guys who tried to flatten me, because you don't know what someone will do with a real honest chance until they actually get one. Give him that. Then watch close.
Also — eat whatever you want. Food is food and it's nobody else's call.
— Goku
Vegeta weighs in
Kakarot tells you to give the man a real honest chance and see what he does with it. Hmph. Warm. Naive. Both at once, as always.
Here is what he skips, because suspicion simply isn't in his nature: you already gave Derek a real honest chance. You brought it to him directly. And in the forty minutes that followed, he converted your legitimate complaint into your apology. That is not a man who stumbled through a cheap shot by accident. That is a man with a precise understanding of how to make the bruise look like yours.
So the question is not what he does next time you speak plainly. The question is what YOU do when he explains it right back at you again, and that familiar pull toward apologizing for something that was not your fault arrives right on schedule.
That is your real opponent. Not him.
I know something about years spent performing apologies that suited someone else's convenience. The cost is not trivial.
— Vegeta