Even though Super Saiyan 5 was completely fabricated with a now-famous piece of fan hâm mộ art, long Ball basically made it canon and no one even noticed.
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While the real-world legend of Super Saiyan 5 disappointingly proved lớn be non-canonical within the Dragon Ball saga, the seemingly godlike size was basically added khổng lồ the series…and no one noticed.
Super Saiyan 5 originated as tín đồ art drawn by artist David Montiel Franco. When the image made its rounds all over the mạng internet in the late ‘90s-early 2000s, the current ongoing Dragon Ball anime was Dragon Ball GT which launched in 1996 in Japan, a series that introduced fans to lớn Super Saiyan 4. Seemingly following the aesthetic of Super Saiyan 4, Super Saiyan 5 depicts the Saiyan (one who was later revealed khổng lồ be an original character by Franco named Tablos) in a more primal form with long hair & fur covering most of his body. The size also gave the Saiyan white/silver hair.
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Even though it is just a fan-made picture linked to lớn a nhái Dragon Ball series known as Dragon Ball AF, the Super Saiyan 5 image carries with it the promise of a power nguồn unlike anything fans had ever seen before. While Super Saiyan 5 ended up being something of a hoax, fans still basically got a version of the form in the current Dragon Ball storyline, or at least, the version fans imagined they would have gotten with the ‘real’ Super Saiyan 5. In Dragon Ball Super by Akira Toriyama and Toyotarou, Goku & Vegeta have unlocked godlike powers, not just with the incredibly powerful Super Saiyan xanh form, but power nguồn levels that only gods and angels have wielded before. Vegeta has reached a power used by Gods of Destruction known as Ultra Ego, but it’s Goku’s achievement that is truly notable as he basically made Super Saiyan 5 canon through his use of Ultra Instinct.
Like the nguồn Super Saiyan 5 was imagined lớn have held, Ultra Instinct gives one the nguồn that surpasses that of a god, proven true by Lord Beerus who hasn’t yet unlocked that particular ability himself. Plus, aesthetically, it’s not that far off. Rather than the Super Saiyan 4 style of long hair & fur Super Saiyan 5 is seemingly derived from, Ultra Instinct keeps Goku’s khung relatively the same. However, just as Super Saiyan 5 turns a Saiyan’s hair white/silver, Ultra Instinct changes Goku’s hair to a similar color, albeit a bit more shiny/silvery than Super Saiyan 5’s more prominent white.
While there are similarities, the differences between Super Saiyan 5 and Ultra Instinct are enough lớn keep this comparison from being obvious, và even perhaps make the comparison flat out disagreeable. However, the essence of Ultra Instinct has proven to lớn be the pinnacle of power, power that even gods struggle to lớn access. When fans saw the Super Saiyan 5 fan art for the first time, the feeling it invoked gave one the impression that this was it, the final & most powerful size a Saiyan could accomplish. While there will assuredly be a power cấp độ even greater than Ultra Instinct in the future, as it stands, it is the end-all be-all for how powerful a character can be in the Dragon Ball universe, và that is enough lớn make it comparable with the fan-made legend of Super Saiyan 5.
In 1999, the long Ball faithful witnessed the image of the fabled Super Saiyan 5.
There he was: an immaculately chiseled Goku, pecs và delts where they couldn’t possibly exist, standing aloft và unfazed above another alien battleground. His mane was crystal white; it spiked down his back lớn meet a regal simian tail và a billowy pair of ivory fight pants. Aesthetically, Super Saiyan 5 merged the hairy, primeval weirdness of Super Saiyan 4 and the angelic excess of Super Saiyan 3.
When the image appeared on prehistoric fan hâm mộ forums of the late ’90s, it was easy khổng lồ buy in. No one questioned it because no one wanted khổng lồ break the spell.
”We’d spend hours each day on our 56K modems downloading images of different characters whose names & likenesses were foreign to us, & random, low-resolution clip clips from across the different series, including from <Dragon Ball> GT, which had yet to lớn air,” says Derek Padula, a dragon Ball historian, và the author of a forthcoming book called USA DBZ: The True power nguồn of rồng Ball Z in America. “All of it was fascinating và novel, & fans shared clips and characters with a lot of excitement. Everyone was trying khổng lồ put the pieces together of who these people were, & how the dragon Ball story unfolded.”
The famed Super Saiyan 5 was a hoax. The image didn’t come from long Ball creator Akira Toriyama’s pen, nor was it intended as a superpowered drawing of Goku. That’s the first thing David Montiel Franco corrects me about when I reach out khổng lồ him over Twitter khổng lồ talk about the fan art that accidentally made him famous.
The saiyan in question is named Tablos. Franco created him in 1998, when he was 17 years old. Looking at the issue of Hobby Consolas, the Spanish gaming magazine that published Franco’s drawing, you can begin khổng lồ see how the misdirection started. The stoic, silver-haired Saiyan takes up the bottom corner of a page, alongside with the inscription “Dragon Ball AF.” AF was the name of Franco’s own homebrew manga series — he dreamt up storylines that could take place after the conclusion of Dragon Ball GT, a time where there weren’t any new episodes on the horizon.
”The goal was khổng lồ innovate the dragon Ball series
This was the late ’90s, a time when millions of newborn long Ball tín đồ artists, mostly in high school and middle school, flooded forums with their own rough takes on Toriyama’s classic silhouettes. In that sense, Franco was like any other teenager, mocking up his very own fanime as a way to claim a corner of the DBZ multiverse. The only difference was that Franco’s art was light-years better than the amateurish mockups of his contemporaries. Removed from its original context, it would be easy to believe that it came directly from the Toei mothership.
And that’s exactly what happened. Sometime in the late ’90s, a theoretical dragon Ball tín đồ scanned that Hobby Consolas page, cropped everything but the majestic image of Tablos, & posted it to lớn a forum, where people inferred that it was Goku transformed into a mythical Super Saiyan 5. Franco’s name was removed from the proceedings entirely, và the community, frothy with the hope for new content, new characters, và new nguồn levels, jumped to the conclusion that it was witnessing a spicy new leak from Japan.
Dragon Ball lifers were particularly interested in that innocuous “AF” in the corner of the drawing, which scanned as a biểu tượng logo for a new series. The fan hâm mộ community eventually agreed that AF must stand for After Future, the hush-hush project that Toei Company was working on to continuing Goku’s journey into higher và higher celestial power plateaus. According to Padula’s research on his Dao of long Ball blog, the internet rarely questioned the veracity of AF. Believing in something as exciting as a Super Saiyan 5 Goku & 100-plus new half-hour shows was a blast. Fans filled in the margins with homemade “illustrations, videos, and episode listings” for the hypothetical AF, which created a bedrock of material that made it hard for any casual to cast doubt.
Franco wasn’t aware of any of this. “After sending & publishing the image in that magazine I started to lớn work and study at University of Alicante and stopped drawing,” he says. For nearly trăng tròn years, he had absolutely no idea that his fan-art was being passed around as an official image from the rồng Ball brain trust. Meanwhile, people like Padula were eating it up.
”Only the super well-educated fans who had seen the entirety of the series by then, such as by watching the Japanese bootleg VHS tapes, could know that it wasn’t real,” he tells me. “These educated fans created a small dissenting voice in the crowd, but most people remained ignorant of truth và falsehood. There’s so much khổng lồ learn about long Ball, và so much misinformation, that it can be difficult to lớn tell what’s real and fake.”
An element of doublespeak has always been a crucial ingredient of dragon Ball fandom, simply because it’s difficult to follow the whims of an enigmatic production company across the Pacific. “Dragon Ball is a series made by a Japanese man who is still alive today, but prefers khổng lồ remain hidden, while a giant publisher & animation studio produce his works và distribute it khổng lồ the world,” continues Padula. “If Toriyama were lượt thích Stan Lee or another comic creator who was actively involved in the community they helped create, he could have quashed those rumors as soon as they began, and it would have put the final nail in the coffin.”
Today, a random fan hâm mộ can pen a tweet to J.K. Rowling & can potentially receive a fiction-altering nugget delivered right to their door. That’s never been the case with dragon Ball. The universe is too silly, too unruly, và too stuffed with fringe cases for anyone lớn be certain they’re standing on solid ground. This is a franchise that deemed an entire television arc, Dragon Ball GT, to be non-canon. So is it really that surprising that the community could be baited by some well-executed tín đồ art? khổng lồ me, that’s just a lovable symptom of the culture.
As the decades piled on, & the internet accelerated, và more Americans got their hands on episodes of long Ball, it slowly became clear that Super Saiyan 5 — at least in Franco’s interpretation — didn’t exist. The rumor was formally put khổng lồ bed in 2012, when Padula made it his mission khổng lồ determine the origin of the drawing once and for all. He lays out all of the detective work on his blog, but basically, he tracked down that issue of Hobby Consolas, examined Franco’s signature in Photoshop, and miraculously found him online. Padula was the first one to inform Franco of the legacy he inconspicuously left in his wake.
”I was totally ignorant about this issue all that time,” says Franco. “The problem was that I was absent, và people didn’t know the real origin of the picture.”
In 2015, Dragon Ball Super premiered, serving as the first entry in the rồng Ball universe since the late-’90s. It definitely meant that Toriyama was not working on anything called Dragon Ball AF, or a Super Saiyan 5. Given Toei’s general reticence with the press, this was about as close as anyone was going to lớn get khổng lồ a formal repudiation of the myth.
And yet, the folklore still thrives. Go lớn the dragon Ball wiki, and you can find a delightfully in-universe history of the Super Saiyan 5 form, và how Goku was the first khổng lồ achieve it, và how it differs from the contours of Super Saiyan 4, with absolutely no disclosure that the fiction was generated out of thin air by hopeful fans. Scroll through all the fanart inspired by Franco’s drawing, that drapes the other rồng Ball characters with the same trappings. (Super Saiyan 5 Gohan! Super Saiyan 5 Vegeta!) The legend has existed for too long for it to lớn ever die. “
The legacy is built on wish fulfillment. If you grew up believing that Franco’s illustration was canon, và that Americans were just around the corner from finally getting their hands on AF, it can be difficult to concede that all of that anticipation was for naught. “’Super Saiyan 5 Goku is real’ is the dragon Ball version of ‘Elvis Lives!’” adds Padula. “People want to lớn believe.”
Dragon Ball, in its beautiful, absurd sprawl, across countless video clip games, movies, mangas, & dubs, encourages its viewers to lớn distort their discernment. Super Saiyan 5 will be passed around for eons. It belongs khổng lồ the fans. It’s as real as anyone wants it lớn be. Given how other, more contemporary tín đồ manga series lượt thích Dragon Ball New Age and Dragon Ball Multiverse continue to lớn thrive, the dose of non-canon daydreaming may be a positive force.
Franco has greatly enjoyed his discovered celebrity. In 2016, for the first time since he phối off for university, he started drawing rồng Ball art again, encouraged by his friends, who told him how many people in the community still thirsted for the AF mythology. Last year he went lớn several manga conventions with his canvases in tow. When he sets up his booth, behind him always is that same fierce portrait of Tablos. Super Saiyan 5 Goku has lifted a lapsed fan hâm mộ artist out of exile, and returned him lớn his rightful place. Franco isn’t an official arbiter of the canon, but he’s also not not that either. The rồng Ball universe is full of contradictions, it makes sense that the reality surrounding it would be the same way.
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”The majority of people don’t believe that I’m the original creator, other people ask me, ‘When will the Dragon Ball AF anime start?” he says. “I feel like another simple long Ball fan who grew up with the series. Hopefully I could collaborate with Toei Animation in the future. We would have an amazing dragon Ball series. I promise.”
Luke Winkie is a writer and former pizza-maker from the hills of Rancho San Diego, who lives & works from Austin, Texas.