Character · Dragon Ball
Broly
A Saiyan who does not need to train. He gets stronger while you are still hitting him.
In Otakana the clue reads: Legendary Saiyan of overwhelming raw power
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Dragon Ball
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Broly began in 1993 as a film villain, in Broly: The Legendary Super Saiyan, and the appeal was simple. Everyone else in Dragon Ball earns power through effort, injury and recovery. Broly's climbs on its own, mid-fight, with no limit anyone finds. He is also the wrong colour: his transformed hair runs green rather than gold, and the aura around him is the same. Fans kept him alive through three films and decades of games.
The 2018 film Dragon Ball Super: Broly made him canon and rebuilt him from the ground up. Akira Toriyama wrote it himself. This Broly is not a shrieking monster but a quiet man raised alone on a wasteland planet by a father who fitted him with a control collar, socially unarmed, closer to his pet than to any person. The fight is enormous. The character underneath it is gentle, which is new.
Saiyan names are vegetables, and Broly is broccoli, his father Paragus is asparagus, and Kakarot is a carrot. The 2018 film took more money worldwide than any Dragon Ball feature before it, which settled the argument about whether a movie-only villain could carry a canonical story.
Spelling BROLY
BROLY is five letters and the L is the problem. The Japanese ブロリー reads Burorii, with an R where English writes L and a long vowel on the end that the tiles have no room for. One L, not two: BROLLY looks right to an English eye and is wrong. Vegetable names run through the whole family, so think broccoli and drop the C.