The world of Dragon Ball is built on a series of rules, with the most important one being that sometimes Akira Toriyama just liked to mess with his readers. Over the course of the manga, he frequently established tropes only to subvert them at the first opportunity. In this way, Super Saiyan 3 was his masterpiece of turning the rules of Dragon Ball on their head.

It is often decried as a “useless” transformation among Dragon Ball fans because it doesn’t actually accomplish anything in the original manga. Super Saiyan 3 is introduced in the Buu Saga as Goku’s ultimate weapon in his attempt to stop Majin Buu from wreaking havoc on Earth. A sudden, unexpected transformation that was as surprising as it was ridiculous to look at, SSJ 3 was a shocking reveal in the manga before being swiftly cast aside in favor of fusion as the new way to achieve new power.

The trouble is that Goku shows up, unveils Super Saiyan 3, and then buggers off when he’s wasted just enough of Majin Buu’s time. In the course of the manga, it helps him defeat exactly no one; it is only ever used as a stalling tactic despite being technically more powerful than any other transformation at the time. Add in the fact that it was unlocked during a time skip and without any of the usual drama associated with Dragon Ball transformations, and you get something that feels underwhelming to fans years later.

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That’s the key point, though; we’re all looking at this years later, without accounting for how it must have felt to have read this story when it was being released in Weekly Shonen Jump. At this point, the previous two major antagonists of Dragon Ball had been defeated by someone unlocking a new Super Saiyan transformation. First, Goku defeated Frieza with the original Super Saiyan transformation, and then Gohan unlocked Super Saiyan 2 and defeated Cell in what is still one of the best moments in the series. Fans had every reason to believe that Buu would be defeated thanks to a new transformation.

So, Akira Toriyama, being the prankster that he’s always been, gave them exactly that – a new transformation. It was almost a parody of the original Super Saiyan transformation, with Goku’s hair getting even bigger and spikier and his physique getting bulkier. Also, his eyebrows disappeared for some reason. Toriyama laid this new form out, showed it beating Buu seven ways to Sunday, and then took it off the table completely without it actually doing anything. It was as though he was explicitly saying that this new villain would not be defeated by a new transformation.

That message was so important that he repeated it again and again this arc, first with fusion and again with Gohan’s Mystic transformation (which in itself is kind of an anti-transformation). Characters keep looking for a new way to unlock greater power only to be ultimately thwarted. In the end, Buu is defeated by a technique that Goku hadn’t used since before transformations became the central focus of the series, the Spirit Bomb, which I don’t think was something that any reader at the time could have guessed. The answer came by revisiting a technique already introduced in the series rather than introducing something new.

Toriyama knew the tropes that he’d already established in Dragon Ball when he started the Buu Saga and clearly wanted to subvert them in some way. Super Saiyan 3 was just the first way that he chose to do so. It breaks the tradition of new transformations becoming the ultimate weapon of each arc and readies the reader for the fact that whatever ends up defeating this new threat won’t be something new – it will be something old.

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