The Most Important Dragon Ball Character Has ZERO Powers

In a series obsessed with power levels, transformations, and who can punch the hardest, the single most important character has a power level of essentially zero. She never throws a punch, never fires an energy blast, and has no special training at all. Her name is Bulma—and if you think of her as just the smart girl, the love interest, or Vegeta's wife, you are drastically underestimating her. This is the case for Bulma as the true main character of Dragon Ball. We start at the very first page, where the entire saga begins—not with Goku, but with Bulma's quest for the Dragon Balls and the radar she invented to find them, which is what pulls Goku off his mountain and starts everything. We look at her real superpower: a genius mind that builds the Dragon Radar, the spaceships, the gravity chamber, and even a time machine—the tools that make nearly every victory in the series possible. We also look at the thing about her that goes most overlooked: she has no way to defend herself, and she walks into the deadliest corners of the universe anyway, from Namek to the androids to Buu, armed with nothing but her nerve. We trace her growth from a vain, boy-crazy teenager into a fearless genius and matriarch. We look at how she humanized Vegeta—taking the most genocidal villain in the series and, with nothing but love and fearlessness, helping turn him into a father and a hero. And we land on what she really is: the human heart of Dragon Ball, the ordinary mortal center that keeps a cast of aliens and gods tethered to something worth protecting. In a franchise about becoming powerful, Bulma never becomes powerful, and never needs to. She was the real main character all along—hiding in plain sight.