Pseudonym said:
Well, at first I saw what they were going for. Krillin had the chance to kill Vegeta but doesn't do so on request of Goku. Then Vegeta could learn from Goku not to be a total failure of a person during the freeza saga. This even sort of happened. But then vegeta didn't make any kind of convincing turn. Unlike Tien or Android 16, Vegeta never does anything to redeem himself. And unlike piccolo or android 18 he won't restrain himself from doing blatantly evil things. Thing is, android 16 and Tien actually come to the conclusion that doing evil stuff is wrong and piccolo and 18 at least have people they care about like Gohan and Krillin. Vegeta just does more stupid, evil and dangerous things while being nominally on the good guy side. He helps cell muder android 18 just to show off his fighting prowess, which then turns out to be hopelessly insufficient. Even when Trunks is growing up near him it doesn't prevent him from joining an evil wizard and trying to murder Goku. If from the moment Trunks showed up Vegeta was shown to have some remorse or at least like Piccolo, not shown to do evil shit, I would have a lot more sympathy for Goku not just killing him at about five different points in the story.
Also unlike Vegeta, none of those characters ever went on mass murdering sprees. Piccolo was the son of King Piccolo and hadn't committed any atrocities yet and, correct me if I'm wrong, the androids in the main timeline hadn't murdered anyone.
Murdering entire civilizations was basically Vegeta's day job and his "redemption" basically consisted of him... not doing that anymore. It's like if Hitler got bored of murdering Jews and decided he wanted to start hanging around the White House from now on, and everyone just let him.
CoCage said:
It boiled down to the writers being idiots and letting a fan fic writer on to the staff. Even as a kid the pairing made no sense to me. If people like the paring, then more power to them, but I have seen more plausible and better pairings in other anime shows.
Not really sure what you mean. Dragon Ball Z was based on the Dragon Ball manga which was written by Akira Toriyama alone. His editors did have quite a bit of influence though, I wonder if the pairing could have been their idea.