Fans have been debating if Dragon Ball Super has eliminated Dragon Ball GT as the series’ official sequel to Dragon Ball Z since Super’s release, but they’ve been missing one key piece of that argument all along: Super itself isn’t even canon with DBZ.
Dragon Ball Super takes place only a few months after Goku defeated Kid Buu in DBZ, which means it takes place between that moment in time in DBZ and its epilogue known as End of Z, which is set ten years after that fateful battle. Within that ten-year time gap, Dragon Ball Super has introduced some pretty wild and outrageously powerful characters and transformations. Not only have the Saiyans elevated themselves beyond the levels of normal Super Saiyan progression by harnessing god ki, but they even broke the ‘Super Saiyan’ mold altogether. Super Saiyan God (and the elevated Super Saiyan Blue), became the highest Saiyan form imaginable, but Goku and Vegeta shattered that power ceiling by unlocking Ultra Instinct and Ultra Ego, respectively, which are not Saiyan transformations–or even mortal transformations. Not only that, but Super has shown that Goku and Vegeta have reached these immense levels of power together while training with literal gods, and that is quickly becoming a problem for the established continuity of DBZ.
Goku & Vegeta’s Relationship in Super Contradicts DBZ
In Dragon Ball Z’s End of Z epilogue (by Akira Toriyama), fans are taken ten years into the future after Goku beat Kid Buu with the Spirit Bomb, and every single Z-Fighter has gathered at this year’s World Martial Arts Tournament–which is the perfect setting for the series’ finale, given that the tournament is one of the most significant mainstays of Dragon Ball. Right before the Tournament, when all the Z-Fighters are meeting up again after being separated for some time, Goku makes a comment to Bulma and Vegeta about how he hasn’t seen them in four years–which, because of Dragon Ball Super, is clearly impossible.
While the existence of Dragon Ball Super was initially fine in terms of fitting into the wider Dragon Ball canon, every movie, episode, and chapter that continues Super’s storyline makes what Goku said to Vegeta increasingly impossible. In fact, the final nail in this proverbial coffin was Pan herself. In End of Z, Pan is fighting in the World Martial Arts Tournament as a four-year-old, which means–according to Goku–the last time he saw Vegeta was when Pan was born. Well, in Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, Pan is three years old, and that movie shows Goku and Vegeta training on Beerus’ world with Whis and Broly. This alone proves that Dragon Ball Super can’t take place in DBZ’s canon, as Super Hero directly contradicts what Goku said to Vegeta about not having seen him in four years.
So, does this mean Dragon Ball GT is more of an official sequel to Dragon Ball Z than Super? Honestly, kind of. Dragon Ball GT takes place five years after End of Z, and opens with Goku training Uub just as he went off to do in the final page of DBZ’s epilogue. Not only that, but power levels, transformation progressions, and even original characters were all more consistent with the original DBZ in GT than in Super. Therefore, when the argument over if Dragon Ball Super cancels out Dragon Ball GT from Dragon Ball Z’s established canon comes up again, it’s important to remember that it never had the capability to do so in the first place, as DBZ itself already proved that Dragon Ball Super isn’t even canon.
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