Pan Can/Can't Turn Super Saiyan - Kanzenshuu (2024)

Pan’s Original Introduction

In the last two chapters of the original Dragon Ball manga, readers are introduced to Pan: the daughter of Gohan and Videl, and therefore granddaughter of both Goku and Mr. Satan! Pan competes in the 28th Tenka’ichi Budokai at the young age of four (even without a junior division!), handily taking out Mo Kekko.

… and that’s all we get of Pan in the original source material!

Even contemporary with its original serialization, fans surely wondered: could Pan turn into a Super Saiyan? The “bargain sale” remark from Vegeta was in reference to Goten and Trunks years ago, and so it would naturally follow that perhaps we could see transformations at even younger ages.

The Daizenshuu Character Profile

The seventh Daizenshuu — the “Large Encyclopedia” — was released 05 February 1996. The manga ended well over a year ago at that point, while the respective TV series had just ended the prior week (Dragon Ball Z episode 291 aired on January 31st!)

Of course production was well underway for Dragon Ball GT by this point, but the series didn’t actually debut until February 7th, two days after the release of the seventh Daizenshuu.

This context is important to consider when reading Pan’s character biography snippet from that guidebook, which contains — alongside descriptions of her facial features, love of training, etc. — the following sentence:

クオーターゆえ、さすがに大猿や超サイヤ人になることはないものの、サイヤ人の血を引くため格闘の才能は抜群。

An extremely literal (read: not particularly useful) translation of this statement might read:

Although because she is [only] a quarter[-Saiyan], and so, as you might expect, never becomes [or “will never become”] a giant monkey or Super Saiyan, since she has Saiyan blood, her talent for fighting is [nevertheless] a cut above the rest.

When read in context with the rest of the character biography, and aiming to make something actually readable by humans, we might go with something like:

Since she is only a quarter-Saiyan, she naturally will never become a Great Ape or Super Saiyan; nevertheless, the Saiyan blood running through her veins means that she is still a formidable fighter.

Of course, the big question here is whether or not it states that Pan simply hasn’t yet already become a Super Saiyan, or is actually incapable of ever becoming a Super Saiyan.

Diving deeper into this, it is important to understand that Japanese has no future tense as such. There are a number of paraphrastic expressions that you can use to indicate future plans or potentiality, but often it relies purely on context. Here, the Daizenshuu statement uses the “[present tense]ことがある” expression, literally “there is a case/time/instance where [subject] does X.” The text says 大猿や超サイヤ人になることはない, which is literally “there is not a case/time/instance [where] [she] becomes a Great Ape or Super Saiyan,” but because of the present/future ambiguity, it could be read either way. “[past tense] ことがない” means “has not [done] [at any point in the past]” — the “experience” sense of the English perfective. For that to be the case, it would be なったことはない instead of なる. As for the particle は vs. が, here it’s being used as part of a concessive/contrastive expression (A is not true, but B is), where は is expected.

So what does that actually mean? When several of our staff members read the statement again in Japanese with fresh eyes, each came to the conclusion of it intending a meaning of “will not”.

And with that, the story comes to an end as Goku flies off with Oob… until…

Dragon Ball GT

Picking up five years later from where the original manga and TV series adaptation left off, Dragon Ball GT continues the story with Pan sneaking her way onto a spaceship alongside Goku and Trunks. The team shares a few wacky adventures and tough battles, but the series ultimately came to an end after 64 episodes.

In May 1997, the first Dragon Ball GT Perfect File guidebook was released — as a point of reference, the series was into its Super 17 story arc by then. In the book’s “World Guide” section is a breakdown of the various Super Saiyan transformations from across the franchise, and more specifically as seen thus far in Dragon Ball GT itself. The “Super Saiyan 1” area contains a sidebar column that theorizes on a transformation for Pan:

Will new Super Saiyans emerge?
Pan has Saiyan blood, so she possesses a high battle power!! If they meet the conditions outlined on the page on the right, both Pan and Vegeta’s daughter Bra should be able to become Super Saiyans!! If a time of great crisis comes along, perhaps we could witness the birth of the first-ever female Super Saiyans?!

CAPTION: If Pan ever transformed, what would she look like?!

Of course, we later see that even Goku Jr. — at least 1/64th Saiyan taking into consideration Pan as his great-great-grandmother — can transform into a Super Saiyan, as does Vegeta Jr.

This seems to negate the possibility of the Saiyan lineage being too diluted, and certainly brings things back around to (some potentially questionable) comments made by Toei Animation producer Kōzō Morish*ta for his Dragon Ball GT “Dragon Box” DVD boxset interview in 2005:

And so Dragon Ball GT finally began. But during the early phase of the program, there were many episodes where Pan was very active.
Pan’s role was to be strong but still lose to the enemies and then be rescued by Goku, to be a “heroine who makes Goku a hero.” To go off-topic a bit, even the hit movie Titanic moved women because it’s a story where the heroine (now an old woman) remembers the hero; isn’t that basic movie-making? If the hero doesn’t rescue the heroine, maybe adults will understand that life is like that too sometimes, but for children it becomes a very harsh story. Stories where the hero rescues the heroine have a sense of security. Therefore we created a pattern where Pan is imperiled and Goku gets mad at the enemy: “I won’t let you get away with this!”

Though Pan has Saiyan blood, she never becomes a Super Saiyan.
Dragon Ball GT has an episode where Pan is turned into a doll, but that episode established the pattern of: “Pan sets the incident in motion while Goku resolves it.” So it would break that pattern to make Pan a Super Saiyan and strong. But perhaps Pan could have become a Super Saiyan if the episode where she was turned into a doll had been a later one.

Pan’s the sort of character who goes even if told not to, so it’s easy to have her cause trouble (laughs).
That’s right. If we were to have Trunks kick things off, then we would first have to explain why level-headed Trunks would act recklessly, which is the most boring thing: an explanation that’s just there to set up another explanation.

While there is no concrete display on-screen, it does at least seem that a “Super Saiyan Pan” could have been a consideration to potentially include one day had Dragon Ball GT continued.

Dragon Ball Online

It’s perhaps worth noting that Dragon Ball Online, the long-since-defunct MMORPG with heavy story oversight by Akira Toriyama, allowed player characters to transform into a Super Saiyan. With the timeline of the game’s story kicking off in Age 1000 (several hundred years later after the events of the original manga), the dilution of Saiyan blood doesn’t seem to have been too big a concern.

The Super Saiyan Fetus!

It’s also worth taking a look at the Super Saiyan God ritual from the 2013 theatrical film Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods, as well as its respective retelling in the 2015 television series Dragon Ball Super.

In Battle of Gods, Shenlong explains that Super Saiyan God was a being accidentally created by pure-hearted Saiyans long ago in order to oppose Planet Vegeta’s dominant evil Saiyans. It was produced when five pure-hearted Saiyans infused their “light” (光 hikari) into another pure-hearted Saiyan.

In Dragon Ball Super, this is described slightly differently by Shenlong, who says that according to the Namekian book of legends, if five pure-hearted Saiyans hold hands and pour their “spirit” or “hearts” (心 kokoro) into another pure-hearted Saiyan, the god of the Saiyans will be born — in other words, the Super Saiyan God.

The real notable thing here is that all of the other Saiyans contributing to the ritual — Vegeta, Gohan, Goten, and Trunks — transform into a Super Saiyan. Everyone becomes surrounded by an aura, which ultimately flows into Goku, transforming him into a Super Saiyan God.

Does this mean the as-of-yet-unborn Pan transformed into a Super Saiyan as part of the ritual?! Unsurprisingly, there is no answer to that question!

Beyond Super

With all of Dragon Ball Super taking place in the ten-year-gap between the defeat of Boo and the 28th Tenka’ichi Budokai, it’s no surprise that we have yet to see Pan transform into a Super Saiyan here in the “main continuity” (for lack of a better phrase) — everything from her birth pre-Resurrection ‘F’ up through Super Hero is still taking place before that tournament.

It is at bare minimum curious that Pan never received a Super Saiyan transformation in any of the Dragon Ball Heroes material — neither as a “What If?” scenario, or for her “Xeno” Time Patroller incarnation, especially considering that the optional female avatar for players was given a wealth of transformations, Super Saiyan included.

Was there a stipulation that Pan never get the transformation? Could only Akira Toriyama himself be responsible for doing so? Was that in the cards for some future event or story?! Unfortunately, we may never know…!