Work Text:
Title: Scars of the past
Fandom: DragonBall Z
pairing: Gen, Videl/Gohan
Author: FrozenFlower
Reader: Dr_Fumbles_McStupid,
Cover Art by: iv0611
Chapter 00 04:24 Chapter 13 05:52
Chapter 01 05:02 Chapter 14 06:55
Chapter 02 04:29 Chapter 15 07:22
Chapter 03 05:30 Chapter 16 06:58
Chapter 04 06:39 Chapter 17 11:12
Chapter 05 06:40 Chapter 18 08:16
Chapter 06 05:46 Chapter 19 7:16
Chapter 07 10:27 Chapter 20 11:08
Chapter 08 7:38 Chapter 21 10:08
Chapter 09 7:50 Chapter 22 6:00
Chapter 10 6:10 Chapter 23 12:02
Chapter 11 6:22 Chapter 24 13:23
Chapter 12 6:57 Chapter 25 11:21
Chapter 26 6:00
(Right click to download, normal click to stream)
M4B 3:28:06
Mirror download link at the audiofic archive
reader's notes:
So I originally read this fic when In 2002, I was in middle school at the time and Dragon Ball Z was one of my first dives into fandom. Sailor moon was the very first but dragon ball z was right behind it. In fact I spent a ton of time reading dragon ball z sailor moon crossovers (I would give the world for a good Dragonball Z / sailor moon crossovers now). Dragon Ball Z had just started the buu saga and Gohan was who I was obsessed with. In retrospect it was painfully on brand for me. The pure cinnamon roll who is placed in a tough circumstance and has to endure great ordeals and goes through a lot of pain. Let's just say the cell saga was an awakening for me in a myriad of ways lol.
In between my sailor moon/ dragonBall Z crossovers, I read Dragonball Z and sailor moon stand alone works, and when reading Dragonball Z stuff I wanted to read about Gohan the most. Anything dealing with the angst of Gohan losing his father during the cell games and the guilt he felt over it was on my A list. I read a lot of fic, tons of fic. But to this day only two pieces of Gohan fiction stayed with me. The first being a contradicting mission by chelsee, and the second being scars of the past: the life story of son Gohan. I reread both of them multiple times and again a number of years later and they still hold up. Iny fandom cycling I came back to Dragon Ball Z recently and decided to see if scars of the past still held up. And to my immense shock, it did. It reads more like a not fic, with it skipping huge chunks of time and only focusing on the most important events, but is still satisfying to read. The only shocks to the system are when it used orbs for eyes a few times and the ever annoying bluenette present in almost all anime fandoms. (Like in Naruto they will use pinkette for Sakura ECT). Not only did it hold up, it was still a gripping read.
When I realized my 8 year podfic anniversary was coming up I knew I wanted to do something special to celebrate it. My first thought was to finish one of every color, a 90k Phoenix wright fic I had finished the first 3 chapters of four ish years ago. I realized there is no way I could record, edit and beta listen to it all before the second of the next month, so I put that thought away
I was deep in dragon ball Z fandom at the moment so I went through ff.net looking for something to record. And you know people call ff.net the pit for a reason, I spent eons searching through ff.net with different sort terms, character tags, and genre tags, filtering by favorite and only one in every 6 pages of results was even slightly a good read. I found a few that were excellent, but they were waaaaaay to long. (I am not even near being a podficcing robot) so those were pushed to the side.
The next thing that came to me was recording an old favorite story so then I decided to take a look at the favorites on my old ff.net account (it is sailormahoshie, all my original fanfiction still lives there, go take a look if you want a laugh). A lot of the stories faves there were not so great (ah being young when everything seemed good regardless of quality! What a time) but then I remembered a certain story being good and it was one of the oldest stories I remember. scars of the past: the life story of son Gohan. I literally don't have memories of reading any older fics. So I went to fanfiction.net and posted a comment asking for permission to podfic it. I don't expect to hear back from the author as they hadn't updated anything since 2002. After waiting a week and not hearing back I decided to go ahead and record.
The actual recording process was a joy, not only was this an old favorite, but each chapter was 15 mins at most with most of them measuring around 7 mins so I could record in short bite sized chunks, which works so well for me right now with both my ADHD and depression acting up. The editing was easy too as each chapter was so short. I didn't think I was going to find any beta listeners for a dragon ball Z podfic (godoflaundreybaskets is the only other fannish person I know into dragon Ball Z fic) so I decided to beta listen to it myself as well.
As I have stated before I love recording podfic from animated fandoms, you have room to go up to 200% and it doesn't sound unusual with animated fandoms. I also find it easier to mimic voices from animated fandoms. I already had a pretty good handle on Vegeta from doing shades of grey. He has this raspy throaty quality to his voice that can be tricky to mic, sometimes I have to record alone over and over again, but I have gotten much smoother at doing it. Chi-Chi is another voice that comes to me easily, higher pitched and loud (although in this fic she never gets as screechy or annoying as canon Chi-Chi can be). For doing piccolo’s voice it is just Vegeta's voice without the rasp which makes 100% sense because Chris sabat does the voice of both of them in the English version.
Gohan starts out the story being age 8 and ends at age 18, so Instead of trying to get that big of a range on my voice I just used my voice with a bit of a lower tone. Gohan was particularly easy throughout most of the fic because he uses aask and doesn't show emotion. He breaks that once in chapter 14 when he kills himself and Kong Emma tells him he is going to heaven instead of hell. That scene was a lot of fun. I love doing emotionally driven scenes, and for how much drama and angst there is in this fic, I didn't get to voice most of it because Gohan is resigned and muted throughout most of the fic.
Besides that scene, I think my other favorite scene to voice is Mr mazuki (the English teacher's) death and funeral. It was such a defining moment Gohan realizing how other people deal with death when it is so common for him.it is just blase. It had some gorgeous prose too, something like "he realized these kids had never met death, had never smacked away his bony hand as he reached for some prize).
And later in the same scene when they read the hollow men by t.s. Elliot, Gohan's break down over the line "not with a bang but a whimper." How Gohan lost it realizing how many loves he ended with a bang was so powerful.
The beautiful cover art was made by lavanderfrost with help from me. I knew I wanted something gorgeous, and lav's covers are always gorgeous, so I asked for her help. Unfortunately she knew nothing about dragon Ball Z so I had to help her source images. But the cover did indeed turn out gorgeous
Thanks for listening to my ramblings and I hope you enjoyed the podfic