Something I feel needs to be said. - Page 2

The lightning, in my opinion, has always been a completely unreliable indicator of what stage of SSJ a person is at. It's not always used for SSJ2, and sometimes it's used when a person is SSJ or USSJ, or SSJ3. It's been used for all the forms before. It's never as sustained as it was for the first appearance of SSJ2, where Gohan had a near continuous surge of sparks around his body. That was the defining use of aura lightning in the series, but it's no indicator that it's exclusively a SSJ2 effect.

I always just took it to express an extreme power level, which is why Cell had it when he returned from near death. It was meant to imply in that case that he was now in the same league of ki as SSJ2 Gohan, not necessarily that he had become a SSJ2 himself.

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The lightning, in my opinion, has always been a completely unreliable indicator of what stage of SSJ a person is at. It's not always used for SSJ2, and sometimes it's used when a person is SSJ or USSJ, or SSJ3.

That's why you should follow the manga, watching the anime is what makes it tricky and faulty. In the manga, only SSJ2 and SSJ3 have continuous lightning in their aura. Super Saiyans, I don't recall any one of them having lightning, except for Vegito in the midst of the transformation, but after that, it vanished as soon as it came, never to come back again. As for USSJ, unless I missed it, the manga didn't add any lightning to them. The anime showed it very often indeed, which just proves how unreliable Toei is when it comes to lightning. They often use it when they shouldn't, and don't use it when they should. My advice, follow the manga, it clearly shows the difference between every SSJ level, as they all have a different, specific aura type, and only SSJ2 and SSJ3 have lightning in their aura's whenever they are activated...