Dragon Ball: Reborn

Any general discussion regarding fan-created works of the Dragon Ball franchise, including AMVs, fan-art, fan-fiction, etc.

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Jedabura
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Dragon Ball: Reborn

Post by Jedabura » Wed Apr 25, 2018 2:03 am

Hello, everyone!

First, a little backstory:

I'm a lifelong, diehard DBZ fan. Fell in love with the series at the ripe age of eleven, been obsessed with it ever since. Having always wanted to write professionally for a living, I indulged in writing fan fiction during my preteen years, mostly of the DBZ variety (with a bit of Final Fantasy VII thrown in the mix). These fics were terrible, assuredly. Nevertheless, I showed them to my father, who was my biggest writing mentor at the time. He took some of the wind out of my sails by giving me feedback that essentially boiled down to, "Why are you wasting your time writing fan fiction when you could be making your own original works?" That stuck with me, and I had an immense repulsion to fan fiction ever since.

Flash-forward to now.

The older I got, the more research I did, and the more I realized that about half of all creative writing for money involves adapted material. Whether you're writing for a comic book that isn't your own intellectual property, writing a screenplay based on an established I.P., or getting a gig working on a show you didn't create. It's all glorified fan fiction, in a way. This epiphany got me over my fan fic phobia, and I decided to embark on a project.

Reminder: I love the Dragon Ball franchise. Few things are as near and dear to my heart. That said, when you rewatch the series as an adult whose consumed a lot of media (books, comics, movies) since then, you start seeing little cracks in storytelling and characterization. You start to view things through a more critical lens. I found myself rewatching DBZ and thinking in a lot instances, "Wow, if they had just done this, this, or this, that would've upped the stakes so much. What a wasted opportunity." I started getting ideas. I started to imagine an elaborate fantasy in which FUNimation somehow got to go-ahead from Toei to do a ground-up reboot of the Dragon Ball franchise with a new animated series that didn't originate in Japan. I started to fantasize about what I would do with said project if I was somehow miraculously given the reigns of it. The more I thought about this, the more I bounced ideas off other people and got enthusiastic responses, the more I thought the worst thing I could do with these ideas was let them go to waste. Never do anything with them. So I finally decided, in an effort to practice at adapting existing material and to further improve my writing, I would outline this pipe dream. That outline evolved into a full-blown, longform, prose reimagining of the series'.

I now present to you fine fellow fans Dragon Ball: Reborn! I have two "episodes" finished so far, working on the third as we speak. I would love to hear your thoughts, questions, comments, concerns, queries, reviews, critiques, anything! Just...try not to be a dick, if you can help it. Full disclosure: I will be changing quite a bit from the source material. I'm using the original as my bible, but I'm not afraid to tweak elements, events, and aspects of characterization to serve (what I think) will be a more robust, complex narrative. I would love this topic to become an all-out discussion (should you all feel it's worth discussing). I'm more than happy to explain my thought process as I write, why I decided to do certain things, and talk about the overall direction as I map it out.

Thank you all for reading! Hope you enjoy.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/14357 ... s/33141354
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12895714/1 ... n-Season-1