Revamping the old thread, cutting away a lot of the AI chaff and obsolete worldbuilding to reintroduce the Yabanverse. Ever since the previous thread, it's undergone a few substantial changes. I was putting off making this thread until I at least had a few certain art commissions ready.
The Yabanverse is a worldbuilding project of mine that's now shifting into actual story mode. It's centrally following a few individuals from a subspecies of Saiyan known as "Yabans."
This admittedly stretches the limits of what a "Dragon Ball" fanfiction is, especially considering that, previously, the Yabanverse wasn't a Dragon Ball fanseries at all. The only thing that tied the Yabanverse before January 2023 to Dragon Ball in any meaningful way was that Yabans looked indistinguishable to Saiyans, and maybe that the main character watched DBZ on Earth. Of course now, Yabans ARE Saiyans, just a separate subspecies from Toriyama's, for all the reasons I ranted about a while back about how it got annoying to make "legally distinct" versions of each species and skirt around similarities with ultra-similar versions of those things and the final straw was essentially when I had Namekians, Kaioshins, and Super Saiyan in all but name, and realized "I'd actually have more fun if these were what they were."
And voila, the modern Yabanverse was born: set in two universes— Universe Prime (ostensibly this universe) and Universe-23. As a result, no Dragon Ball characters ever appear in-universe, even though various DB races do. This at least gave me freedom to take the verse anywhere I wanted.
Not that fanfics "need" to stick to the original world and lore 100%, but this is essentially a retrofitted DB-inspired original universe that was way too similar to DB to be in any way legally capable of commercialization. Imagine a Star Wars fanverse that didn't take place in the original Star Wars universe and thus none of the Star Wars characters ever appear, but nevertheless still had most of the assets of Star Wars on top of new ones that might not even tonally fit with the movies (so I guess, imagine Knights of the Old Republic except it was another universe entirely instead of thousands of years earlier)
As a result, while it does contain whimsy and xuanhuan martial artistry, there's a great deal in the Yabanverse that isn't anything like Dragon Ball. Indeed, that was kind of the original point: instead of doing Dragon Ball over again, do something different.
Also, since this was a worldbuilding project and essentially built everything up first instead of starting with a story, I've done loads of artwork that depicts stuff way later in the timeline before the main narrative threads ever started. Sort of like building a world and then making stories in it, instead of making a story and building a world around it. Neither direction is necessarily better, though the former definitely runs the risk of getting so wrapped up in worldbuilding that you forget to ever tell a story and lose yourself in nerd details (and admittedly the latter has its own risk of caring so little about the world outside the story that you build a world that flat out contradicts or constantly retcons itself)
Inaugural story: Little Miss Savage
As always, this is more of a slice of life story than what the verse seems to suggest, and I've realized it's essentially a "reverse isekai" in many ways: a young Saiyan girl is exiled to Earth-Prime (aka ostensibly "Our Earth") circa 1999, into the hands of an eccentric cryptid vet/underground doctor and his cousins.
The early parts of the story are/will be intensely shmaltzy. It's mostly about the absurdity of a Saiyan (and a few others) living on Earth
- Little Miss Savage on RoyalRoad (most recommended!)
- Little Miss Savage on FanFiction.Net
- Little Miss Savage on Wattpad
- Little Miss Savage on Archive of Our Own
Right now, I think of it more as a light novel/webnovel. If I open a Patreon and get any support, I'd be able to turn it into at least a 4 or 5 panel webcomic, which is certainly more ideal.A young Saiyajin from a mysterious subspecies known as the Yabans. Her young life has been a pilgrimage of pain and battle: born a low-class barbarian upon the haunted world of Kollidor, raised to be a battle-crazed killing machine, and her body broken from war by the age of 14. So let's put her on Earth at the turn of the millennium, in the care of an eccentric but otherwise normal young man. What could go wrong?!
There's loads of artwork and images to post, but I'll put off on them for a while.
Any and all questions welcome, because there's a lot I do have to answer about the verse, often for my own benefit just to flesh out aspects I might not have thought of.