Little Miss Savage/Yabanverse [Revamp]

[Yuli Ban]

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 and could get some infographics done. Not that I am 100% averse to using AI-slop, especially for worldbuilding purposes and whenever the wallet's getting thin, but generally I find more interaction to be found from commissions (and also most AI-slop is low-quality, so only if it's extremely well done, no Eldritch fingers or anything, will I consider it) and generally would rather support human artistry. Not that all the low-quality came from AI stuff; I really desperately need to curate the commission artists because I've had plenty of unfortunately low-quality results, a couple of which I've decided to not share because they were way worse than I expected to get for the price. So if anyone has any art recs or is willing to draw, I'm absolutely willing to give you a shot (pure fan-art, of course, is always welcome too; I've gotten a few of those already)




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

And here is our main character: Sol Yulaan

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?!

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.

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.


There is one question I want to knock out from the start, though:
"Why are they called Yabans?"

I originally intended for "Yaban" to stem from the Japanese word for "savage/barbarian" which was the case throughout 2018.


But around late 2018 or so, I decided to not be such a weeaboo and went with another language, deciding upon Turkish since, at least at that time, I was drawing inspiration from a lot of central and northeast Asian culture and designs for Yabans (before eventually generalizing it and turning them into their own thing)

And lo and behold, when I looked up the Turkish word for "wild"



Sometimes, the universe is trying to tell you something— and when it does, you really ought to listen.

[Yuli Ban]

Completely forgot about this thread, when the new story floundered. I've been thinking about how to better do that fic, and I'm starting to come to the conclusion that I might as well drop all pretenses and put it in the Dragonverse somehow, just to exploit the actual DB characters being involved. The main reason I didn't want to have Goku and friends/enemies in the Yabanverse wasn't even because I wanted the universes separate but because I didn't want transformation spam/power level obsession. That, and the two series are fairly tonally different. Yabanverse can cross over into DB-style wackiness often, especially anything to do with the Universe 23's Earth and the Gosamyrs, but it's also much more severe and certainly has "an American created this" quality to it.
Also, worldbuilding without having to worry about the established rules of the Dragon Ball universe let me go wild in ways that wouldn't have been possible otherwise. Jamming the Yabanverse into the Dragonverse makes sparks fly.

But come on... there has to be something surreal about the idea of Goku watching Dragon Ball Z, isn't there?

Anyway, here's an artwork I meant to post here earlier:
Reply of the Kokozarene Saiyans


Commission by /u/dreb_28. Please give this man more work to do, he was excellent!


Obviously taken from the classic artwork of Ilya Repin, Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks.

In the context here, this depicts a bunch of male and female Yabans from Kokozar, an extremely martial and Titanistic nation on Planet Kollidor, penning an extraordinarily crude letter to the king of a rival nation, presumably a Jinkai warlord.


However, I deliberately commissioned it to be vague enough to be useful in a more Dragon Ball context, because when I saw the final product, the first thing I thought of was "imagine a bunch of Saiyans penning a rebellious letter to Freeza-sama."
I'd love to hear someone remake the original letter in that context too.



Strongest Under Heaven

Original photograph: Sunset at Yellow Mountains (Huangshan), China by /u/Vidyutrautela

Obviously I won't use this in any official capacity unless I get permission from this user. I just love the photo. Really captures that "wuxia/East Asian fantasy" sensibility.

Strongest Under Heaven is best described as "Dragon Ball Alternative." Saiyan girl meets a perverted monk boy who is seeking to free a Majin girl from a cursed talisman and got his ass kicked immediately when he set out to do it, so he convinces her to help him. A gang of warlords and a powermad martial artist doctor are in their way. Hijinks ensue, that eventually leads to other hijinks, which leads to more hijinks. All set on an alternate version of Earth (both Earth-Prime/Our Earth and Dragon-Earth).

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

Remember in the dub version of DBZ and, to an extent, the Japanese version where Vegeta is obsessed with strength over everything and is more than happy to live the most austere, laconic lifestyle possible in service of getting stronger (and this is the wrong way to do it)? Also do you remember the 20th century?
Well then, here's that, distilled even further.

[Yuli Ban]

I'm not even going to pretend that bollois didn't steal most of my attention with the project. Besides the fact that both Enekai and Yulaan are such, I think there's just this baphomic thrill inherent in the concept. "Girlboss"/Strong Female Character™ archetypes seem to be a divisive topic in media, and yet here I am thinking "they haven't gone far enough. Perhaps with humans, they literally can't. But here I have the opportunity with my genetically-modified Saiyan OCs to close that gap."

[Yuli Ban]

Made this (with actual art help from Ishida1694) and decided 'You know what this needs? Some actual character profiles.' So after this, I'll get around to that.

Drugatsko came at the perfect 1-2 punch back in mid-2022 when the Yabanverse took a sudden turn into comical hypermasculinity. Between her and her Hokuto no Ken/Mad Max-esque army of glam rock gladiatorial space road warriors and the "Knife Edge Death Match" arc I came up with around that time, I don't think the Yabanverse has ever recovered from its collapse into idiotic Titanism

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

So I keep mentioning that Little Miss Savage is set on Earth-Prime. What does that entail?

WOULDN'T YOU LIKE TO KNOW....

Yulaan and Kevelnege at Blockbuster, 1999


The two Yaban girls, Yulaan and Kevelnege, at a Blockbuster Video in 1999, for maximum nostalgia pandering.
While Chale and Randy are looking at Pokémon VHSes, these two vrodas are looking for something more macho, and what better to appeal to their sensibilities than some ultramasculine homoerotic action movies

They live that sort of life, so it's always nice to see how humans try to portray those honor-driven death struggles on the big screen.

"Why do they look like schoolgirls, Yuli Ban, what have you done"

Well the idea is that, since they're living on Earth for the long-haul, they also wind up attending St. Richelieu Catholic School, the same school the human kids attend at the time. It's a place to make sure early Little Miss Savage is as disgustingly schmaltzy and middle class as possible. And despite the fact bollois are the furthest thing from "Catholic schoolgirls" in temperament and lifestyle, these two are still female and do have to follow the dress-code I guess, so...
(I don't think Kevelnege respects our ways of life enough to even begin to give enough of a shit to hide/depress her vidalia trolldoll hair)

Needless to say, this is the part of LMS that indulges the most severely in schmaltz, no matter how disgusted at that schmaltz it actually is, it still does it. And likewise it's also the most surreal because you have this DBZ donut steel in a world in a timeline where Dragon Ball Z exists as fiction.

[Yuli Ban]

On that note

A Yaban Watches More Saiyans

Yulaan watches more Dragon Ball. The inherent absurdity is not lost on her. But that's why she's doing it. Everyone told her she needed to watch Dragon Ball Z, referencing it the moment she arrived on Earth Prime. So here she is, watching the original Japanese airing.

What's interesting is that she actually prefers the other two major wuxia/kung fu fantasy shonen anime over Dragon Ball— Hokuto no Ken and Yu Yu Hakusho. Not that she doesn't like Dragon Ball. She just prefers the bloodier and gorier stuff.

Blockbuster Party Night [Turbo 90s Nostalgia]

Yulaan, Kevelnege, Chale, and Randy have themselves a good ol' time on evening in 1999 or 2000.


On Friday after school, there is no fighting ring, and Yulaan instead decides to head over to Chale’s house to spend the weekend there, and the first thing they do after watching Toonami (especially FUNi Ball Z) is decide to head out to Blockbuster. They’re getting pizza, Mountain Dew, Doritos, the whole shebang, and then they’re going to raid Blockbuster. They have to stress to Yulaan they only mean that as slang; don’t actually steal stuff. Kevelnege will hold her to that.

Esmeralda wants to watch Toy Story, and she can do that in the living room while the boys get the upstairs room. Yulaan commits to memory to get her Toy Story; Yulaan herself wants to watch some old grindhouse and adult comedies like Master of the Flying Guillotine and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. But they have to go to Blockbuster first.


I think it finally dawned on me that LMS's first real arc (a slice of life arc within a slice of life story) is essentially made for a tiny handful of Zillennial manchildren geeks who:

• Were reasonably young, preferably children between the years of 1997-2004
• Indulged heavily in whitebread middle-class Anglo-American pop culture, especially for kids (e.g. Toonami, Pokémon, Blockbuster video, old school Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, pop punk, X-treme sports, etc.)
• Are nostalgic enough to care
• Aren't put off by the idea of sharing that indulgence in nostalgia with a mook villain archetype from an 80s Japanese children's show
• Also enjoyed a particular slice of early internet history

Basically the RebelTaxi audience.

This is, thankfully, the closest I ever plan on Little Miss Savage dancing towards the core of the fire of utter schmaltz trash, mostly just to get it out of my system and maybe make me hate the taste of it going forward, because after this, there's much different stuff happening. Consider this just the "nostalgic Zillennial manchild hook"

[Yuli Ban]

The Ido Yarboggesh, one of my favorite aspects of Kollidorian mythology, and easily the most "stoner metal" the verse ever gets (I speak no hyperbole; the character concept came directly from listening to Sleep's Dopesmoker and imagining some ancient Yaban war-witch instead of the Weedians), as well as a good example of how different tonally the Yabanverse is from Dragon Ball. Her lot is more meant for the likes of some epic 70s fantasy, the kind that was written by someone who loved Lord of the Rings and cannabis in equal amounts, except she's also some Saiyan witch.

The whole spiel I did about the "Dead Gods Society" and the idea of a "solar witch" was some of the most fun I had in 2020.

Spoiler:

I mention sometimes that Yulaan is a follower of the Ido Yarboggesh and the Self-King Philosophical Tradition and Satvyan astral mythology.

"Sol Loves Sol" is the joke. And she falls in love with the works of H.P. Lovecraft because he was basically writing of fleshy satvyas. If stars were biological.

Because Yarboggesh's musings have a very Lovecraftian style to them, and yet she's not talking about Shoggoths. She spoke of satvyas. Gods. Stars. Satvya = star and god in the Yeren language.

We want to imagine what Lovecraftian horrors would look like. Yet we experience such a thing daily. It's called the Sun.

The Sun is a giant, godlike orb of plasma just... existing there. It has no shadow. It creates something that it literally cannot experience, like a 0 creating a 1. All things on Earth were born from it. Earth is its own stillborn child. It is incomprehensibly old— older than Earth. It will live an incomprehensibly long time. Indeed, when it dies, it will consume its own children. But that will not come for billions of years— an epoch so far away that ten thousand more civilizations could walk this Earth and every single one would have long faded into the mantle of the planet before the Sun even began to die.

Except it would not actually die, but rather undergo a metamorphosis into a form that will live for trillions upon trillions more years

Though it is a perfect sphere, it possesses tendrils and tentacles, formless and emergent of its power, which lash space-time itself. Even the smallest of these plasma tentacles is larger than Earth.

Its light and form is so powerful that all life in the its system was born from it, whether from the rays themselves or it allowed to exist beyond its form.

Its visage is so powerful that humans cannot directly stare at it for longer than a second before their eyes begin to decay and burn, its form burned into them. And even when they don't stare at it, merely standing in its power will cause their bodies to break down and destroy themselves.

Humans simply accept its existence and do everything they can to avoid gazing upon it at risk of permanent injury. Yet humans adore it. The natural human instinct is to see sunlight as holy, pleasant, warm, and almost motherly. Sunlight is good. Sunlight is natural. Humans possess a reverence for the Sun they literally cannot control, a reverence wrought by the Sun. Even rebellion against the Sun could not happen without the Sun.

And occasionally it screams, sometimes at Earth. And should it ever scream at a slightly louder pitch than normal, all of mankind's great modern abilities would instantly vanish.

Without the Sun, humans would perish. They exist solely in a quantum of ideal mercy which the Sun could, at any time, reverse through means humans still do not understand.

And yet for all its power and glory, the Sun is but the starspawn of another star that died— and the Sun itself is a deeply, profoundly insignificant speck in a vast, ever expanding universe filled with other entities of vastly greater power.

Some of which are also godlike orbs, except of such absurd and ultra-arcane power that they simultaneously exist as holes in understanding. Places where the wail of dying gods rips holes in existence itself and all understanding and logic break down so perfectly and completely as to cease all continuation with the universe, and these entities have horrible forms so dark that they consume all light— their strength so total that even the Eldritch gods themselves could not hope to fathom the darkness within. These dead gods of blackness so thick and absolute, simple contemplation of their form inspires madness.

That's the universe we live in. The difference between science and religion is tangible, repeatable evidence— but that does not preclude seeing the universe in the starlight of the bizarre. There's no reason mathematics and physics cannot also be occult runes detailing the horrors of the elder starspawn gods.

Mathematicians and astrophysicists are the wizards of the modern age, writing and speaking in an arcane runic language begotten of the cosmos to peer beyond the ether into the realm of these savage gods. Just a tiny shift in perspective, and the stars become gods and demons of unfathomable power— the Sun being the Lord of Earth, uncaring and ancient, a god of light far beyond the powers of man.

This is how Yarboggesh the Solar Lord saw it. Why does Yulaan prance about in vantablack worshipping black holes? Because she follows this tradition.


Also, "solar lord" is a bit of a misnomer since "solar" refers to our own star, Sol, but whatever.

[Yuli Ban]

An explanation of why the Saiyans and the Primal Yabans especially tend to fascinate me. It runs deeper than just "Dragon Ball Z is cool." If you took Saiyans out of DBZ (as I originally had with the Yabanverse up until 2023), they would still be cool. In fact, arguably cooler if you could actually run with them as a fantasy race on their own merits.

At multiple points between 2018 and 2022, people told me "You could totally sell this to people if you just made the Yabans fully "not-Saiyans" instead of just "Legally-Not-Saiyans".
Why did I not change Yabans out to be tail-less psycho warriors like even more insane Mandalorians or Viltrumites? Essentially because the Saiyan attributes themselves were the point. If you take away the extreme hair, the primate tail, and ridiculous superhuman strength, then you take away the appeal (to me at least).

[Yuli Ban]

Case in point

Yulaan the Barbarian

(Drawn by Trollfeetwalker/David Haire)
On Kollidor, Yulaan found her apotheosis, a living embodiment of the Will to Power. She was more than a warrior; she was the very spirit of the wild, untamed and untamable. Her battles were not fought for glory or recognition but for the sheer, intoxicating thrill of existence at its most raw and visceral. Yet this was not an indulgence of primal instinct. It was her conscious decisions, her ability to master her impulses and the external threats that both sought to destroy her, her bellicose capacity of dynamic growth beyond material infancy into martial acts of perpetual rejuvenation— mastery of herself and her fate through her own will— that defined what she was. How she wished to inspire great men of unrealized potential to reach to achieve these same. Though the nexcidious impulse of violence screamed in her blood, it was through her own conscious decisions to thrust her skills and strength against these foes in mortal combat that brought her to the current peak of her existence. And as always, as she stood upon this peak, cutting down the dinosauroids and feral Saibamen and goblins, she needed only look up and see another peak ever higher, ever closer to the valhallic halls of Kabbatha.

_______________

Sol Yulaan on Planet Kollidor, doing what Yabans do best— getting thrill from fighting. In this case, she's slaying some bloodlusted Kegarin goblins. It's a savage fight by a savage bolloi against savage goblins.

Yulaan's home continent of Subotai is a primeval hellhole, perfect for a species so savage as Yabans.

Style is meant to evoke pulp fantasy art. Especially those old testosterone driven blood and thunder fantasy stories. Considering how macho Yulaan is, it fits too well.

Best part about all this? In Yulaan's native language, "Yulaan" literally means "Skullcrusher."


And I should probably also mention the two elephants in the room.
Why is Yulaan shirtless? Well, from nearly the word go (and I mean literally December 2017 or so, days after I actually started the Yabanverse), I had made the choice that one aspect of it was that, if the newly-created and as-yet-unnamed female not-Saiyans were going to be in the thick of it a lot, I wasn't going to go out of my way to ignore the inevitability of battle-damage and decided then than, since this wasn't going to be a particularly "kid friendly" series, the bollois would not be against fighting shirtless, just like men do.

Of course over time, it went from "bollois don't get bashful fighting shirtless when they take battle damage" to "you know that thing men do where they'll outright take off their shirts to fistfight? Bollois do that too"

Case in point there:

Lei Tai Showdown: Yulaan vs. Teiken

(by shiredora)


"So.... what do they do about the... you know, the jiggling?"
Idea for that is just that since Yabans are something like 5x denser than humans, that's not as much of an obstacle. If you're female, imagine your boobs were still there but were near-literal rocks on your chest.
"Why would they even have boobs actually?"

Rule of sexy, rule of cool, nothing more than that. Realistically no species besides humans needs boobs; even humans don't need boobs and we have no idea why we have them. Yabans are even less in need of them because at least humans menstruate year round; as I'll outline in an eventual infographic on bollois, they're entirely estrous and even then fairly rarely and at a low intensity since yenois are the ones who are menstrual. I think, I haven't really thought how a third-sex's/gamale's reproductive cycle would work in depth, because I felt no need. But the reptilian brain goes "booba." Have your cake and eat it too, I guess.

[Yuli Ban]

On the topic of "sword and sorcery" though...

Valley of the Godbreaker, by Trollfeetwalker


Also known as the Valley of the Starbreaker, Valley of Batzor, and Tath vos Satvagarath (lit. Yeren for "Valley of the God/Starbreaker")

He whose strength shatter'd the stars

The Thunder-Voiced Lord of War forever stands tall before a procession of warriors. Down unto the crags of Kollidor, deep in the wastelands of Subotai, there is an immortal mega-statue of Batzor, the legendary warrior of Yeren mythology. On the path to his might, eight immortal Yabans raise their scimitars and tails in a fascistic procession: four nagois, four bollois, all mighty warriors.
The titanic constructs are beyond belief. Just one of the Eight Immortals of Satvyanism stands as tall as the Statue of Liberty— Batzor dwarfs them all, for the tip of his scimitar reaches above the clouds, not unlike the height of the pile of bodies he left behind in life.

Just viewing the raw might of the Godbreaker inspires aggression and bloodlust.

Batzor's sword is raised forever for war and ruination. Go! Fight! Kill! Kill! Kill! Spill blood! Die proud! Die angry! Give Getavara his fill! Tear the heart of Heaven itself! Let chaos reign!! Reign in blood!!

The constructs are often destroyed and ruined by fights and skirmishes wrought by Yaban bloodlust, but the god Getavara always renders them standing and renewed. He will never let Kollidor be laid to waste, for the ultraviolence of His insane creation is too eternally amusing to Him. So swords may crumble, bodies may crack, and limbs may fall, but know that it's but a temporary ailment.

___________
Perhaps to tie it more to Judas Priest than Trunks's attack, I've been considering it more "Valley of the Starbreaker" for a good while now
Visually inspired very heavily by the Valley of the Dark Lords from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. In fact, directly by the Valley of the Dark Lords. I'm fairly sure that the idea for the Valley of the Starbreaker came from a bored daydream I had some point in the early spring of 2018, of playing through Knights of the Old Republic and going to Korriban and seeing the Valley of the Dark Lords again and thinking "Man, you know what would've been cool? If something like this was on Planet Vegeta."

Well, we never got that opportunity, but I can at least put something like it on Planet Kollidor, eh?

[Yuli Ban]

(Originally drawn by Ishida1694)

A covering on the topic of the various kagoras.
Vroda kagoras get all my attention because "booba!" No no that's not just it, it's also because placing such a hypermacho culture among females is inherently fascinating to me, so it tends to warrant way more attention, compared to senja kagoras (which are dudes doing bro things, which we see all the time) and the koda kai (which is interesting in that it's enby/hermaphrodites doing motherly "girlboss" things but I've rarely touched on them yet)

[Yuli Ban]

(By Salvamakoto)


Raza the Space Pirate stands off against Yulaan the Barbarian Warrior, taking place in the run-down streets of New York City, 1977. High on kung fu and wuxia grindhouse films, Yulaan enters a street fighting tournament set against the backdrop of the Great Blackout of 1977, and it's during the final moments of this tournament that a secret challenger enters— another Yaban! This one a nagoi named Raza, who has been eager to fight the Butcher of Gorta for years. And fight they do, showing off their superhuman qi abilities to the humans watching. But this is no fun, so what say they put away the magic tricks and settle this with a test of balls— hand-to-hand, a pure secular fistfight in a Knife-Edge Deathmatch!

"Why are they in 1977?"

Temporal shenanigans. There's a few different ideas to the timeline I want to do. The "main" version of Little Miss Savage has her come to Earth alone initially in the late 90s, but there's an alternate version called "Middle American Mythology" where the entire city of Atomsk is sent to the Pine Barrens in New Jersey at some point in the 20th century. THAT version of the story is pure, raw worldbuilding and sociology/anthropology for its own sake: "what if a decent population of Yaban-Saiyans (and a few from some other races) lived on Earth-Prime in the mid-20th century? Culturally, sociologically, socially, what would change? Easily the furthest the Yabanverse gets tonally from Dragon Ball or any sort of kung fu fantasy storytelling in the macrosense, perhaps distressingly, Middle American Mythology is the one I like tinkering on way more, and again it comes on down to that aforementioned fascination I get from bollois specifically and how they relate to us and our ways.

"But what are the IRL reasons for the female Yabans going topless so often?"

Spoiler:

Spare me a doubt and an advocate here when I say it really had nothing to do with any sort of coomerism. I was always aware that the coombrains will lust for it (I may already have some who think the Yabanverse is some "topless female fighting fantasy" story). It just comes with the territory.
But in truth, the idea came from watching old kung fu movies, most directly the Cynthia Rothrock vehicle Undefeatable. As I consumed more and more, I could not help but take notice of the fact that there was always a pure dichotomy: you would routinely get these hotblooded fistfights between two shirtless dudes that often screamed "platonically homoerotic muscle-worship" but never the same with women (probably more noteworthy because while they were far from egalitarian for many reasons, kung fu movies had at least an order of magnitude, maybe two, times more female fighters than Western action movies did, ESPECIALLY in the heyday era of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Of course, there's many ways you could read that, but it's not at all a mystery why.
We in the America (and our influenced/vassals in the far-East) tend to see the female nipple as Satanic. Maybe Europe has a different viewpoint (basically everyone except the British), but Americans view female breasts as inherently sexual, so even if we did get more action-ladies in time, there was little chance of seeing the same sort of "fighting shirtless for the sake of machismo" outside literal pr0n artists.

As I don't particularly care either way and the Yabanverse was never meant to ride right alongside tonally with Dragon Ball, the Yabans being "gene-modded Saiyans" (whether a subspecies of Saiyans or Legally-Not-Saiyans) gave me the raison d'etre to just go ahead and indulge in that sort of gender-equal violence, including tending to pit bollois against male characters rather than the more common "Designated Girl Fight" since whatever perceived strength and cultural differences between males and females leads us to sticking to homogenous fighting isn't as relevant when bollois are involved.
Bollois aren't human, so just do whatever I need to to justify why they're such "toxic men with boobs" can be done. "Women are naturally more nurturing because they're the ones who give birth?" Here's yenois, screwing the reproductive dynamic completely. "Women need to be more empathic because of their children and the long gestational period and childhood?" Bolloi mothers only gestate for a month or two max, and Yabans are lethal within a few weeks, so being "motherly" by human standards is entirely a choice. "Women are more valuable than men because a woman can't get pregnant 100 times in a week?" Okay true, but again, yenois steal their purpose for the most part, and nagois and bollois are largely aro-ace/very low-burn het, so it's not really a concern.
Just keep the questions coming, and I'll find a way to piss off the biotrads somehow.

For example, there's ANOTHER reason why women don't tend to do much topless, despite being legally allowed to, that any woman would tell you if you actually listen to them: "boobs are unwieldy." Imagine you try running or fighting or doing anything with a pair of 1lb fat rolls strapped to your chest. Not very comfortable, not very fun, unless you have a sports bra.

"Screw it, Yabans are 5x denser than humans, and bolloi boobs don't get in the way anywhere near as much."
Voila, solved, and no I'm not hearing any counterarguments!

[Yuli Ban]

Bioelectrical Output
(From Ishida1694 and Salvamakoto respectively)


As for why there's lightning around Yulaan, that's its own little bit of lore, both in-universe and IRL...

I have an old theory that borders on headcanon that the reason why Saiyan hair is so spiky and wild is because they have ludicrous amounts of bioelectricity

I forget when— it was probably around 2014 or so— but I stumbled upon this interesting video of kids playing with a Van der Graaf generator as part of some educational material. The video's still up too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ptu07enIsY

It didn't take more than the thumbnail for me to wonder "Hey, is that how Saiyans do it too?"

It makes sense if you think of meridians and chakras and how one could allegedly use qi for electrokinetic abilities (most famously with electric eels)

Therefore a greater ability to use qi = greater amounts of bioelectricity. And Saiyans are outright shown loads of times to be vastly superior at humans at using ki on an almost fundamental level, to the point humans can only roughly match them through extensive cultivation and training. So it seemed reasonable to assume that Saiyan hair is so wild because not only are they barbarians, but they're also electric monkeys

And Super Saiyan causes their hair to turn skyward literally because their already ridiculous bioelectricity then goes insane, with Super Saiyan 2 and 3 pushing it out to such extreme amounts that said bioelectricity is literally crackling around their bodies

Of course, the actual reason is "they're anime/manga characters"

Because otherwise you could argue Naruto characters are even more electrified than Saiyans considering they seem to have run with the thick, shaggy, super-spiky hair now that Dragon Ball's largely toned down the 80s hair elements

And that also implies most anime characters are Electro

But I loved the concept enough to use it as the explanation for why Yabans look the way they do

TLDR: I got it in my head that Saiyans had such wild hair because they had high levels of bioelectricity. When I stole created Yabans, I made that the de jure canon. Now that they're back in the Dragonverse.... that's still how Yabans work. Whether or not that's how the Getabaru-Saiyans work is irrelevant.

You see it too now, right?

Spoiler:

[Yuli Ban]

On that topic of "bollois are my excuse to get away with more mixed male vs female fighting"

Berserkers Clash: Djuggesh vs Nappa

(By Salvamakoto)

These days, despite how much the two verses tonally clash, I figured that since Dragon Ball is a bigger draw, I will likely have characters from the Yabanverse crossover into the Dragonverse just for fun and profit

And no, Djuggesh is not a Super Saiyan God; referring to the original infographic at the top, Yabans have more hair colors than just black. Seeing as one of the inspirations back in 2018 was that, in fleshing out their culture and society, Saiyans and thus Yabans wound up coming off as fascistic in many ways (before I came up with Titanism that is), so I went with black, white, and red as their primary color scheme in general, like the Sith and, you know, the Chaplin Mustache Man's regime.
I've toyed with the idea of Yabans having even more hair colors than that. Predominantly it'll be black, but perhaps brown and blue ought to be included. Because they're gene-modded by a god, the rules of the Getabaru are not totally applicable to the Yabans.

[Yuli Ban]

(by Ishida1694)

The Narakans are a pure indulgence in Y2K-era edgelordism, and I love them for that. Not really a race that can stand up to Yabans or Gosamyrs regularly, but they're a good background people, and maybe a few mutants can rise to the challenge.

I want desperately to believe they are absolutely not the kind of race that Toriyama would have created at any point, but considering how turbo-Zoomer Dragon Ball Super started getting.... let me stay ignorant!

[Yuli Ban]

Sol Yulaan pixel art gif designed by hidorE


"She looks like some generic background Saiyajin mook in a beat-em-up"
Yulaan being a generic mook is kind of the point. It's impossible to make a protagonist of a story like this generic FOREVER, to be fair, but the inception of her being completely average to the point of looking like a nobody in a crowd was at least part of the inspiration— Yulaan's a glorified ascended moon to begin with, since she was just a tiny side character I created for the main story back in late 2019 that I just happened to get really invested in.

He did a good job, though I've been meaning to get a higher quality gif made, something more fluid that looks more akin to a 32-bit arcade game