Showerthought: Caulifla ought to have been based on Song Jiang

[Yuli Ban]

Apologies if this sounds random; it's just a thought that built up in my head over the past few weeks. Someone on another forum lamented that manga!Caulifla was basically Robin Hood, as if they couldn't even let us have the punk version of the anime as if it was intrinsically better; I disagree since I actually preferred the Robin Hood version much more, though not totally, and it's confused me as to why that was the case for years.

Meanwhile, I got around to reading through Water Margin and realized halfway through, "Wait a second... Is this what Toriyama intended Caulifla to be?"


It actually fits with the "alternate Son Goku" thing too: make Caulifla a female Song Jiang. Yeah, you see it too, right? Make her the leader of a gang of 108 Saiyan outlaws living in the wastelands, doing their own violent thing. And Kale would be the female Li Kui. The manga version seemed to have this in mind to an extent, but the anime version had it closer to how it'd actually play out (except with Saiyan greasers inexplicably led by a Bōsōzoku teenager). It'd be a perfect analog, playing off Dragon Ball's roots in one of the four Classic Chinese Novels. However, Super rushed through all the universes to get to the actual tournament. That and, to my knowledge, Caulifla was just a throwaway character to begin with, created to give Kale companionship, so whatever Water Margin inspiration there may have been was fleeting at best. Still, it'd have been a neat reference.