June 2026 marks the tenth year since I started posting Unguarded. A lot has changed since I began this journey. As I work on some more celebratory milestones and look ahead to another round of revisions to tighten the story even more, I’ve taken some time to consider a decade’s worth of pages, notes, old scripts, abandoned ideas, and questionable creative decisions.
For the rest of this month, I’d like to share some behind-the-scenes thoughts on the comic’s development. I don’t have a strict roadmap for these posts. Think of them as a sort of retrospective commentary rather than a formal Q & A. This will be for anyone who ever wondered what happens behind the curtain while Unguarded is being produced.
Who was Unguarded Even For? Or A Masterclass in Alienating Potential Readers :D
I was only semi-joking when I talked about how I was writing a fan comic so niche that no one would ever read it. “Triple-niche, borderline quadruple-niche,” I would say. Perhaps that was my own way of steeling myself against the chorus of crickets I had anticipated.
Creating a Dragon Ball Z fan comic was the least obstructive part of this choice. Writing on a series that hadn’t released a new show since the 90s was already a big risk. I was fairly removed from news about the franchise altogether to the point I didn’t even realize that Dragon Ball Super had been announced at the time. I wouldn’t come to know of its existence until the anime started airing later that summer.
On top of that, I wanted to focus on the story’s most notorious villain. There was plenty of Freeza fan content back in the early 2000s but you had to go looking for it. FanFiction.Net was still in its infancy so your best shot was to find someone’s Angelfire or Geocities fan site where they happened to love the character you did and had actively consolidated a list of links to this type of content.
Readers who enjoy retellings from a villain’s perspective are often divided on how far that perspective should go. People have strong opinions when it comes to shining a sympathetic lens on these characters and the popularity of this approach tends to ebb and flow over time.
And of course, stories that include fan characters with any sort of narrative weight will further alienate potential readers.
There are definitely easier stories I could have told.
Instead, I ended up writing something that sits in a strange place between genres and audiences. The story has some action, though not enough to satisfy the average shonen fan. It has a love story subplot, though not enough to satisfy the average shojo fan. It has none of the lighthearted whimsy that appeals to core Dragon Ball fans. It includes drama, politics, dry humor, psychological elements, and earnest relationship dynamics. I don’t think Unguarded neatly fits into any one category.
One of the riskier choices I made was labeling the comic as “mature” from the beginning. Not because I planned to fill it with explicit content but because I knew the story would eventually tackle subjects that I wasn't interested in sanitizing. Unfortunately, many potential readers see an adult rating and immediately assume they're either getting pornography or edginess for its own sake. In reality, I was using the rating to create room for uncomfortable conversations, moral ambiguity, violence, coercion, and flawed adults making bad decisions.
Even though this further limited my audience, something that only reinforced the decision over the years was watching how audiences engage with media that is clearly marketed toward adults. Increasingly, I see discussions surrounding 18+ stories revolve around whether a work should provide clear moral instructions, uncomplicated role models, and definitive answers.
Some of this may simply be the result of younger audiences gravitating toward media that was never intended for them in the first place. That's perfectly normal; every generation does it. What I find more puzzling is the expectation that those stories should then abandon the very ambiguity and discomfort that justified the adult rating in the first place. When people think of a mature rating, they often think first of sex, profanity, or violence. Those elements are present in my work but they are secondary to the themes I wanted to explore.
I think adult fiction should exist to explore uncertainty. Sometimes that means depicting ugly thoughts, unhealthy people, and situations that don’t cleanly resolve. To me, that's exactly what the mature rating is for.
I believe that good stories can take something familiar and make it feel unfamiliar again. I’m not saying that this is something I’ve achieved or am even capable of achieving but it is certainly a goal. My influences seem to conflict with what many expect from a hardcore DBZ fan. Perhaps I should talk about those influences in another post.
Most viewers/readers have an opinion about Freeza in the canon. They know who he is and what role he plays in the story. They know how they feel about him.
I was never interested in trying to change the opinions of potential readers.
Instead, I wanted to slow down and do an in-depth character study of someone who represented an obstacle to be overcome. I knew this would limit my potential readership. Not everyone wants that kind of story. And that’s okay. The readers who do want this kind of story tend to engage with it deeply.
I was close to dropping Unguarded just before it really took off and oddly, it happened in a way that put it in front of the very eyes of the readers who I was convinced would hate it. Most of the comments were actually quite kind. Still, ever the catastrophizing type, I chalked up a lot of it to the story’s real direction also only starting to make itself apparent at the time. After a few years, the hype from Youtube died down. But some of those readers still stayed.
In a lot of modern entertainment, I notice there is a temptation for creators to write around every possible misunderstanding that could result in someone’s interpretation of a story.
If a character does something terrible, explain it immediately.
If a scene is uncomfortable, clarify the intended message right away.
If someone could infer the wrong interpretation or message, put a disclaimer up in advance.
At some point, the story stops being a story and becomes an instruction manual.
I trust my readers more than that. I don’t think fiction should have to stop every few pages to extrapolate the correct emotional response to what’s happening through exposition. Instead, I would rather let actions of characters have consequences and allow readers to wrestle with those consequences themselves. That means that some readers will inevitably make interpretations that I never intended or that I disagree with. Inevitably, some will walk away.
I don’t think the possibility of misreading can become the standard by which every creative decision is made. I could have exhausted myself trying to armor the story against misreadings. I recognize that every safeguard would push the story further away than what interested me in the first place. I accepted that risk. I don’t regret it.
Ultimately, I wanted to write for readers who, like me, are willing to sit with uncertainty and messiness. I like writing for these readers who enjoy this odd combination of Dragon Ball Z fan content, character drama, slow-burn storytelling, and questionable life choices. To me, that is far more satisfying than trying to sand off every rough edge in pursuit of wider appeal.
I have a small readership.
But it is the readership that I wanted.
