#yabans

I have no idea if this would be your dream but it might be

Playing video games and going to Blockbuster with your whiteboi best friend and two Saiyan tomboy warriors you just so happen to know, circa summer 1999

(Both drawn by Salvamakoto)

The two Yaban-Saiyan 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.

(Don't ask me why Salvamakoto really fucked up drawing hands in these two)

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 Dragon Ball Z) is decide to head out to Blockbuster. They’re getting pepperoni and bacon 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.

And it’s there they meet Shane Dawson, one of Vicente’s friends. The boys run wild throughout Blockbuster while the bollois immediately head to the movies for grown-ups. Not that the boys don’t also want to watch grown-up movies, especially for the boobies; for Chale, he just wants to watch some Pokemon episodes over again, especially the new Thundershock! VHS.

As for video games, they rent GoldenEye 007, and decide to play that endlessly all night long while downing their greasy bacon-pepperoni pizza. It’s pure boyish fun. And yes, Yulaan does rent Toy Story for Esmeralda. For all her own boyishness, Esme is still just a little kid, and she watches Toy Story on repeat for hours, annoying the parents.

Gathered around the flickering glow of the television screen, the friends eagerly dove into the world of GoldenEye 007. Although Yulaan and Kevelnege were novices, their natural aptitude for combat quickly allowed them to dominate, and they enthusiastically embraced the competitive spirit. Chale and Randy, seasoned players, were in trouble: Yulaan's prowess meant that even as she picked Boris or Dr. Doak, even Oddjob was no match against the might of a Saiyan. Between mouthfuls of pizza and swigs of Mountain Dew, the living room resonated with laughter and playful banter. Simultaneously, in the nearby rooms, Esmeralda's voice harmonized with Toy Story's soundtrack, while Valentina navigated the uncharted waters of the internet within AOL chatrooms.

I think it finally dawned on me this arc of Little Miss Savage (a slice of life arc within a slice of life sidestory) 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-Japanese pop culture, especially for kids (e.g. Toonami, Pokémon, Blockbuster video, old school Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, pop punk, nü metal, X-treme sports, 5th and 6th gen consoles, 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.

~PajamaJames

An infographic about the city of Atomsk on Planet Kollidor, starring the Titanist teacher and martial arts master Amota Kundorog

Atomsk is renowned on Kollidor and off-planet alike as one of the great landmarks of this particular stellar system, though tourism is discouraged unless you're simply coming to watch one of the many blood-fights taking place.

Atomsk is not a very welcoming place on any given day, and never was supposed to be much more than a hive of villainy and evildoers.

The original inciting idea for Atomsk dates back to 2015 around the time of the proto-Yabanverse, when I imagined the idea of what cities and cultures on Planet Vegeta might be like and inevitably came upon the idea that, if Saiyan women were so strong-willed and allegedly mighty, surely Saiyan Amazons had to exist in no-small number (respective to the small population of Saiyans, that is) and they must have formed their own spaces. Indeed, while I did not like Gine very much, one thing many people oft overlook about her and the implication of Saiyan non-combatants is that it appears that Saiyans are not leisurely like humans (or Tsufruians). Saiyans did not have air-travel, mini-malls, or cappuccinos— Gine, despite being a complete weakling, still seemed to be part of the Vegetan proletariat, suggesting that if nothing else, Saiyans were almost entirely segregated between workers and warriors with no other real definable classes— there didn't seem to be artisans, consumers, farmers, etc (then again, Toriyama never concerned himself with worldbuilding, so that might just be the implication). Either way, the point I took away was that if Saiyan women were indeed generally weaker than Saiyan men and less cut out for combat as Toriyama seemed to imply, that still meant they were almost entirely laborers, and not even service or professionals like we tend to view human women as being, but rather legitimately heavy laborers much like blue-collar men.

Of course, again, there is no actual evidence of this, only headcanon, but like with so many other ideas, I ran with this for the Yabans to create bollois (whose name literally stems to "industrial/heavy laborer person"). Heavy/blue collar laborer culture tends to share many similarities across the world, being very macho and tough, so that bled into those early ideas for bollois as well, leading directly to the current conception of them. And a side effect of that was the idea that bollois would be the primary builders of whatever cities were on the otherwise primeval, ultra-ultraviolent planet of Kollidor, and if that was the case, it just felt natural for some kind of "Martian Rome" aesthetic for them.

The general rule of thumb that "if bollois were male, we'd call this for what it really is" remains in play here. Atomsk being the "Anti-Themyscira" doesn't mean it's a rival city-state to Themyscira or anything, but that its context and values contrasts so sharply with Themyscira that it shows the difference in mindset between bollois and women.

Drawn by Valeria Bossa

Photorealistic Yulaan, aged 10. 

10-year-old Sol Yulaan, a Saiyanthropus ferus (aka Yaban or Demonoid) barbarian from eastern Subotai on Planet Kollidor Though she starts out as a barbarian and fights as a primal warrior in her young life, she eventually begins shifting into a proper martial artist and Spartan-like personality. Coincidentally this shift starts around age 10. By pure chance, this made her sudden change to living on Earth that much less difficult for everyone involved. As has been mentioned, Yaban society exists at every point on the "Warlike Spectrum," from organized honor-coded militarism not unlike the aforementioned Spartans, Mandalorians, Klingons, all the way to animalistic nexcidium not unlike zombies or certain kinds of lower demons (hence their colloquial name 'Demonoid'). Unlike Spartans, Mandalorians, and Klingons alike, Yabans are cursed with nexcidiousness (i.e. an impulsive lust for battle and destruction), making pacifism and diplomatic existence impossible for their species, so they'll always lean towards the more ruinous ends of warlike existence as a whole, but individuals run the gamut. Some, like Ral Enekai and Sol Yuta (some of the most docile Yabans to ever live) are martial artists who only fight for sport. Yulaan, especially at this young age, is a more brutish kind of fighter. She becomes less brutish with age, but it's a slow evolution that starts with military training at age 7. She was born a Chaotic Yaban, but shifts into that of a Docile Yaban. Docile Yabans range from the "only fight for sport" types that could overlap with the great Son Goku to the regimented Spartanoid militarists with which Yulaan finds kinship. To put it another way, Liquid Snake would see "Docile Yabans" as the peak type of person— warriors not so brutish that they are literal animals, but who have discarded softness for a life of war filled with chaos and honor. Chaotic Yabans would seem similar to Chaos Warriors in the 40kverse. Driven to ultraviolence and war by higher guidance and a system of death worship, they are every warrior society thrust to the limit. Some also live not unlike Orks— they live just fight things and smash the other monkeys into pulp. They don't need gods or society to tell them to fight. It's Feral Yabans you need to really fear. You use Ferals not unlike a grenade or atom bomb, something which destroys everything in its path without thought or self reflection. This is Yulaan's people and explains why she is the way she is.