#yulaan

A Yaban Watches 2 Saiyans, courtesy of Salvamakoto

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. (And don't worry, Zillennial Americans, she does also see the cringily nostalgic FUNimation Ball Z)

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. She's already a Saiyan, even if she's specifically a Yaban rather than a Getabaru like Kakarotto and Bejita.

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.

Yulaan practicing qigong to form a ball of chi, by Shiredora

Especially with Strongest Under Heaven, but it's still present in Little Miss Savage: the extensive root of wuxia/xianxia/shenmo fantasy, which shouldn't even be a revelation for a Dragon Ball work, but most Western fans have literally no clue what any of those are despite them being everything Dragon Ball is supposed to be.

Courtesy of Salvamakoto

One of the first events in Little Miss Savage. This young fellow here, Vicente, recently won Yulaan in a bizarro game and suddenly found himself in possession of a real-life Saiyan child.

Though Yulaan is a Kollidorian rather than a Vegetan, and also she weighs a ridiculously heavy amount (though graciously she reduces her weight with chi so he can lift her out of the bag), she is tame enough and curious enough to go along with everything unfolding: in this case, Vicente figured he'd need to bring his new pet monkey to a veterinarian, if perhaps a very offbeat, cryptozoological vet...

Yulaan has a vague idea of where she is: Planet Earth, where her old owner said he'd be sending her to exile. Yet this is clearly not the same Earth she knows.

She's no longer in Universe 23, but rather "Universe Prime," in a year known as "1999"

Art by 0zJim11

Yulaan, her baby brother Yuta, and her best friend Kevelnege are together exploring Earth-7, visiting a place known as Mount Paozu, when they encounter another Saiyan child. Except this one seems to be a Getabaru descendent rather than a Yaban. Except he also seems to be... human?

Yulaan, who has been watching Dragon Ball Z in preparation back on Earth-Prime, sees the shaggy head of spiky hair and mazoku clothing and knows exactly who this is already. Fascinating to meet the prodigal Son at long last...

Son Gohan, meanwhile, was running through the bamboo forests of Paozu looking for fruits, when he felt a most unusual presence: it was Saiyan ki, three sizable figures— but bizarrely, this Saiyan ki didn't feel like his own, his father's, or Vegeta's. So he ventures out and sees a peculiar sight: three youths with tails and wild spiky hair, very clearly Saiyans. One of them is a boy who looks even younger than himself and is clad in an orange martial artist gi and has white hair and the most innocent expression he's ever seen on anyone other than his father. The girl standing next to him first had him do a double take, because she was muscular and beefy enough that he wasn't sure if she was a boy or girl at first. She looks like some sort of heavy-metalhead, hides her eyes behind long bangs, and is covered in battle-scars to an almost absurd degree as if she had literally been born in the thick of battle. Yet the third is probably the most surreal: she looks like a genderbent chibi Vegeta, complete with the same sort of weird pointy hair, and she even looks like she's wearing the same sort of armor he saw Vegeta wearing during the initial Saiyan attack some time ago, yet in a chrome and black color scheme.

What the heck is going on here? Where'd they come from? Mr. Vegeta was so clear that there were only 4 pure-blooded Saiyans left alive, and two of them are dead. Yet these three are clearly full-blooded Saiyans. What's more, two of them are female, and if Vegeta was at all aware that female Saiyans were still alive, he'd never have settled down with Bulma of all people, would he? They can't be from Planet Vegeta if it was blown up. Are they descendants of survivors? At least the other girl has disgustingly familiar armor, but if so, why don't they have scouters? It's like they already know how to sense ki.He's also never seen a white-haired Saiyan before. His father can make his hair golden when he becomes a Super Saiyan, and when that aura isn't flowing out of him, his hair kind of looks white-ish, but that's not this; this boy's hair is naturally white. Does that happen too?

Rose City ‘87 Also, Yokoshima ‘87

Drawn by Ishida1694 A poster for Rose City '87, a video game Yulaan commissions centering around her and Yoshua's illegal adventures in 1987 and 1988, specifically in the two cities of Rose City and Yokoshima, spoofs of Miami, USA and Osaka, Japan, very heavily inspired by her playthrough of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. In this case, she and her Mazoku cohort involve themselves in a wuxia-fied drug war kickstarted by Yulaan's desire to form a martial arts school that rubs afoul of a network of mobs. It plays like if YuYu Hakusho got a Sleeping Dogs-type open world game, with martial arts-heavy combat, jacking cars, ki attacks, martial demons roaming around in the background, and otherwise being very 80s. It's part pastiche, part parody, and one big excuse to listen to loads of 80s music, see bits of 80s shows, play some 80s video games, and just generally be gratuitous about nostalgia for a time in which she didn't even know existed a few years prior. In the first one, she's riding a motorcycle through the countryside of Yokoshima, heading away from the city with 80s city-pop blaring.

For the second: Yulaan also being a metalhead and pophead, she gets the perfect opportunity to license out all this 70s and 80s music in a thinly veiled recreation of 80s Miami/Florida Keys (Rose City) and 80s Tokyo/Osaka (Yokoshima).

Adore the retro Zenith TV too!

As for the posters, it’s everything from AC/DC to the Buzzcocks because Yulaan has good taste. See if you can identify them all!

Drawn by Ishida1694

Random doodles of this little primal proletarian Yabaness.

16-bit Yulaan gif by hidorE

Yulaan 1+UP logo by Salvamakoto 

Cartoon Yulaan 1 and 2 by Guiritiru