The Yabanverse Thread

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Yuli Ban
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The Yabanverse Thread

Post by Yuli Ban »

As I mentioned a few times before in status updates and the Personal Chat thread, this is the story that replaced Mother Meki in my mindspace over the past 3 years.

Well it's not A story but a series of stories.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/41329 ... iss-savage
https://www.deviantart.com/yuli-ban/art ... -910139287

What is the Yabanverse? It's a worldbuilding project that's like DBZ meets Warhammer 40k, with a slice of life story on the side (except that SoL story is the main attraction as of this point).

In a nutshell, it's a project I've been tinkering on for about half a decade now, formally since 2017. It was born out of a Dragon Ball Z slice of life fanfiction concept I toyed with for a few months where I asked a simple question: "what if a Saiyan actually came to Earth? And I mean our Earth?" I intended on that being a pretty simple story that would inevitably fade into the dark sides of my mind over time, but it really caught me when I started seriously exploring it more and more and realized a few curious truths emerged. For example, if this person is the only such person to exist on Earth— i.e. no Goku, no Superman, no one else but them— then we as Earthlings are essentially bound to their will. And this has extreme consequences far beyond what I initially thought. In fact, the questions spread beyond my scope and became downright philosophical and pseudo-mythological in nature. Fun!

I also began becoming obsessed with the idea of lore and worldbuilding and VERY quickly realized that I'd have far more fun if I stole the Saiyans out of Dragon Ball and made my own version where I'd have free reign to do as I pleased. Sometime very late in 2017, I formalized that idea and created Yabans.

Yabans are Legally-Not-Saiyans. I'm not going to mince words or even attempt to pretend otherwise. There's no copyright law on the planet that's going to let me get away with this:

Image
So...
This thing.

I've been on-off working on this project for several years now but only committed to it about a year ago, right as the pandemic really started.

It's not a comic or anything, more a webnovel/webserial.

After all that time doing things like coming up with characters and plots and lore and backstory, I figured "why not just write the damn thing?" The answer being that it was too fun worldbuilding and imagining things, but I have to actually start work on it some day.

So I made it my intention to start writing this thing, starting today in fact, and to start publishing it as a serial over on RoyalRoad and maybe some other sites starting March 16th. It's just a fun story I'm doing more as a hobby, not anything commercial, as you will obviously see.

The gist of the story is that an ultra-powerful monkey-tailed girl who goes by the name "Sol Yulaan" winds up in the possession of an eccentric man on Earth with various conditions, such as that she is not allowed to kill willy nilly and must respect the sovereignty of Earthlings. The man, a weird young lad named Vicente Xaxalpa, is already living an unusual life close to the periphery of the mainstream, being a murkily-legal underground doctor and self-professed lover of the unknown and mythological despite their fleeting existence. In his life skews a few different paths: one being a somewhat lightweight narco story due to him occasionally involving himself in a particular cartel's business due to his line of work (not that they're his only client; just his least legal) that's really just an excuse to get a use of grindhouse tropes; another being what I hesitate to call "a cast of characters from a kid's show" consisting of his younger cousin and his motley crew of friends that he often has to deal with; and the third being his personal rondo of friends.

Or to put it another way, a Thermonuclear Klingon appears on Earth. A shady, eccentric young man is forced to own her. Hijinks ensue.
It's blossomed a little bit, and I figured that I had to start writing it sooner or later.

One fun side aspect about this is just the silly fact I realized about superhero movies and anime: if these superhumans ever seriously did anything wrong, who would put them in their place?
There is nothing humans can do about Yulaan, no matter what she does.

The same thing could be lobbied at any of the usual capeshit movies from Marvel or DC. Superhumans regularly destroy cities and kill thousands, but the most in terms of side effects that's ever raised is "insurance companies and property rates and occasionally citizens getting fed up." There's probably going to be an MCU or DCU movie in the near future about common citizens revolting against superheroes for casually causing such havoc, and the fact average people can't compare to superhumans, mutants, or aliens will be a missed point.

If a superhuman with the ability to destroy even just a city appeared on Earth right now, and even nuclear weapons could not affect them, human civilization would be fucked— and not for any dastardly plot involving them either.

Human civilization is built around the unstated fact that all humans are equivalent creatures. It doesn't matter the delusions of the traditionalists that some men are better than others— no king is going to survive getting hit by a speeding car. The strongest man who ever lived would not survive a beating from three other people ganging up on him if he was unprepared. The most powerful man who ever lived only had social power; a single gunshot, knife shivving, or poison dart would kill him all the same as the lowliest peasant. No man can fly without technology. No man can punch down a building. No man can run faster than a cheetah. We're all fairly limited apes.

If a superhuman really appeared, all of that goes to shit. We have no contingencies to deal with someone genuinely qualitatively superior to ourselves. If you could destroy a country just by shooting a Hadōken at it and wipe out a whole army with your bare fists, the last thing any Earthly power would do is oppose you. Indeed, most people would reject their governments and idols and give reverence to you, and right there you start seeing the breakdown of society. If you can outthink us a billion times over, how do we counter you? How do we plan against you? We can't, and it's foolish to even try to come up with scenarios where we could. We're like ants trying to fathom a human. If a human kills a ant , do the ant put that human into ant jail? No, they just have to deal with it. No legal framework can possibly exist to handle Yulaan, and to make things maximally hard, there's no one we can call either. Yulaan's the only one. No Goku, no Superman, no Thor, no one. It's just us and our contemporary world with this otherworldly being, and we just have to hope her values are aligned with ours to survive.


Gee. What does that sound like?

Yep. Somehow I even managed to turn a bizarro slice-of-life wuxia-tinged story about ̶m̶y̶ ̶X̶e̶n̶o̶v̶e̶r̶s̶e̶ ̶w̶a̶i̶f̶u̶ a Saiyan ripoff into a mild allegory of the Singularity

Thankfully for Earth, Yulaan isn't some spoiled bratty teenager but instead some esoteric shadowy barbarian with a high level of self-control. To start with, at least...
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Re: The Yabanverse Thread

Post by caltrek »

Human civilization is built around the unstated fact that all humans are equivalent creatures. It doesn't matter the delusions of the traditionalists that some men are better than others— no king is going to survive getting hit by a speeding car. The strongest man who ever lived would not survive a beating from three other people ganging up on him if he was unprepared. The most powerful man who ever lived only had social power; a single gunshot, knife shivving, or poison dart would kill him all the same as the lowliest peasant. No man can fly without technology. No man can punch down a building. No man can run faster than a cheetah. We're all fairly limited apes.
I don't know if you realize it, but you have here pretty much restated a basic theme of Thomas Hobbes. It was upon this that he (and others) based his social contract theories.

I suppose if a being of the type you described were to arrive on the planet, a new type of social contract would have to emerge. Maybe something like "I am in charge here now....got it?' :o
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Re: The Yabanverse Thread

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Funny you say that

"Too Strong" by Ishida1694
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Image

Just how powerful is Yulaan?

"Enough."

Earth-Prime (our Earth) is a world of science and limitations. We're not a world of gods and demigods unto our lives, save for one's sincere beliefs. Thus, we needed a demonstration.

Yulaan is a Yaban. Yabans are quite like Saiyans.

Imagine a Saiyan, except they're here.

That's what Governor Colin Maddox needs to see to be convinced, and that's what Yulaan is happily obliged to show. Yulaan isn't just strong. She isn't even very strong.

She's too strong. Too strong for our world. Ah, but see, that's not her problem....

Yulaan uses qigong and gathers qi, causing the Earth itself to shake and mountains to break apart.

She's put the fear of a new God into Governor Maddox. He's just a man. Man is a fearful creature. That which we cannot understand, we fear. And that which lives beyond our power, we worship. In times before secularization, we'd elevate men to the status of living gods. These times were chaotic and supernatural for all involved. If the gods walked the Earth casually, everything of Man's doing could be rendered worthless and forgotten at any moment. But the cold fact is that even history's greatest God-King could be felled by a 9mm. No God walks among men as an equal. One becomes a God by transcending man.


Yulaan didn't expect this, and for one so proletarian, she doesn't like it. But she knows why now. She can see it in Colin's eyes.


Let me tell you something. Superhero movies all fail. They fail at something profoundly basic. They may be good movies and fun to watch which is all they need to be, but attempts to be deep by bringing in interpersonal drama or social issues fail to recognize the God in the room.

Humans of Earth Prime are used to a level of power that never transcends beyond the lower supernatural. What the Pazuzu-possessed Regan called too vulgar a display of power would bring mocking laughs unto even a secular Yaban's lips.

If a person of Yulaan's caliber ever appeared on our world, they'd need not do a damn thing. Hero or villain, rogue or renegade, they just need to let their power be known to destroy the world— and we'll gladly destroy it ourselves.

Humans are only capable of cultivating superhuman social power. The most powerful man in history was he who convinced millions that he was the most powerful man in history. The same god-king killing 9mm would drop him all the same. No man can move mountains; he can only direct others to move them for him through great technological effort. But we will never call it such. Our mass self delusions are a byproduct of our parasocial civilization.

If a person of true power ever appeared, civilization would come apart at the seams. Someone who could break the moon with a flex of the wrist, or explode a city with their fingers, or survive a nuclear explosion unharmed is simply too strong to be anything other than a God. If taken seriously, superhero movies wouldn't be pseudo-artsy kid's flicks— they'd be pseudo-mythologies. Property damage and insurance woes would be the least of anyone's worries when superhuman forces of nature walk the Earth. Most would rather render worship unto these walking gods, and some would exploit the chaos for their own ends, creating unapproved cults with the "blessing" of their new patron deities.


As could possibly now happen on Earth Prime. And unlike the MCU, or Dragon Ball Z for that matter, Yulaan is all alone. If she so desired, her will be done without competition. She's here as punishment, in a low-energy universe to make her suffer. But that's just her. What this means for us is irrelevant. There is no Goku to save us should she so decide to lay waste to our world. No nuke or germ will put her down either.

Some, like the God-fearing conservative governor Colin Maddox, need to be convinced that they're no longer truly in control. But others can remain blissfully ignorant as Yulaan stays in the shadows. Her spartan ways allow her a life without luxury or great desire for anything but combat, but if she ever desired to take the reigns of world, those same ideals would be brutal for our world.

Heaven forfend the day a Yaban becomes God of Earth. Humans would soon be molded into the space orcs we believe ourselves to be, within reason.

Such is the way of Yabans, even Dociles like Yulaan. She's incorruptible for the worst reasons. Yabans, those fascistic war-obsessed space monkeys, make only for good villains.

So it's for the best that Governor Maddox remember his place and remember too that no amount of corporate lobbying or private threats will sway his new "constituent." He's playing politics when she's living God of War.



After Yulaan tells him of her full capabilities, a young man with autism tells her fairly defiantly one day that she would get clapped by Goku. Something she doesn't deny— but the issue she brings up is, "What does it matter?" Goku exists in the pages of a comic book and on TV screens; he exists in the Yabanverse the exact same way he exists IRL. So what does it matter if they hypothetically came to blows? If Yulaan actually aimed a ball of qi at Earth at this moment and threatened to fire it, is Goku going to materialize and stop her? No. Because he's a manga character. And that threat to blow the Earth up— that would get any other person arrested and locked up for years. Not her. And why? Because the criminal justice system is not built to handle superhumans like her. It's not a matter of her being too rich or well connected. It's a matter of her literally, physically being too strong. She only suffers punishment through her own free will, which defeats the purpose.

Have you ever asked yourself "How come no one ever does anything about Vegeta?" The answer is "Because he's too powerful."
You can't cancel a god and you can't put Superman in jail unless you have peers of equivalent power willing to do so.

The humans of Planet Earth-Prime in Little Miss Savage luck out so hard, so hard from Yulaan choosing to not exploit her godlike superiority over all. Because otherwise, we're all alone.

This is a pretty important point to set early because the question of "how do you hold a superhuman accountable?" and the answer being "You can't" is one of the things that incited this whole project.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/800j9t/the_most_unbelievable_part_of_any_superhero_movie/
Civilization period, never mind "economy."

A civilization with superheroes/villains is alternately chaotic and tyrannical, and people would lose interest in making plans or playing by rules when they see it all repeatedly evaporate every time someone with a power gets an itch.

This is what people don't understand about ancient societies ruled by God-Kings and cunning warlords - they were not orderly. At all. People had no control, so they didn't plan and didn't follow rules - didn't even know they had the option.

All these franchise movies where people go about their business like everything is normal and then just make a passing reference to entire cities being annihilated by incomprehensible menaces are just embarrassing. The world would revert to the 10th century in 5 years tops, at a quarter of its former population.
And let's go even deeper: how the f*ck is science still a thing?? Everything we've learned is all but proven false— Newton's Three Laws and Einstein's various proofs clearly mean nothing in a world where these superbeings possess enough power to move faster than time, can punch planets off their orbits, or are wholly composed of nonbiological material that allows them to do utterly fantastical things. Not to mention that the existence of aliens, mutants, and interdimensional beings capable of rendering our world a neat little pile of rubble floating in space is too much for us to handle psychologically. Superheroes and supervillains need only be to cause havoc on the world. Societal order is already breaking down before any single one of them has thrown a punch or used their powers.
Yup. Most people would revert to desperate superstition and cultism because they have nothing else to rely on - a situation the villains would encourage, and build cults around themselves. The few willing and able to probe the physical nature of the "powers" would be massacred, or enslaved by the powers they study to develop weapons against their enemies.

Superman doesn't have time to be a laboratory security guard and ethical watchdog to ensure they're not just being forced to build weapons against himself.

Instant reversion to the Dark Ages.


By the way, I have no clue as to the forum's policy on NSFW imagery, so I'll be censoring everything relevant.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Re: The Yabanverse Thread

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This thread reminds me of one of my favorite superheroes - K9. For those not in the know, K9 was (and still is, but I will get to that) a robot dog who served as a traveling companion and protector of Dr. Who. Main features included a little laser cannon built into his nose, supercomputational abilities, and the power to project a force field similar to Enterprise shields. So, an attack by some city destroying energy blast of Yuli Ban's imagination might very well destroy all surroundings, K9 could survive unscratched. He was not entirely invulnerable - one episode had him dying as his batteries ran out, only to be recharged and thus brought back to life. He was also amiably subservient to the Doctor - referring to him as "Master". Still, the fact that he was so darn powerful actually became a problem for the writers. Always, one began to wonder, why doesn't Doctor Who simply send K9 to deal with the latest supervillain?

One had to at least write an explanation of that into the plot line - usually that they were separated. Still, even that became a cliche. Enter Sarah. Sarah was Dr. Who's traveling companion. Now, Dr. Who was Galifrain while Sarah was human. So, there was not a romantic relationship between the two. Just a sort of intense fondness. Being human, Sarah began to become quite stressed out from all of their encounters with evil aliens out to destroy the universe, or at least one planet or another. Slowly, Dr. Who began to realize that what Sarah most needed was peace and quiet, and some degree of security. So, Sarah was dropped off in her hometown (London I think) and gifted with K9.

There were some subsequent spinoffs featuring Sarah and Dr. Who, and even within the last decade they made a guest appearance. In at least one of the spin offs, earth was once again threatened by some alien or another, and so K9 and other earthling friends of Doctor Who banded together to help provide a defense. At one point Dr. Who decides to intervene in Sarah's timeline and saves her son from a traffic accident. In these guest appearances, we see that Sarah has survived rather well and still looks attractive for her increasing age. Of course, K9 shows no appearance of age whatsoever.
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Re: The Yabanverse Thread

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Recently I've been overhauling this concept, seeing what would be more fun to do and more interesting to play out.
The themes of masculinity vs. femininity that came naturally in this tale also went into maximum overdrive. When you have a Strong Female Character™ as the lead of a multi-story project, especially thrusting her into eras where her femalehood is impossible to ignore, it just comes with the territory. Unavoidably!

And it also goes into maximum overdrive when you have a lead female character like Yulaan, who is essentially designed to have as little behavioral femininity as reasonably possible.
Why? JUST 'CAUSE!! 2.
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Drawn by David Haire

Actually, bollois stem from this old thought experiment I had back in 2009, which I called "Girl, Negative" which was essentially a storyline imagining what if girls from a negative universe came and competed against boys from ours? As in they were clearly feminine-looking girls, but acted completely like boys. And I mean completely. Not even "tomboyish" or "Butch," I'm talking all traits of boyish masculinity... but as girls. Back then, I simply didn't know how to make that work (cut me some slack, I wasn't entirely well-read on the Amazons).

Fast forward almost a decade later to when I created Yabans and gave them three sexes (in fact directly inspired by American society in the World Wars of all things), I had an aggressive "Strong Female Character™" as the lead I wanted to play with at the time, and I figured "You know what? I should just see how far I can take the Strong Female Character™ concept," largely because I wanted to see how you could create an actual SFC™. But I took it too far and made all female Yabans (bollois) this way. However, this proved fun to play with, especially when it came to contrasting bollois with women. Weak women, strong women, it didn't matter— get two types of females together and inevitably you start comparing and contrasting them, and at some point I decided to make bollois the realization of that "negative woman" concept. Like Amazons but even more extreme, even more behaviorally masculine with one glaring exception, one which I'm still not entirely clear on how it works myself: sexuality. Amazons are at least very sexually aggressive and promiscuous as a rule, as well as homosexual— they make love to women, but they only breed with men. Bollois aren't even that. And for obvious reasons, this seems to be the biggest sticking point a lot of other people have about them, because we are all but programmed to view females as sexual/romantic creatures. Even, perhaps even ESPECIALLY when they're written as masculine or "badass." So taking that away from bollois just leaves all the rest— aspects that get a bit uncomfortably close to Futurism (of the Italian variety) and even ur-fascism.
This one comes more out of the kung fu movie tradition of manly lead characters not at all caring about sex or romance, to the point of homoerotic asexuality. Most notably their direct visual inspiration, the Saiyajin of Dragon Ball Z— the rule of thumb for Saiyans in canon is "they are as violent as humans are sexual." That's basically how I originally envisioned Yabans— so gunmetal in their sexuality that you could describe them as a whole race of aromantic asexuals (hence the need for a parthenogenesis hermaphroditic third sex), even if it's not quite accurate. When I made Yabans more and more Orkish and Spartan, I took that rule of thumb as a de jure rule. I'm not saying they aren't sexual at all, but when discussing Yabans, you're just about always going to be discussing matters of violence, aggression, and war.


Sure, the "base" story may be set in the 2020s, but imagine the fun of her going to the 1950s, the '60s, and the '70s. Or of her mingling with outrageously ultra-misogynistic alien barbarians. All of which happens and more! And I'll discuss some of these ideas below...
Yuli Ban wrote: Sun Mar 20, 2022 10:45 am This is a pretty important point to set early because the question of "how do you hold a superhuman accountable?" and the answer being "You can't" is one of the things that incited this whole project.
By the way, as I mentioned in the OP, this also stemmed from something else.

A nonhuman, superhuman agent alien to human social mores, whose abilities run infinitely far beyond all human power and may, no, will be beyond our ability to control? One whose interests may not be aligned with humanity's and, if said entity were to turn against humanity or even simply had a goal whose very act of carrying out would destroy humanity but simply didn't care about such a side effect, would be utterly unopposed and unstoppable?

Gee, what does THAT sound like?
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Re: The Yabanverse Thread

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Categories of Violence and Aggression: How to Define a Warrior Society
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Art by Seacar14

Some caveats I'd add to this: an "Ultra Pacifist" society isn't necessarily benevolent. They may not expand and impose their will and violence upon others, but they'll be more than happy to do it unto their own people...
Plus, there's also the case of mindless expansionists/Assimilation Conquerors. Basically Tyranids, the Borg, and the Flood. Kind of like crossing Category 3 with Category 5, showing that this is only a VERY rough outline of what these societies could be like...
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Re: The Yabanverse Thread

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A recent image, drawn by Salvamakoto
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Little Miss Savage: Middle American Mythology

The year is 1977. New York is a city in decline. A modern Sodom, the Big Apple has rotten— fallen into dilapidation and the starkest divides. 
It's this breakdown of modern society into its rawest form that pulled Yulaan enough to leap across time to have her own fun here and now. As a traditional bolloi, she is attracted to the machismo and political incorrectness of the era.
There are several faces she meets in this era, including Jocko Roosevelt, the son of Buck Roosevelt and a Green Beret who's seen action in Vietnam. There's his best friend, fellow soldier, and war-damaged George "Elf" Kirby who is the first Yulaan encounters in 1977 when she lands in the American Southwest and meets Elf as an outlaw biker. There's Glenn Sampson, the typical Male Chauvinist Pig of the '70s and a Brooklyn native. There's Glenn's close friend, Michael LaBlanc, filled with hot-blooded Black Machismo and having grown up on James Brown and Ray Charles. There's Jennifer Campbell, a forward lady of the time and a disco-loving exotic dancer. And there's Lori Goldwater, a funky, rough and tumble street punk chick who grew up an a number of rough neighborhoods.

Yulaan's not unused to hanging around humans— she's marked her life with the disgustingly middle-class youths and manchildren of the 2020s after all. But Yulaan finds greater disharmony among this crowd, a hotbed of racial and gendered conflicts that simmer hot compared to the relative egalitarian attitudes fifty years hence. And what she's really here for is to fight manlier men.
Unsurprisingly, Yulaan jives with the kung fu craze, dropping by a grindhouse theater, watching several martial arts flicks. She then reveals she's a competent martial artist herself, also revealing her tail and electric powers to her little in-group. Finally she reveals that she's an alien, which seems fitting because Star Wars just came out the other day and it's all about aliens and mystical stuff.


As a funny aside, a superhuman kung fu monkey-tailed space alien remains a completely novel concept to the people of this era. It's still only 1977, and Saiyans would not be introduced to the world until 1989. So to everyone she encounters, there's quite literally no perfect frame of reference to understand what a "Yaban" is supposed to be other than some bizarro crossover of Klingons, Spartans/Amazons, Yahoos, and Planet of the Apes with a little bit of Thor thrown in.

A hot and angry summer day arrives, into the Blackout of 1977. People are violent, frustrated, agitated, and ready to fight. Yulaan enters a street fighting tournament. She reduces her qi to nil and fights purely secularly, winning every match with brute force. She then let's her final opponent use qi to prove a point, that she is naturally stronger than humans because of her physiology, but humans are not as weak as they think themselves to be. She gave this man an iota of qi and it was enough to stumble her around. 
Also, now that he feels such qi, his actions seem to become so much more deliberate and opera-like, almost like a kung fu movie. 
Yulaan beats him with brute strength, and the qi he has protects him from serious injury. But it leaves him. She's not going to just give humans her own qi. If they want to cultivate such abilities, practice qigong. Maybe they'll break through their limits. 
Anyway, plot happens that I'll eventually figure out, and this culminates in Raza revealing himself to be on Earth and challenging Yulaan to a fight, one which ends with the two having expended their qi. Yulaan is satisfied to be fighting someone like him, especially in this time of all places, and Raza can tell that the Butcher of Gorta is into this, so he decides to throw a knife-edge deathmatch. 



"How about we settle this with a Knife-Edge Deathmatch."

Raza is a space pirate, one who raids interplanetary and interstellar vessels to sell the materials on them on the black market, but this is really just a front. All he's really into is a good fight and butchery, so he deliberately targets the most well-defended and hardest-to-penetrate ships in the cosmos for the sake of a great challenge. Indeed, because of the insane nature of nagoi piracy, they're often employed by warlords and mercenary groups to do the difficult missions no others will dare to contemplate, let alone try. Raza isn't a top-tier pirate— he's a small fry all things considering, but that's his lot in life. Unlike a lot of his compatriots, he's perfectly fine with staying small rather than advancing through the power structure, feeling that it keeps him close to the best kinds of action— those down-to-Earth sorts of fistfights that really get the blood pumping... often all over the walls. 

I've always talked about vroda kvltvr because female characters are inherently interesting to me. But senja kvltvr is also interesting. Nagois are very manly as a rule, and they are still capable of brotherhoods— after all, "senja kagora" literally translates to "brother fellowship" or "fraternal chivalry," so they clearly have this capability. Indeed, nagois ought to have very strong brotherhoods because part of their spiritual dao is that of the ultramasculine huo combined with the feminine yin— but all the feminine third does for them is allow for that self-control and compassion for one another that makes fraternities so strong while also enhancing their destructive potential. Bollois are widely seen as lacking that sort of compassionate side hence why they make such effective butchers and assassins (as they spiritually are seen as only having the destructive huo and the masculine yang), but they still have chivalrous sisterhoods, so it makes sense that nagois will be males of unity and fellowship. Considering male friendship is a major manly theme on Earth, the manliness of nagois doesn't really need to be stated.
But that being said, senja kagora is still not some feminine ordeal or anything. Nagois do manly things that often get homoerotic, and one of those things is a knife-edge death match, where these manly space warriors get to have their fun beating each other bloody between blades. Again, bollois do these things too— nagois and bollois share many behaviors in their fellowships. Indeed, Djuggesh and Ghojin are an undefeated winners of multiple knife-edge death matches. However, Yulaan had never actually heard of these things because she never had the chance to really get into vroda kvltvr before her war on Planet Gorta, hence why she's confused by the offer to fight in one against Raza. To be fair, he's also beguiled that the Butcher of Gorta has never been in a knife-edge death match, let alone heard of them. It seems more than a bit odd, like a badass mercenary with hundreds of kills having never heard of even the concept of honor dueling or underground fight clubs. So he teaches her via actually holding one.
And what better place to do it than in 1977 New York? A place of the cusp of post-modernity, where the chauvinistic and chivalrous machismo of the past still lingers on and triggers many bystanders to become so incredibly uncomfortable.



It can't be avoided as a subject: Yulaan is female. She may not be a woman per se, but she is indistinguishable from one, since Yabans are essentially that classic "humanoid alien" archetype. She looks and sounds like a woman, and she's female, so to these people, she might as well be a woman— indeed, it's common for people to call her a woman in many forms, such as "Yaban woman," and even "bolloi woman" because they don't quite get that "bolloi" alone works (it would essentially be like calling a female fowl a "hen woman" but made far muddier by the fact bollois are, as aforementioned, indistinguishable from women). She already upsets people by being so well-built and battle-scarred. Tossing her into a brutal bare-knuckle pit fight with an insanely muscular male just seems offensively obscene to these modern eyes. Not that everyone's against it.

Sure, some like Glenn and Michael think it's an afront to the Lord Himself for this to happen and Jennifer weeps, thinking that Yulaan's throwing away her beautiful face and shouldn't be doing something so toxically wretched— but then you have the amazed Jocko and Elf who, even though they also possess era-appropriate chauvinism (how could they know their general attitudes would make them villains to those two generations away in the future?), are more tolerant than they let on and certainly don't mind a lady going topless to fight. Plus the sheer audacity of such a fight is astounding, especially to Elf who sees it not as some mixed brawl but as a legendary struggle of will. Nor is Lori anything but awe-struck. Again, she'd never get involved in such a dumb sort of brutal fight herself either, and while the fight itself is so dumb to her, it's also awesome.

Alas, Yulaan and Raza couldn't care less about what the humans think of their fight. They're Yabans; this is just what they do. That there might be anything unusual or wrong about a male and a female fistfighting with such raw brutality is an alien concept to them— on Planet Kollidor, only the strong meet on the battlefield! Strength is all that matters.  There is no "equality" on Kollidor; only strength and power.



_____________________________


Admittedly, causing that sort of discomfort is part of why Yulaan even heads back to the past, such as to 1950s Spain and 1960s America and East Asia. These time periods were eras of far stronger gender norms and far greater male honor in daily life. There's a natural clash between human and Yaban norms as a result. We humans expect our females to be tender, delicate, graceful, kind, compassionate, submissive, motherly, sensitive, emotional, and indecisive, even in modern times when such isn't "politically correct" to say directly and thus vastly moreso in past decades. Tradwives and tradwomen are supposed to be bearers of that sort of ultra-femininity. Yabans, by comparison, expect their females to be industrious, brutal, aggressive, unconcerned, logical, and cruel. In fact, a traditional bolloi or tradbol would be seen as completely lacking femininity to humans. As has been stated before, bollois may be the females, but the hermaphroditic yenois are the "Women," at least by traditional standards. Yulaan considering herself a "somewhat traditional girl" is ironic in that context considering that, by Yaban standards, she very much is so, and yet by human standards, we'd probably call her "ultra-Butch" and some certainly might consider her a "frigid feminist" as a result. Hence why it's so fun to thrust her into places like Francoist Spain, suburban mid-century America, 80s Japan, and more.

This is what happens when you take the Strong Female Character™ trope and run with it to its maximum possible extent.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Yuli Ban
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Re: The Yabanverse Thread

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Sol Yulaan and Sgt. Buck Roosevelt, 1965, by Ishida1694


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Little Miss Savage: Middle American Mythology


Yulaan meets Gunnery Sergeant Buck Roosevelt in 1965.

Who is Buck Roosevelt? A very manly man.
Buck Roosevelt is a Marine who is a devout warrior, a man who has dedicated his life to the art of combat and self-reliance. He's been to Korea and is about to head to Vietnam.

Roosevelt is surprisingly one of the few men of these times who tolerates Yulaan, probably because she understands him in a way no female ever has before, at least not any he's met. He's not about to speak for, say, those Soviet sharpshooters or anything. But the broads over here, they're a different stock, he says.

He tells Yulaan about his life story. He was just a typical boy like Raymond Miller, except he was a kid in the '40s instead of the '60s. He was born in 1931 in Circleville, Ohio, and was raised reading pulp fiction and adventure serials, fantasizing about being some manly warrior like Conan the Cimmerian or Doc Savage. When the Japanese laid waste to Pearl Harbor, he didn't even particularly care about the people who died or gave their lives. He was still a little too young to understand it. He didn't understand what death was, honestly. And that's what the rich man wanted from him. That's when he started his path towards being a warrior. When he finally understood death, when his uncle came back home wrapped in a flag and in a box, and instead of grief, he said to himself, "I wanna die like him." He didn't know what he was saying. He knew what death was by then, but didn't really understand the eternal implications. But that didn't matter.

He was an all-American boy during World War 2, with the same surname as the President, obsessed with manly heroes. He would fantasize of being in Europe. 1940s, 1240s, didn't matter. He's the kid Yulaan wanted to know, basically. He's the man she's molding Raymond into.

In his teenage years, he was a solitary kid who worked out, fought other boys, and learned how to shoot straight. And then he joined the military and took to their lifestyle of restriction. Not to the same extent as Yulaan, admittedly, but he realized the importance of physical training and hardship. Thus to keep himself fit, he became a boxer and lumberjack after Korea.

He is a very manly man because he lives by the seven virtues of manliness: Manliness, Courage, Industry, Resolution, Self-Reliance, Discipline, and Honor. He lives in a log cabin that he himself built, and willingly goes to fight for his country. He's a man of Masculine Self-Denial.

To Yulaan, this is a righteous warrior, a worthy opponent.

And if this guy is impressed by how manly Yulaan is, surely that's saying something. If anyone can tell you which kind of Self-Denial she engages in, it's him.

Feminine Self-Denial is best exemplified by Chavela Xaxalpa, the bisabuela of Vicente and Chale Jr. (in fact, circa 1965, Chale Jr's grandfather, Chale Sr., was himself just a boy). Chavela is a Godly woman of who denies her mind the burden of being heard and who dedicated her life to her family and children first and foremost. She is a woman of boundless love and sacrifice to her children, working tirelessly every day to keep her husband and children happy.

Chavela Xaxalpa is a woman of gracefulness, gentleness, empathy, humility, and sensitivity— tenets of Marianismo.

Sgt. Roosevelt, an American, never met Chavela Xaxalpa, who lived in Mexico.

But it doesn't take a brain surgeon to tell you that Yulaan is clearly not of the same sort as her. Yulaan's Self-Denial is very much in the same vein as the Laconic ones, those Spartan warriors who denied themselves in service of a greater, more glorious cause. She also lives in a yurt she herself built, and even then only occasionally. Her house has few amenities, and certainly no pleasantries.
She goes further than he could even dream of doing himself. He lives in a log cabin and runs a farm, but he still participates in society. Yulaan could be a cryptid if she wanted to. She hunts almost purely; the only times she doesn't hunt her own food is when she's with another person and feels it'd be rude to reject offerings of food or pleasantry. Now that is honor, especially considering what she is. She should otherwise be killing everything she comes across, but her self-restraint is great.

She sleeps on the floor whenever she's in her own house. And when she isn't in her house, she gets comfortable on the Earth. Because she is a warrior, and that means she's often out in the world. Not every place has a bed, and while she could spend time getting comfortable, simply finding shelter to rest is more valuable time spent.

This is the antithesis of femininity. Chavela is not a woman who forgoes material comforts. Heck, the whole point of her Self-Denial is to make sure her family is comfortable. Ideally, the Man of the House rewards her quiet work with comforts. It's literally the woman's role to be pampered. The more comfortable she is, the better the family is. A woman adopting harshness and denying vanity is essentially denying femininity. To be feminine is to be vain. It's to make yourself presentable and spend time grooming yourself to cultivate beauty for the community. That doesn't mean obsess over yourself, but it does mean to avoid being "hard." A woman can help, but she is not supposed to build the house or provide for the family. That's the Man's role. A woman certainly can learn how to do these things, but it's peripheral to herself.

So says 1965 society, at least.


It is this utter explosive failure of femininity that platonically attracts Sgt. Roosevelt. That Yulaan is some wuxia wizardess of godlike strength is peripheral to that which interests him more. Many ladies have been described as powerful beyond measure; far fewer, perhaps not even the Amazons, have been described as so vicious and spartan. It attracts many in the 2020s, so naturally far more would be beguiled in the 1960s.
Buck's never seen a female so well-built or aggressive, and he sure as Hell has never seen one with a monkey tail or wild electric hair before. As to what bollois are supposed to be, he's still not entirely sure...

It should be stressed that, as it's 1965, Sgt. Roosevelt has absolutely no idea what Saiyans are— no one, not even Akira Toriyama himself would know for another 24 years, so the closest analog to Yabans he'd have are either demons or Yahoos (a la Gulliver's Travels), or, more questionably and of-the-era, American Indians. Or, of course, some of those evil races and hordes that populated the hero pulps he'd read growing up before his father forced him to start reading the classics (til he got his revenge by reading the sweats).
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Re: The Yabanverse Thread

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Sol Yulaan and Raymond Miller, 1965 by Fiztaart
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Little Miss Savage: Middle American Mythology

When Yulaan goes back to the 1960s in Little Miss Savage: Middle American Mythology, she makes a side-mission out of a desire to find an average boy and raise him to become a warrior. Raymond Miller is that average boy. He's even average by his own admission, not being more than a B student or having high aspirations in life. But that's why Yulaan wants to cultivate him.
Raymond and his sister Linda Miller are about as "1965" as you can get, both being Baby Boomer kids. Plus, 1965 in America is not that much different from the mythologized 1950s— indeed, in many ways, the early/mid 60s are what America remembers the 1950s as being— a post-war pre-counterculture, highly stable, highly affluent WASP utopia where teens bop to rock and roll. This era of Modesto hives with Stepford wives; capable fathers, stay-at-home mothers, two and a half kids, and the family dog, of Silver Age comics and TV westerns.


To Yulaan, it's a fascinating time, the absolute barest possible version of the 2020s that's still recognizably such.

Now about the Miller household. It's a classic WASP suburban household, perfectly attuned for the 1950s and '60s, to the point it's actually cheesy.
Raymond loves movies as well as pulp fiction. He loves Doc Savage and Conan the Barbarian, and he loves sword and sandal movies and sci-fi B movies and adventure serials. His sister Linda hates them, but she loves romantic comedies and big historical drama pieces. They only share a love for gangster flicks. But while she loves the glamorous lifestyles and set pieces, he loves the violence and manly characters.
They're almost like a parody of WASP suburban gender roles, Raymond and Linda.
Raymond is a Boy, Linda is a Girl.
Raymond likes comic books, jet planes, adventure comics, war planes, and sports. Linda likes fashion, talking to her friends on the phone, romance, and pop idols.
Raymond annoys Linda with gross stuff like the Rat Fink, while Linda annoys him just by talking.
Raymond plays with science kits and obsesses over baseball icons. Linda used to play with dolls and is in love with the Beatles.
Raymond has a pet dog. Linda has a pet cat. The two animals get along better than they do.
Raymond is a little troublemaker who stops short of wearing a slingshot in his pocket. Linda is a model big sister.
They get on each other's nerves, but they do still love each other as all-American siblings would.
This is early 60s suburbia distilled into actual humans. You couldn't write a more cliché set up if you tried.
Hence why Yulaan blows their minds. Especially Raymond. Linda finds her gross and toxic, while Raymond finds her to be the antithesis of everything he ever knew girls to be. Girls aren't tough and aggressive like this! Girls aren't blunt and brutal. Girls cry easily and only think about boys. He sees her casually kill a deer and not flinch. But aren't girls supposed to freak out and cry about this stuff? She sees a rat on the floor and pounces on it. She grabs it, bites its head off, and eats the rest. That's not how girls work! Girls scream in fright at rats!
Yulaan says she can't speak for all females. But he's talking about human girls, isn't he? A bolloi who screams over a fuckin' rat is getting lynched.

She is absolutely a Top Gun macho vroda, one who wears the blood and bruises of a brutal fistfight with pride.
That's probably the hardest thing to really communicate to people— the sheer raw machismo latent in Yulaan and the vrodas. It's not just that Yulaan is a tomboy, a lady who can keep up with the boys while maintaining some feminine energy. I mean Yulaan just totally lacks feminine energy altogether. Most bollois seem to. There's a reason Planet Kollidor is considered to be so hypermasculine— though you do have yenois, nagois and bollois are just so macho that the stench of their nexcidium overpowers the planet. It's almost like yin and yang between Kollidor and Sarrat, with the far more feminine-oriented Gosamyrs.
That's not to say she disrespects femininity. Indeed if anything, she's always been far more tolerant of it than some of her vroda mates. She recognizes fully the need for womanliness and femininity and doesn't trashtalk it as something unnecessary for women to cultivate. Then again, she is a bolloi who has no stake in our human game of life.
And yet that's literally just the surface reality of Yulaan's life. He's not even scratched the surface of the tip of the iceberg because of the depths of Kollidorian lifestyles, mythologies, cultures, and Yulaan's own personal history that drives her. And to some extent, he literally can't understand her. Much like Sgt. Buck Roosevelt, he's a product of his environment, and the closest analog he might understand would be Amazons.

Actually, considering her bioelectricity, Raymond thinks of Yulaan as the Female Zeus. Knowing who Zeus is and how he behaved, Yulaan finds this ironic considering the sexlessness of Yabans. Though that does bring up a funny thought: imagine a Yabanfied Zeus... would that basically be Thor with a monkey tail?



On that note, just like Roosevelt and everyone on the planet, there is no understanding of Saiyans. A godlike battle-obsessed monkey-tailed space warrior is 100% novel to him. As an American boy, he also has no knowledge of the likes of Sun Wukong or Hanuman. Say "Sun Wukong" to him and he'll either say "Bless you" or think you're talking about some spinoff of King Kong about an ape named Sunwu.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Re: The Yabanverse Thread

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Drawn by Seacar

"You know better than anyone, Yulaan— the heart of fascism is the death worship of war. Warriors are the high priests, and battle is the holy sacrament, blessed in blood unto soil. ”

That's the thing about all these "proud warrior societies." Saiyans, Klingons, Orks, Mandalorians, Spartans, whathaveyou... any society rooted in war and combat is inherently fascistic— even if not intended. We're simply insulated from these truths by the escapism inherent in the stories told. You're never going to meet a Klingon, so you're never going to have to deal with the darker realities of their ways of life personally.

Girl on the left is a Pseudo-Saiyajin; guy on the right is a Francoist-sympathizer. If anyone knows what classical fascism is supposed to be, it’s them. A cold fact of Yulaan's life on Earth is that her ways and values are deeply troubling to many people. So her being the most powerful person on the planet a hundred million times over ought to be an existentially terrifying thought. If she were more malevolent and tyrannical, we might have a bit of a problem.


And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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