Of course as I said at the beginning I’m just joking. I might absolutely be misunderstanding all of this and we technically don’t get confirmation! And things change during story writing, that post that im drawifrom with the anatomy things was from 2017. Which- checks notes- was… Jesus 9 years ago.
You’re not far off at all! There is a bit of missing context on a couple of those points though. I’m thrilled to think someone would dig that deeply. When I obsess over these kinds of details, I often include a sort of preface that “I know no one cares about this except me BUT. . .” so I’m quite chuffed that there might be readers are out there digging through old comments, posts, and the comic itself to check for consistency. :D
1. What makes you think we’ve already arrived to the “second half” of the story? ;)
The first snip was in relation to whether I would be pulling lore from Dragon Ball Super. There are two things I can clarify there.
The first is that I treat Kuriza as a special exception. I do not consider the Neko Majin manga itself canon to Unguarded (it is already an AU), but I do borrow Kuriza as a character. He had appeared there and in the Budokai 2 game at the time so I started working on the story; he was already well-known in a lot of circles.
Second, when I talk about not using DBS lore, my cutoff is essentially the point at which Dragon Ball Super became its own thing. I consider the Beerus film and Resurrection 'F' to fall under Z-era material because that was part of the lore available before the rebranding. In practice, anything up through Movie 15 (Resurrection: 'F') is fair game for me, while material introduced through the Dragon Ball Super TV series and manga is not.
People sometimes ask about Frost, the Tournament of Power, or Freeza's second revival. Those are all areas I deliberately avoid. There are narrative reasons for that—which I can't really get into without wandering into spoiler territory.
The DBS exception I’ve included is the first flashback from DBS: Broly: the scene showing Cold handing the army over to Freeza. That wasn't actually a change in direction for Unguarded. Long before the Broly film existed, I had already planned on Cold transferring control of the army to Freeza. The movie simply happened to depict a very similar event. By the time I got around to drawing that portion of the story, it made sense to incorporate some of the details the film had added because they aligned with where I was already headed. The end result remained the same: it was Cold's army before it was Freeza's.
Ironically, the actual inconsistency comes from young Freeza's physical appearance in that scene. By the time Broly released, I had already established my own version of what a younger Freeza looked like so I couldn't simply swap over without creating contradictions. My compromise was to treat those colors as representing a freshly molted state instead, which was a concept I had planned, but not yet depicted in the comic. The timing worked out: dominating Cooler in a fight was the catalyst that secured Cold’s decision.
Had the Broly film existed when I first started outlining Unguarded, I probably would have aligned more closely with it. Most of the differences come down to timing rather than preference.
2. Live birth vs. egg laying is actually one of the few points where I can't give a complete answer without stepping into spoiler territory.
What I can say is that you're correctly identifying a contradiction between those two pieces of information. That isn't you misreading anything. . . nor is it something I overlooked.
For now, all I can really do is put a pin in this one and ask for patience. This is probably a conversation better had after a few more story pieces are on the table. 🙂
3. This one falls into the category of "Tig has spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking about xenobiology."
The apparent contradiction comes from assuming Arcosians are built exactly like real-world reptiles. They aren't. There are definitely reptilian influences there, but not a 1:1 anatomical correspondence.
I had to take a quadrupedal reptilian body and adapt it into one of a bipedal humanoid. My compromise was that some reproductive structures are located behind the legs at the base of the tail while others are positioned further forward.
In other words, the parts being compared here are not actually in the same place. Or, to put it less scientifically, the family jewels are in the back and the er, transport vessel is between the legs, at the front. ;D
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