| abstract
| - I had always been fascinated by the Saiyan-Tuffle War, and this story was my attempt to explore that period of Saiyan history I found so interesting. At first, this story was just a nebulous idea in my head. I had thought of writing this as early as late 2012 and had brought it up with both Destructivedisk and Hyper Zergling several times before I made the page. I really wanted to write this story in collaboration with Hyper Zergling since I didn't think I could tell the story without mentioning his Saiyans (since his characters are canon to my universe, as a result of our previous collaboration - Dragon Ball: Cold Vengeance). I remember being hesitant to bring it up since Hyper Zergling didn't have a good experience with writing CV. He felt very embarrassed by the dialogue he wrote in that story, saying that I often re-wrote it to make it better. That said, I thought this story could be different if we handled it differently - namely, we would each write different sections, not editing one another's sections too much. This was a grand idea, but it didn't exactly work out in in practice. Hyper Zergling did sign on to the story rather easily, to my surprise. We created the page for The Great War in April of 2013 and began brainstorming the plot at that time. We soon created the characters of Zhukin and Amanito, who became central characters in the story. Our early brainstorming led us to dividing the story into three sections - Saiyan unification (Vegeta uniting the tribes to challenge the Tuffles); Saiyan-Tuffle War; and post-war stuff. Because we divided the story like this, we realized that we needed main villains for the larger sections. Zhukin became the grand Saiyan antagonist and Amanito became the Tuffle general whom Vegeta fought against during the entire 10 year war. This was very important for the story to take shape. Without us creating Amanito, I don't think this story could have worked. The Saiyan unification was inspired by the Mongolian campaign from the video game, Age of Empires II. In the first mission of that campaign, the Mongolians are tasked with uniting various Mongol tribes to form an empire. I thought it would work rather well for the Saiyans, since the Saiyans are very similar to the Mongols in appearance and temperance (not to mention, they live in similar climates). To make this section work, we had to define the number of Saiyan tribes. I didn't want there to be too many, so we created seven. I was originally going to have eight tribes to reference that being a lucky number in Chinese. Hyper Zergling thought that would be too many, so we reduced it to seven. The next task was coming up with the tribe leaders. I knew Vegeta, Zhukin, and Nappa would be ones off the bat. Then, I searched through Dragon Ball wiki for all of the Saiyan articles and figured out which canon Saiyans I could use for the other tribes. I wanted to have as many canon Saiyans be tribe leaders as possible. This is how I came up with Zorn and Paragus being tribe leaders. We then had Hyper Zergling's Saiyan Dogom (the father of his main Saiyan, Cuber) take over another tribe. I had to create the last Saiyan as well, since there were no other suitable canon Saiayns to be leaders (Bardock couldn't be one, since he was considered a low-class Saiyan later on). Thus, Creissa was born. Afterwards, I came up with populations for each tribe which became the basis for their hierarchy. The larger tribes were more powerful, and thus posed a bigger threat to Vegeta. I put all of the tribes together on this page for my own reference for the story. Notice that Vegeta is a leader of a mid-ranking tribe. This was important for me. I didn't want him to start out as the best or worst, since that would be cliche. Putting him in the middle of the pack allowed me to have Vegeta conquer the smaller tribes too. This is why he conquers Creissa's, Zorn's, and Paragus' tribes in the very first chapter. They all have less soldiers, so they are easier for him to conquer. Then, he moves on to Dogom, then Nappa, and finally Zhukin. As he gains more soldiers with each tribe conquered, his tribe eventually outnumbers Zhukin's, allowing them to challenge the great Saiyan. That's the basis for the first section. The populations were carefully constructed so that Vegeta would have a larger tribe than Zhukin's after he conquered the other five tribes (accounting for casualties taken during the conquering). The second section, the actual Saiyan-Tuffle War, is built upon having a strong Tuffle antagonist who can challenge Vegeta and the Saiyans. Since the Tuffles are supposedly peaceful people, I needed a Tuffle who wasn't like the rest, otherwise I think Vegeta would have easily won the war in less than 10 years. I remember spending a lot of time with Hyper Zergling coming up with Amanito's personality and his role in the story. We didn't come up with the rest of the named Tuffles until their introduction in the story, however. The structure of the war was that we were going to show a few major battles and a lot of minor conflicts. There's always a few major battles in any war, and we didn't think that on a planet-wide conflict there would be only one. So we built the second section around the ebb and flow of war - a major battle, then some smaller ones, then another large battle, etc. We also decided early on that we were following anime canon with this war. The Saiyan-Tuffle war has different histories in different media, so we had to define what we were using. We didn't see GT as canon, so we disregarded everything said about the Saiyans and Tuffles there. That left King Kai's account in anime filler as the primary background for this story, as the Tuffles aren't really mentioned in the manga. Of course, this brought up an immediate problem that no one seems to realize or address on Dragon Ball wiki - the time cycle of full moons. If we go by King Kai's account, there is a full moon every 8 years. But, the Saiyan-Tuffle War was 10 years long. That means that there would have been a full moon two years into the war as well as the full moon during the end of the war. Obviously, this is a major plothole in the story. If the Saiyans became Great Apes two years into the war, then they would have won at that time. The only explanation is that they didn't. So Hyper Zergling and I came up with the idea of the moon shields to rectify this. Other than that, we mapped out the specifics of chapters just before writing them. We wrote all chapters save for the first one over a shared google doc. Hyper Zergling primarily wrote scenes involving his characters (though I wrote a few for his characters). I'm not sure if he wrote any scenes not involving his characters, but I don't think he did. He did about one scene per chapter, though there is one that he did two scenes in and a few he didn't do any scenes in (I'll talk about those in the below endnotes). I wrote the majority of this story, just like with Cold Vengeance. We mostly wrote our own sections and then just put them together, though there was a little editing by both of us. I edited Hyper Zergling's sections somewhat and he did the same for mine. I think he liked writing this story more than he did with CV since he was able to have more fun with the battle scenes and didn't have to worry about writing for the plot too much. This story was written very sporadically. Sometimes we would release a chapter every week, sometimes we wouldn't release one for months. This was due to a variety of factors. Sometimes Hyper Zergling couldn't write, sometimes I was busy, sometimes neither of us wanted to write it. My original goal was to finish this story before 2015, but I was unable to do to various things going on in my own life. We almost did it (we could have released 10 of the 11 chapters in 2015 if I had had a bit more free time). During the summer of 2014, I didn't write much of this story due to me working on so many other stories at that time. But during the fall/winter of 2014, this story was my focus and it was Hyper Zergling's too, which is why we released so many chapters during that time. I should also mention that we created the page for The Great War in April 2013 and didn't write the first chapter until March of 2014. This is primarily because I was working on other stories at the time and wanted to finish them before moving on to a new project (TGW). Once I had finished most of my other projects, I sat down with Hyper Zergling, went over the first chapter, and then we wrote it. Other than that, there isn't too much to say. I won't be bolding Hyper Zergling's sections because we edited the whole document together and there are various lines in each of our "sections" that the other user wrote or modified.
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