The Dragon Ball Character That Struck Fear in His Creator: A Fan-Favorite in the Saga

While Akira Toriyama recently left us on March 1, many anecdotes around Dragon Ball are starting to emerge. This is how we discover the genius of the creative process of the mangaka who was renowned for taking inspiration from the simplest things to create brilliant things from them.. And clearly, it is not the creation of the most cult antagonist of the saga which will deviate from the rule.

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A nightmarish appearance

At the time of the Namek arc, we had to end up drawing Frieza, presented as the galactic tyrant, the ultimate threat that the world of Dragon Ball could contain. So, to do this, Akira Toriyama was inspired by his own fears for his design and his personality. So, the author recalled a regular nightmare he had as a child, in which he saw a terrifying creature with a lizard tail. He therefore took this very specific element to create this iconic enemy of his work… but that's not all.

As said earlier, Akira Toriyama was known for being a lazy person, but a genius lazy person. He never hesitated to steal concepts from right to left to reinvent them and integrate them into his work.. We remind you that even though at the beginning, Dragon Ball was heavily inspired by the Chinese novel “The Journey to the West”, that is to say. So for Frieza's design, it is not very surprising to see that'Akira Toriyama was inspired by the most terrifying alien in pop culture at the time, i.e. the Alien or the Xenomorph First seen in Ridley Scott's film Alien. If this was enough to create the design of the galactic tyrant, for his personality, the author was inspired by behaviors that are unfortunately very real.

A character unfortunately inspired by reality

As a reminder, Frieza is a galactic tyrant who takes great pleasure in ravaging planets and killing their inhabitants so that he can then sell them to the highest bidders. Moreover, this aspect is even more explored in the Granola arc of the Dragon Ball Super manga where we discover the Heaters, a brotherhood who negotiates with him. So, this “world-selling” side was inspired in Akira Toriyama by the Japanese real estate developers of the time who do not hesitate to destroy and rebuild to make their fortune. The brutality of money circles has always particularly struck the author and that is why he wanted to transcribe it here, in his work. All of this combined makes Frieza probably the most cult antagonist in all of Dragon Ball.