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Dragon Ball has always had a strange relationship with continuity. Not only was Akira Toriyama famous for forgetting details like Saiyans' tails growing back or Launch’s existence, but the existence of both Dragon Ball GT and Super as sequel series creates seemingly conflicting canons. However, Dragon Ball Daima is set to retcon one of the most famous retcons in the series’ history and it changes everything we know about fan-favorite character Piccolo’s history.

The first episode of Dragon Ball Daima takes place almost entirely in the Demon Realm, a location that has been alluded to but never fully explored in Dragon Ball. As part of that, it tells us that Namekians were originally residents of the Demon Realm. If that sounds familiar, it is because when he was first introduced, King Piccolo (the previous incarnation of the version who kidnapped/raised Gohan) was referred to repeatedly as a demon before the series introduced alien races like Namekians and Saiyans.

This makes the change of Namekians back into demons a retcon of a retcon (a ret-retcon?) but it isn’t just a case of Toei making big changes to Akira Toriyama’s work. During the Dragon Ball Daima panel at New York Comic Con 2024, original sketches of the Demon Realm by Akira Toriyama were shown to the crowd and several details of those sketches pointed to Toriyama always planning this change to the franchise’s established continuity.

In a landscape of the Demon Realm, a small village can be seen in the distance. Even at that small scale, the similarities between the houses we see during the Namek arc in Dragon Ball and those shown in the image are pretty clear. The ship that Glorio pilots in the artwork also bore a striking similarity to the ship that Kami took to Earth long before the series began.

These are small details that were shown to the audience in the New York Comic Con panel, but they seem to confirm that Akira Toriyama himself was behind this impressive retcon to the Dragon Ball series. Piccolo has been a demon AND a space alien this whole time, which will be interesting for him to find out as we get deeper into Dragon Ball Daima.

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