Toriyama didn’t originally plan on going past the Freeza arc
At its most basic, this claim is probably true, perhaps even trivially so. After all, as we have seen already, Toriyama did not even originally plan for the series to go on long enough to get anywhere near Freeza. As he said, the popularity of the series prevented him from ending it after only 10 or so volumes, and that popularity only grew as the series reached the Saiyan and Freeza arcs. In Shenlong Times #1, Yū Kondō, Toriyama’s second editor, notes that the Freeza arc was when Dragon Ball did best in Jump‘s popularity polls:
Quote:
Fuyuto Takeda: So then, Kondō-san became the editor right around the time the Saiyan arc began. At that time, Dragon Ball was explosively popular; when Jump did a 1000-ballot survey, at its height Dragon Ball got around 700 ballots.
Yū Kondō: No, 815 ballots. That was in the Freeza arc.
In the world of Jump, unpopular series get cut, while popular ones keep going. It is only natural that there would be considerable pressure to keep Dragon Ball going when it was at the height of its popularity. Knowing Toriyama’s dislike of the weekly serialization grind, and the fact that he chose the name “Dragon Ball Z” because he wanted to end the series soon, it seems pretty unlikely that Toriyama would have refused the opportunity to end the series after the Freeza arc if it had been offered. On its own, the claim that Dragon Ball‘s popularity made Toriyama continue past the Freeza arc is extremely plausible.
We must not forget how misleading it is to mention this claim without the proper context, however. The speculation that Dragon Ball‘s popularity made Toriyama continue past Freeza is frequently mentioned by fans, while the fact that its popularity also made him continue past the first year, and volume 10, and then volume 13, is seldom brought up. This makes the Freeza claim take on undue importance, as though ending it with Freeza would have been Toriyama’s Plan A, when in reality it would have been more like his Plan C or D.