"Gift", African Lion, Betrothed of the future king
"I thought you were very brave."

There's always been arguments among TLK fans as to what licensed material counts as "canon" in the TLK universe. In my humble, modest, and clearly superior opinion, "canon" means nothing. All fictional work is equally real (that is to say it's not), so if I wanna say that the foreign comics that feature Nala and Simba having adventures as kids before Mufasa's death were a thing that took place in the Talking Cat Monarchy Universe then I can. And frankly I should! Because these are interesting characters that a lot of people are attached to, and we're all ravenously hungry for as much context on their lives as we can get. I appreciate Nala enough to piss off some fans because she had a lot of potential as Simba's bestie, not just as his grownass wife.

Even with her as a cub, I chose to interpret Nala as having much fewer spots and a substantially lighter coat then Simba's. Hell, she's lighter then any other lion, for that matter. As with her future hubby, I wanted to make her an unusual color morph. She'd likely be considered a "white lion" in real life, though she's obviously not stark white. "White lion" is a misnomer though - real white lions range from snowy white to very pale shades of tan. Making her leucistic both justifies her lifelong teal eyes as well as gives me an excuse to make her lighter then her male counterpart without it being totally based in gurly character design tropes lolol