Well, I did it -- and survived! I wrote a 13-episode fan fiction Season 3 of Big O in 13 weeks, posting
Act 27 exactly one week after Adult Swim aired Act 26 for the first time.
If anyone had asked me, I would have said it couldn't be done. In fact, I never actually committed to doing it -- I figured I'd keep it up as long as I could, and when I ran out of steam or ideas, oh well. I was pretty surprised I made it all the way to the end!
A few things really helped out. One is that I'm a very fast writer. Another is that I decided to write in an episode format. This was great, because a lot of decisions were made for me. I needed a big fight about two-thirds of the way through every episode, and the episode would end a couple of scenes after the fight was over. A lot of the first part of the episode would be setting up the events that would culminate in the fight, and I could have character development and stuff in there, too.
In addition to keeping me on track, the episode format is spacious enough that I could write the episodes relatively loosely. Short stories end almost before they begin, and you have to make every word count. The shorter the story, the truer this is. My episodes were mostly in the 8,000-12,000 word range, which is big enough that they can meander a bit. If I write a scene whose dialog isn't essential to the plot, I can leave it in! You can't do this with shorter formats. It probably takes me just as long to write a 3,000 word story as a 10,000 word story.
In the beginning, I had to make a lot of decisions about how Paradigm really worked. I lean towards simple explanations that make sense out of what happened. A lot of theories deal with names, labels, and symbols, but I mostly didn't care about these, and dealt only with events. So I didn't worry my pretty little head about whether Big Venus should be a goddess of love; I considered her name to be largely irrelevant.
In particular, it was very important that all the main characters be who they had seemed to be all along. Roger had to remain Roger, Dorothy had to remain Dorothy, and Angel especially had to remain Angel. It would have been ludicrous to have her strip off a mask and turn out to be God or the Devil or Cecil B. DeMille or something. The series had invested a lot of time and effort in Angel, and it would have been ghastly to throw it away.
I tried to stay true to the series in most ways, though I decided from the start to get Roger and Dorothy into bed right away (though not on-camera) and to increase the general level of smooching to what you'd expect if the show were American rather than Japanese. There were lots of hints about future developments and about the nature of Paradigm in the show. In many cases, even though it wasn't clear WHY things were the way they were, the pattern was well-established, and I could run with that.
When writing, my biggest problem was plot. Usually, the plots involving enemies were very difficult for me to come up with, while the ones involving friends were much easier. Once the situations were figured out and set up, the actual combat sequences weren't that hard. It was coming up with enemies in the first place, figuring out their motivations, capabilities, and plans that was difficult.
One of the more entertaining things about the episodes was the use of different viewpoints. It's a great deal of fun to write Megadeus combat scenes from Beck's viewpoint, for example, because he's so uninhibited. While Roger might condescend to use Big O to dance the Cucaracha on a swarm of zombies if it were necessary, he wouldn't LAUGH while doing it. Beck would. In general, I found the more extravagent and out-of-control characters to be much easier to write for, while the controlled and self-contained characters were more troublesome. They're nowhere near as expressive.
Writing dialog for Dorothy is also quite difficult. I'd make special passes through my drafts solely to reduce the number of words Dorothy said, and to a lesser extent Dori's, too. The other characters didn't really require any special treatment; they pretty much wrote their own dialog for me.
I intended to put a lot more of Norman into the episodes, but I was thwarted at every turn. He simply spends too much time at home.
I found that adding Dori into the cast diverted a lot of attention away from Roger and Dorothy, and that there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it. The addition of more Megadeuses also took the spotlight away from Big O. This was inevitable, but I wanted more Roger-Dorothy time in the series.
The one-episode-per-week pace was really too fast, and I was getting pretty tired towards the end. On the other hand, if I hadn't had a (self-imposed) deadline, I probably wouldn't have written anything at all! The tight deadlines meant that I needed to cut corners. I never made my own map of Paradigm, I rarely knew what day it was, I didn't sketch out the enemy Megadeuses so I could describe them with precision -- stuff like that. Sometimes I didn't check my facts, such as keeping track of whether damage was to the left or the right leg of a Megadeus. I never mapped out a timeline of how quickly an android's early emotional dependence on her awakener faded -- I just winged these things.
Another thing I learned as I wrote this was that my readers' appetite for romantic moments and fan service was insatiable. There may be an upper limit out there somewhere, but I haven't found it yet.
I have also not found their limit of tolerance for brutal robot combats. I'm always amazed that Japanese robo-combat is always so clean. Where's the smoke-filled cockpit? Where are the rivers of molten metal pouring off the armor when hit by energy weapons? Where are the non-mortal internal fires and explosions? Where are the limping robots and the robots with only one functioning arm that continue to fight gamely? Where's the crew valiantly trying to get the systems back on line? Where are the knees to the crotch? I put a bunch of this into my combat scenes.
My advice to other fan fiction writers is to try working on a larger canvas. An episode or two, rather than just a scene or two. The familiar format works in your favor, and the greater size of the story makes it much easier to write. It's big enough to have some mystery, some romance, some detective work, a robot battle, some fan service, a couple of laughs, and some loose ends to pick up next time. A lot of fan fiction is so short that it can only cover one of these bases. There's nothing wrong with that, but the audience here at Paradigm City consists 100% of people who really liked Big O
episodes, so you'll find it easier to hook them and reel them in if episodes are also what you do.
I also found it very comforting to try and run with the series as I found it, rather than changing everything around. Mary Sue stories, for example, introduce the problem of getting rid of one of the lovers so you can take his place, something which is hard to do convincingly and will alienate a large part of the audience. Alternate universe stories require that your readers accept your alterated universe. This can be done, but the fans love Big O, and you can make your life easier by giving them something that tries to be "real" Big O, rather than a Big O derivative. The obvious choices are to start after Act 26 or to write stories that occur between existing episodes.
I'm always surprised at how rare this approach is. It's so much easier than the alternatives and has such an increased chance of fan acceptance that I would have thought that everyone would do it.
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