Writing By The Seat Of Your Pants / Anime & Manga

• Berserk author Kentaro Miura said he hadn't even formed the idea for the Band of the Hawk or Casca when he drew Guts' confrontation with the God Hand in volume 3, and there were a lot of details that he made up as he went along but which fell into place later. In fact, it fits together so well that it's surprising to learn he didn't plan everything ahead in great detail. A prime example is that the creepy fetus Guts sees in the first three volumes wasn't originally supposed to be Guts and Casca's child, but Miura later realized that this would work really well and made it into an important Recurring Character. Oddly enough, Miura claimed that he had the entirety of the Berserk story planned out in his head since high school.
• Tsugumi Ohba admitted he'd write Death Note by putting Light into a massive jam at the end of one chapter, and would then try and figure out how to get him out of it only when the time came to write the next one.
• The writers of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann admitted, regarding the flash-forward prologue the series never got to, that they "lost that plot thread somewhere".
• Bleach: Tite Kubo has admitted to using a combination of this and arc planning. However, he is infamous for using this trope and for his special use of Chandler's Law: "When suffering writer's block, introduce a new awesome character to overcome it". The trouble is, he doesn't actually introduce a new character, he introduces a new horde of characters instead. The result is a large cast of characters.
• Hidenori Kusaka does this in regards to Pokémon Adventures, as he has to write alongside whatever games just came out. What really makes him impressive, however, is that he doesn't work for Game Freak yet the series has a large amount of generation-spanning Arc Welding and Chekhov's Guns. Fans joke that he can see into the future.
• Osamu Tezuka wrote Ambassador Atom (the prototype for Astro Boy) as he went along. Notably, he had no idea who "Atom" would be, until he later decided to write him as a robot built to replace Tenma's deceased son. He would later Retool Atom into his current incarnation and subsequently redid the story as an episode of Astro Boy.
• Rumiko Takahashi admitted not planning and not knowing where her manga was going during the supposedly final battle with Naraku in Inuyasha or with RIN-NE in general.
• Akira Toriyama of Dragon Ball fame has admitted that he made up the story as he went along.^note Sort of. He had a general idea of where the plot would be going in the mid-term and had always written at least a few chapters ahead of the most recent one. The fact that this worked is quite impressive but led to numerous plot holes and inconsistencies over the years.
  • The Trope Codifier of the Super Mode, the Super Saiyan, actually didn't have much thought put into its design at all. Toriyama's only real idea was that Goku would start using villainous expressions when he entered the state. The golden hair was a last-second suggestion by a co-artist, to save time on having to continue filling in his black hair. The original idea for the Super Saiyan was based on a moment in Dr. Slump, and could be seen in Dragon Ball Z: Lord Slug.
  • The Cell Saga is a particularly funny example: he originally intended Androids 19 and 20 to be the main villains, created Androids 17 and 18 after his former editor complained that they were lame, and created Cell after the same former editor said they weren't threatening enough. Then he introduced Cell's semi-perfect form when the editor hated Imperfect Cell's insectoid appearance. THEN he insisted they hurry up to Cell's perfect form when the editor thought his semi-perfect one looked too goofy.
  • Perhaps most legendary of all is the unexplained disappearance of the character Launch starting with the Saiyan Arc. Toriyama eventually admitted that while he did intentionally put her aside for that arc, between all the stuff he had to keep track of while trying to make up the continuing story out of thin air, he just plain forgot she even existed (not helped by the fact that the story follows select characters to planet Namek, and it wouldn't return to Earth for over two years!).
  • The actual results of each Tenkaichi Budokai match were made up as each one was being written, which Toriyama found more exciting to write.
  • Toriyama isn't the only one guilty of this: when creating the Z movies in the 90s, Toei would come up with the subtitle of the movie first, then write the story based on that! This explains why the Meta-Cooler movie is titled "Clash!! 10,000,000,000 Powerful Warriors", and others get rather generic subtitles like "A Super Decisive Battle for Earth" for the Tree of Might movie. This also explains why so many of them are Non-Serial Movies, even with each other!
• A more recent example is Dragon Ball Super. According to some sources, Toriyama created a rough outline for the arcs, but a lot of the details were left either intentionally or unintentionally vague enough that both the anime and manga teams had to find ways to take those ideas and translate them into full arcs or ideas. For specifics:
  • The Universe Survival Saga. Toriyama and his collaborator Toyotaro decided that they wanted an 80-person battle royale tournament, but only designed four characters for it^note Excluding the Universe 6 characters already introduced in their own story arc: Ribrianne and the three main Pride Troopers Jiren, Toppo, and Dyspo. All of the other characters' designs were created by various Toei staffers, who also helped flesh them out: Toriyama only designed Ribrianne as fat, while Toei staff suggested making her a parody Magical Girl based on their work on Pretty Cure. However, in other ways the trope is averted: Toriyama's original draft for the story included a full beginning-to-end write-up that covered the main plot points, what happened to every member of Team Universe 7, and even Frieza being called in to replace Majin Buu when the latter falls asleep.
  • During the Future Trunks Saga, Toriyama wasn't keen on the idea of bringing back Vegito, saying that there was no way Vegeta would agree to it, but Toyotaro convinced him to go through with it by saying that they could make it meaningful.
• Buronson, writer of Fist of the North Star, has admitted in interviews to never plan things out and write on the fly. For instance, the initial reason Kenshiro has the seven scars on his chest is simply that it would be cool, and Buronson came up later with the idea they were inflicted by his Rival Turned Evil. Buronson considers this method of writing very effective since the readers can't predict what will happen if the writer doesn't know either.
• Much like its initial influence Fist of the North Star, Hirohiko Araki has admitted that he's been essentially making up JoJo's Bizarre Adventure as he goes. While this is impressive in that the story likes to make a lot of callbacks, it does explain the more "villain of the week" format that was in much of parts 3-5.
  • While Parts 3 and 5 had the goal of defeating DIO and The Boss respectively, Part 4 is where this trope is very apparent. Jotaro comes to Josuke's hometown of Morioh in pursuit of a notorious serial killer, who's defeated in the opening chapters/episodes. Said serial killer was given his Stand by someone who shot him with a special bow and arrow...who's dead shortly thereafter, usurped by one of the people he shot and granted a Stand. Said character floats around for a bit before coming out to face the heroes and shortly after that after he does he's defeated too. Then another serial killer is introduced with more buildup and mystery built around him...but soon enough he's defeated as well, at least until Araki finally decided to keep him around as the Big Bad and he somehow managed to escape the heroes and gain a new identity, disappearing without a trace. Following this he remains the Big Bad and discerning his identity again becomes a large part of the Part.
• While Eiichiro Oda of the One Piece fame certainly doesn't improvise plot all the time, he may actually be doing it more often than his fans - who almost worship him for his use of Chekhov's Armory - realize. He has admitted that some things were made up more or less on the spot:
  • Vivi wasn't supposed to be the series' best-known princess and honorary Straw Hat at first. She was just supposed to be a generic, short-lived Arc Villain even though The Reveal about her being a princess came a few chapters later, meaning that Oda made that up rather spontaneously. This is why her face completely changes design between two scenes, going from harsh and sharp-eyed to soft and wide-eyed.
  • Trafalgar Law was introduced extremely suddenly along with the other Supernovas because Oda's editor wanted him to make some interesting characters for the Sabaody arc. So even though he's a very significant character in Doflamingo's arc, his involvement wasn't planned during Doflamingo's first few appearances, neither was the fact that he's a D.
  • Downplayed with the Going Merry: She was originally supposed to be the Straw Hats' ship for the whole series. Then Oda realized how underwhelming the little caravel looked compared to the ginormous enemy ships, and decided to "kill" her off and let the Straw Hats have a bigger ship. Still, her "death" was planned a couple of years before it actually happened, but it wasn't planned when she was introduced.
• Bakuman。 is a series about fictional manga creators by the same authors as the aforementioned Death Note, and it portrays nearly every writer at Weekly Shonen Jump as making things up as they go, mostly because they spend so long with their series on the verge of cancellation. The clearest demonstration comes when the main two characters realize the best ending to a chapter was the revelation that its events were caused by an earlier chapter, even though they planned no such thing when the earlier chapter was written.
• Naruto creator Masashi Kishimoto stated that he'd made Madara Uchiha so powerful that he had no clue how he could be defeated. Eventually, he came to a solution: having him be stabbed in the back by a Diabolus ex Nihilo, who was even stronger but easier to defeat due to inexperience.
• Hiro Mashima admits he's had a weird relationship with this trope to varying degrees depending on his work.
  • Rave Master: This only happened in minor doses as he was planning ahead, with the only major change being the first quarter of the manga where he jumped into his planned Final Battle as per his editor's suggestion to boost reader interest. After switching out the Big Bad with another, Mashima was able to correct course relatively smoothly, with the rest of the manga playing out more or less exactly as he wanted from the second half onward.
  • Fairy Tail: Plays this completely straight, with the one pre-determined story element being The Hero's search for the dragon who raised him. Everything else—from the reasons for said dragon's disappearance to entire story arcs—was made up on the fly, though not without Foreshadowing; it's just that the things he foreshadowed were typically either made up at that moment or weren't worked out yet.
  • EDENS ZERO: According to Mashima, it lies somewhere in between his levels of planning for Rave Master and Fairy Tail, setting specific characters and story beats in stone while making up everything in between. Some of his plans have wound up being slightly distorted because of this, with certain characters being introduced earlier than anticipated.
• Miki Yoshikawa of Flunk Punk Rumble and Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches has stated that she and her editor usually only planned the story one chapter at a time and had little idea of what would happen in future chapters. In most cases, anyway; there are some reveals - such as Miyamura's reason to transfer to Suzaku and Nancy's secret - that have so much foreshadowing that they were clearly planned several chapters in advance.
• A Downplayed example with Neon Genesis Evangelion. The show was put into production with a plot that had more or less been outlined from start to finish, and the series did by and large follow this outline to begin with. However, much of the second half of said plot outline had to be scrapped and rewritten from scratch during production, as some crucial scenes had an unintentional similarity to the Aum Shinrikyo cult's terrorist gas attack on the Tokyo subway in March 1995. The latter half of production also happened to be at the same time the series creator Hideaki Anno was undergoing heavy treatment for his clinical depression, the experience of which also started to creep into the scripts. As a result, the show started seriously deviating from its original plans around Episode 16, resulting in the Mind Screw sequences the latter part of the show is (in)famous for.
• According to Monkey Punch, Lupin III only even exists because he wanted to create a manga but had no idea what he wanted to make it about. When the publishers he applied for asked what he wanted to make, he hadn't thought of it, but felt like he had to give an answer right there, or else he wouldn't get the job (though whether or not that would have actually been the case is unknown). His quick answer was that he wanted to make something like Arsène Lupin. The publishers approved of it, he was allowed to create the manga, and the rest, as they say, is history.
• The author of Gravitation outright admitted in the author's notes for one of the later volumes that she had no idea what she was writing and was basically just making it up on the fly.
• According to this interview, Hayao Miyazaki's films go into production before he's finished storyboarding them, or even deciding how the rest of the story will even play out.
• Yoshitoshi ABe has stated that Haibane Renmei was written without plans in mind, as he wanted to "pull the story from [his] subconscious".

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