[Meta Monday] Fics based on other media

This month I thought it might be fun to talk about Fics I’ve written that were inspired by other media. Most of the time I get my ideas from a random line of dialogue I hear, or a weird fever dream, but every so often I’ll come across a piece of media that makes my brain run wild.

I’m gonna start this off with My Father’s Son since it’s my current Ao3 WIP, which was inspired by a Japanese movie called Like Father, Like Son.

I actually watched it for a university course on Japanese cinema, and it immediately clicked with my brain, which of course started me down the line of “now make it ktdk”. I ended up rewatching it with a fandom friend while we chatted about it and threw ktdk ideas around. It’s obviously morphed a lot from the movie, but the premise of finding out when the kids are starting school came straight from the movie, and the difference in lifestyle/economic status of the families is pretty close too.

Before I named the boys in the fic, I used to think of them by the names of the movie characters all the time! I almost ended up using one of them because I just couldn’t think of one I liked better, but I did some kanji-digging and found Hiroki and Yuuto, which seemed more appropriate for the characters 🙂 Although everyone seems to spell Yuuto’s name wrong in the comments so maybe that wasn’t my best choice haha.

Of course, Like Father, Like Son doesn’t result in the two dads hooking up 70 chapters down the line, and you can safely watch the movie without spoiling the ending of the fic or anything – the storylines diverge pretty early on! I highly recommend it though, it’s a great watch.

Next I’m going to one of the classics: Second Chance. I’ve talked about this one before, but this entire fic was inspired by a song – “Haven’t Had Enough” by Mariana’s Trench. A friend had recently introduced me to the band and my brain kept getting stuck on this song.

Well, I just wish we could go back one more time and begin it
Back before I lost myself somewhere, somewhere in it

This kept conjuring ideas for me of Izuku trying over and over to get something right, going back to the beginning to do it differently and getting so caught up in getting it perfect that he kind of loses himself along the way.

We've been stuck now so long
We just got the start wrong
One more last try
I'mma get the ending right

Carrying on from the idea spawned in the first bit, the “we” in here felt like him talking to Katsuki, trying (badly) to explain to him that it’s okay, they messed up the start but they can try again and get it right this time, which is kind of where the scene where he makes plans with Katsuki and chooses to start over came from.

(As an aside, I wrote that scene with the intention that Katsuki thinks he’ll back out, he knows trying to stop him won’t work, so instead he plays along, makes the plans, and thinks Izuku will calm down and move on by the time they’re done – I got a lot of comments though, complaining that “Katsuki would never let him do that” and “there’s no way he’d believe it that easily” and so on. That was easily one of my most controversial chapters of anything I’ve posted)

And of course there’s the intro/outro pair:

Testing, testing, I'm just suggesting
You and I might not be the best thing

Testing, testing, I'm just suggesting
You and I might just be the best thing

Because Izuku goes from trying to do it all on his own, leaving Katsuki out of it and just trying to shoulder the burden by himself, to learning and realising they can work together – along with their classmates, eventually – to actually make things better, without destroying himself in the process.

For the record, it’s still one of my favourite songs, and probably one of my favourite fics, too.

Carrying on the music train, the little-read fic Leave A Light On, inspired by the song of the same name (by Tom Walker). This was a more literal words-to-storyline interpretation, and was a lot heavier/darker than a lot of things I write, so it never got a lot of attention.

The second someone mentioned you were all alone
I could feel the trouble coursin' through your veins
Now I know it's got a hold

Izuku is obviously the type to isolate himself and take on too much, and I liked the thought of everyone else taking him at face value when he says he’s doing okay, of them just thinking “oh he needs a little time” while Katsuki knows he’s spiralling and needs to do something about it. But Izuku is stubborn of course and won’t make that easy for him.

Tell me what's been happenin', what's been on your mind
Lately, you've been searchin' for a darker place to hide

This part to me is Izuku’s sink into dark habits, which gave me the ideas of him drinking too much and playing fast and loose with the law, trying to find a way to forget about his guilt and pain instead of acknowledging it and working through it.

And of course we have the chorus:

If you look into the distance, there's a house upon the hill
Guidin' like a lighthouse
To a place where you'll be safe to feel our grace
'Cause we've all made mistakes
If you've lost your way
I will leave the light on

Katsuki can’t force him to get help, but he hopes he can make Izuku feel safe with him, that maybe he’ll be able to push through the dark patch if he has someone to lean on, so he wants Izuku to know he’s always welcome there, that Katsuki is always waiting to welcome him in, and that he’s ready when Izuku accepts that he needs help.

I definitely think I could have done better with this fic, I tried to work in some other formatting stuff etc that didn’t quite work out how I wanted, but I still think it’s an emotional story!

And finally, we have my current baby: All Who Wander. This is based on one of my favourite video games, Harvest Moon: One World, which a lot of people didn’t like the style of, but I adored it. I had a lot of thoughts about the city covered in snow and how I was still getting scenes about the citizens starving while I had a backpack full of food to spare – they needed to add a game mechanic where gifting people food or selling it to the store would impact the story or something. Anyway, I digress.

It’s the first time a video game has made me want to write something, so that was a weird experience – unless you count Animal Crossing but those fics were based on my antics with friends and the characters playing the game, rather than an AU based on the game itself.

Anyway, in One World you travel around to different farm areas in various cities, do quests for the villagers, and grow crops – each city has a different environment and sometimes crops mutate based on which one you plant them in, but I decided to leave that part out of the fic since Izuku doesn’t have access to spreadsheets. There’s also a whole mining subplot that I mostly abandoned too other than a couple of vague references, because it didn’t seem relevant to the story, but who knows, maybe somewhere down the line Izuku will decide he needs to go mine glass for Mei.

Seriously though how do you mine glass it makes no sense.

Anyway that’s a little peek into some of the ways I spawn fic ideas! Happy October!!