#i didnt link ihtwcyn because again i hardly count that and thus never mentioned them

[n7punk]

Does fanart ever inspire your writing?

Sometimes! Actually, I meant to do a post for this and forgot 😅 So I've never had a fanart inspire plot really, but I have had it inspire setting! Below is a list, as complete as I can make it.

Some pieces of art have helped motivate me when I was already working on a fic with a similar setting, but I see that more as me bending the art around the idea I have in my head rather than it inspiring me. Sometimes I wanna tag art I see with my preexisting AUs if it fits, but I worry that the artist might not like it, especially if it's for their own AU, so I usually only do that if it's the piece of art that kicked off me making the AU in the first place because then it's like "Hey, you arted so good it made me write a thing."

SLAS: As mentioned in the second author's note, I started thinking about an ex-assassin bodyguard AU primarily because of this art. Though bodyguards was a trope I had been eyeing beforehand, that art turned it into inescapable brainrot.

OTOS: The fic was completely my own, but one of the smut scenes in the final chapter was inspired by an art done by Jem. It's NSFW so I'm not sure about linking it directly here, but it's linked in the final chapter's author's note.

BIOTS: This is halfsie, but I'll include it. The smutfic of the Greys/Waiting For My Spaceship To Come Back For Me series includes glowdora (Glowing!Adora), which has been featured in art on NSFW SPOP Twitter. A friend and I were actually talking about glowdora in DMs literally two weeks before we saw the art for it start, though, so it's kinda handwavey, and no one particular piece of it is responsible. The art did inspire me, but the idea also wasn't unique to the art.

iHTWcyn: Only halfsies again. I had the idea already, saw a piece of art of farm girl Adora that I can't for the life of me find now, and just sighed and made a new word document LOL. The art is somewhere on my blog but I'm not going digging for it now considering it was just the push I needed to write the idea down. This was back in December and I'm not scrolling that far.

Three Makes Two: The kitten brainrot took me because of a mamacatradora that my friend @jem-jarrett (once again) did, but it's not posted and it's for another AU that isn't mine so I can't link it. However, it did feature Catra and Adora wearing babyslings and carrying their two kittens around, which gave me brainrot and led to me writing TMT. It shares no similarities with the AU the art was originally made for, but that's what kicked it off.

Lullaby of the Drowned: Another halfies inspiration. I had been thinking about various ways to do a mermaid AU since late 2020 and narrowed in on the idea of a Pirate Catra/Siren Adora AU in April of 2021. I even added the AU to my upcoming projects list on May 18th under the name “Carry Me To Unknown Shores” (which I only changed after I started writing the fic). There had been various pieces of mermaid art (some generic and some for She-ra) that made me go “damn, I gotta get back to that mermaid AU” but this one is the one that gave me the idea for Adora’s siren form looking like She-ra and the story beats started following after seeing the art. I outlined it very quickly.

Let Me Ride: I got the idea to first do a motorcycle AU from all the fanart with them, which eventually morphed into the idea for Let Me Ride.

On the Rocks is an unreleased AU inspired by a piece of art in a similar manner to SLAS, but I can't say more on that without spoiling it. I'll add it when I can.