[Fic Intro] All Who Wander

Starting today you'll be seeing the initial chapters of All Who Wander - another fic that will be very long by the time I finish it. This one is much more recently spawned than the others so far, and I've spent probably a hundred hours on planning it so far - the mindmap is wild on this one.

All Who Wander is an AU based on a Harvest Moon game I was obsessed with last year - I know how ridiculous that sounds, trust me. It's gonna be a very slow burn as Katsuki and Izuku won't even meet for at least the first 10 chapters, but I hope the story itself is engaging enough in its own rights to keep people going, and there will be plenty of romantic interaction later on! The first few chapters are very short, along with a couple of the later ones to come, but the rest should be a lot longer.

This is the kind of fic where I got so obsessed with the world building that I just never got around to actually writing the story - every time I started, I thought of something for further down the line and got into a deep dive on some weird research topic.

On the bright side, I now know a lot about making homemade paper?

I'm not usually an AU writer, as most of you know, but there were just so many elements of the Harvest Moon: One World story which felt so fitting for these boys. I enjoyed playing it so much, but there were just one or two things that I felt like the developers had missed so much potential with, things that if they'd made them slightly different could have made the world and the story so much more engaging.

If you've played the game, you can probably predict where a lot of the story will be going, and you may even be able to guess the few elements I wanted to change and work with haha. On the bright side, with the multiple options for romancing in the game, you don't necessarily know which one will be Kacchan!

Although it becomes pretty obvious in literally the second chapter, so... Yeah.

I'm actually kind of curious how open-world the game really was, if you could visited the towns in a totally different order than I did, so while I'll be basing this on my own experiences, feel free to let me know if you did it differently! And if you haven't played it but are a fan of Harvest Moon games, I definitely recommend it - tbh the reviews were surprisingly bad, but I think it might have been my favourite one so far??

Anyway that's enough rambling about Harvest Moon, time for the spoilery plot summary, so feel free to stop here if you want to be surprised!

All Who Wander is a story about Izuku, an eighteen-year-old who sets out to see the world (or at least the country) and discover foods he's never tried before. He lives in a world where crops only grow in very localised areas, where most people have lived their whole lives on just one or two different crops/foods, but an old book tells him stories of the different varieties that used to be available, and he's determined to find them and try them all, and maybe bring some back home with him. Along the way he will make friends with all kinds of people who live all kinds of different lives, and be exposed to a world of experiences he never could have dreamed existed - and he'll have to make a choice on how he wants to spend the rest of his life.

I hope you enjoy this story even half as much as I enjoyed dreaming it up.

[Chapter 1]