Heroes of Ashihara Village

**Heroes of Ashihara Village**, (formerly Heroes of Animal Village) or **HOAV**, is a series of books created by Meg Stock, better known Angawd online.

It chronicles the adventures of eight anthropomorphic animals: Isabelle, K.K., Tom, Rubicante, Sophie, Reese, Blathers, and Kapp'n, gifted with elemental powers as they fight to preserve the land of Nippon.

The series is inspired by many other properties, the most notable being *Animal Crossing* and *Okami*, as well as the webcomic *Chakra* by Arven92.

## History

### 2019

The project began in 2019, after Angawd purchased *Animal Crossing: New Leaf* and subsequently became involved in the fandom. Soon after, she and a friend began working on a spin-off parody fanfiction together, titled *Not Nook's Child*. The story revolved around Dominic, the imagined child of Tom Nook and Sable, and his grievances with his parents. This story was published on Wattpad and is still readable today, but only a few chapters were ever finished. After a while of attempting to continue the story, another idea took hold: the journey of multiple select characters from Animal Crossing, blessed with elemental powers, going on a quest to save their village. Like Not Nook's Child, HOAV was initially intended to be a parody due to how removed the concept was from its source material.

Angawd spent most of the year conceptualising ideas for the story, first intending for it to be a book, also to be published on Wattpad like its predecessor. The story was published on August 17th, 2019, with a disclaimer and the allegiances being published on the same day. Although the first chapter was partially written, it was never completed. Due to being preoccupied with other things, the plot of HOAV remained largely in Angawd's head going forward, constantly being worked on and altered.

It was around this time that Angawd considered making the story into a comic as she had visualised from the beginning, however at the time she did not have the time to dedicate to such a large project. As a test, Angawd made two hypothetical comic pages: pages 1 and 2 of the prologue.

### 2020

Come March 2020, lockdown had begun and Angawd had more time to work on HOAV physically. She decided that there was now time to commit to the comic. Over the course of the lockdown, 12 pages were created, completing the prologue and beginning Chapter 1. A cover was also produced and posted before any of the pages. These pages were uploaded to deviantART, Instagram, and Angawd's Animal Crossing Tumblr blog, angawdcrossing bi-monthly, on the 1st and 15th of each month.

### 2021-Present

During 2021, the last two pages were produced, pages 15 and 16. After this, production stopped due to Angawd suffering from mental health difficulties. Whilst these have persisted to date, the story was reworked into an original project. It is currently still in development, and will likely be returning to written format with the end goal of being published in the near future.

## Trivia

The working title of the story was going to be Legends of Animal Village, however it made the story seem as if it was set in the past, so the name was changed.

In the original Animal Crossing version of the story, there were 10 heroes, with Pete and Lyle joining the party as the 'eye in the sky' and the analyst respectively. Additionally, Tortimer was the leader of the heroes, with Tom as his second-in-command.