Tomodachi Life is my new favorite fanfic idea generator

In 2024, I fell in love with the Disney cartoon Pepper Ann. Within weeks, I’d watched the whole series and read all the surviving comics. But I was horrified to find that in the nearly three decades since the show’s premiere, only a handful of fan fiction pieces had ever been published, most either a few hundred words long or barely readable. As any writer who’s joined a dormant fandom knows, it’s exhausting to write without getting much to read in return.

Enter Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. Tomodachi is a Mad Libs simulator, yes — but it’s also an amazing way for me to visualize my favorite characters, putting them into a world where they can walk and talk and generate stories by themselves. 

Tomodachi Life isn’t the first game that lets the player design their own characters, or even their own world. Players have been inserting their OCs into The Sims since release, for example. But Tomodachi has two qualities that you rarely see together, that let it rise above other life sims: Its extreme levels of customization, and its independent NPCs.

These traits turn Tomodachi from a simple life sim into a living fanfic all on its own, as well as an endless spring for fan content.

Customization tools let you create — or recreate — any universe or scenario

Plenty has already been written about Tomodachi Life’s character creator, and how amazing of a tool it is for accurately recreating characters. The first three Miis on my island were Pepper Ann’s main trio, each captured almost perfectly: The lovable loser Pepper Ann, with her pupils that fill up the frames of her glasses; the obsessive bookworm Nicky, with her elongated head; and the misunderstood artist Milo, with his squiggly mouth.

But the island really pops off when you start introducing things that stray from canon, like bizarre new lingo. I started simply — Pepper Ann and her sister chatted about “skating,” My Hero Academia’s Mina Ashido got into “breakdancing,” and so on. Ideas that the canon characters are actually interested in.