Kidfic

Fanfic genre based on the idea of giving one or more characters a child to raise. This is a common device for promoting a favored shipping (often slash), by showing how well the favored pair act as parents together. Sometimes the resident badass will be given a child to soften them (can be seen as somewhat related to Morality Pet) before pairing them with the hero.

In some cases the child may be another canon character, de-aged in some manner. In other cases, it can be the instantiation of an Intercontinuity Crossover, with a child imported from another story or series.

When one or more males are involved in the process, mpreg is always a possibility.

If the author is particularly unoriginal, Patchwork Kids or Gender Equals Breed may ensue.

If this is canonical, it may be a Parents for a Day situation. Heavily overlaps with Fan-Created Offspring.

Add a few years, and you may have a Spin-Offspring.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• The Lucky Ones, an Inuyasha fanfiction by Terri Bota, is one of the most well-known.
• Death Note:
  • I Won't Say revolves around L and Light raising Mello, Matt, and Near.
  • Here's a Death Note one that is closer to the tone of the original story.
• 25 Years Later is a story starting 25 years since the day that Ash and Misty first met one another, and has them having a daughter together.

Comics

• All That Remains in which Tony Stark takes in the female clone of Captain America after the Marvel Civil War (2006).
• Ice Cream Ice Cream by Ash Ai is a series of one shots that has Tony and Pepper raising their their little kid, Jared.
• The appropriately named fic, Xmen: Sabertooth Mpreg, is one of the rare kid fics that isn’t warm and fuzzy.
• Calvin and Hobbes:
  • Calvin & Hobbes has lots of fics where an older Calvin has a son and/or daughter, often with Susie Derkins.
  • In Frankie and Hobbes, they have a daughter in first grade called Frankie who Hates Baths and is a prankster.
  • In JT and Hobbes, Calvin is dead but they have a son named JT.

Crossovers

• Many fans of the Harry Potter franchise have been known to write fics where Harry is taken from the Dursleys and raised by a character from another franchise, who is almost always portrayed as a better parent than his relatives. These writers will sometimes dial up the abuse Harry suffered as a means of making the new character raise him more justified. Fics that do this include If Wishes Were Ponies (where Harry is adopted by Twilight Sparkle), Harry Tano (Harry becomes the adopted son/Padawan of Ahsoka Tano). Canon Wizarding World characters will often comment on how Harry is happier/healthier with his adopted parent than if he'd been left at the Dursleys.

Film — Animation

• Bolt: Subverted in "The Kippies" from the series The Bolt Chronicles. The initial section of the story suggests Bolt and Mittens have produced hybrid Patchwork Kids that are part canine and part feline. It's revealed later that this is all a daydream conjured up by Mittens, who is unhappy that she'll never have offspring with Bolt or otherwise.
• Frozen:
  • Becoming Free has a sequel called Becoming Family where Elsa and her lover Freya adopt an orphaned girl.
  • The oneshot Love Will Thaw revolves around Elsa being too scared to hold her nephew.
• Zootopia:
  • The Zootopia fanfic The Violet Diaries is about Nick and Judy having a bunnyfox kit named Violet.
  • In Take a Stand Nick Wilde discovers that he has a six-year-old daughter named Luna with one of his ex-girlfriends. Which complicates his relationship with Judy somewhat.

Film — Live Action

• Star Trek (2009):
  • So Wise We Grow is a Kirk/Spock Star Trek (2009) story in which the Vulcan Council locates Spock's son among the surviving Vulcans. Which would be great, except Spock's never heard of the kid before in his life.
  • Another Star Trek (2009) is the Trust series; in which prior to his marriage to Spock, Sufficiently Advanced Aliens force Kirk to address his deep-seated trust issues by regressing into a troubled childhood. It's up to Spock and Kirk's elder brother Sam to help him get back to normal. Handles the subject matter more tastefully than one would expect, and includes social commentary on the TOS-canon Federation's system of term-marriages.
  • Fanfiction.net has a Star Trek (2009) community dedicated to archiving de-aged fics, fic about the crew's childhoods, and childhood A Us. Mostly de-aged fic.
  • Yet another Star Trek (2009) example: The DVAS series. The full-length story focuses more on how the Deadly Vulcan Assassination Squad came to exist in the first place, but the side-stories are ridiculously adorable little tales featuring Jim, Spock, and the titular Squad - Selik the Adorably Precocious Child, T'Pralena the starship captain in training, and T'Lalia the Innocent Prodigy.
• Youngling, a Star Wars fanfic involving Anakin being de-aged to a three-year-old. Slightly more unusual in that Anakin remembers everyone and everything perfectly, but still has the mindset and emotional capability and the mindset of a (slightly-advanced) toddler.

Literature

• Harry Potter:
  • Laume (on fanfiction.net) has written several kidfics for Harry Potter, including:
    • Last Chance, in which a slightly more sensitive Dumbledore ends up raising the young Tom Riddle, and
    • Four and Counting, in which a potions mishap reduces Severus Snape to age four, several years after Voldemort's defeat.
  • A very well-written example would be Stealing Harry by Sam The Story Teller (link), which starts with Harry being raised by first the Dursleys and then Remus and Sirius (who open a bookshop near the Dursleys' house to keep a watch on him, then kidnap him after discovering he was being abused).
  • This Harry Potter fanfiction, called Baby Project, is an example.
  • Also this classic Dramione fic, Future Parents Program.
  • Malfoy Child, is a classic Drarry fic in which Draco is de-aged and put into Harry's care.
  • This one takes quit long until the parents are revealed.

Live Action TV

• In the Leverage fandom on livejournal there's a somewhat common trend of de-aging the team's badass bruiser Eliot to be a small child and then sticking him under Nate's care.
• Supernatural:
  • Blessed Is His Child, a Supernatural kidfic, of all things that manages to be hilarious and heartbreaking within the space of a chapter! (pairings Dean/Cas, Sam/Gabriel and Crowley/Anna, as well as various OC pairings). Here's part one, which links to the rest. Be warned, it's unfinished and may well be abandoned. And here's the prologue. If you read it, you'll be on the same page as the angels; if you don't, you'll be on the same page as the Winchesters.
  • Another Supernatural Kidfic series: The Adventures of John Gabriel Winchester, The Messiah. about Dean and Castiel's son. The pairings are Dean/Cas and Sam/Ruby.
  • This plot actually occurred in canon in seasons 13-15 when Castiel and the Winchesters adopted the antichrist Jack. Since Jack had a Plot-Relevant Age-Up to become a teenager right after his birth, though, there are several fics that have him stay an infant or get de-aged to one to better fit this trope.
• There are a LOT of House finding out he has a daughter to the point of the fans getting annoyed at them.
• NUMB3RS:
  • One story, Nixie, has Don discovering he has a young daughter with a dangerous woman who is being charged with trafficking.
  • In a series known as Watson, Colby has a daughter named Nena that he raises with Charlie.
  • There also numerous fics that have Don and Charlie as kids.
• Sherlock:
  • The Lizzyverse, a Sherlock series, is about Sherlock and John's adopted daughter Elizabeth. It starts out with how they go about scaring off her boyfriends, and skips all over the age range after that.
  • Getting Better is an AU in which both Sherlock and John are single parents, centred around the growing friendship between their children, Emily and Tristram.
  • In this drabble, Sherlock's abused son shows up on their doorstep. No pairings.
  • Another novel-length Sherlock kidfic is the Cinnamon 'verse, in which Sherlock has been raising his adopted daughter Imogen since before John moved in.
• The Nursery Files is an entire website dedicated to The X-Files kidfics from various couples in various categories.
• White Collar gets two with a de-aged Neal for Peter and Elizabeth to raise: One with him as a teenager and another with him as a toddler.
• There is a whole website dedicated to Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis kidfic, mostly of the deaged!character type: The Littleverse.
• Many Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfics feature a character, usually Faith or Dawn, being de-aged and cared for by the other Scoobies.
• The Good Omens (2019) fic Getting a Wiggle On takes the Crack Fic premise of "Crowley tries to prank Aziraphale by giving him fake snake eggs to take care of but Aziraphale's complete belief that they're real causes him to subconsciously miracle them into actually hatching, resulting in five snake babies resembling both him and Crowley" and makes it surprisingly sweet and adorable. It became popular enough that several other authors have written Recursive Fanfiction about the continued adventures of Crowley, Aziraphale, and their new snake children.
  • There are also several Good Omens fics, like And the Antichrist Makes Three, that have Aziraphale and Crowley decide that instead of letting the Antichrist get adopted by a human family, they should raise him themselves as their own son so that they're in a better position to convince him to not end the world when he comes of age.

Video Games

• The Team Fortress 2 fanfic Something New is about Scout and Miss Pauling having a little girl named Alice.

Web Animation

• RWBY:
  • The fic Snowflake! is about Yang and Weiss' 5-year old daughter Snowflake.
  • Flame's Shade is a fic where Raven is killed but her newborn daughter Ace survives. While on a mission, Ruby coincidentally comes across her half-Faunus sister and decides to raise her, mainly alongside Blake.
  • Little Bird is about Qrow's daughter Robin as she grows up into a huntress.

Web Comics

• El Goonish Shive: "Mommy Bear", by Laparoscopic, which is about Grace and Sarah's kids and what happens when someone decides to threaten their family. Spoiler alert: it doesn't go well for them.
• There are a few Homestuck fanfics based on this, such as "Cold Grublings". Made very convenient by the setting's local Applied Phlebotinum - "ectobiology", which allows an instant creation of a child which is a genetic mix of any two persons from anywhere and anytime (regardless of gender or age), without the need for actual physical contact. The universe introduced in Act 6 created a lot of these, as it had the four human heroes switching places with their ectobiological parents. The Grand Finale depicting several grubs and kids being ectobiologically born on Earth C and The Homestuck Epilogues (which is partly a parody of common fanfic tropes) introducing some semi-canon teen offspring of the kids didn't hurt either.

Western Animation

• Thundercracker's Glory by Kenya Starflight is a Transformers: Generation 1 fic in which Thundercracker finds himself caretaker to his orphaned niece after his co-creation (sister) is killed. Shenanigans ensue.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Past Sins with Twilight Sparkle as a mother.
  • It's a really common plot concept to make Derpy Hooves a mother to Dinky Doo, a filly who somewhat resembles Derpy and is accepted as her daughter in fanon (though they've only been seen together in a few semi-official merch items). It usually shows how Derpy's ambiguous disorder affects her role as a mother. Amethyst Star is sometimes included as Dinky's older sister because she and Dinky participated together in the Sisterhooves Social.
  • Adopted Displaced is the Intercontinuity Crossover variety of this trope, seeing My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic's Mane Six and others de-aged to babies and then sent to alternate universes to be raised by different parents.
• Oddly popular in the Young Justice (2010) fandom for a while, usually involving Klarion turning someone(s) younger and forcing someone else to take care of him/her. (Alternatively, in a lot of fics Klarion turned people into cute animals for the same purpose.)
• Better Off Not Knowing is a sort of inversion of the concept, in which the biological daughter of two canon antagonists is Happily Adopted by characters with no connection to the main plot.
• Parthenogenesis is a Where On Earth is Carmen Sandiego? fanfic from the POV of a now-retired Carmen's daughter, Marguerite. However, Carmen is a single mother and the identity of Maggie's father is never revealed to the reader.
• The More than My Friend fanfic series is a Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends AU where Frankie adopts Mac after his family dies in an accident.

Other

• Kijikun (on livejournal) has written several kidfics for Biker Mice from Mars, The Incredibles, Highlander, Due South, and Iron Man/Captain America.
  • The Redemption Clause which follows the growing relationship between Buddy Pine and a adult Violet Parr, partly centered on Buddy Pine's adopted daughter.
• Harry Potter And The Invincible Technomage: A crossover one by Clell 65619 in which Tony Stark (and by extension, many of the premiere superheroes of the Marvel Universe) raises a young Harry Potter.
• The Son of Mine series on Fan Fiction.Net takes places in the Guyver universe, and gives Masaki Murakami a son.
• Common in Touhou doujins. Some of the more notable ones include Life of Maid and Mamange (Danbooru warning) as well as quite a few others.
• Marie is Coming is a story about Isabella's pregnancy with Marie Flynn.

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