What Bit Of Fan Fic/Edit/Theory Made a Thing Better or even GREAT For You?

[Mannahnin]

Very possible, though a quick search doesn't find any acknowledgement of an influence.

Hidden Fortress is still a pretty archetypal heroic story, just the viewpoint framing is from the picaresque farmers.

Sure. Just noting the common element of both stories involving a couple of peons getting caught up in great and dramatic events, and us seeing them through their eyes.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

Makes me wonder if Tom Stoppard took any inspiration from that for Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead. The play debuted just 8 years after The Hidden Fortress...

I mean ideas get into people's heads all sorts of ways, but I think if the two are connected it's because the origin source for both is likely that so many plays of Shakespeare (of which both Stoppard and Kurosowa were obviously avid fans) involve a secondary cast of (usually menial) characters less connected to the main narrative events who nontheless witness some of them and have their own secondary narratives. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern did not get this treatment in Hamlet, they are supporting players in every scene they appear despite the fact that they end up getting killed ignomiously offstage by the play's events, so Stoppard gave them their own play.

I'm less confident in speaking to Kurosowa's inspiration because, while he certainly had studied Shakespeare (cf. Throne of Blood or Ran) I don't know what other inspirations he had, and while there are many authors and traditions of narrative, theater, etc. which never give secondary characters scenes front and center or their own narrative, its still not an idea unique to Shakespeare.

I read or saw all of the works referenced above more than a decade ago so if I wrote something wildly nonsensical I apologize.