Hardcoded

The only surviving works of art left to understand humanity by, out of everything that ever has been or will be created, are eleven thousand Danganronpa fanfics about Kaito Momota.

Not even the original game. Just the fanfiction.

It's a great concept. I feel like the game could have fleshed it out more: I came in knowing very little about Danganronpa and I came out still knowing very little. Now, I was a nerdy kid who spent a lot of time online, so I've read a lot of fanfiction. This actually includes quite a few Danganronpa multicrossovers, a trend where you would take 10+ different settings and put the characters from all of them into a Danganronpa game and force them to murder each other. Like DanganRonpa 69: There’s MORE goddamn hope!?, which features Luigi, Fluttershy, Hatsune Miku, and Sans Undertale, among other characters. Or Danganronpa: Teenage Wasteland, which features Hermione Granger, Ruby Rose, and the main character of Ready Player One. Those stories were fun, but they didn't tell me much about what actually happens to the characters of Danganronpa within Danganronpa, and years later I've forgotten most of it anyway. And no, Kaito Momota wasn't in any of the stories I read.

Some of the fanfiction I read was actually quite decent, at least by the standards of self-published internet novels. I would not put the two stories I linked above in the "actually quite decent" category, for the record. But I think this game doesn't quite capture the feeling of digging into your latest teenage obsession, staying up until 1am reading a story before a school day and being convinced, absolutely convinced that it's the greatest thing ever, an invaluable work of art, and realizing that there are only five people in the entire world who share that opinion, and none of this will be remembered because nobody cares, because all of it falls away forgotten in the end.

I wanted a closer look at the people who must have read and written these stories, at how fanfiction is related to society and culture in general, and how that reflects in the content of the actual stories themselves. More details about the actual plot of Danganronpa and what Kaito does in it would be nice, so we can see how that gets spun in the eleven thousand stories about him. Have you ever seen these fanlore people who do deep dives on the statistics of fanfiction? Stuff like what language it gets written in, and who gets paired up with who, and the most common tags, and all that. You can't analyze a body of writing without analyzing the society around it. Eleven thousand is a lot, so even if you only have the stories to compare with each other, there should be something there. I want to know how AO3 changes over the decades. I want to know what people are writing about Kaito in different languages. I want to see the Kaito World War III historical fiction AUs. I want to read the Kaito fanfiction written in the year 2079, damnit.