For each of my major fandoms, I do a short writeup talking about how it fits into my fandom history. A fandom qualifies as 'major' if I've written five fics for it, or ten thousand words across at least three fics.
The latest addition to the stable is a little weird!
FanganronpasThe
Danganronpa games have a very distinct formula: a group of people, each with a specialised talent, find themselves trapped in an unfamiliar location together. They're told that the only way to escape is to kill one of their fellow captives and get away with it; if they succeed, the murderer will go free, but everyone else will be executed. Every chapter is its own little murder mystery: someone turns up dead, and the survivors have to escape execution by working out which of their friends is responsible.
It's a great formula! The murder mysteries are fun, and the fact that you get to know all the potential victims and killers in advance really heightens the emotional impact of the cases. If a beloved character is killed or, worse, turns out to be the murderer, it's genuinely devastating, both to the characters solving the mystery and to you as the player.
Because the
Danganronpa formula is so distinctive, some ambitious people have taken it upon themselves to create
Danganronpa-style stories of their own: fan
Danganronpas, or Fanganronpas. And then I got into these fan projects, and then I started writing
fanfiction for these fan projects, and here we are now!
I didn't originally plan to check out any Fanganronpa projects; I love the original games, but I wasn't sure fan replicas would scratch the same itch. But I became vaguely aware of one Fanganronpa in particular, the YouTube series
Danganronpa: Despair Time, because I follow someone on Tumblr who's very passionate about Ace, a character from it. I was a little surprised to learn via his blog that this fanmade character had won a
Danganronpa character poll on Tumblr, beating multiple well-liked canonical
Danganronpa characters; was this fan project really that popular?
When AO3 created a new canonical tag for
Danganronpa: Despair Time, meaning
Despair Time fics were no longer folded into the general
Danganronpa tag, I messaged the aforementioned Ace enthusiast to let him know. I was
very surprised to learn, in the process, that
Despair Time had over 1,400 works on AO3. Apparently people really liked this thing! Given my love of
Danganronpa, and the fact that at the time I thought we'd probably never see another official
Danganronpa release, maybe I should at least give it a try.
I watched
Danganronpa: Despair Time at the age of thirty-seven and went insane about it. It had its rough edges here and there, but it absolutely nailed
Danganronpa's tone and emotion, it had a lot of fun plot developments and twists, and I really enjoyed the characters. One character in particular is up there with my absolute favourites from the official
Danganronpa games.
The other Fanganronpas I've investigated since then are
Project: Eden's Garden and
Danganronpa Another, the latter of which I'm still working through. I really enjoyed
Eden's Garden; I don't think it gets the tone as well as
Despair Time, but it's a stunningly polished achievement - it honestly looks better than the official
Danganronpa games do - and I'm looking forward to seeing where it's going. I'm struggling more with
Danganronpa Another, largely because of translation issues, but I'm finding it interesting as a historical curiosity - it's an early Fanganronpa project that had a big impact on the overall Fanganronpa scene - and it does have a terrible boy I'm really enjoying.
As a side note, the large
Despair Time AO3 work numbers that originally provoked my curiosity are actually a little misleading! It turns out there are four specific incredibly prolific authors who have, between them, written approximately 750 works for
Danganronpa: Despair Time; the
most prolific of the four has personally written 285
Despair Time fics. I have to admire the dedication that leads people to write literally hundreds of fics for a niche fan project, especially when there's not much of a readership to be found; half of the 1,600 fics in the
Despair Time AO3 tag have under ten kudos.
Favourite character: David Chiem of
Danganronpa: Despair Time, by a long way; I was
not expecting to lose my mind this hard over a character in a fan project, but it turns out he's absolute catnip for me. My favourite character in
Eden's Garden is Wolfgang; my favourite character in
Danganronpa Another is Kinjo. Come to think of it, all three of them share the quality 'this seems like a pleasant young man - oh, no, something is very wrong with this boy', meaning they appeal to the same part of me that adores Light Yagami.
Favourite pairing: I really like David/Arei from
Danganronpa: Despair Time; they have some very cute moments, and I was surprised by how invested I became in their dynamic. I'm also absolutely here for horrible David/David selfcest.
Number of words written: 9,645 across five fics: four for
Danganronpa: Despair Time, and one for
Project: Eden's Garden.
Absolutely historic development: if my Fanganronpa fics are counted, my latest fic means the overall amount of fanfiction I've written for
Danganronpa (92,000 words) beats the amount I've written for
Top Gear (90,000 words), making
Danganronpa my most-written-for fandom by wordcount.
...apart from
Assassin's Creed (128,000 words).
Assassin's Creed is kind of a special case because I wrote about 120,000 words for a single project, which is
very unusual for me; I almost exclusively write short one-shots. Let's discount that project for a moment, because 'another fandom has finally dethroned
Top Gear after eighteen years' sounds a lot more impressive than 'another fandom has finally de-second-placed
Top Gear after
Top Gear got knocked into second place nine years ago'.