DCA, an HTML4 webpage

Once upon a time, there was a game called Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, a polished port of a Dreamcast game but now for the Gamecube. My first Sonic game. My brothers and I would play this game a lot, and my life as a gamer-- rather than just someone who watched others play video games-- stemmed from those days. And one of the side attractions in this magnificent early-2000s joy was the "Chao World," a pet-raising environment with rather complex mechanics. You had these cute little fellas, "A-Life" creatures, called chao. You could name them, pet them, hold them, feed them, take them to school where they'd learn how to sing and dance, and you could even enlist them in cute races or karate fights. There were RPG stats to raise, there were animals they could imitate, and there was a whole growth/"evolution" mechanic, a whole tree of possibilities for your chao to grow into, and that's beyond the basic question of raising your chao to be Hero, Neutral, or Dark. This was itself tied to a fundamental well-being mechanic-- do you treat your chao well, or do you abuse them? Do you hold and cradle them, or do you throw them across the room and watch them cry? Do your chao see you and rub their faces against you like a cat, or do they see you and turn away and shiver? You could have a well-treated Dark Chao (a cute lil devil), if you treated them right while playing as a villain character, and vice versa for Hero Chao (a cute lil angel) with hero characters, but abusing them as either will push them towards the opposing alignment. I found all this fascinating and heart-tugging as a child.

Among my brothers, we had an arrangement: Nathan would raise Hero Chao, Adam would raise Neutral Chao, and I would raise Dark Chao. Really, I was the only one who stayed invested in the chao, probably because I was the youngest and incessantly committed to Doing The Right Thing, and... okay let's not get into the psychology right now. The point is, when the day came that we needed to make some room on our Gamecube memory card, Nathan proposed deleting our chao save data, and I agreed knowing it was for the sake of playing more video games. But I still.. felt something. I had grown invested in our silly little virtual creatures and their little perceived personalities. And I was growing into a strange person with an acute awareness of the secret powers of grief-processing within Storytelling (like, I had already had experience with that by then, my life has been weird and lonely and a kid held in secret trying to make himself Known and Taken Seriously). (...the psychology is important.) So.

So.

So in May 2005, when I was 10 years old and finally had a computer to myself, I started a fanfic all about our deleted chao carrying on their lives. And I kept it going to this very day.

Welcome, art appreciators, to Dark Chao Adventures, where DJay forged himself.

There are two primary ways to experience DCA right now:

Over on AO3, I have been uploading and revising DCA for THE DEFINITIVE EDITION. Every episode has Author Notes providing, in sum, informative context for the whole ride. We are currently seven seasons in. Combine this with the SPECIALS and you have my recommended version.
When I was still a kid, my dad gave me a subdomain in his FTP server and taught me the rudiments of HTML, and with that knowledge I made the Official DCA Website, which, amusingly, is now deprecated because it's a hassle to keep logging into the FTP server compared to neocities. If you have already read the AO3 release and want to see what the script used to be like before I changed certain episodes, you can find them all here.

Here on this Website, I have arranged little pages for each season:

And here's your NAVIGATION: Back to Gallery