Cause like, that’s the weird thing with games that are bare-bones in lore or self-insertionary, they really blur the lines of what is “fanfic” and what is “original work”
Like. The lore I write, and anyone else writes, is primarily made of Original Characters in Original Situations and Original Plots, draped hap-hazardly over the bones of this pixel dragon dress-up game, and sometimes barely even that. The lore community of Flight Rising is, arguably, 98% pure, original content.
And yet despite this, that 2% tethering it to the source material forces it to be classified as “fanfiction”. Any one of us could, theoretically, file the serial numbers off and walk away with an Original Thing. It’s such a weird liminal state of being for a story, and I never quite know what to make of it.