I wanted to give a direct reply to ClassicDrogn, but since my last post was already quite long, I wanted to break it up a bit. ;p
You already know a bit from other replies, of course, but here's a concise summary:
The two authors are Chris (hi!) and Aaron (the other guy). Basically, yes, we both got killed in a (somewhat mysterious) car accident, whilst my girlfriend and Rob were not (but it's worth noting that I died instantly, and Aaron was only fatally wounded and passed out). Aaron then ended up somehow sharing a mind and body with Ukyou Kuonji from Ranma 1/2, a situation that both of them were very unhappy with and did not understand. I ended up in a different situation: I woke up in the body of a recently deceased street person in America, and soon afterwards found out that the body I was in began rapidly decaying (a process that was unbearably uncomfortable for me) but that I could allieviate it by jumping from one corpse to another. Morally, this could be called a difficult situation, particularly because I can also gain the skills that the deceased person by accessing the memories in their brains... doubly so because a body like that of a superhuman martial artist takes a lot longer to rot.
Neither of us, at first, knew about the other. We both ended up in Japan, interacting separately with characters we knew (at first primarily Ranma), then met each other in an unfriendly fashion, then went our separate ways and dealt with different issues. My driving motivation was to deal with the rotting problem that kept "forcing" me to kill people; Aaron/Ukyou had their own problem forced upon them when Sailor Pluto tried to kill them, because she had been sent a message by her future self stating that Ukyou would inevitably destroy the universe. Ukyou/Aaron, who would have left to their own devices mostly agonised over Ranma and tried to find a way to separate themselves, were thus forced into contact with the Sailor Moon cast, which went badly, and then things spiralled entirely out of her control and forced her into doing more and more things and taking more and more responsibility which she did not always deal well with.
In the background of all of this, and increasingly as time went on, where the various powers of the world from the different series' involved, who were startled to learn about all the things they had somehow missed up until now (like Guyver's world-spanning conspiracy Chronos not knowing about Ranma-style martial artists, or the Sailor Moon villains not knowing about powerful opposition on Earth that wasn't the Sailor Senshi). The ramifications of this were that carefully balanced timelines like Sailor Moon's rapidly altered beyond recognition as people who EXISTED from the beginning but were otherwise occupied (such as the Deathbusters) started reacting to the increasing chaos of the world (all of this forms a lot of what happens in Book II, and leads to the world situation in Book III that other people have been referring to).
One theme that comes out from all this is the wondering many characters have on what is real. Ukyou, for instance, has to deal with the fact that she shares Aaron's memories, and knows that Aaron read about a large chunk of her life (that for her hadn't happened yet!) in a comic book. But she never read the comic book about Aaron's life: it doesn't exist. What does that MEAN? How do you deal with it?
Questions of morality are raised, too, for instance by my situation: is it okay to kill people to survive? Probably not, really. But what if they're evil people? What if somebody else killed them and your hands are clean? What if they were people who were going to die anyway if left to their own devices? If you WANT to do good things, does that mitigate the fact that you really aren't doing them? So yeah, there's that. I am not a heroic character in the fanfic, but I'm not as flat-out a villain as, say, Jadeite. What I am is primarily left up to the reader to decide: it's worth noting that for a good chunk of the fanfic, reader reaction was that they found the Chris character more sensible and protagonist-like than the Ukyou/Aaron-character (which we thought was a very interesting reaction, and influenced how certain events went).
If you're expecting a fanfic where the self-inserts are the only people of consequence, that isn't here. Indeed, one key theme of Book II was how much bigger the world was than Ukyou or Chris, and how events they had nothing to do with (in England, for instance) were still spiralling out of control. Moreover, some readers have praised us (and a few complained) about how important and standing on their own many of the characters are. Of course that's for you to decide whether you agree with, but I will say that it was our intention from the beginning to balance the necessities of Ukyou in particular being the main character against the fact that other people should not be mere sidekicks to the self-inserts.
You've seen to an extent our explanations how Hybrid Theory is deconstructionist and full of commentary or ironic references to fanfiction and all that, and it is. You've also seen that it is primarily intended to be a good story with a interesting and often unpredictable (but still foreshadowed) plot, as well as fresh takes on a lot of characters and deep characterisation, and hopefully we succeeded at that too. But there's something else almost as important as that.
The original tagline to Hybrid Theory was "So I asked myself: what if someone wrote a self-insert with a point?" We changed that for a number of reasons, mostly because of the fact we found a cooler tagline, also because a few people took offence. But it was true, in this sense: many self-insertion fanfics, even well-written self-insertion fanfics (and no I'm not going to name names, because it's beside the point), contain themes, ideas, and characterisation that did NOT require a self-insertion to explore. Someone even accused us of this once, saying we could remove the self-inserts, give a certain character knowledge of the future, and have a more interesting story (in our defence, said person had only read about half of Chapter 10 and none of the rest of the fanfic before making this complaint) while doing the same things. At the very least, many self-inserts never answer the question "Why you, fanboy? Why you and not Bob Schroeck?"
We didn't want to do that. From the conception, Hybrid Theory was designed to be a story told through being a multicrossover and self-insert, a story that could ONLY be told through a multicrossover self-insert, a story where the concept of "people from our world go to anime world" has a real plot-based reason rather than being a handwaved kickoff to the story, and a story were there are real reasons for "Why us?" as opposed to "Why not Rob Kelk?".
So there's that. Whether any of that makes you interested, I don't know. But without getting into any spoilers (beyond the stuff you'd seen in Chapters 1-3), that's the best synopsis I can give of the setup of Hybrid Theory and why we wrote it.
(And all of this goes to prove, once again, that the only thing worse than asking a mother about her child is asking a writer about their story. ;p)
You already know a bit from other replies, of course, but here's a concise summary:
The two authors are Chris (hi!) and Aaron (the other guy). Basically, yes, we both got killed in a (somewhat mysterious) car accident, whilst my girlfriend and Rob were not (but it's worth noting that I died instantly, and Aaron was only fatally wounded and passed out). Aaron then ended up somehow sharing a mind and body with Ukyou Kuonji from Ranma 1/2, a situation that both of them were very unhappy with and did not understand. I ended up in a different situation: I woke up in the body of a recently deceased street person in America, and soon afterwards found out that the body I was in began rapidly decaying (a process that was unbearably uncomfortable for me) but that I could allieviate it by jumping from one corpse to another. Morally, this could be called a difficult situation, particularly because I can also gain the skills that the deceased person by accessing the memories in their brains... doubly so because a body like that of a superhuman martial artist takes a lot longer to rot.
Neither of us, at first, knew about the other. We both ended up in Japan, interacting separately with characters we knew (at first primarily Ranma), then met each other in an unfriendly fashion, then went our separate ways and dealt with different issues. My driving motivation was to deal with the rotting problem that kept "forcing" me to kill people; Aaron/Ukyou had their own problem forced upon them when Sailor Pluto tried to kill them, because she had been sent a message by her future self stating that Ukyou would inevitably destroy the universe. Ukyou/Aaron, who would have left to their own devices mostly agonised over Ranma and tried to find a way to separate themselves, were thus forced into contact with the Sailor Moon cast, which went badly, and then things spiralled entirely out of her control and forced her into doing more and more things and taking more and more responsibility which she did not always deal well with.
In the background of all of this, and increasingly as time went on, where the various powers of the world from the different series' involved, who were startled to learn about all the things they had somehow missed up until now (like Guyver's world-spanning conspiracy Chronos not knowing about Ranma-style martial artists, or the Sailor Moon villains not knowing about powerful opposition on Earth that wasn't the Sailor Senshi). The ramifications of this were that carefully balanced timelines like Sailor Moon's rapidly altered beyond recognition as people who EXISTED from the beginning but were otherwise occupied (such as the Deathbusters) started reacting to the increasing chaos of the world (all of this forms a lot of what happens in Book II, and leads to the world situation in Book III that other people have been referring to).
One theme that comes out from all this is the wondering many characters have on what is real. Ukyou, for instance, has to deal with the fact that she shares Aaron's memories, and knows that Aaron read about a large chunk of her life (that for her hadn't happened yet!) in a comic book. But she never read the comic book about Aaron's life: it doesn't exist. What does that MEAN? How do you deal with it?
Questions of morality are raised, too, for instance by my situation: is it okay to kill people to survive? Probably not, really. But what if they're evil people? What if somebody else killed them and your hands are clean? What if they were people who were going to die anyway if left to their own devices? If you WANT to do good things, does that mitigate the fact that you really aren't doing them? So yeah, there's that. I am not a heroic character in the fanfic, but I'm not as flat-out a villain as, say, Jadeite. What I am is primarily left up to the reader to decide: it's worth noting that for a good chunk of the fanfic, reader reaction was that they found the Chris character more sensible and protagonist-like than the Ukyou/Aaron-character (which we thought was a very interesting reaction, and influenced how certain events went).
If you're expecting a fanfic where the self-inserts are the only people of consequence, that isn't here. Indeed, one key theme of Book II was how much bigger the world was than Ukyou or Chris, and how events they had nothing to do with (in England, for instance) were still spiralling out of control. Moreover, some readers have praised us (and a few complained) about how important and standing on their own many of the characters are. Of course that's for you to decide whether you agree with, but I will say that it was our intention from the beginning to balance the necessities of Ukyou in particular being the main character against the fact that other people should not be mere sidekicks to the self-inserts.
You've seen to an extent our explanations how Hybrid Theory is deconstructionist and full of commentary or ironic references to fanfiction and all that, and it is. You've also seen that it is primarily intended to be a good story with a interesting and often unpredictable (but still foreshadowed) plot, as well as fresh takes on a lot of characters and deep characterisation, and hopefully we succeeded at that too. But there's something else almost as important as that.
The original tagline to Hybrid Theory was "So I asked myself: what if someone wrote a self-insert with a point?" We changed that for a number of reasons, mostly because of the fact we found a cooler tagline, also because a few people took offence. But it was true, in this sense: many self-insertion fanfics, even well-written self-insertion fanfics (and no I'm not going to name names, because it's beside the point), contain themes, ideas, and characterisation that did NOT require a self-insertion to explore. Someone even accused us of this once, saying we could remove the self-inserts, give a certain character knowledge of the future, and have a more interesting story (in our defence, said person had only read about half of Chapter 10 and none of the rest of the fanfic before making this complaint) while doing the same things. At the very least, many self-inserts never answer the question "Why you, fanboy? Why you and not Bob Schroeck?"
We didn't want to do that. From the conception, Hybrid Theory was designed to be a story told through being a multicrossover and self-insert, a story that could ONLY be told through a multicrossover self-insert, a story where the concept of "people from our world go to anime world" has a real plot-based reason rather than being a handwaved kickoff to the story, and a story were there are real reasons for "Why us?" as opposed to "Why not Rob Kelk?".
So there's that. Whether any of that makes you interested, I don't know. But without getting into any spoilers (beyond the stuff you'd seen in Chapters 1-3), that's the best synopsis I can give of the setup of Hybrid Theory and why we wrote it.
(And all of this goes to prove, once again, that the only thing worse than asking a mother about her child is asking a writer about their story. ;p)