#Monika the whole game is trying so desperately hard to convince herself that everything she's doing is okay and that no ones real anyway | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sawtual · 3 years

Note

wow thanks! that was a really in depth post about it you make good points! when I played I definitely got the sense that monika had encouraged sayori to kill herself and I didn’t get the sense of any remorse when natsuki or yuri died or got fucked up but I guess u do make some good points there about how she was just trying to make them less desirable rather than kill them. I’m new to the game and the fandom so im not super familiar with everything yet but is there anything in the canon or lore that points away from monika having pushed sayori to commit suicide or is it mostly just fan theories and personal readings? either way thank u so much for answering!

yes i can absolutely find you some info on that!

there's quite a bit of information hidden within the games files, so I'm kind of assuming if you're new to the game, that you might not have seen these things? so ill dive into them too!

I'm gona do this under the cut so i can like, dissect things from the game !

(also i found stuff thats specifically pointing away from her meaning actual harm/death for Both yuri and sayori, jsyk)

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.txt (discovered in game files during act 2)

“All I want is for you to hate them. Why is that so hard.”

not, all i want for them is to die. she doesnt want to kill them. she wants to separate us from them so we are with Her, not them. things spiral out of control, but it was never her intention for things to get this bad. ntm its repeated over and over in this game how badly monika wants to die. she's hanging on by a thread, keeping on only because she wants to be with us, to be in contact with reality. this leads to really unfortunate circumstances but i really strongly believe everything in the text alludes to the fact she did Not want things to get this bad

ACT 3 INTRO:

(im copy pasting a transcript of the monologue here, but this is taken from the very beginning of act 3, which you can see in this video starting at 25:56)

imo this is all the proof needed to show that she really had no intention of ‘killing’ sayori and yuri. things spiraled out of control far beyond what she was capable of handling.

her goals with making sayori more depressed and yuri more obsessive were, in here words “to just try to make them as unlikable as possible”. she didnt want her friends to brutally die!! she loved them q_q i feel like a lot of people really dont look at this specific part of what she says and take it to heart. its very telling for her character and important for understanding what she does and why she does it

ACT 3 MONOLOGUES:

sayori's hanging (cw: graphic descriptions of suicide)

dialogue of importance:

"I was thinking about Sayori earlier... I still wish I could have handled that whole thing a little more tactfully."

"Come to think of it, it was probably less 'changing her mind' and more just her survival instincts kicking in." "So you can't really fault her for that." "It's easier to think that she probably wouldn't have changed her mind anyway, right?" "It's not healthy to think about the things you could have done differently." "So just remember that even though you could have saved her, it's technically not your fault she killed herself." "I may have exacerbated it a little bit, but Sayori was already mentally ill." "Still, though..." "I wonder how things would be if you and I just started dating from the get-go?" "I guess we'd all still be in the clubroom, writing poems and having fun together." "But what's the point when none of it is even real?" "I mean, it's the same ending either way, right?"

ok so whats important here, is monika is essentially using us, the player, as a mirror in act 3? the things she says i believe, very strongly show her sense of uncertainty in her actions, and her fears of what if she could have done something else??

"even though you could have saved her, its technically not your fault she killed herself" reads SO much to me like shes trying to comfort herself with this, she doesnt want it to be her fault. nothings real, sayori's a character in a game. but she wishes so badly they could have just been normal girls living together.

happy end poem

OK SO LIKE. this is actual proof of Why she does everything she does. she's scared if she reaches out and tells us she's trapped in a game, we'll stop playing, we'll kill her. she tinkers with the game, trying to make herself look the best, trying to make us choose her, and nothing works. and this leads to her becoming frustrated and scared, and screwing with the game more and more desperately trying to do anything to save herself.

if you recall, in act 2, she gives you a poem which bluescreen the computer. this was actually an attempt she makes to escape the game q_q she never wanted to kill yuri, she never wanted things to escalate like that. she wanted to get out but she had no idea how to program her way out of the game, resulting in everything crumbling around her, and her friends dying.

my own route

hang on this one genuinely makes me so upset.

it very much relates back to how in the conversation about sayori's suicide, she's still clearly thinking about how things could be Different. shes thinking about how they could be normal. "I may not have needed to take such drastic measures to be with you. Maybe the rest of the club would still be around..." , and then immediately trying to convince herself it doesnt matter, and that she doesnt care.

its so so obvious shes hurting and she misses her friends. the additional "i really dont (miss them)" at the end really shows that shes desperately trying to convince herself that it was worth it, that she did everything she should have, and her friends dont matter. but they clearly do matter to her. she loved them (she couldnt even delete them if u recall)

also another important part about this monologue, a lot of people say she killed the other girls out of jealousy, but this shows thats not true??

"I think I would end up forcing you onto my route anyway." "It has less to do with me not having a route, and more to do with me knowing that nothing is real."

this wasnt because shes 'in love' with us. she wanted to be close to something real, something tangible. she's clinging onto us, the player character, like someone lost at sea with a piece of driftwood, doing everything she can to stay afloat

wine

ok this isnt on the surface level as important as the other ones, but literally look at how she talks about this memory.. she misses them so much and talking about this memory she clearly cherishes brings her so much joy. she doesnt belittle any of them, she doesnt talk down on them, she’s just reliving this memory because it makes her happy

I HOPE THIS HELPS?? im sure theres a few more things im forgetting, but i did my best to scrabble up everything i could to show how monika’s not an evil mastermind, shes a scared girl who didnt realize what she was doing and when things got too bad, she did her best to fix it, only for it to get worse n worse

edit: oh heres the proof that monika always loved the girls and never actually deleted them

:’)

edit 2: haha.. um ouch

“It’s not right for me to miss things that weren’t even real in the first place.” shes forcing herself to try and ignore her feelings for the other girls

#asks #anon #ddlc #monika #oh i put warnings in the post but also #suicide mention

33 notes · View notes

thiefking · 5 years

Text

major ddlc spoilers ahead, also i don’t know if all of this has been said/theorized before since i’m extremely late to the party here but i have a lot of Thoughts having finally played the game

firstly: i need to explain that every theory i’m about to present relies on the hypothetical game that would have existed if monika wasn’t self-aware

basically, irl the game was always meant to be what it is, but within the canon of the story, the ORIGINAL (fictional/hypothetical) ddlc was a regular dating sim visual novel. in canon, it was monika who changed it into the game we actually end up playing. we get only a glimpse of what the game would have been without her interference after you delete her and restart the game-- the mc no longer calls sayori “annoying” and yuri no longer mentions being into “surreal horror,” etc etc. that hypothetical unaltered version as a full game (henceforth referred to as “original ddlc”) is where most of my “what if”s have been clustering around to the point where i’ve genuinely considered making a fangame or something but instead i’m just gonna chat about it here

topic 1: monika’s route

monika claims she didn’t have a route in the first place. by all means, it seems that way-- you can’t appeal to her with your poems, can’t pick her for anything, etc etc. however, as much as monika is aware that she’s in a game, that doesn’t mean she’s genre-savvy.

i’d actually say she probably isn’t too much of a video game person in general, and i’m not referring to her 4th wall shattering, i’m saying she probably just likes to play acnl, minecraft and other casual, lighthearted games that don’t have an ending to them and can be played indefinitely, and maybe mario party if her friends come over, yknow? that’s just kinda what she seems like to me

now i ain’t dunking on anyone who only plays that kind of game, mind you, but if monika isn’t herself someone who plays a lot of video games, and you add that together with the fact that she was not immediately sentient (we don’t see her BEFORE she became aware, because the original ddlc is already gone by the time we start playing), the fact that while she’s aware what genre the game is she clearly has minimal idea of how they work or what makes them appealing, and that she has little coding experience and despite being able to alter files/lines she also couldn’t prevent basic game mechanics or predict said mechanics getting in the way, then i think it’s not only possible but very very very likely that she missed something. she missed something big.

monika was supposed to be an unlockable route.

so, y’all remember mysmes? i haven’t played it since it first came out, so mind you my memories are fuzzy here but mysmes also isn’t the focus of this post in the first place, so excuse any technical inaccuracies here but i’m certain that the IMPORTANT parts here, the italicised ones, are correct:

there was an unlockable "deep story” which served as the true end.

you had to play every route in the game before you could read the deep story (i think you also had to play the three other character routes before you could play 707′s route, but that might be wrong). also, each of the main story routes ended after the uh... the ball thing. the big event they throw? whatever it was, that’s where the story stops for those routes, whereas the deep story continues on past that.

you had to be on 707′s route for the deep story (i’m pretty sure you had to play his entire route and have it be your most recent playthrough to get at it, even if that isn’t the case, the deep story is specifically a continuation of 707′s route)

to be honest i was never a fan of the deep story for several reasons and i never really saw what the appeal of dating 707 was but that’s not important the point is that out of your four dating options, only one of them was considered the “true end”, but you had to do every single route before you could get that ending.

i’m sure you see what i’m getting at here, yeah?

there are a couple of other things, too:

monika tells you which character your poem appeals to most, she’s the one who introduces the game on the steam page (which is also proof she was sentient, at least to a degree, before you played the game), her name means “advisor/counselor”... iunno how many people reading this are savvy to the usual conventions of “games in which dating characters is a thing” but i’ve played a LOT of harvest moon. monika is a prime example of a Special Bachelorette. in harvest moon, Special Marriage Candidates are generally one or more of the following: a character from another game (like, literally-- you have to have a gba gamepak in while playing a ds game to see them), a shopkeeper or tutorial-fairy, characters with extremely elaborate unlocking and/or courting rituals, and characters who don’t even seem to be romanceable (in harvest moon games, romance candidates tend to have hearts next to their sprites that change colour depending on how close you are. generally that’s how you know who you can marry and who you can’t, but some marriage characters actually don’t have visible heart meters!). ... once again you see what i’m getting at right? put her in harvest moon and you bet your ass she’d have an invisible heart meter and an intricate courting ritual

she’s an important character. she’s club prez, she’s your tutorial fairy, she tells you who you’re appealing to. the tropes don’t lie, man, sayori would probably be the most realistic ending but i don’t think i know of a single game where the childhood friend character is the “true end” route-- they’re so easy to romance, they tend to be the route people do their first run and then never end up coming back to. i’m not trying to say anything in particular about this setup/logic, i just know that it exists and it exists a whole lot. if there’s a true end route in the original ddlc, it’s without question monika

by the way, in the corrupted ddlc, you still have to play every character’s route for the true ending. the true end requires you to have obtained all of the character cgs, which you can only do by playing all of the other characters’ routes, or at the very least, courting sayori, resetting and courting natsuki, and then letting monika warp the game, since you’ll end up on yuri’s route during the second act of the game no matter what you do. and what happens when you’ve had a chance to date sayori, natsuki and yuri? you end up on monika’s route. even when monika corrupted the game, there was still inherent logic to it-- all the characters inevitably become interested in mc, and you still can’t reach the true end without doing everyone’s routes.

as much as it would be painful for monika to watch you romance everyone else before you finally got around to her, she could have at least taken solace knowing she was the real ending, had she just been a little better at coding, just a little more genre-savvy...

of course, there are these lines she gives us, so clearly a sentient monika is still a monika that wouldn’t just sit there and wait regardless of if she knew she was the true end:

she says it herself: she’d still force her route, because she’s terrified, and the only one who seems to be aware that she’s in a game, but the really, really sad part is that as hard as she tries to convince you and herself that she doesn’t regret any of what she did, doesn’t feel guilty, doesn’t miss her friends...

she does. she knows she did something terrible, and she didn’t even actually have to do it.

... well, maybe “she didn’t HAVE to do it” is obvious enough for everything she did, but let’s keep in mind here that monika was scared out of her fucking mind, and reasonably so. if you were in her place, if you found out nothing was real, your friends weren’t real, nothing but code... and someone real came along, but no matter what you did, you couldn’t get them to talk to you long enough for you to ask for help... wouldn’t you get desperate too? monika was scared, and panicking, and remember: she knew she was in a game.

uninstalling a game does not a murderer make, right? the npcs, and the player character, they aren’t dead. they’re just code. if you back up your save, they’ll all be there if you download it again-- if you didn’t, they’ll still exist, they’ll just be reset. it doesn’t mean you’ve actively given someone amnesia.

but you still feel guilty over it, huh? even if you need disk space, even if you make a backup, it still kinda feels bad to delete the fictional friends you made.

you feel bad for doing that, and they were fake to you in the first place. monika was part of the game.

this is why it’s so sad to me. she was scared, and she thought she’d never even have a chance to ask for help, because she thought she didn’t have a route. her situation was, from her perspective, utterly hopeless. she felt terrible doing what she did, she misses her friends, but it was the only way to save herself, and being that she knew she was in a game, of course she’d try to rationalize her actions by telling herself her friends weren’t real and it was no different than overriding a save file. if she didn’t tell that to both you and herself, she’d be a murderer. she isn’t a murderer, either-- it really is just code, the problem is the overwhelming guilt that she has to suppress for the sake of her own sanity that she wouldn’t have had to bear in the first place had she been a normal route, or known that she had a route somewhere in the game.

the other characters do seem to have more sentience/free will than monika thought/noticed, but none of them are as Aware as monika-- natsuki shows the most amount of awareness (without being the club prez), having not only noticed that yuri and monika were acting strangely but even writing a note, one that clearly wouldn’t exist in the original ddlc, asking the mc for help. yuri also has several moments of lucidity, both with her own actions/behaviour and that of her clubmates (and by clubmates i mean pretty much just natsuki). like i said before, though, they aren’t as aware as monika, and while sayori (in the first run), yuri and natsuki all seem to realize something is wrong, they also don’t know that they’re in a game.

monika was very, very alone, even when she was surrounded by her friends. friends that she legitimately cared about and enjoyed spending time with. i wonder whether it would have been better that she were more self-aware, or never was in the first place

topic 2: the true end

so i already talked a lot about how i think monika woulda been the true route, but not about what i think would happen in the true end. i have less to say on this topic both just in general and because i already spent so much fucking time on the first topic, but of course i have Thoughts, i wouldn’t be claiming monika would be the true route if i didn’t have an idea of how said route would work

i’ll take this character-by-character for the sake of clarity and organization

sayori:

so here’s the thing:

monika exaggerated sayori’s depression, yes.

sayori is, understandably, probably the character most people would rather the mc end up with, sure.

... but sayori never told mc she was suffering, not until he happened to catch her in a moment of weakness

not in the original ddlc either-- the mc has a very lukewarm response when she tells him she’s woken up on time for a few days in a row, which he wouldn’t/shouldn’t have had if he had known. it was always part of the game plot for mc to learn about sayori’s depression onscreen

it makes sense sayori would have feelings for him, but it also seems like she doesn’t trust him very much-- in her “bottles of happiness” poem, towards the end she seems to talk about her friends being concerned for her, but she’s shutting it all out because she doesn’t want them to worry. the mc at this point doesn’t know she’s suffering. it seems like she’s had other friends who have actually noticed she was hurting-- whether those friends are the club members or not, iunno-- and that even though she does try to conceal it, she’s aware that they’re aware, y’know? mc had no idea, and seemed incredibly unequipped and unqualified to help sayori

while that sort of thing would be remedied in sayori’s route, he wouldn’t be spending as much time with her on the other girls’ routes... not to mention that dating someone can’t cure your mental illness, but mc seems exactly like the kind of person to think that it can. that’s just my Own Ape Canyon though

what i’m thinking is true end sayori doesn’t end up with anyone, and she’s okay with that. true end sayori is prioritizing herself and learning to deal with things healthily. she’s letting her friends help her, and she’s holding off on romance, because she acknowledges that if she isn’t careful, she might sacrifice her own well-being for her partner’s happiness.

natsuki:

fun fact: i didn’t know if the buffsuki edit was actually in the game or not for... up until a few days ago. i had no idea if it was from some kind of joke ending, or if it was fanmade. i was pretty disappointed to learn it was the latter i wanted to watch her physically break out of the game with her giant rippling muscles

now while the main topic is the true end, i’d actually first like to discuss what a full natsuki route would be like

i think that natsuki’s route would be furthest from a good end without being a bad end, tbh

i don’t think her route would be a total disaster, mind you, but i don’t think it’d be a happy end. i think you’d end up dating her, which would make it an unhappy end

see the thing about natsuki is: she’s only got a small handful of friends, she’s used to being made fun of, she immediately gets prickly when sayori brings mc in, specifically saying that the mc being male is killing the vibe-- meaning, she probably doesn’t have any male friends... leaving her dad as probably the only man she interacts with

in other words, she avoids men because of her dad

so when mc shows up, is friendly, doesn’t make fun of her, and he’s the only male figure in her life that she feels remotely safe around, it’s no question she’d probably... maybe... develop feelings for him...?

of course! yes, of course, because natsuki is VERY HETEROSEXUAL, and she likes BOYS! this is proof! most boys, she can’t stand em, but this one was nice to her, so of course she’s got a crush on him right?

in case you’re missing my heavy sarcasm, i’m saying natsuki is a lesbian with compulsory heterosexuality issues and due to said issues convinces herself that she’s romantically interested in mc, because he’s the first boy she’s met who hasn’t treated her like shit

hence making the natsuki route a pretty unfortunate one, since like i said i think you really would end up dating her, at least for most of it. maybe the end would be something like her moving away or something leaving the relationship sort of Over without actually having a breakup, i dunno

oh by the way: do you want some evidence for natsuki lesbian? oh there’s plenty but i’m gonna wait a moment for that one. i’m also not gonna go into natsuki’s true route for now, you’ll see why soon

yuri

and by soon

i mean now

i don’t have any thoughts on what yuri’s route would be so we’re gonna go right into discussing the true end

so, here’s a little something:

monika also exaggerated the turbulence in natsuki and yuri’s relationship

once again, in the original ddlc-- the part you can actually see, after you delete monika, the two are actually pretty close! they do butt heads occasionally but in the one instance you get to see in the original ddlc, they made up very quickly

monika also modified a lot of their lines in the Big Argument they have in act 2, which has both of them saying a lot of shit they wouldn’t have even thought, much less say aloud

the reality is, though, that natsuki is actually very fond of yuri

the amy in this poem is two people, depending on how it’s read: natsuki or yuri

when amy is natsuki, it’s a poem about how her own harmless interest in manga causes her to be made fun of or insulted

when amy is yuri, it’s a poem about... well, her self-harm, but a lot of yuri’s traits/interests could apply as well

and when amy is yuri, you can see a lot of information about natsuki and yuri’s relationship in this poem. natsuki doesn’t hate yuri, of course-- remember that this poem is meant to point out how dumb it is to hate someone for one tiny trait when all of their other traits are that of an all-around nice person

first 3 lines of the second verse. just take a real long look at those

here’s another poem!

this is the poem natsuki writes if 2 or less of the poems mc writes in act 1 don’t appeal to her. this makes it fairly clear the “you” in the poem isn’t mc

the “you” is someone, though

yuri.

it’s yuri. the poem is about yuri.

by the way, if all 3 of your poems did appeal to natsuki, the poem she writes is nowhere near as BLATANTLY ROMANTIC as this one is. it most certainly doesn’t say anything about kissing

btw hey did you know that “yuri” also refers to lesbians

once again i think it’s probably obvious what i’m getting at here: the true end for natsuki and yuri is the two of them dating. hell, i’m pretty sure part of the route would involve mc and monika trying to play cupid-- monika is the one who tells you who your poem appeals to, after all, so why wouldn’t she try some matchmaking for her pals?

i imagine they do still have little spats every now and then, sure, but they’d learn to respect each other’s opinions long before they’d start dating, and the fact that they’re both passionate is what makes them work. while their writing styles are almost polar opposites, that just means they have a lot to learn from each other and could balance the other out when they take their style to an extreme that makes it hard to understand what they’re trying to get across, and i’m certain they could make a kickass story together

anyways, that’s all i’ve got to say for now, partly because i spent four fucking hours writing this post and partly because i gotta get back to staring into monika’s eyes. i added the monika after story mod because i cycled through all of her available dialogue in the vanilla game. i just want to be friends with her so bad

#doki doki literature club #ddlc #ddlc monika #monika ddlc #ddlc spoilers #i'm just tagging monika because most of this post is about her specifically #i do talk about the other girls too though #long post. like super fucking long. i went apeshit

37 notes · View notes