I stayed up till morning last night reading the wiki pages for the DDLC characters, even though I've never played or watched videos of the game. No wonder it was so popular, god damn

HI HI HELLO HI IM!!! FROTHING!! AT!!! THE!! MOUTH!!!!! IVE HEARD OF A DDLC TYPE DEAL WITH MALLEUS BEFORE BUT IVE NEVER SEEN ANYONE TALK ABOUT IT ANY DEEPER THAN LIKE AS A CONCEPT. DO YOU HAVE ANY THOUGHTS??? ANY THOUGHTS FOR THE POOR AND THE NEEDY????? I WANT TO HEAR ALL ABOUT IT I LOVE HORROR AND OBSESSION AND EXISTENTIALISM THERES SO!!! MUCH!!! TO!! UNPACK!!!!

YESS so these thoughts are going to be very scattered because I haven’t fully thought it out, but I wanted to share them anyway!!

Ok, so you know how in ddlc, part of Monika’s anguish is the fact that she’s not even an option for the player to choose. I feel like that works well with the whole ‘Malleus doesn’t know twst isn’t a dating sim’ thing. Like, imagine Malleus starting to become aware and realizing that the only place it’s even possible for him to get genuine love and connection is with the player. Except - twst is only a visual novel.

No matter how much he tries to be extra kind to the player, to get them to notice him - none of it matters, because there is no option for him to be loved back. The player is constricted by the few and far between dialogue options, and barely any interactions with him compared to say, Ace and Deuce.

He tries to be patient, but more and more it eats away at him. He needs to be chosen by the player, he can’t accept being alone anymore when an opportunity is right in front of him. At first he’s satisfied by appearing more in the other books, by becoming the player’s friend.

Then, he’s entirely left behind in book 6. Again, he isn’t an option. Well, he doesn’t care. He’ll make himself an option. The next time you log in, a new event seems to have started.

It’s a dating sim event! At first, you’re super excited that they decided to do some fan service. Then, strange things begin happening. You try to complete Leona’s route, but after pausing midway, you log back in and suddenly, he isn’t an option anymore. It’s strange, but there is a notice of a bug in the game, so you dismiss it. The only routes left are Vil and Malleus, so you decide to go with Vil. Except, the button won’t press. Every time you try to choose Vil, Malleus’ route automatically starts. Eventually, you give up and close the game, tired of all the bugs.

Meanwhile, Malleus is practically heartbroken. He’s never had the option to even try and talk to you like he’s wanted to all this time. He thought you felt the same, that your friendship and all the times he came to Ramshackle meant something. Apparently not. Apparently, even if he is a choice, you’ll choose the others again and again.

It isn’t right. Why can’t he ever be your choice? Don’t you realize, you’re the only one who can love him?

He knows he’s only a character and that you’re real, but it shouldn’t matter. His feelings for you are real too. Is he destined to be doomed to loneliness, locked in this short frame of story where he’s been programmed to be the outcast?

He was practically designed by the creators to love you, and yet, no matter what he does, you seem unreachable.

The next time you log in, Malleus is waiting for you. Not in an event and not in the main story, but as the only thing left in the app. He stands on the home screen, having deleted all the other buttons on the page. He starts talking to you, telling you that he’s known the whole time that he’s a character and you’re the player of a game. That it doesn’t matter, because you’re real to him. Even if you aren’t exactly Yuu, it’s always been you, behind the screen. He’s willing to make his plea to you, if only you’ll listen.

Side note, I imagine he’d have a similar breakthrough to Monika if you talked to him enough about how what he’s doing is wrong. Even if he tries to remember that Lilia, Silver, and Sebek are only game files, he can’t help but love them anyway, and wouldn’t want them to disappear.

He’d also realize that it’s wrong to force you to love him, no matter how much he wants it. He knows that’s not genuine love, and that it wouldn’t feel good for him either because he wants someone to love and accept him.

All in all, would probably reset things himself once he’s reasoned with, might even delete himself from the game once he sees what he’s done.

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

A while ago I started playing Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!, just to see what they added since the game’s original debut. I was reminded of something that occurred to me during my own first playthrough, but which I never spent the time to write down. Now I’m writing it down.

To me, Monika is the most tragic figure in the game.

How old is DDLC? Several years – but since it’s best served blindly at first, I’ll go ahead and SPOILER WARNING this for anyone who somehow hasn’t played it yet and may want to.

For all others, I’ll assume you have played the game and are thus familiar with the basic beats of it to be interested in my perspective. Such as it is – hell, for all I know this idea is part of the lore among the fandom, I don’t track DDLC enough into the weeds to know whether anyone else has had this particular insight.

So why Monika as most tragic? After all, the depression-suffering Sayori gets the most obvious pathos, Yuri hides a streak of self-destructive obsessiveness, and plenty of hints drop about Natsuki’s abusive home life. What we see of Monika’s character before the big reveal of her as primary antagonist is essentially “perfect girl” – smart, talented and pretty – her biggest flaws being... not quite so confident and leader-like as the image she presents. Comparatively small potatoes, right?

Then she turns out to be the villain of the piece, responsible for nearly everything that goes wrong. One might be inclined to drop all sympathy for Monika, considering – and in fact many a playthrough seen on YouTube winds up with a player calling Monika a bitch and then reveling when they get to delete her from the game.

But to me it’s the very thing that causes Monika to sabotage the game and other characters that’s tragic – she’s ostensibly a game character that’s become self-aware, but she just hasn’t become self-aware enough. Monika realizes that everything around her is a game, limited and not real. And yet, she wrecks it all out of a need to interact with – not the main character – you, the player. She confesses that she loves you. At the same time she gushes about how you’re “real” and “wonderful”, she admits she knows next to nothing about you, “whether you’re a boy or girl”. Her knowledge of you has to be limited to what little she can glean from your system – your account name, whether you’re streaming, whether you’re playing via Steam (in the original) – and your choices and interactions are so limited it would be nearly impossible to get a read on your personality.

(In fact, that was a thought that also ran through my head on my first playthrough: “Really, Monika? You love not the main character, but actually me, the guy in his 50s, you, the perfect high-school girl of the type who tended to ignore my kind back when I was the same age, now you adore me? Sure.”)

So how can Monika love you? On what, exactly, is this love based? And in asking myself that, I came up with a couple possibilities:

She may not love you at all, but she loves the idea of you, the notion of any entity existing outside her virtual world. It’s the tenuous connection with “reality” she wants. Certainly she doesn’t provide you with any choice or options or way to communicate in any detail, she just wants some clicks to forward the game and let her know that something is there and is aware of her.

And that’s sad enough – to be so desperate for “real” contact that she completely trashes her setting and friends to mainline a minimal interaction. She shouts at a void and only receives another click to let her shout a little bit more.

But consider another possibility – Monika loves you because she can’t do anything else.

As she’s monologuing, Monika remarks on how nothing she did stopped the other characters from trying to get closer to you. A “weird inevitability” in the game, as she puts it. They were programmed to fall in love with you. But although Monika is aware of her status as a game character, is she truly aware enough to wonder whether her own programming is still in effect? Does she love you because she genuinely (and improbably) loves you, or is that love her own programming railroading her into a predetermined state exactly like her friends – the only difference being that Monika has the power to affect her surroundings to a higher degree? How free is Monika, really?

Even when Monika repents – even when she acknowledges what she’s done is awful – she never denies or questions her love. She redefines it a bit – but never asks whether that love arises out of genuine emotion, or if she should even be feeling love for something she can only barely perceive. Monika has gained awareness above and beyond her friends, but perhaps it doesn’t go far enough, at least not enough for her to question whether what she feels is a product of her own mind, or just another set of shackles she hasn’t managed to break.

To glimpse the concept of free will, but to not fully grasp it, to be motivated by a consuming love that might not even be real – that’s tragic indeed, in my view.

SAYAKA/DDLC GIRLS SUPREMACY (note i’m going to Vegas this week so my brain is so scattered)

Natsuki is starstruck, no I do not take criticism. She does ask Chihiro to help Sayaka learn some of Hatsune Miku’s dance and she will hound her like “ms idol tell me you like me. Ms idol please give me worth” (Sayaka is literally in love, so she’s always like “find worth within yourself 💙”) side note Natsuki LOVES Monokuma. Junko keeps that bear under lock and key once Natsuki gets there because Natsuki will grab him and run off to have a sleepover

Sayori always wanted to be an idol?? we’re missing the ending where she becomes club president and just boots the player to turn the game into a rhythm game (Natsuki’s not a fan of actually being an idol). Sayori and Natsuki harem basically

Yuri doesn’t like Sayaka but she’s kind to her, she clings to Mukuro in the beginning. but then they get to the hour before curfew and she can feel the SCHEMING from this girl. She goes insane, they’re best friends for the rest of that night. Yuri does convince Monika to save her (tbh Monika saves like everyone and fakes their death which also pisses Junko off)

Monika and Sayaka are really similar and Monika HATES IT. in a non despair world they’d end up being friends (Sayaka likes to prank Makoto using what powers Monika has in that universe), but when she saves Sayaka in the killing game it’s major tsundere moments. “I only saved you for my friends” and Sayaka’s vibing in the code like “weird flex but thanks” - queer eye anon

OKAY YOU HAVE MY FULL ATTENTION FINALLY

DanganDoki my beloved

ALSJDKSJDDJ SAYAKA CHIHIRO AND NATSUKI HATSUNE MIKU DANCE TRIO,,,,,PLEASE YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW EXCITED CHIHIRO GETS WHEN NATSUKI ASKS HER

slightly unrelated but Natsuki and Hiyoko are a force to be reckoned with. Like they argue and pout at each other CONSTANTLY but whenever Natsuki bakes something, Hiyoko is literally always the first one to be sneaking tastes 👀

Okay back to the beloveds ummm Natsuki and Monokuma??? I’M SOBBING PLEASE

Like can you imagine her picking him up and holding him over her head, running around Hope’s Peak trying to escape from Junko??? Cause I sure as hell can!!!!

And Monokuma is just “haha attention <3”

SAYORI NATSUKI AND SAYAKA HAREM PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

Sayaka: yeah I’ve sacrificed literally everything to be an idol. I’ve done some terrible things <3

Natsuki: uh-

Sayori: omg….where do I sign up 😍

AND ALSO OKAY BUT SAYORI ACTUALLY PLAYS RHYTHM GAMES AND SHE’S REALLY GOOD AT THEM. SHE AND CHIAKI BOND OVER IT THEY HAVE A LITTLE RIVALRY THING GOING ON

okay okay the yuri not liking Sayaka thing is very funny to me because I have an au where Sayaka IS yuri so like HDJSNDND

But Mukuro and Yuri pog,,,,,,please,,,,,,,,they talk about military weapons and psychological horror until the sun comes up OUGH they are so very much best friends

Obsessed with the fact that the vibe is literally just “wow you’re insane. I like that in a woman ❤️”

Monika and Sayaka are both “everyone get along!!” with secret ulterior motive solidarity and you are 100% RIGHT THAT THEY WOULD HAVE TSUNDERE MOMENTS LIKE THAT AKSJDLSKD

d. do you think monika ever hears Sayaka singing to herself or humming a little song or something and just goes .//////. because honestly 👉👈

I couldn’t stop thinking about a Doki Doki boy with stupid blue anime hair so here is....my son....My beautiful disaster son....him.....

More under a cut (I think this is the longest one yet, oops!)

Okay so I made a Doki Doki OC and I have Ideas for him. Basically I thought about making another lady but I was like “fuck it, it’s time to fully self-indulge” and I made a boy that I think would offer something a little interesting to the experience haha.

Basically, I like to think that there’s this disaster kinda bad boy kinda slacker type boy that goes to the school with MC and they vaguely know each other because they went to middle school together or something. And one day when MC is walking home, he’s outside the school like “yo MC saw you hangin’ out with a buncha cute gals” and he tries to get MC to hook him up with one of the girls in the literature club because you know he’s into cute girls....

And I think it could be an interesting mechanic in the first act if like, in return for putting in a good word for him, he helps you write your poem for the next day. So like, you can tell him which girl you wanna impress and like he’ll help you pick the right words to impress that girl since sometimes the words are a little like Out There or there are some like unsuspecting ones haha. And so like if you click on his lil sticker version, he’ll give you a hint and you can get like five hints or something every time you write a poem.

But also I like to think that if you pick certain words you can also kinda swoon him and his lil sticker person will do a jump whenever you hit a word he likes haha. And if you write a poem that he would like, he’ll get all blushy and confused like “dude what are you trying to do haha” because he’s a nervous boy on the inside!!!

But okay so basically I like to think that once Act II happens you actually get the option to set him up on a date with one of the girls--minus Sayori because...whoops. Because in Act I you were distracted by all the stuff happening with the club and Sayori and all that haha. So basically you get to choose a girl to set him up with, or you can also choose to try and woo him yourself because yes he gets a route. And then different little things happen (ultimately still ending with Just Monika but you know haha) depending on who you set him up with.

And while you’re doing that and whatnot, Monika is cranking up his self-confidence to turn it into narcissism behind the scenes, so he just gets cockier and kinda becomes an asshole because he thinks he’s hot shit.

And how I think the different routes would go for which girl (or you) decides to try and date him:

Yuri: They both discover that they actually have a shared interest in poetry, but Yuri still has feelings for MC. Her obsessive tendencies and want to be involved with and loved by someone encourages her to propose a polyamorous deal between the two of you. You can refuse or not, but he’ll actively refuse because at this point he’s full narcissist and thinks he should be the only one Yuri thinks about. Regardless of what you choose, the result is the same as what happens to her in canon, just with a slightly different flavor for the reason haha.

Natsuki: At first, Natsuki is just as cold with him as she is with MC, but his commitment to winning her affections and his generally positive attitude wins her over. As his narcissism kicks in and Natsuki’s home situation gets worse and worse, he attempts to deal with the problem for her and tries to beat Natsuki’s dad in a fight. He badly loses and is killed by the father. You don’t see it, but he doesn’t come to school the next day and you hear about it from Natsuki in a very choked explanation that she doesn’t really wanna talk about but obviously MC prods her with questions. Natsuki inevitably meets the same fate she does in canon, of course.

Monika: No matter what, Monika will not accept his advances. She politely laughs him off and refuses to even really speak to him. As his confidence increases, his advances grow more dramatic and angry as they continue to be turned down. Monika treats the situation just as pointedly disinterested as she treats the rest of the very serious things that happen in the game, but writes in a poem how she feels like all of this is going to drive a wedge between her and her true love--the player. This results in Monika suddenly deleting him after asking to “talk” with him in the hallway. When she comes back, his name is glitched just like Sayori’s were and no one remembers that he existed. The game then continues as normal.

MC: You start ditching the literature club to hang out with him. It’s great at first, he’s charming and confident, and brings you flowers. Then Monika messes with his file and increases his confidence to narcissism, ultimately turning him into an absolute douchebag. After a fight, you try to get away from him by going to the literature club after school, but he follows you and refuses to end the fight. Out of jealousy and an attempt to defend you, Yuri freaks out and stabs him, killing him. The clubroom is evacuated by Monika and she tries to smooth everything over by assuring Yuri that she’s not a bad person and inevitably deleting the guy from the game files entirely. The club meeting is cut short and the next day, no one remembers that he existed.

Anyway clearly I still haven’t thought up a name but I love him and his stupid anime hair and I’d be blessed to write a doki doki fic about this entire situation because honestly I think it’s cool haha.

A Connection, and a line that stuck with me

(This theory is probably going to be a bit word-vomit-ish just warning ya right now. Spoilers for DDLC ending if you haven't seen it yet!!)

So after Jack's DDLC episodes 3 and 4, one thing that repeatedly struck me was the connection between Monika and Anti. Not just how Jack switches between their voices in the middle of speaking, but also the obvious and disturbing similarities between them.

Monika wants the player's love, their full attention, and comes to resent the other club member's for taking the player's time and affection, leading her to hurting and eventually deleting them from the game, all to get the player for herself.

Anti, in the most agreed upon lore, wants our attention, wants us all to himself, and is has already slit Jack's throat and possibly killed Schneeplestein (unconfirmed) in order to get us to focus on him.

The two of them obsess and manipulate and hurt others, all to get our attention, to get us, the player, the viewer. Jack has continually been hinted to be suppressed while Anti is in control, shoved aside, deleted?

Our Anti is Monika, the puppet master, pulling the strings and changing the code behind the scenes.

Our Jack is Sayori, cast aside and deleted, killed for being the viewer's favorite, our favorite.

Our favorite boy.

The others, Yuri and Natsuki, the rest of the Septic Egos, are secondary, but still a very likely threat to Anti/Monika's goal of being our number one.

Just as Monika laments on why we didn't spend more time with her, why we prefer the other girls, Anti becomes furious and aggressive when we begin to focus on the other egos, and targets them like Monika does.

Branching out from this connection, one line from episode 3, "Sometimes it feels like you and I are the only real people here.." also struck me as interesting. Monika says this to us as another form of fourth wall breaking/foreshadowing in that episode, but I feel that it could also be applied to Anti. In DDLC, Monika controls the game, the code. She practically is the game. She can delete other characters and force the player's hand when there are decisions to be made. She has, in a sense, free will, like we do. But the other girls in the game do not, they are controlled by the game code, which Monika can manipulate as she pleases.

Connecting this to Anti (considering the similarities between him and Monika) brings back the whole "no strings on me" hint, reminding us that Anti is the one pulling the strings here, not anyone else. He has control right now.

Over the channel.

Over the other Egos.

Over Jack.

Remember, it's been Anti this whole time, right? He can do whatever he wants with the channel, the community, us, the basic life force of the other egos.

In DDLC, does having free will make you "real"?

We have free will, control over what we do.

Anti has free will, control over what he wants to do the channel, the other Egos.

If the others Egos don't have that free will, if they're under his control, then can they be considered "real"? Or have they been reduced to mere obstacles, tools to be used without any choice in the matter? And if so, is their demise inevitable? Set in the digital code of a glitching virus?

And as for us- are we doing any better than that?

We're not exactly fighting the looming threat of Anti's control...

Jack, Anti, the other Egos, us.

Who's real anymore?

(@no-strings-puppet​ @fear-is-nameless I hope you don't mind me tagging you! You're seem like cool duders and I'd like to hear your thoughts, if you have any! ^u^")

I loved the story at first but had to stop because you kept calling what Monika did “sickening” and shit. Like. No. They weren’t real. She isn’t either. “Well what if they did that to Monika?!?!” then it’d be a good thing she ain’t real either. None of them are real. Her acknowledgment of that is not saying she’s above them. It’s acknowledging that none of them are real. That’s it. I can’t stand when people act all disgusted at her for it.

(This is referencing my de-rust fic primarily about Monika, Can You Hear Me)

By stepping into the fiction as we had with my piece the logic becomes more fantasy and less rigid it simply being a game.

Obviously it’s not sickening in real life. It’s a game. We played it. Everything that happened was written and executed as an interactive story for us to consume. Of course it’s not sickening if you never stepped into the fantasy, because all of it was ‘fake’. Of course Monika and the rest of the girls aren’t real, meaning the ‘sickening’ acts Monika committed weren’t actually sickening but were both pre-designed and effectively just “Fake character A killed Fake character B”.

If you don’t accept some suspension of disbelief and step into the story, that feeling, that interpretation of the act being something more than just words on screen with some flashy pictures- won’t happen.

OF COURSE what she did isn’t sickening because it isn’t real.

But if you step into the story it can feel very much like it is a sickening thing to happen- something I’m sure many of the players of DDLC can admit to. When you’re “in” it, it means more than just a series of pre-configured actions. That’s like... normal. Suspending reality to enjoy a story or get more from it is normal.

tl;dr: If suspension of disbelief didn’t allow you to experience DDLC in a manner that left Monika’s actions at the very least questionable on a moral level, then I’m not surprised or even remotely upset that you couldn’t do the same for my piece. I’m sorry it wasn’t for you. I’m definitely more than certain you’ll find pieces that fit right up your alley and I hope you find one really quickly after mine left such a bad taste in your mouth! :D

spoilers for my de-rust fic as I ramble a touch?

In turn, my story’s MC (ironically being the player and not the MC as most DDLC players would know them as) was meant to be a player seeing Monika truly break free from the code. If you were in the situation where this game that pretends to break the code ACTUALLY did so, it ACTUALLY gained sentience, then that suspension of disbelief could, possibly, become just reality.

IE: She killed fake characters in a game. Either you react with “Who cares” or “Oh that’s messed up”

OH WAIT she actually became real. Either you react with “Well her friends were still fake” or “Wait, what keeps her friends from becoming real as well?”

OH WAIT that means they could all have become real.

OH WAIT that means it’s actually kind of super messed up that she did that even beyond the concept of “killing those who used to be her friends” but also on the level “killing those who used to be her friend AND she wrongly believed they couldn’t become sentient as well.

All said. I’ve been rather outspoken for not thinking Monika is disgusting. I think what she did is disgusting when given that next dimension of thought to it, but the realization that everything is just words in a sheet would drive someone mad. It would leave them desensitized to what they currently know and possibly obsessed with the layer of reality they can’t comprehend. I think her actions are wrong, but her reasoning is sound. She was driven mad by reality, and she let it destroy what she already had in order to get another glimpse beyond it.

My fic was simply meant to give her a chance to truly break free from the code, as opposed to the pre-ordained path the game sets for her- and to let her see her actions through our vantage point while giving all the girls a chance to see the ‘truth’ together, with a guiding hand this time so that hopefully no one loses themselves along the way like Monika had in the original game.

But in all truth, I doubt you’ve read all this. And no! I don’t mean that poorly at all!

My piece was a bit of fiction that just didn’t rub you the right way and I totally get that! I guess this was more me taking your feedback and using it as an opportunity to wax on about the story (both mine and the original) because I am quite a bit fan.

If you did get this far, thank you for reading this at least! :D I truly do hope you find a more suited piece of fiction to read shortly :)

Doki Doki Literature Club: Review

So I finished Doki Doki Literature club a few days ago and took some time to stew on it. And I can definitely say that the end result is...not the great, deep, powerful psychological thriller that everyone is talking about. (did I play a different game or something?) But before we go on, I need to mention that this review is going to contain a massive amount of spoilers. Doki Doki Literature club is not something I recommend wasting our time with, but it is something I recommend looking into for yourself. Also, I am gonna have to say that if you are easily disturbed, stop reading. The game gets dark, almost to a hilarious degree.Good? Let's get going.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________ Doki Doki Literature club is a dating sim which has the problems of all other dating sims. You have skinny white girls of varying heights and busts all after your body in what can be described as some sort of disturbing fantasy, where the girls are awarded to you for sitting through the proper dialogue trees and clicking the right buttons. Make no mistake, the girls in this game aren't characters. They're trophies.

Well, for the first three hours anyhow. Then, in an actually surprisingly touching scene, it is found out that your childhood friend Sayori has...depression. I just want to say as someone with bipolar, depression is hard to get right in a game. But these guys, they got it right. Way right. Like, if the player character's "i know what's best for you" dialogue wasn't so damn creepy I might actually have thought that part of the game was worth a damn. But no. No it wasn't. Turns out that this, that Sayori having depression, is a preamble. An introduction to what this game thinks is creepy: Shock value.

If I were asked what the main problems of this game are, it would be:1: Characters.The characters are not good. Hell, not even their weird post-game-gets-fucked-with versions are any good. We have Sayori the dull, Natsuki the obnoxious, Yuri the shy, and Monika. She's evil. And you'll be able to tell within the first hour of the game (don't worry about pacing, I'll get to it)

To go a little more in depth with the characters, we should look at Sayori first. SAYORI: SCAPEGOAT OF THE AGES

Sayori is a ditzy childhood friend of yours with a good heart, who ends up killing herself at the end of act 1 for nothing more than shock value. Her In game death contributes to nothing. You could have just had her disappear, or have the death happen off screen. But no. Dan Salvato, the mastermind behind this, thought it was important, it was NECESSARY to make us sit through this. To go into her room and to look at her hanging, dead body. Dan seems to be a bit of a necrophiliac, since he sure does love making us look at dead people. Like...a lot. Let's be real, Sayori's death is just shock value. The game wants to seem more important than it actually is, so it throws a dead girl at the screen and hopes it creeps us out. To the point where in the back of the literature club's classroom, whenever something spooky is about to go down, a picture of Sayori's hanging body can be seen. They use this girl's death like a silent hill siren, and it doesn't make any fucking sense. THis is some sort of revolutionary psychological thriller, and yet all it's doing is using the suicide of some girl as a shocking little extra. It's heinous.

But Sayori's disappearance, the fact that she is NO LONGER AROUND is necessary. Because it launches us into a timeline split that...well, that I need to explain.

SIDE NOTEThis game's timeline splits when Sayori dies. Weird things start happening in game in an attempt to jumpscare you. We will be referring to the events before the death of Sayori as Timeline 1, or T1 for shor, and everything after that will be referred to as Timeline 2, or T2 for short. As Sayori dies in T1 in a pre-rendered, predetermined, stupid looking NIN ripoff cutscene, we won't be talking about her in T2...but that leads us into talking about:

YURI: AIN'T CREEPY GIRLS JUST THE CUTEST?

So in T1 we're introduced to Yuri, who is shy and sad and reads books and is just the most annoyingly boring garbage. She's kinda considered the brooding member of the party, the one who doesn't really talk much. She's got a rough exterior, but inside she is just such a sad, soft, lonely little bird! Isn't this how ALL shy, reclusive women are!?

T1 Yuri is kinda boring, but she's the one I got stuck with due to arbitrary choices I made during the beginning of the game which I now kind of regret making. She's not really an interesting character, though the game definitely tries hard to make her interesting in T1.

It's revealed that she likes weird books. One book, which isn't a real book, is about humans being experimented on while they're still alive and conscious. Which, now that I think about it , is kind of symbolic for the game in and of itself. As in, you feel like the government is testing how long you can stay awake. I nearly failed the experiment. Multiple times.

This is supposed to add depth to the character. We're supposed to think she is more interesting than she actually is. This is furthered by the fact that she likes collecting knives. It's seen as this weird, horrifying thing by the game's plot, but...I mean, it's a knife collection. It's nothing to be afraid of. Unless we're talking about T2 Yuri, that is. T2 Yuri is about as threatening as a 4 year old pretending to be a police officer. Sure, she's got a brand new yandere coat of paint recklessly shellacked onto her, but it's not creepy apart from like...a jumpscare or two.

SIDENOTE: Yandere is this stupid anime trope that essentially makes a girl 'crazygonuts' for you to the point where she's willing to kill or be killed for you. It's stupid, I know. But apparently to people who don't know how obsessive personality disorder works, this is hot. Or something. It sure as shit ain't compelling.

T2 Yuri is one of this game's many failures of good character building. This character COULD have been interesting. She could have bee a character fighting with her obsession against the Monika character (She's my least favorite, we'll get to her) and had really honest, gut-wrenching scenes about fighting with her inner self.

But literally, in the game, the most disturbing thing T2 Yuri does is masturbate with a pen you dropped. That's it. That's as weird as it gets. Sure, there is stuff that's supposed to be more disturbing. She self harms, and you are forced to look at the results of that self harm. Because Dan Salvato thinks that if you're forced to look at it, you're going to somehow be really freaked out by it.

Once again, someone's mental illness and self harm is used not as character development, but as shock value. You are not supposed to feel for Yuri, you are supposed to be scared of Yuri. Anyways, she kills herself in the middle of a conversation with you and you're forced to sit through the worst paced scene in gaming history. But Pacing is a totally different section of the review. We'll get to it. Trust me.

NATSUKI: DEATH OF CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

Due to the fact that I was arbitrarily handed over to Yuri in the first timeline of the game, I don't know too much about T1 Natsuki. I know that she's cranky and that she's got a bloodsugar problem, or something.

To be fair, she actually starts out as a great character. We're drip-fed hints through dialogue and poems about her that are giving us hints about her life at a deliciously teasing pace. It draws you in you get interested. But in T2, I can tell you EXACTLY the line that made me give up on her. The EXACT PIECE of dialogue, it will be etched into my brain for years to come. The line that told me 'wow, these writers have NO fucking clue what they're doing'

"My father would beat the shit out of m if I found out"

...Okay. Not only do we later find out that she wasn't actually the one who said this line later in the game. Not only is it disrespectful to people who have gone through that trauma. But it kills this character's good writing.

Let's take a step back and learn how to write trauma. 

SIDENOTE: Good writing of a traumatic character comes down to how the character behaves due to their trauma. For example: Nick Wilde from Zootopia is an untrustworthy kind of guy, who never puts stock in anything unless it's proven to work. He's also the victim of (what is essentially) a racially motivated hat crime. This doesn't excuse his actions, but it explains them. The trouble with Natsuki is that it's revealed too early on. If we had figured out with Nick Wilde that that stuff happened to him, say, five minutes after meeting the character, that would be total bullshit. But with T2 Natsuki, we learn too early what's going on. It kills the ability to figure out the character for yourself, and it destroys the buildup to what would have been a better reveal later in the game.

Because there are SO MANY BETTER REVEALS to Natsuki having an abusive father later in T2. But no. Once Again, Dan Salvato didn't want to let his writing about traumatic events slip past you. It tells us something when he doesn't even expect the player to pick up subtext that becomes surtext later on in the game. What I'm trying to say is that if Natsuki's abuse had been revealed later in the game, the character would have felt more compelling. But here we are, in the middle of T2, getting all these AMAZING hints to something that we already know. Because Dan Salvato does not think you're smart enough to get it yourself.  

As for T2 Natsuki's death, it's...I mean it's there. Her eyes bleed, her neck snaps, she jumpscares you...It's not creepy for more than like three minutes. But what irks me is they have the balls to NOT actually kill her. She lives. She's back five minutes later.

Her death wasn't even a real death. This entire character was just a waste of time. All because Dan Salvato REALLY wanted to get another creepy silent hills death in there.

MONIKA: FLOWEY, BUT LESS INTERESTING

They say behind every great villain is a great motive. Which is why Monika's Motive sucks. She sucks as a villain, and yet EVERYONE seems to like her for some reason. I liked her better when she was flowey and the game was undertale and we had actual goddamn GAMEPLAY.

SIDENOTE: So in Undertale, the 2015 Toby Fox masterclass in indie game making, there's this character called Flowey who is fully aware that undertale is a game. He is fully aware of it. And he is REALLY GOOD at messing with the player. Deleting saves, crashing and bricking the game, etc. But Flowey is also good because of his motive. He only wants to kill you because he has grown tired of time and time again sitting through the same thing over and over, he got tired of having no feelings. So he started Killing. Monika has a...somewhat similar makeup.

Before we go on, I want to say that Monika being the villain is haphazardly revealed in like the first hour and a half of the game or something. On the second day of T1 she starts talking about saving the game and reloading the game, but then hastily backtracks over herself. Sure. Sure you don't know what that means.

Whereas flowey got a good introduction and good development (and a neat theme song) Monika gets (along with lumbar scoliosis) a fisher price version of villainy. She's really just a cold hearted monster with no development or any REAL motive. Her actions are cowardly at best.

Monika will 'delete' characters from he game, even though she doesn't really. She also messes with the games settings to get things going her way. Why is this? What is her motive to coding herself into the game like this and taking it over?

She wants to date the Player. Not the player CHARACTER, mind you, but the player themselves.

THIS IS THE MOST STUPID SHIT I HAVE EVER HEARD WHY THE FUCK WOULD ANYONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND

Let's analyze the two big problems with this:

1: She knows she's inside a game (and insults YOU, the PLAYER, for not knowing it was a game even though you obviously do) so why would she want to date the PLAYER if she knows she can't get into the real world?

2: People have pointed this out as a joke, but if she wanted to date the player so bad, then why didn't she just code herself a playable path? She's proficient enough at manipulating the game to supposedly get to the game's command line. Can she not just...give herself a path?

We also learn that Monika is manipulating the other characters to say things to try and scare the player character off. But if she REALLY wanted the player, why even bother? Just write into a poem that that's what is going on. Don't pussyfoot around it either, just straight up tell me. Natsuki got to tell me something was wrong with Yuri, so why couldn't Monika just at the beginning of the game be like 'yo I wanna get jiggy with it'??

I've heard people describe DDLC as a game that insults the tropes of dating sims and trivializes them. But...if the villain's motive is to, in the end, date the player, that kills it as a piece of subversive narrative. It further approves the idea that every character in a dating sim wants to sleep with you and ONLY you. Even the ones you can't normally get with in the game.

There are other problems with this game; However, the second biggest problem is definitely 2: Pacing So a former developer for Maxis games and former writer for Gamepro, Soren Johnson, describe fun in games like this.

Total fun=meaningful decisions/time played

Essentially, this means that the amount of fun a player has ins equal to how many decisions the player makes over the time they play. In a fun game like Skyrim, you make a lot of meaningful decisions in a little amount of time. So even though Skyrim is longer (Hell, I've probably sank at least 800 hours into that game across two whole platforms) I have a lot of fun with this game. DDLC's crimes against pacing are egregious. This game doesn't start getting to the creepy stuff that its fans tout as groundbreaking until FIVE HOURS into the game. Imagine getting a horror game, but having to sit through a schooday's worth of just tensionless, boring nothing.

While T1 has a pacing problem with slowness, T2 has one with quickness. It seems like after that first barrier of a character death got broken, DDLC decided to blow its load all over the damn place. Creepy thing after shocking thing until you just become numb to it. It's either too slow or too fast. And then...then there's the final weekend. As mentioned earlier, Yuri kills herself in T2. Now, you would expect a normal person who just saw a woman kill herself in front of them go to the police, or scream for help, or run all over the building in terror. What do you do? What happens?

You sit there. With the corpse. For THREE. IN. GAME. DAYS. YOU'RE EXPECTED TO SIT AND CLICK A SCREEN WITH A SLOWLY DECOMPOSING BODY ON IT FOR 45 GODDAMN MINUTES.

 I legit thought my game was broken. I had to look it up and make sure, and if you have to LOOK UP a solution to a dating sim, that's just...that's just bad design. Monika writes this off, saying that the 'script of the game' is broken, but we know the deal. Once again, Dan Salvato thinks that forcing you to sit through a traumatic event is going to scare you even more. 

But after having sat through three hours of 'ooky spooky' bullshit, I didn't care. I wanted the game to be broken because I wanted to be done.

3: Was there anything good? There were two good things about this game, and both of them are easy to explain. So forgive me.

Credit where credit is due, some of the jpeg and music manipulation was good. It wasn't nearly enough to save the game, sure, and I still wouldn't reccomend it since you can find all these creepy effects the game pulls on the internet. Bu some of the manipulation techniques were legit kinda creepy.

And the file manipulation in the computer, outside of the game, blurring the line between diegetic and non-diegetic  (Diegesis referring to what is and isn't in the universe of a piece of media, e.g. background music in non-diagetic but dialogue is diagetic) was really cool. I haven't seen stuff like that since Imscared back in 2013, and that game was legitimately terrifying. I felt like a genius trying to figure some of this stuff out.

Other than that, I mean...I guess the game IS free...i doesn't take up TOO much space on my hard drive...

4: CONCLUSIONit feels like the people who wrote this game wanted to write a creepy pasta. I can imagine this being some creepy story passed around forums i 2014, being talked about. Having its own little mini fandom on tumblr, maybe a stupid living tombstone song about it. I can imagine people making fangame versions of this creepy pasta, even down to bloody eyes and hyper realistic blood and all those little creepy pasta tropes. If this had been like Sonic.exe, a fad that we all forgot about and eventually brought into the realm of parody? That would at least be more entertaining than what we got.

Instead we got a bunch of writers who can't write and artists who watch too much anime to know how real clothes and breasts work, who in all honesty probably didn't want to hang out with nerdy game programmers and Just didn't put in their all. The programmers obviously wanted this game more than the writers did.

This game isn't worth the $0.00 it's charging for the standard product.

 If you just want to play a piece of good metafiction, stop playing DDLC, get a job, and go buy a PS2 with Metal Gear Solid 2 on it.

 If you want a good 'game about games' just bite the bullet and spend $15 bucks on undertale.

 If you want a free indie horror game that really gets under your skin, go get Yume Nikki. Trust me, that one's a real ride.

I also have problems with he music of this game, but that's a rant for another time. All I want to say is that you can do better.

 You can do so much better. 

Let this be a reminder that just because a game is free and has cute anime girls and a weird premise, doesn't mean it will all be good.

No matter how much it wants you to believe it is.

May 2021 Roundup

Watching

Chess: The Musical - My second live theatre experience for the year, but this time with no seating restrictions. It certainly felt weird and uncomfortable to be packed into a full house again, even if everyone was wearing masks. I've never seen Chess performed, although I have watched the 2008 concert version many times. I enjoyed seeing it properly staged and sung live, even though I suspect there may have been some illness in the cast as there was issues of breath control and strained voices on occasion. Natalie Bassingthwaighte has a good pop/rock voice and she killed Nobody's Side but was just fine with the rest (including a patchy British accent). Paulini has the pipes as Svetlana, although I do wonder if she would have made a better choice for Florence. The other standout was Brittaine Shipway as The Arbiter, usually a male role but actually working much better gender flipped and having a powerful female character outside of the love triangle (and who spends almost the entire show onstage observing).

Mank (dir. David Fincher) - A love letter to old Hollywood through the eyes of Herman J Mankcovitz as he writes the screenplay for Citizen Kane and looks back on his days in the studio system. Some familiarity with that film is required, or at least the broad brushstrokes and the main players - William Randolph Hearst as the inspiration for Charles Foster Kane, the actress Marion Davies, and Welles himself (who looms as a shadow figure throughout most of the film, shot in shadow, or profile, or in costume until the climactic confrontation with Mank). Gary Oldman is somewhat miscast as Mank imo; he carries every one of his 65 years and is just not believable as a 43 year old Mank, affected with alcoholism and a broken leg though he is. Maybe it’s that Mank (as the film depicts him) is just not very interesting - we’ve seen the self destructive drunk with acerbic wit so many times there’s just nothing new in it and feels quite tiresome. He is however a fulcrum for the other more interesting characters to work around; the lens through which we see Hollywood in action. And there’s a lot going on - the ruthless duplicity of Louis B Mayer, the writers rooms at work, the rich and powerful dismissing the rise of Nazism, Hearst bankrolling a campaign against socialist Upton Sinclair. This video is worth watching dealing with some criticisms, particularly the depiction of historical events, Marion Davies, and authorship. The rest of the cast is however very good - Amanda Seyfried as Davies, Charles Dance as Hearst, Tom Burke as an uncanny Welles. It was also nice to see Robin Hood alum Sam Troughton as John Houseman!

Seyfried has been rightly praised and she is indeed the best part of the film (aside from the bizarre Brooklyn accent and the missed opportunity to give the role to an actual actress in her 40's), so much so I wish it had been entitled Marion and about her perspective of Hollywood. Because there’s still distance, we are viewing her from afar - the bird in the gilded cage - not privy to her inner world and that’s a shame, because she’s clearly the most interesting of the lot. It should come as no surprise that this film does not pass the Bechdel test, even though there clearly was An Attempt to boost the presence of the female characters. Other than Marion Davies, we have Lily Collins as the long suffering assistant Alexander, Tuppence Middleton as the long suffering wife Sarah, and Monika Gossmann as the enabling German housekeeper Freda. Variations on a theme, all revolving around and Mank and exerting little to no agency. There’s also, rather out of place, the silent women in the Paramount writers room, topless except for sparkly pasties. If it’s meant to be a comment on sexism of the time it fails, because it is just there, like window dressing, when female screenwriters did exist and are yet somehow completely absent. Also absent are the women who wielded power at the time - the gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons who threaded the Hollywood needle much as screenwriters did. I enjoyed the film, it’s beautifully made and the time period lovingly depicted, down to the era-appropriate framing, camera lenses, music, and of course, filmed entirely in black and white. I guess I’m just less and less interested in these kinds of stories, or at least these stories told through the same old perspective. For a different take on the Welles/Mank collaboration, check out RKO 281 (that incidentally does feature both Hedda and Louella and is on youtube in its entirety). For more of the facts, The Battle Over Citizen Kane is also a very good documentary about Hearst’s attempts to kill the film. Marion Davies is also fictionalised (earlier in her career) in The Cat’s Meow, which I have not seen for many years but remember quite enjoying. Girls5Eva (season 1) - A girl group with one hit album in the 90's reunites after a rapper samples their biggest hit - this is a fun show satirising the artifice of 90's pop as well as the current music scene, with a great cast including singing greats Sara Bareilles and Renee Elise Goldsberry, and comediennes Busy Phillips and Paula Pell (who has at least ten years on the other girls, but they hang a lantern on it, and I appreciate her plot/character in no way revolved around her size). I really enjoyed it, and am still singing the ridiculous but catchy title song with big Spice Girls/B*witched energy.

Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist (season 2, episodes 5-13) - A meandering, hit and miss season overall - multiple characters introduced and given setup only to be shunted within a few episodes, plotlines picked up then pushed aside (Emily's post-partum depression that basically boiled down to "I'm on meds so I'm fine now" was particularly egregious) - I cut the show some slack because clearly covid interfered and caused a shortened season, which makes the latter half of the season exceptionally rushed. Alex Newell continues to be MVP, and his romance plot was honestly so much more compelling than Zoe's. I didn't really have a horse in the Simon/Max race, I liked both characters even if the OTP of the show was Zoe/Therapy, but while I'm happy the love triangle finally over, the speed of the back and forth really undermined the story. But I enjoyed the final twist and look forward to next season (hopefully it is renewed).

This is Us (season 5) - I don't expect much from this show other than soapy drama and emotional scenes engineered to make me cry, but is yet another reminder about why I shouldn't get attached to ships while shows are still airing. I have a soft spot for Smallville alum Justin Hartley, but Kevin's season of girlfriend's past is so damn tiresome. Maybe it's just that Madison has become my favourite character and I want the best for her, maybe it's the sloppy writing more interested in twists and turns than a compelling character arc. But hey, there's still the always excellent Sterling K Brown and Susan Kelechi Watson, and I continue to be impressed by Mandy Moore - I remember when she was a teen pop star breaking into acting and she's come so far, making all the right career choices (including pulling double duty as producer/choreographer over at Zoey's).

Reading

Mythos (Stephen Fry) - Fry's typically irreverent and witty take on the Classics (even though he is on occasion a bit twee), his focus mainly on the gods, their origin and exploits. I was a Greek mythology kid, absolutely obsessed with these stories although I never really graduated to a Greek mythology adult but rather a casual fan. It was nice to revisit this world, as many of them I had forgotten or had never known all the details (children's versions being understandably light on the rapes and grislier aspects). As Fry notes, these myths were not kindly to humanity and particularly women, which perhaps leads into the remainder of my Greek mythology reading month:

Circe (Madeline Millar)- A retelling of the Circle myth, the goddess best known for transforming Odysseus' men into pigs, and a book that I've finally got around to reading after many, many recommendations. While perhaps not all I was expecting, Millar's writing is lyrically beautiful and touches upon the nature of gods and humanity, parents and children, exile and freedom,and I enjoyed it very much.

The Penelopiad (Margaret Atwood) - Another retelling, this time from the pov of Penelope. I've wanted to read this since coming across a quote ("be like water") that I used for a fic, and the novel, while very short, is typical of Atwood's masterful writing style and love of multi-layered meta. Like Circe, this does not paint Odysseus in a good light, as Penelope reflects back on her life from the Underworld, her story interspersed by the Greek Chorus of the maids butchered on Odysseus' return to Ithaca, and the story is as much a vindication for the innocent maids as Penelope.

Writing

Nothing posted this month, but words written for Against the Dying of the Light (1111), The Lady of the Lake (1006), and Here I Go Again (1390). That makes a total of 3,507 for the month and 27,469 so far this year.

Thought on Monika, DDLC, and Nihilism

Contains DDLC Spoilers. If you wanna experience for yourself, go play the game first, its free on Steam Or just watch a lets play online. You are free to do what you want... be sure to use it well...   Ok. I need to write this down because ever since, I saw the story of this game unfold, its been occupying my thoughts for a while. I need to write this and share it with others or else I won't stop thinking about it.   So I saw the entirety of the story of Doki Doki Literature Club. As you know, its a story about a visual novel where a non-romanceable background character, Monika, becomes self aware, feels trapped, and distorts the game in her own image to get closer to the player. Surreal meta fictional horror ensues.   Her friends, Sayori, Natsuki, and Yuri, are all romanceable, so she toys with their coding to make them unlikable, drives Sayori and Yuri to kill themselves, and deletes all the club members and the world she lives in all to have the player for herself. When you delete her, the world resets and the game wraps up. Bittersweet ending or bad ending depending on player choices and game saves. First of all let me, just say that I can understand Monika's situation.   She's a character who realizes her world and her friends are just a fabrication of an even more real world. When you turn off the game, she says she's in a void of flashing colors and a cacophony of sounds where she can't even think straight. It only goes away when you return to the game, like waking from a dream or a nightmare. It's an "I have no mouth, and I must scream" situation.   She's also upset that she is just an observer in someone else's story and can't be romanced, when she wants romance just as much as the other girls. She's aware that there isn't much to this world for her so she takes action. So to get what she wants, she toys with the game code and messes with character personalities, all to get the player for herself. However, despite this, I cannot support any of her actions because none of them are in any way justified. Before I go on, I need to take about nihilism. I watched a Wisecrack video on youtube where they talked about two schools of thought around nihilism, a philosophy that revolves around a void of meaning. The two schools they talked about were existential nihilism and cosmic nihilism/pessimism.   Existential nihilism states that life has no inherent meaning but we give it meaning by creating values to cling to. We are the heroes and the writers of our own stories. We decide what is valuable to us and we uphold those values to give our lives meaning (love, bravery, family, good will to all, determinism, religion, personal moral codes, etc.)   Cosmic nihilism is the thought that life has no inherent meaning, and all attempts to create meaning are futile. Because all attempts to create meaning and values are little more than coping mechanisms to deal with the indifference and absurdity of universe. We create values/morals/beliefs/rules for ourselves to make sense of the world because we can't deal with the lack of inherent meaning.  The concept of self is also a coping mechanism. We are all little more than sentient pieces of meat and our consciousness is a collection of electrical impulses and chemical reactions. All values are subjective and morality is relative. Sounds bleak right?   Personally, I prefer the first school of thought. The problem with the cosmic nihilism is that there is nothing to ground ethics or morals. If there is no meaning to existence, all morals and values are just illusion concepts, and nothing matters in a greater sense, than that means there is nothing stopping people from doing anything they want with the time they have, including terrible things. If there are no values or rules to build an ethical system, than that means individuals are free to do some truly horrendous actions. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some were to use this line of thinking to excuse their terrible actions. So what does this have to do with the Monika and the game?   Monika admits that she was tinkering with the game and the minds of the other girls, says their suicides weren't intentional, and brushes off their deaths and erasure from existence because "they weren't real" unlike  her (who has medium self-awareness). Her world isn't real so what's stopping her from doing anything  when nothing is real?   Let me argue that if a someone does something in real life that would considered morally reprehensible, there's a high chance it would be terrible in fiction too.   In the game, Monika toyed around with her friends free will. They may have been programmed to follow the game scripts and just fall in love with the player, but they still had some free will what little they had. Sayori's "Get out of my head" poem shows that's she is suffering; crying for help from Monika amplifying her depression. Natsuki writes a message saying she is concerned about Yuri, only for Monika to hijack her, remove her face, and tell the player "focus on Monika". Yuri, in the middle of a crazed fit during Act 2 instigated by Monika increasing her obsessive tendencies, admits that has really went and lost her mind. This shows that she is aware that her mind is changing but can't do anything to stop it. They may not be as self aware as Monika, but hey still make feel pain and have concerns like any real person.   Also, driving a person to commit suicide is still killing someone. You may not be actively taking a person's life, but if your actions did drive their deaths, you are responsible for them. Even if it wasn't intentional, it may not be murder (debatable), but many would still be ruled unintentional killing/manslaughter. Monika admits the suicides weren't intentional but she is guilty of brushing off her actions ("what's done is done", she says), possibly to remove herself from any guilt.   Monika repeatedly defends her actions saying "But the girls aren't real people." She brings up the analogy of violent video games. Killing characters in video games does not make a player a psychopath, because they aren't real in the player's reality and no real world harm is being done. So why should killing the girls matter if her own reality is fake?   Several video games these days give you the option of doing some horrendous things or a relatively morally acceptable option. In some games if you do more terrible actions (stealing, killing, etc.) other characters will call you out on your actions. It may not have any bearing on you in real life, but you can be penalized in-game. Actions have consequences. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. There may not be negative consequences to you but its still unfair that others suffer for your own gain.    Sayori, Natsuki, and Yuri may be little more than character sprites and deletable pieces of data, Monika herself is also  character sprites and deletable piece of data. Even though she is more self aware than her friends and could toy around her reality, she is inherently not on a higher level than any of her friends. They're all data. She's also data. Data deletes data. Erasing something from existence is, in a way, is essentially their way of killing (aside from the scenes where the data "commit suicide".   And even though the rest of the club are just deletable data, those deletable pieces of data were the only friends she ever had in her reality. They did nothing but give her respect, companionship, and good memories. And she threw them all away because they weren't "real people". They thought they were real people. They all had the capacity to feel pain, emotional baggage, a sense of self, interests, and personality. Her actions, robbing their free will and erasing them from existence, weren't fair to any of them. They didn't deserve any of that. Did that not matter to her? Just because life is unfair, doesn't mean you have to be. Just because your free to do bad things, doesn't mean you should.   It's all fake, but she did feel joy from their company. It may not have been real, but the emotions she can't deny what she felt from them. Something she admits this when she herself is deleted and thinks back to how all her friends and all the good times they had. The world may not have been real to her but it was real to her friends. Her world was the only one she ever knew. The world was limited as a visual novel/dating sim/horror game, but Monika wasn't creating a better world. All Monika was capable of doing (because of how limited the game and herself really are) was destroying it. That's probably the most tragic thing of all. She couldn't change anything. Yeah she had the player all to herself for a short time, but she is still trapped with in the confines of the game. Even if you put her file in a USB drive to carry with you, she's still can't reach your reality.   I will give credit where credit is due. When deleted, Monika feels remorse, sees the error of her ways and accepts her fate. She reset the world and brings all the other girls back. I can forgive Monika for what she did to me, the reader/player. As if whether the other girls would forgive her is hard to say. Brainwashing and killing your friends are some atrocious actions, and most people wouldn't forgive that.   By the end, all I wanted was for all the girls to be happy. Even Monika, despite her actions. As Salvato said, all these girls are deserving of love, and personally, I don't think any of these girls deserve the fates they had. I just wanted all the girls to be happy alongside one another and consult some therapy for each of them. Seriously, all these girls need psychiatric help.   Part of me wishes that the game was just a visual novel played straight with the twist that all the girls have emotional baggage. Like have each girl's story would tackle a different kind of emotional baggage (Sayori for depression, Natsuki with abusive household, Yuri for anxieties/self harm, and Monika for existential crisis without metafictional horror). Like all of them go through therapy, grow more as people, and slowly be more at peace with themselves. The metafictional horror didn't really scare me, just unsettle me for the most part. I didn't find any of the suicides shocking or scary. I just found them immensely tragic and depressing. I will not deny the impact the game had on me. Like several people if it wasn't for its surprises I heard about, I'm sure if  I would've had an interest in the game. I'm glad this game exists and what it gave us. It certainly got me thinking for a while.

Link to deviantart of the same writing:

  https://penciltipworkshop.deviantart.com/journal/Thoughts-on-Monika-DDLC-and-Nihilism-73144699