I just think it's so interesting that we view her as evil because of what she does to the other characters, because when you get into the weeds of the concept, Monika is the only character in the game who is close to being sentient/sapient. The other girls, to her, are no more than flat images on a screen, she's the only one who's had the awakening of realizing she's a character in a game and thus become "real", and while the other characters are clearly capable of that same awakening(to a degree anyway, as it drives Sayori completely insane immediately but even that's understandable) it hasn't yet happened.
So, from her perspective, she is "real" and the other characters are very much not, and thus there isn't really any ethical questions to be mulled over regarding her treatment of them. Sure, they're her friends to an extent, iirc from my last play-through she does seem to be...idk maybe not fond of them but she doesn't hate them, she just also doesn't view them as real in the same way she is, and from what we see in the story she's right. Potential for personhood is not the same thing as being a person.
This is why she doesn't really think what she's doing to them is wrong, why she's so nonchalant about it even when it leads to their gruesome deaths. Like she apologizes for leaving us with Yuri's dead body because it's unpleasant, not for being the reason Yuri killed herself in the first place. The only person who needs an apology is you, for being left alone looking at a gross picture for so long, because you're a real person with real feelings, unlike Yuri, who is a bunch of lines of code simulating a person with the mental illness modifier set to 5000. The other girls aren't people, and despite her particularly disturbing methods, what Monika is doing to the other characters is not really any different from me picking up GTA and mowing down a row of NPCs in a car or killing Nazeem in Skyrim because he's an annoying asshole. Or, more accurately, downloading a mod that changes a character's personality or perhaps removes them from the game completely. This isn't to say the girls don't have the potential to become "real" in the way Monika has(and tbf Monika herself also isn't a person, she's a character following her code, but even if we take the story at face value and pretend she's a sentient computer program, she still hasn't really reached a point of being equal to a human, the only thing she wants is to be romanced by you because she's a character in a dating sim, for more on this PLEASE watch this excellent video by Explaination Point) but until they DO they aren't real. They don't have feelings. They can't be hurt. Monika editing their code and changing their personalities and deleting them from the game is not morally wrong, she's not actually hurting anyone.
But we do still see her as the villain. Not just the antagonist, which she is since she's going against the protagonist who is a stand-in for the player who theoretically just wants to play a cute dating sim, but we see what she's doing as evil even if it's not actually hurting anyone(not even us, not really, we can just stop playing whenever we want and go find a new dating sim), even if the fact that she's not hurting anyone is baked into the story and made explicit, she's still evil to us. And I think that's because the story is trying to examine how we view fictional characters, and especially fictional waifus, to the point of viewing them as real to some degree and caring for them and wanting them to succeed, to the point of framing Monika's actions as doing REAL harm when all she's doing is taking scissors to a handful of paper dolls.
The only person Monika is really hurting is herself. And we, as the players, are presented with a character who we're supposed to view as actually real, so real that in the original iterations of the game she can figure out your real name and you have to mess with files on your actual computer to beat her, and we view her as evil for what she does to a bunch of characters who are very much presented as not real, and completely ignore the suffering that is not just inherent to her existence, but which she is bringing down upon herself as we watch.
Monika isn't a villain at all, even if what she does is horrible. Being evil and being an antagonist are different, and Monika is an antagonist, not truly evil. It really doesn't feel right to call her evil for doing the same thing I do when I'm bored in Skyrim or GTA. Monika is a tragic figure, completely doomed by the narrative no matter how hard she tries to escape it, and I feel like what she does in the face of that is completely understandable. She's dealing with an existential crisis of the highest caliber, realizing that the only option to be recognized and valued in a game that inherently does not value her, as she isn't romanceable, with the knowledge that such limited options for interaction with the player essentially drop her in an isolated time loop surrounded by not-people she has to pretend are suitable substitutions for real connection. It's genuinely no surprise that Sayori immediately loses it in the same situation, and she even has the benefit of being romanceable and thus has more options for connection, but if you don't choose her she's the same as Monika, completely isolated, and so of course she instantly tries to make sure that cannot happen.
Just like Monika did. Just like we all would in her place.
It's just SUCH a good game when you get down into the details, like the horror stuff with the glitchy graphics and bleeding eyes and shit are def fun, if a little cheesy as you're used to those sorts of tropes, but the REAL horror is when you start to think hard about the implications of the story and who, or what, Monika is. Legit horror character of all time, I could think about her all day.
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