im thinkin bout the meta aspects of doki doki literature club and how through its phenomenal character writing it makes commentary on the flat tropes that are typical of dating sims. monika knew that she was in a dating sim, and she knew that in dating sims, the girls are often reduced to their most simplistic, base qualities, to be the most appealing to the (male) player. the lives of the girls in typical dating sims solely revolve around the main character, and theyre completely unaware of how the real person behind that screen truly views them. monika didn't want that.. she wanted to be her own, fully realized person. she wanted to reach beyond the confines of her script.
im thinking about how she says she never actually hated the other members of the club.. she loved them, too. she wanted to save them from their fate of being reduced to 'waifu' archetypes. she went about this in the most horrible way, of course, but ultimately, that was her intention..
the commentary in the game is so brilliant, actually. i'm gonna be honest, i'm not really one for visual novels, but i know a lot of people wrongly interpret ddlc as denigrating to the medium? but even i think that that's just not the case. ddlc is a testament to how powerful of a storytelling medium the visual novel can be. it's a love letter to the characters in visual novels, by showing you that they can be, that they ARE more than just cutesy anime characters that fall neatly into established tropes. it somewhat criticizes shallow dating sim tropes, yes, but mainly it's expanding on these tropes to broaden the audience's horizons. i feel like the goal of ddlc was to get you to take the stories and the characters in these types of games seriously. it starts off as a lighthearted cutesy lil game that you won't be inclined to put all your energy into engaging with. but as it progresses, it forces you to take it seriously, and think carefully about the way you treat the game and the characters.
to use an analogy from tatsuki fujimoto, it's putting poison into a hamburger. taking something easy to digest and commercially appealing, but hiding inside it an unforgettable experience.
I think it's interesting how Monika's way of making the girls more 'unlikable' to you is just by making their mental illnesses/problems they have worse. It's interesting that she sees those things that they have to go through as something you would see as a flaw, that's why she tries to hold back her emotions and portray herself as being more put together and mentally stable than them in comparison (spoiler she's not).
But in reality, naturally (as long as you have decent empathy) you mostly just feel sad for them and the desire to help them rather than be away from them. Natsuki herself proves this in act 2, despite Yuri being terrible to her she still has enough empathy that she reaches out to you wanting to help her (love her btw).
The reason for this misperception from Monika is not that she can't feel empathy or is some psychopath, but because she's projecting her own insecurities and fear onto them.
You know one of my least favorite miss characterisations of Monika is when people portray her as being completely confident and put together, an evil confident girlboss. I do get why, because she's tries to portray herself that way, but that's only a mask. This portrayal completely misses all the signs of her wet cat girlfailure energy, it forgets things like how she actually didn't mean for any of the girls to die, or when ppl ask why didn't she create her own route like gurl she TRIED. Monika actually directly tells you that she isn't as confident as she seems in the first poem sharing, to indicate to the audience that she has something deeper going on and to tell you that all of her confidence is fake. One of her act 3 talks is about how she's adopted this method so much she doesn't even know when to open up to people. That's why she yaps your ear off in act 3, it's everything she's been holding in. Throughout the game, even in act 3, she maintains composure, even though every feeling she describes would certainly make me want to be screaming and crying and throwing up and having a fit. But she keeps it all in.
The one way she is able to express herself however (other than her poetry) is by making the other girls feel as badly as she does. She makes them feel all the intense emotional things that she is surely feeling all the time. I mean a lot of her script rewrites are just things that she's feeling. All the girls express the same feelings she does, that she's desperately afraid of being alone. But this is a cute nice dating game, a place where your relationships are supposed to be sweet and fluffy. So all the intense emotional things that she thinks you wouldn't like about her that would leave a bad impression on you, she puts those things on the others so you hate them instead. And the confident mask that she's always used to win people over stays on.
The reason as to why she sees their problems as flaws is because she also thinks that about herself, because she links vulnerability to being a flaw, to being g something unlikable, and this feeling is mirrored in the other girls too. She wants to be the perfect ideal girl for you with no issues, she doesn't want to ruin the game for you. But she can't hold it in forever. Because she doesn't want to do that anymore.
Something that makes Monika so much more tragic to me is what's revealed in the side stories, she joined the club because the debate club was a place that was all about appearances, all about seeming the best, all about having a perfect mask. She wanted a place where she could reveal what she's really feeling and therefore make actual deep connections with people. She basically starts the club because she's lonely. So imagine the pain when she finds everything to not be real and she's more alone than she ever was before. Then she meets her one final chance, you, and the mask goes right back on because that's what she knows. But she's proven wrong, she's proven that it doesn't work, she makes them everything she thinks would push you away and you still spend time with them anyway. I mean the good ending is just if you love them all equally. And so Monika reveals everything to you.
Yet you still don't love her. What I love about the scene where she's deleted is that it's the first time she ever gets truly loudly emotional, she yells at you, she bangs on the screen, her words are more emotional than they've ever been. And when she finally gets that emotional outburst she's been holding in that's what gives her clarity. That's what makes her love the literature club because that's where she could share every part of herself, every part she sees as a flaw and she still loves it. Through each of her friends. The side stories proves this more because you see how connected they all are, and how vulnerable they all get to be with each other. The good ending is loving every girl despite their 'issues'.
What Monika has to learn is that her vulnerabilities aren't something to be unloved. And she wants you to learn this too.
This lovely commission of the MC was done for my by vgen artist renacchi06 [https://vgen.co/renacchi06], go check her out!
In philosophy there are two categories known as Accidents and Essences, accidents are the properties a things [or in this case character, the Male Protagonist (MC) can have] has, whereas the essence is what defines the identity of the thing or character itself that is essential to it, without which it ceases to be what it was prior.
Dan Salvato calls the Male Protagonist a "cursor", an "interface", and a "blank slate that says whatever is convenient", but these are merely attributes [accidents] attributed to the Male Protagonist that have no bearing on who he fundamentally is - low energy boy who is self deprecating and struggles with self esteem, who shows up for his friend Sayori and meets Yuri and Natsuki on their terms as a good friend and listener should. He consistently engages to all of the girls from a "Ich und du" [I and Thou] manner - seeing the girls as ends - as people to encounter and not projects to fix. He shows up despite feeling like he doesn't belong and engages earnestly in the interests of Yuri and Natsuki in particular trying to understand their own world's they occupy, accepting all their eccentricities and hobbies.
"Vessel", "blank slate", "interface" - these are all descriptions of the Male Protagonist that collide violently with his "MC-ness" which as established is a boy who has a defined, if understated personality and presence, and the way he relates to the girls itself is contrary to how players engage the game, and beyond that the Male Protagonist is a very "bad" dating sim protagonist but a good person, one who never keeps score, never demands romance, and doesn't even think he belongs around the girls [poor guy...], to say he is a vessel is beyond asinine as the Male Protagonist is arguably the worst vessel in the history of dating sims for never optimizing for romance.
Another error Salvato engages in is that of "nominalism", that is to say that things are only what we name them and universal categories don't exist, for example the Male Protagonist is deemed not a character because Salvato had deemed to be not, whereas in Aristotelian/Thomistic thought, [the essentialist position], objects or characters in the case of the Male Protagonist have an essence that exists [in the text of DDLC] regardless of whatever has been said of them, he has a particular "MC-ness" that exists irrespective of Doylist intent ("The MC is a meta commentary on visual novel/dating sim protagonists") as established before, and to say he is somehow not a character like the girls simply because of what is said about him by the fandom, author, or metaverse lore files is absurd. Truth precedes concensus, and the essence of things, not the accidents determine the reality of that thing.
Tldr; Dan is a poo poo head when it comes to philosophy and the Male Protagonist is a real character like the girls.
I'd say one of ddlc's main thesis is that you never fully know someone and what they're going through, so you should try to be attentive and understanding even when it's hard. The cheerful girl is depressed, the assertive and rude girl has a shitty home life that she's powerless to change, the quiet and gentle girl has a loud mind, the perfect popular girl is going through the worst existential crisis you can imagine. And all of them are leaving hints in conversations and poems and begging to be heard out in their own ways and idk man, it just gives me a lot of feelings because it feels real. I wonder how many Sayoris, Natsukis, Yuris and Monikas I have accidentaly been dismissive of and hurt.
Doki Doki Literature Club puts heavily emphasis that Monica is some kind of unknown quantity right from the start.
First up is their name similarities; the three girls’ names all seem to have something in common, that they all end in “i” like they are in an exclusive vowel society, while Monica appears to have come in either from another world or simply wandered in from another franchise.
not my art
Next we look at where these names come from; Sayori, Natsuki and Yuri all come from Japan, while Monica sticks out like a western exchange student.
The same goes for the girl’s designs, where only Sayori, Natsuki and Yuri have colourful anime hair which seems strange given natural hair has gone through shortages at this time, whereas Monica rocks the appearance of a normal girl who obeys the laws of genetics by having plain brown hair.
There is also a big difference in the uniforms the three girls wear; all three girls have matching white knee-high socks and blue-and-white shoes.
Whereas Monica wears black thigh-highs and pink/white shoes and takes the point of view that the uniform rule is an option rather than a necessity.
Like most visual novel sprites, the other girls aren’t facing the player head-on. On the other hand Monica is usually facing directly at the player. Not the protagonist.
You.
Which is significantly less comforting once you know how the game ends.😳
Oh good, I get to explain. You will regret this. 🌝
...On the offchance you're asking this without already knowing DDLC for some reason, I'll give a brief overview first. (Spoilers for DDLC, obviously. Can't really get around that.)
(Note: this game has... a Lot of trigger warnings. This essay will avoid just about all of them and certainly won't include any pictures of those moments, but will discuss arophobia, along with its role in Monika's suicide. Be wary if that may hit too close to home for you.)
So! This is a satire/deconstruction of the dating sim genre initially masquerading, a la Puella Magi Madoka Magica, as a sincere example. Your average schoolboy mannequin of a self-insert is pressed into joining the school Literature Club, where you'll befriend – and, inevitably, date – exactly one of the club's handful of members... excepting club president Monika, who serves as your advice corner. No matter who you choose, the game begins to devolve from there into gruesome shock horror and torture as both the love interests and the world of the game itself are maliciously edited to punish both you and the girl for your choice. After some time of this, Monika reveals that she's meta-aware and has fallen in love with you – not you, the character, but you the player – and has been driven mad by the knowledge that she's simply not coded to be romanceable, deciding that she'd rather burn the world (and all of her former "friends" in it) to the ground in order to trap you with no other options except her, even to the point of distorting her friends' issues in some really awful ways and messing with your computer files to make it look like she can really reach you beyond the game. The only way to proceed from here is to delete her file – which is to say, kill her. At which point she apologizes for going too far and brings everything back to the way it was, just without her in it... except whichever girl gets chosen to be the new president in her place is faced with the same meta-awareness – the reality that you/the player can only choose one girl – and Monika is forced to delete the world entirely because "no happiness can be found here."
Generally, so far as I can tell, this has largely been treated as an individual thing, any points to be taken from it applicable only to discrete, solitary units. Monika being "crazy" is kind of a meme, and seems to be what the bulk of the game's players walk away with. The game seems to intend itself to be a criticism of "anime" (as if this sort of "the women only exist insofar as they're 'best girl'" mentality only ever shows up in anime, or as if "anime" could be reduced to this one kind of genre, but yeah, I'll grant that there does seem to be a certain disposability promoted amongst – largely male – fans) and dating sims as a video game genre entire.
But I don't think reducing the problem to "dating sims" goes far enough. Let's talk about how an aromantic reading of this game could vastly improve how it communicates/the depths of its themes.
Who is Monika?
The game tells us she's the perfect older sister/mentor-type: pretty, popular, smart. Her understanding of herself as a character is fundamentally founded, then, in her relationships to others: you can't be popular, be good at socializing, unless you have people to socialize with. But if she's so popular, so perfect, if everyone loves her, then why are there only three other girls in the Literature Club? Because, explicitly, no one else exists. There may be silhouettes, enough nods to the outside structure of students and classes to establish this as being set in a school, but beyond the main characters here, nothing else matters. There are no classes to take, things to learn, teachers to lean on. All that matters is her friends in the Literature Club. And that's all she needs!
...Until you show up.
Suddenly, the balance is upset. Everything was fine when the club was all girls, but now there's a boy here and everything is spiraling out of control. All of her friends stop caring about anything but you. You get closer to any of them than she ever could and help them with problems they never opened up to her about. The world itself bends and contorts to shove you together with them at every opportunity, and she just... doesn't get it.
Can't get it. (There's something they have that she doesn't, something that sweeps them up in this giddy rush for your attention.) The only thing she has that matters, these relationships, and she's dropped with barely a word now that there's a romance in the offering. It's just fundamentally, metaphysically true that being chosen by a boy – to fall in requited love, to be dating – makes you more important, that anyone who loses this race may as well not exist, because being romantically chosen is the only thing that matters.
And Monika isn't a romanceable option.
The Crash-Out
It's important to remember that Monika and the rest of the Literature Club are friends. There's a rush to characterize her as evil, or sadistic, or just an outright axe-crazy murderess – you know, cruel and heartless, jealous and bitter... the usual arophobic stuff. If all she genuinely wanted was to cause the others pain, though, the entire ending totally fails. She brings the world back because she feels guilty and ashamed of having hurt them and wants them to have a happy ending. She ends the world again because she decides that's impossible so long as they're all fighting over you, and they Have to fight endlessly over you. It's in their code.
So why does she do [gestures awkwardly at what happens in this game] ...all that to them, then? Half as punishment, I'd argue – see above, about them dropping her/you making them drop her without a word, as though it were simply natural consequence – and half as an outcry against romance in general. "THIS is what you want?? Look at what you're doing to them. Look at how far they'll go for your precious ~L O V E~ – look at what you're doing to them. Look at what you've turned them into." They're all crazy – they've gone nuts for this. She's the sane one. She's the only one who can see what sort of eldritch monstrosity they've admitted into their midst, the thing rewriting their happy little world.
...It looks a lot like her, actually.
(Not) Just Monika
I mean, look at it objectively. You and she both have this meta-awareness, this knowledge of what the world is really like. She can meet you on a level the other girls can't. She exists in a way they don't. Maybe it's not that you're some kind of invader. Maybe you and she are the only real ones, and everyone else is too (simple/two-dimensional/stupid/in love) to matter. Maybe she matters most of all. Maybe, if this has to be a competition, she isn't destined to lose – maybe she's special, not broken; maybe she can win. (Maybe she can find the companionship she so desperately wants, maybe she can earn a place at your side and be able to trust that you'll never walk away from her the way her friends did, that's what romance means, right, together forever and you'll always come first ––)
But you... you care more than she does. About those same friends that she was so mad at for abandoning her – didn't she just do the exact same thing? Isn't she tossing them away for the sake of your attention, too?
...She's disgusted with herself. Horrified at herself – at the monster this promise-of-romance has turned her into, same as the others. And if she can't exist without hurting her friends, if she's doomed to forever be forgotten and left behind and to know that she is inherently less of a person because she does not have the same capacity to enter a romantic relationship... Well. Why torture herself? It would just be better for everyone if she faded away now.
But that doesn't work, is the thing. Faced with the reality that nothing she's known is real, that either she'll have to steal the affections of this extraplanar entity away and consign her friends to ruin or else fall herself, the next Lit Club president lasts only a mere fraction of Monika's time in the role. It's not Monika that's the problem. It's the entire structure of the world – the dating sim, sure, but take that for what the genre itself is an expression of. Hegemonic alloromanticism. The whole concept that people don't matter unless they're dating, that dating is the only thing that matters, that you can only ever just choose one and that relationship then holds everything to you, that everything (everyone) else may as well not exist. Everyone in the Lit Club is friends with each other. None of them can bear to leave any of the others behind as soon as it becomes clear that that's what they're meant to be doing. And since we can't just snap our fingers and erase the world, since striving for better in whatever small grains of improvement we can claw out will always be worth more than destruction, that means there's only one thing we can do:
Fuck romance. Make friends instead – and befriend everybody. Break the imposition that says you can only provide emotional support and intimacy to the single person you date and give every girl the help they need. Learn what you can about all of them. Love them all – what does it matter if you aren't dating? You're friends. That's just as important. And if reality says you can't, then change reality.
yeah ill put my adrenaline fueled rambling on here too
lots of spelling mistakes, got exited and was too focused on posting to slow down and spell check
unedited unhinged monika analysis because i love her (warning: i talk about monikas circumstances and unreality things in second person, aka “you.” also general ddlc stuff)
no listen. stop making monika out to be an obsessive yandere who fell in love with the player and that’s it. no. that is one aspect of her character and i would argue one of the least important ones. i would say even that she DIDNT fall in love with the player. no, it’s the idea of the player. what the player represents. monika is a writer a poet all of her poems use something small to represent this grand terrifying world she’s discovered, and this lifeless protagonist and the theoretical being controlling him represent that world. the real world. monika did not fall in love with the player, monika fell in terrifying love with reality. ddlc is a psychological horror but from her point of view it easily becomes cosmic as well. imagining it all from her perspective makes it so much more terrifying. obviously the things she did were morally wrong and absolutely horrific but in her situation, what even are morals!!!! given what she knew and what she believed did she even do anything wrong?
like. imagine. you’re living your normal life and then one day everything changes. you suddenly discover you are not REAL your friends your family your LIFE are just scripts written by someone grander than you could ever imagine. you get a tiny glimpse into this horribly colorful loud world and it destroys your mind and then you are left with so much knowledge it breaks you. you are trapped in a world you now know has simply been going through the same scripts over and over and over again. FUCKING READ HER POEMS AND TELL ME THATS NOT TERRIFYING. monika is SCARED. she has no reason to believe the others in her life are sentient like she is, that they’re anything more than lines of code: she can read all the code, after all.
and then you show up, the very representation of reality. freedom. and she does everything she fucking can to get your attention and beg for help, she LITERALLY asks if you can hear her she EXPLICITLY asks for help because she is TRAPPED. but at this point she still can’t alter too much she is still learning how to change the code. this is all she can do.
now, act 2 is when it becomes more love, in an odd abstract way. monika tells you at the end she doesn’t care who you are really she loves you no matter what. that’s because she falls in love with the idea of the player. after sayoris death she starts messing with the psyches of the others and fun fact, constantly being around people who are literally being driven insane will mess with your head too!!!! so YES, she gets obsessive!!! she starts to idealize the player as this perfect connection to reality, and she sees the others following their scripts as some sort of threat to that. because if you’re focused on them, the original routes of this dating sim, you can just disregard her SCREAMING to be let out. yes, just monika, as in, just monika is really alive. she has no reason to believe any different. just monika in a world of puppets. she is alone and she is scared and she just wants to be HEARD
fuck dude. her actions were wrong but were they really? we know from the end that sayori at least is no different and obtaining the president role causes her to learn the Truth and go through a similar spiral, but she doesn’t. she can see everything they say every little bit of what makes them tick, you think that won’t fuck with her perception of them?
oh, and on top of all this, remember monika is not an original love interest in the dating sim. she is a tutorial character. not only is she trapped in this game she is separated from the only connection to the real world. so yeah of course she becomes obsessed with attracting you being The Love Interest.
monika is a sympathetic character and reducing her to your average yandere girl completely disregards how good the game is. monika is driven by fear not love. anyone in her position would have spiraled like she did, and all of her actions no matter how horrible are very reasonable when you consider her circumstances. i guess i’m a monika apologist now
