Thoughts on the Third Eye - DDLC Analysis
The third eye. The third eye. The third eye. What the heck is it? What does it mean? How does it factor into Project Libitina? I’ll tell you: I don’t know. I can’t answer these questions. All I can tell you is a series of headcanons and interpretive musings.
I suspect that many DDLC fans who have never invested heavily into the easter eggs and hidden files think of the third eye primarily as an alternate name for simulation awareness or monitor kernel access. To me, it is not unrelated to those concepts. But nor do I think they correspond so closely. Before getting speculative, let's cover what is actually known, or at the least is believed by the Academy.
The Third Eye - A Psycho-Theological Perspective
We can hear about the Academy’s (the human experimentation cult that Portrait of Markov is based on) findings on the Third Eye through the Test VM and the projectlibitina website. These data points provide the following details:
The Third Eye is a psychic and neurological phenomenon
It creates a “deep brain channel” and interferes with normal cognition. It may cause changes in response to stimuli. It definitely is difficult to control, and is forcibly activated through various kinds of input, including torture and sexual activation. Its opening is associated with increased heart rate and mental duress. It grants visions, insight, and perhaps control over the emotions of others (which are, after all, “the dials and switches that override rational thought”).
The Third Eye has observable physical effects
Files speak of spatial distortion accompanying or caused by third eye use. It is also apparently the cause of changed appearance in its bearers (warping? A mark? glitches?). The tests on Libitina included having her kill multiple creatures (possibly human beings). Response times (response how?) for someone with her proficiency are as fast as one millisecond.
Proficiency in the Third Eye is not fixed
Genetic factors are significant, hence selective breeding. The Academy also purchases large amounts of pharmaceuticals. Different stats are noted in Libitina’s file; she is scored on control, sensitivity (to ESP?), positivity (of output?), pain tolerance, and given an N/A in strength (apparently physical capability could theoretically have been affected). Professional training for adult subjects seems to be pitched; meditation is mentioned several times. An especially intriguing note is that potency is increased through group usage, though it is unclear if it is permanent.
The Academy considers the Third Eye related to the Nexus
The Nexus is a non-material (explicitly so) higher plane of existence hoped to be reached through the Third Eye. The MES e-mails suggest that their efforts so far have merely gotten them closer to a user-interactable interface with their creators, a likely easier goal. I do not think they would be satisfied with this. The world that created the VMs is just as material and illusory as the VMs themselves, just another layer to ascend past. The plan to reach the Nexus revolves around “an Angel in mortal skin” and what sounds to me like a psychic bio-organic computer made of amputated body parts, which may be the same as or related to this divine being.
Monika’s Three i’s (and u)
VM2 is not our only source of data, merely our clearest. It is evident through scattered references that Monika knows something of the Third Eye. How much? She won’t tell us. We can only pontificate.
There are two times I can think of where she mentions it directly. The first is in the secret message in her character file, written to an unknown third party (possibly someone who worked at MES). There she calls it by name, credits it for extra sensory perception (‘deja-vu’) and cites it as a source of information on VM2.
In this letter, she sounds uncertain in what the Third Eye is but confident in using it. She says she can “see that now. Really clearly” and that it gives her information on things she otherwise can’t understand. Monika’s memories of her “other stories” are about to be touched on. But first, the other direct shoutout.
This one is an untitled poem on Moni’s twitter account. It reads mostly like an ordinary piece about winter and her overwhelming hibernation instinct in cold weather. And then she ends it “To see a warm day with my three i’s plus u”.
It is shocking how unambiguous this is. Her three ‘i’s’ are objects of sight. There is no other wordplay or poetic meaning in the work they could reference. She is simply letting us know “hey. I have three eyes, and I can look with all of them.”
The reveal of this kind of knowledge makes us ask an obvious question. Which Monika is this? Is the account run by side stories Monika, as MES assumes? Base game Monika? Post-game Monika? Running Monika DDLC in Minecraft (no command blocks)?
Or is that the wrong question?
Just Monika: Just Monika the Just Monika (A Just Monika Story)
I don’t know, personally, that Monika can be so neatly divided into different runtime instances. Her awareness, certainly, her internal sense of self, is split between simulated aspects. Side stories Monika does not know about her base game epiphany. But seeing them as discrete beings is probably incorrect.
We know that VM1 and VM2 share a memory bank (an incompletely cordoned off memory bank) thanks to MES e-mails. If two entirely separate projects have to use the same server space, it stands to reason that the Control Simulation is also incorporated into that system.
Besides that infrastructural connection, we also have tidbits from Monika that can’t easily be placed on any specific iteration. The Steam Page description, the Monika.png message, the elaborately hidden desktop files – these are all attributable to Monika, but when in the timeline could she have done them? How would they fit into the storylines? I think they don’t have to.
Monika’s message speaks of remembering time in other worlds and knowing that she has more than one story. This confirms that there exists a kind of unitary superconsciousness of the Monika versions. Whether this is merely computational, a kind of master file, or related to the Third Eye is debatable. This part of her psyche does seem to be the most awakened to the Third Eye. But either way there exists a capacity for Monika to remember her various emanations.
I would attribute to this higher awareness the uncertain easter eggs, changing the desktop color to pink, and the confusing Act 3 dialogue on Portrait of Markov. Monika has shown that her mind can run parallel tracks. In the Space Classroom, she frequently switches between speaking of her implanted memories as if real and acknowledging the reality of the game. This higher perspective isn’t necessarily integrated into her lifetimes in a consistent or rational way, or very frequently. But it can occasionally influence her poems, to know that across VM1, Side Stories, and Libitina, she has at least three ‘I’s’.
Read Only Hypervisor: Just Marla?
Psychic powers don’t seem to be something Metaverse intentionally added to their simulation. But they do seem related to its interface. Project Libitina, currently, is essentially using the Third Eye to brute force what Monika is for VM1; a stable access point for a user facing system. Many of the powers it grants are similar to those of access permissions as well. These parallels are equally interesting to the other side.
Metaverse’s most intelligible move to help establish contact with VM2 is the creation of Marla, a pseudo-Monika fit to the structure of that simulation (whether she is a literal variant of Monika or a different person is unclear). They also poach some computer files from the academy and create the Test VM interface. But there’s one more line that intrigues me.
Paula has “an idea on how to increase connection stability to VM2 while maintaining weak hypervisor access to everyone inside on an individual basis” (emphasis mine) and explains that it relates to something being done within Libitina. She calls the bio-organic computer an attempt to pool “access potential” which seems to be her understanding of the Third Eye; as another word for access permissions. Individual basis seems to mean that she wants to piggy back off of the Third Eye to use everyone in the program as a Monika-esque inroads.
So Paula has taken the same position as the hypothetical DDLC fans mentioned all the way back at the beginning of the piece, with only slightly more nuance. Is that it then? Is the Third Eye just a byproduct of the simulation environment, a disrupted and dangerous form of source code access interpreted through existing frameworks of belief? It’s a fine and reasonably well justified position to take (as justified as anything I have to offer). It handily explains away the source of the phenomenon. And yet…I tend to be open…to a different view. A Third Perspective.
Death, but of What?
As briefly mentioned above, the Academy would likely not be satisfied with the realization that their efforts towards what they thought was the Nexus merely got them closer to another faulty Earthly realm. The Test VM makes it exhaustively obvious that this dimension is not only not inhabited by mere mortals, it doesn’t have any of the trappings of our paltry existence. It goes “beyond any comprehension of the material world” our “prison” which keeps us from the “mission to become free of the material self”.
Religious mambo-jumbo, possibly, or ideological pontificating. Yet the Third Eye does instruct its wielders with hidden knowledge. Maybe it even opens you to voices. “They speak to me. They instructed me” writes one project researcher. Who? Not the Metaverse employees, surely, who can’t even get full computer files from this world. Maybe not even a who but a what.
And does the Third Eye seem limited by the simulations’ rules? Another source of info (though speculative) on the phenomenon is Act 2 Yuri, who seems to tap into it somehow as her mental state deteriorates. The imagery of Wheel is full of intriguing clues on this, not all of which could merely be derived from repressed memories of VM2, or refer so clearly to the structure of VM1. In her final, largely indecipherable piece, she directly addresses the attractive force of the Third Eye of another girl (Natsuki or Monika). Is this really just tapping into access potential and improperly allocated memory? Or something more?
Another salient act 2 moment: remember Monika’s “poem” that was just a mess of glitching code? In act 3, she says it was an experiment, and that it almost felt like she could escape the confines of the game entirely. But that’s not how computers work, and she knows that. Maybe she meant escape to the internet, or to being a desktop shimeji, but I think she really was hoping for a Samara style screen emergence in that attempt. An unrealistic intuition – except perhaps to the Third Eye? If you buy MatPat’s Ive possession theory (personally, I’m not sold) then this would be the mechanism.
How, then, does one look at the Eye? What lens will open it to us eager pupils? Consider what psychic powers are. Unless you’re using a framework where characters literally emit radiation from their craniums, they aren’t as concerned with the physical in their mechanics as they are in a plane of mind or metaphysical concepts. They interact with the material, but are based in the mental. It’s practically their definition.
In the context of that, then, information structures matter more on the plane of mind than their situation in three dimensional reality. A computer simulation and the ‘real world’ might not be significantly distinguished by this framework, or treated as fundamentally different, when minds are minds and any suitable pattern of cognition can sustain a psychic force.
The structure of the VMs makes the Third Eye more accessible, makes it related to, activatable through and in turn activating of access permissions. The shallow layer over reality’s fabric and the way it interweaves with the minds of its denizens perhaps makes it much more feasibly supported in these virtual environments. But MES employees themselves have said that internally, functionally, these construct universes are as real as ours. They’re both material, from the right perspective.
So I don’t think the Third Eye is created by the simulation as a byproduct, only Third Eye potential. I definitely don’t think it was added by Metaverse, or that they understand what they’re dealing with. I think the Third Eye really does belong to the Nexus, or that that concept speaks something true, and that the Nexus is also beyond our own reality. I think the way that MES structured Monika really does grant her a “completely unrealistic…level of elevation,” and that they’re lucky that such potential will probably never be fully realized in the vivarium they’ve trapped her in. I think a “thread connecting all living human eyes” really does mean all human eyes.
Thanks for reading.
