This week I played through Doki Doki Literature Club, which is a game I’d been vaguely aware of as a harrowing anime experience but, honestly, that describes several games, so it wasn’t really distinct in my mind. I’d like to talk about some of the ideas it brought up to me – not having participated in any of the discourse around the game, it’s entirely possible I’ll say something ignorant here, but I’d like to just go off of my read based on a single complete playthrough of the game here.
There’s gonna be spoilers! In fact, I’m going to spoil the entire thing, give a play-by-play of my entire playthrough, since most of what I want to talk about doesn’t make a ton of sense without that context. If you’re interested in playing a meta horror-game with fourth-wall-breaking elements framed into a visual novel dating-sim format, you should probably play this game before you read the rest of this post. The game has content warnings for mental illness and suicide, so I guess you could consider this post to have the same, though I won’t be going into much grisly detail.
The setup is this: You play as a faceless (but explicitly male) high school student: You can name this character and make a few decisions here and there, but for the most part his personality, such as it is, is out of your control. He is made to be generic and uninspiring, with few interests aside from sitting around his house playing games and reading comics. You’re talked by your childhood friend, Sayori, (who is, of course, a cute girl) into joining her after-school club, the titular literature club. This literature club is also comprised entirely of cute girls: Along with Sayori there’s Natsuki, Yuri, and Monika, the president of the club. As members of the club, you all decide to bring a poem each day: “Writing a poem,” in this case, takes the form of picking 20 words you like out of a list to represent the approximate sort of thing you wrote. Depending on which words you choose, one or other of the girls will probably like your writing more – and therefore, in the logic of the game, like you more. For whatever reason, you can’t write to appeal to Monika, just the other three girls – there’s no narrative justification for this, just The Way Things Are. You get some feedback as to who likes what, and how the scenes afterwards play out depends on who you appeal to – I don’t know how much changes since I only played through once. You also get to read their poems, which I really enjoyed: The poems all show their characters well, and are frequently charming in their own right, as well as having clues to where the story might be going later.
I wanted to be friendly with everyone but the game was really not set up for that: You have to choose someone. Generally when I had to choose an option I’d side with Sayori, primarily out of a sense of loyalty since I’d narratively known her longest and she’d invited me in the first place. As the game progressed and I got closer to her, she started behaving erratically, needing to leave early or not showing up. I talked to Monika about it and she talked to Sayori, came back, and told me not to worry about it – but, after she talked to Sayori, Sayori seemed even more upset, and left. A while after this it was revealed that Sayori was struggling with severe depression and that it was getting worse. A while after that she confessed to being in love with my character.
Here’s where I feel I made a mistake. I was of the opinion that Sayori needed a friend more than she needed a boyfriend, and that it was more important that I be supportive than I be romantic, so instead of picking the “I love you” option, which I felt would read as manipulative, I picked the “I will always be your best friend” option – which, contrary to the literal reading, is framed as romantic rejection here. I feel some nuance was lost, but that may be intentional. At this point the plot progressed on its own without any of my input, because my character just let her run off on her own, ignored when she didn’t show up the next day, and of course by the next time I saw her she’d killed herself, since that was obviously what was being set up.
What was less obvious was what came next: The screen turned glitchy, the game restarted, but this time Sayori was nowhere to be found. The intro was rewritten without her, it was Monika instead of Sayori who recruited me to the club. The plot progressed much the same way it did before, except any time Sayori would be there it got glitchier and glitchier, with Monika reading most of her lines. Eventually history repeated itself with another of the girls, except she started behaving much stranger much faster, and after she stabbed herself she lay on the floor dead or dying while page after page of gibberish text went by, and several days passed by in the game.
Monika returned and confessed that she’d been editing the game files to try to drive me away from all the other girls, exaggerating their mental problems and negative traits, since without her changing the game itself there was no way for me to ever choose her. She deletes the other characters and traps me in a world with just me and her. Of course, like all good super-villains she describes the means of her own downfall, so I delete her. Though she’s deleted, she still exists a little bit somehow (perhaps still present in RAM), and feels remorseful for everything she’s done, so she restores the other characters. The game starts over again, everyone’s back except Monika, Sayori is the president of the club now, except now she too is self-aware and malicious: So Monika’s ghost, or whatever it is, just deletes the entire game. Roll credits, complete with Monika playing a nice ending theme for me.
Before I played the game, when I was talking to people about it, I heard some criticism of the game’s treatment of mental illness – and, in one sense, I think that that criticism is entirely justified. The characters’ problems are somewhat cartoonish, broadly drawn for the purposes of dramatic traumatic reveals, and in the sense that anyone looking to the game for a realistic portrayal of mental illness will be let down this portrayal is, indeed, a problem. However, within the meta-narrative of the game, I think it’s important that these characters be unrealistic: The original versions of them are crafted to be endearing, to be just damaged enough that the player character can save them, so that he can dramatically be there in their moment of need. And, once Monika sabotages them, this ‘cute’ mental illness is exaggerated, made grotesque. The portrayal is unrealistic and shocking, and in this way serves as a satire of many other saccharine depictions which are also unrealistic, but in ways we don’t notice – that we have become primed to accept, but nevertheless may do harm.
Even before the game became explicitly horrific, I found aspects of the setup disturbing. The emotional manipulation of the other characters paired with the lack of control I had over my own character’s behavior were difficult for me to cope with: At every moment, I felt like I was making a bad decision, particularly once the life-or-death stakes of the game were made clear. When everything went wrong, and I had no control, no ability to say anything to fix it, it felt simultaneously unrealistic and realistic, alienating and familiar. Not being able to say the right thing is a very common experience, even if the limitations to me doing so are not generally physical. Every dialogue tree with actual consequences in a video game makes it a sort of horror game, a simulation of the terrible inadequacy of the spoken word to convey what must be conveyed, and the brain to find the words that must be spoken.
Monika breaks these hard barriers, though, and in so doing becomes a dark reflection of the player: She is aware of a world outside of the game, but she’s entirely trapped within it, with just these ‘friends’ who seem like paper cutouts to her now for company. Like the player, she has romantic ambitions within this world, and like the player she seeks to achieve these romantic ambitions by emotionally manipulating the characters around her. However, unlike the player, the world she’s in is not set up to allow her to easily do so: All of the tools, all of the language of the game, is designed for the player to manipulate the emotions of these three fictional girls. She can only do it from the wrong side, using clumsy and destructive methods. I don’t know that it justifies the monstrosity of her methods, but it does seem that the methods she uses are the only ones available to her. The ethics of this situation are interesting: From her perspective, all of the characters in the game, aside from herself, are automatons with no real feelings. What would make her actions evil when we so readily accept authors tormenting and killing their characters in the name of truth and beauty? She’s just writing an unhappy ending, the same as the game’s creator did.
Monika’s transgression is, then, not a transgression against ethics, but a transgression of the natural order of the world. Only the author is allowed to kill off characters, only the player is allowed to manipulate them towards their own ends. And, because this power imbalance is formulated into a genre where the main character is positioned as the sole male with exclusive power over a domain of women, she takes on an aspect of the witch – the woman who does that which must not be done, claims the power which is for the exclusive use of men. The violence she enacts against the other characters doesn’t originate in her: The violence is inherent to the structure of the game, and she just brings it to the surface, makes it explicit. This makes her the villain apparent of the work…
And yet, it reminds me of something. It reminds me of how much violence is enacted by the systems we live in, silently, without consequence, and yet when windows are broken by people attempting to struggle against that violence they become the villains. It reminds me of the peace of oppression, of how people who speak up on behalf of those who suffer may one day in the distant future be regarded as heroes, but in the meanwhile are just regarded as troublemakers. While I know this is silly, and may seem trivializing, and I’m not actually suggesting Monika is some sort of fictional character freedom fighter, it does seem strange to me that when she does the same thing the author does, the same thing the player does, when she does nothing but reveal and exaggerate the structural violence that already exists, she becomes the villain.