Doki Doki Literature Club is a free visual novel with a slight dating simulation in which the player can try to get with one of three girls in his school’s literature club. The game starts off innocently enough, but it soon lives up to all of the “disturbing” tags and warnings as things in the club go awry. The following is an examination of the president of the club, Monika. Needless to say, spoilers are afoot for anyone who has not played this game.
For a lot of people (like my brother for instance), Monika comes off as a terrible person and manipulative egomaniac. I totally understand and when I played the game the first time, I thought so too. Monika scared the crap out of me. But after playing the game through a second time, I began to notice more to Monika.
It comes down to me seeing that all Monika wants is what we in our reality take for granted. That is, free will and all those lovely perks that go with it. In the beginning of the game, Monika serves as the oracle for the player and protagonist (two very different people for this game). By oracle, I mean someone who guides the protagonist, but ultimately does not share the same victory with the protagonist. Think Athena to Odysseus from the Iliad and Odyssey. In some reality/world/universe (whatever you want to call it) out there, there is a version of this game in which Monika plays her part, helps the protagonist get with one of the three stereotype girls, and then the game ends and nothing is amiss.
However, at some point she realizes that her world is not real. Maybe it was the repetition of always having the same three girls picked and not her. Maybe it was the lady she mentioned in her poem Hole in the Wall. Or maybe it was the predictability in the poetry writing. Who knows. But she realized she was not alone in her thinking as the person playing the protagonist also viewed her world the same way. As the game presumably was replayed over and over again, Monika started to understand more and fall more in love with the player (not the protagonist).
So she creates her plan to get the player all to herself. The problem with Monika’s plan is twofold: 1. Her attempt to make the other girls undesirable by heightening their flaws only makes the protagonist more intrigued by them. And 2. She restricts herself by playing by the same rules as the game.
Why the flaws don’t deter the protagonist and the player is because Monika heightens flaws that are potentially rescuable. Sayori has depression and so naturally we want to comfort her and make her smile. Yuri has an issue with cutting herself because she was taught that being excited and passionate about something is bad, so we naturally want to support her interests and passions. Natsuki actually has no personal flaw, but her dad beats her and never gives her lunch or money to buy lunch at school. So we naturally want to offer her a safe place to enjoy her manga and cooking.
When those flaws don’t work, Monika then decides to double down by either continuing to heighten those parameters in the girls’ files more or by just actually whispering in the girls’ ears to add to their insecurities (the game is unclear). Her goal this time is much more nefarious. If she increases Sayori’s self doubt, Sayori will kill herself. If she increases Yuri’s excitement and paranoia, Yuri will seem so crazy that the player will be scared off.
Sayori is the first to fall and the game is forever changed because in order to not arouse suspicion with the other girls, Monika deletes Sayori’s character file. Yuri actually backs herself into a corner when she confesses to the protagonist. Either she stabs herself to death because of rejection or she stabs herself to death to counter the massive amount of excitement. When both girls are gone, Monika simply deletes Natsuki.
By this point though, the protagonist has completely stopped talking and describing the scene. The player is the one being addressed and is the one that has seen everything Monika has orchestrated in the name of removing her competition. Which she does easily because those girls were NPCs, not self aware people like her. For Monika, it was simply about removing objects so that she could be the focus for the protagonist and in turn, the player.
Doki Doki Literature Club is, at its core, a visual novel. It has a dating sim story in it, but the 3-4 times you play the poetry composition “game” is hardly a way a dating sim would go about having the protagonist pick his/her mate. But the game does present itself as a dating simulator would: A protagonist enters a room and suddenly all the prospective girls see only him.
Because Monika knows no other world rules, she believes this is how love works. By having a girl simply spend time with the protagonist, that girl will just inevitably fall in love with him. It’s in almost every dating sim out there. Monika’s hope is that by locking the protagonist in a room where space and time don’t exist, that the player will just fall in love with her as she is the only option. But that’s not how the real world works. Both parties enjoy their freedom to choose and reject.
Monika doesn’t learn this until she is forced to reflect on her actions when the player deletes her file. It is then that she begins asking the questions, “How horrible am I for you to hate me this much? All my friends… I did so many awful things. So many selfish and disgusting things. I shouldn’t have done any of this. I’m just messing up a world I don’t even belong in. A world you wanted to be a part of.” Notice that she isn’t saying this as a plea to undo the deletion. She says it as a result of the reflection for why the player would delete her.
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Just before the computer finishes the deletion process, Monika resets the game back to the beginning, but with her removed. The game starts over and now Sayori is alive and president of the Literature Club. Natsuki and Yuri are alive as well and with no memory of what had happened. Everything seems to be going as the visual novel intended until Natsuki and Yuri leave the room. That is when Sayori reveals that as president, she became aware of everything too, or at least of everything Monika did. She decides to do the same thing and trap the protagonist (which in turn traps the player who has to go where the protagonist goes) in the same room Monika created.
But this is where Monika returns. She had mentioned that when she was altering the files of the game, she had created backups in case things didn’t go according to plan. Seeing Sayori hold the player hostage in an attempt to force love is the last piece Monika needs to know this is not how love is supposed to be. She decides to destroy the game, killing herself in the process. She apologizes saying she was wrong that there was any happiness here.
Her truly final act is to play the piano song she said she was practicing for the player. It is an immensely, gut wrenching song about how her innocent goal became corrupted and then ultimately the lesson she learned: people aren’t obligated to love you and you can’t force them into it. You have to leave them be.
