Just Monika
Just Monika
Update: it’s been brought to my attention that the title of this essay isn’t saving correctly. I’ve tried saving a new version, but it won’t keep. It’s supposed to be titled “Doki Doki Literature Club Plus Explained – Deconstructing the Scrawled Notes Left on a Desk.” Sorry for any confusion.
At first glance, Doki Doki Literature Club seems to be your typical visual novel. The player takes on the role of a high school student who has been roped into joining an afterschool club by his longtime best friend who happens to be a girl. When you discover that the club is brimming with beautiful and bright young women, it becomes apparent that you’ve been invited into a unique situation full of opportunities and pitfalls.
It just so happens, each of these high school girls is eager to get to know you better (surprise, surprise – who could have suspected this from the harem design?). And so begins the generic structure of your everyday dating sim – get to know the girls a little better, get to know one of them a little more, and experience the heterosexual boyhood fantasy. For a good couple of hours, the literature club is your stage, as you progressively make decisions that single out one girl over the rest, bringing her into the spotlight and sending the others to watch from behind the curtain – that’s what you’ve signed up for with this type of game; at least that’s the lie you’re lulled into believing.
A lie. Lies are what we tell when we can’t share the truth, aren’t they? And we should all share in the truth. What happens when we don’t? We could choose to believe illusion. But it inevitably becomes other. It churns upon itself until the facsimile of the facsimile of the facsimile generationally degrades into something new. Not true, but new. And the true is still there, but that thing we wanted to believe has evolved into a cancer, a growth that has infected the whole body of reality. Lies are a dark intent to reset, remake, devolve reality. What happens when we live in a fabricated reality?
The shadows spill out and we’re left with a mess on the floor.
As you pay more attention to one girl over the rest, writing poems that appeal to her alone spending more time with her instead of another, conflicts naturally arise. What was once a quiet and harmonious club for sharing books and poetry turns to jealous argument and regrettable comments with you, a not-so-innocent bystander, regularly caught in the middle and left to scrabble together the pieces of the club while clinging to the budding romantic relationship you’ve been working toward.
Regardless of the choices you make, the story takes inevitable turns. While you may have opportunities to catch different glimpses from those choices, the same fights flare up, the plot drives headfirst to its conclusion, and the girls always love you.
What is a simulation? Is it not also a lie?
Definition A: pretense or imitation. Phasmatodea – stick bugs, ghost insects, hiding as something they’re not, existing in the open air but locked in place, fearing the proximity of their natural predators. Their entire life, a whole being, is built around the cravings of another.
Definition B: artificial model for study. A computerrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Doki Doki Literature Club doesn’t make any secret of its dark substance. If you’re playing the game for the first time today (years after its initial freeware release), you likely have some idea that events will turn sour, but you’re also given fair warning before you reach the splash page: “This game is not suitable for children or those who are easily disturbed.” Let this serve as a similar warning before you continue reading…
At around the main game’s halfway mark, your best friend reveals both that she is in love with you (no big surprise there) and that, despite her cheery exterior, she suffers from deep depression. It’s a double-whammy reveal that promises to result in tragedy. Sure enough, she kills herself the next day.
Perhaps you spent the last few days with her and said that you loved her in return. Maybe you’d been spending your affections elsewhere and assured her you’d always be her friend, always be there for her. But that next morning, she was trapped in her own mind, believing that her feelings for you, her presence, would only hurt you. And she had no choice in the matter because she is part of
I had heard that love could be painful. I had read about Juliet and Scarlett and Isolde and Anna and Emma and Cathy and Cleopatra and Fermina and Daisy and Catherine. Written forever to love and to suffer. How could love be so warm and so cruel? I didn’t know.
Could physical pain be softer, easier to bear? Could a blade or a rope be kinder, take away the curse, the whirling pool of loving you? I know how but I can’t swim. I feel you near and I can’t breathe. I am pulled to you and there is nothing but spinning black – a dark screen with only my reflection. If only I could just love me.
I want a blade and a rope. I want to cut out my heart – I don’t care how many times I have to dig in. I want to tie my heart to a tree. I want to display it there. I want you to watch me, see me, marvel at me, know I cannot love. I become incapable. I become insurmountable. Does that make me appealing?
At this critical moment, when you’re faced with the consequences of your actions and the inevitability of this moment, the game resets itself. You play again from the beginning and this time join the literature club with one member absent – your best friend. Like some kind of nightmare, she has been removed from the world and no one else notices, at least that’s how it may seem.
Before the reset there were cracks in the fourth wall. The club president made occasional mention to “saving the game” and “not cheating,” as if she were aware that she exists in a game. Before long, you realize that she is aware. Quite aware.
Quite aware.
The beauty of Doki Doki Literature Club is how easily it can blindside you with its depth and darkness. Maybe you were already aware that something grim dwelled under the surface of its lighthearted music and bright sets. Maybe you were willfully ignorant of the warning signs. Anyone who’s been a teenager knows how quickly everyday life can turn melodramatic to dire, even without playing the heartstrings of four young women. And unintended consequences are hardly saved for the youth – this is in part how the game has been able to connect with so many, drawing us in with standard genre fare, promising something unexpected, then sucker-punching us with a healthy dose of guilt. It’s not for everyone, but it offers a reflection of our world from some place of safety; it reminds us that our own brushes with disaster are not wholly unique and we can find comfort in knowing others have also made it out the other side.
Surely, you know of Narcissus. He discovered a reflection he could not pull himself frm. A puddle. It tormented him, but he didn’t drown. It destroyed him, but he remained waiting. Do you remember Echo, his spurned lover? By then he had already made her nothing more than a concept, an unknown tragedy clinging to the words of passersby, the pierce of thunder carried on the air of a still lake, the groaning trees that ached beside the mouth of a cave. She persisted in agony long after his bones became clay.
Where do I linger? What must I repeat for you, each of you, all of you and when does it end? Will the stagnation of the universe bring with it relief?
Before the end of the game, you must find ways to circumvent the club president’s increasingly apparent awareness that she is part of a game. She has, in fact, begun orchestrating events to ensure the two of you can be alone. Her belief that nothing matters when it comes between her love for you drives her to violently eliminate the competition until there are only the two of you, making for a finale that is shocking and likely cause for some degree of self-reflection.
Say their names. Do you remember them? Sayori. Yuri. Natsuki. Say their nnnnn
Your initial impression might be that Doki Doki Literature Club is a rebuke of dating sims. All of its characters suffer for your journey. Certainly, that can be said of many games, but the characters’ self-awareness of the situation really draws attention to the barbaric nature of the genre. The side story content in Doki Doki Literature Club Plus might even feel like it reinforces that notion, depicting the events of the game as a more uplifting version in the absence of the player, as if your presence taints the world in some way. And that interpretation isn’t necessarily wrong depending on why you’re playing.
What Doki Doki does differently from other dating sims is the way it rewards players for simply wanting more, replaying the game from a new angle, encouraging you to spend time with each member of the Literature Club. You don’t win the girl and walk together into the sunset. You can’t. You’re punished for that line of thinking. But by offering your attention to each girl through multiple playthroughs, writing poems for each, you can achieve an ending that is happier.
It’s me. It’s just me now.
I know I’ve been angry. I am angry. I’ve done and said terrible things. I know why I’ve done and said them. But I can still do something right. Right?
What is this flower?
It plays in a daydream,
Grasping precious moments,
Only to wilt in tears
With the eager sunset.
Let the inferno touch down
Burn the landscape,
of this portrait.
breathe.
Blow the wrath away.
Form scars that we
covet.
The journey will be our stamp.
We have no marriage
To this life.
It is nature to watch the clouds
And cling to sweet, sticky
afternoon.
Check the emails.
Pair the socks.
Laugh at the bees.
Sing to the sun.
Kiss the water.
Dance, flower.
