SPOILER ALERT: Plot details follow for Doki Doki Literature Club and School DaysBy now, most everyone knows that
Doki Doki Literature Club is subversive in some way, but I imagine that those first few who downloaded the game suspected nothing of the sort. On the surface, it looks like a regular dating visual novel, with four different anime archetypes ready to fall for you. The game can be played for free, is fairly short, and has little to with literature, so it would otherwise be forgettable, and yet...
Despite not being from Japan,
Doki Doki perfectly mimics the standard visual novel formula. You are pushed by Sayori, the ditzy best friend who probably has a crush on you, to join the high school's literature club. The club's members include Yuri, the quiet, but well-endowed
kuudere who enjoys horror, Natsuki, the abrasive
tsundere who has taste for cute things like baking and manga, and finally the leader, Monika, the well-rounded leader of the club who weirdly resembles Sailor Jupiter. You are assigned to write poems for the club each night, picking out words associated to the interests of whomever you want to get closer with. These choices get you into some genuine romantic moments, from popping chocolate into Yuri's lips or tasting the cream off of Natsuki's finger. You can get so wrapped up in the heat of the moment, that you forget about the other shoe that's due to drop,
and drop it does.
Sayori, it turns out, is depressed. She's only cheerful when you're around, a delightful distraction from her deteriorating state. We get a hint of this from her last poem, When she confesses her love for you, you can either accept her as lover or friend. It doesn't matter, because the end result is the same. The next morning, you enter her home and find her hanging by a rope. This is by far the scariest and most unsettling part of the game. The lack of blood and creepy music certainly help in that measure. It's fitting that Sayori's suicidal depression isn't cured by a confession of love, as that is hardly ever the case in real life. Some things are out of our control.
From here on out, the game devolves into psychological horror. You are encouraged to start a new game, with Sayori's face blurred on the menu screen. You join the club afresh, but Sayori has been erased from existence. Occasionally the game glitches, with unreadable text and distorted faces. Like the music genres of vaporwave and future funk,
Doki Doki reuses the generic computer effects we're all familiar with for aesthetic effect. Further, we see that Yuri and Natsuki are far more distressed than they entail. Their poetry starts to reflect this. It's implied that Natsuki is neglected or abused at home, and that her short stature is due to malnutrition. Yuri jokes about her scrounging for coins under the vending machine, while Monika tosses her a candy bar and she gobbles it up like a dog. Her love for manga is an escape. If you neglect Natsuki, there's a jump scare where her neck snaps at a right angle, and she rushes toward you. Yuri's shyness hides her extreme possessiveness of you. She is also masochistic, taking breaks at the drinking fountain to cut herself. Yuri isn't a
yandere who would harm
others for your love. She would only harm herself. So when she confesses her love, the ecstasy of emotion is so great that she stabs herself to death. You are left with her corpse for the weekend while unnerving music drones on. This is where making multiple saves is useful. Go to an earlier save, and you'll be made to spend the weekend with "Only Monika." Even the movement of the mouse is restricted to force your hand.
Here we see the game's mastermind, Monika. You sit in an empty classroom with her, while space drifts in the windows. In a fourth wall break worthy of
Metal Gear Solid, Monika reveals that she knows her reality is a video game. So whenever you quit the game, she feels the pain of death. What Monika wants more than anything is to be "best girl" and loved by the protagonist, but she's never picked. Monika is most well-rounded of the four, and so, the least "dere". She isn't an
kawaiified exaggeration of certain traits into a character. Monika even makes note that few would be attracted to actual personalities like Yuri or Natsuki in real life. All that makes them human is stripped away, while only the cutest parts are retained. Monika, however, is the
yandere of this story, deleting the character files of the other girls from the game to eliminate the competition. Now she has you trapped to stare at forever. Try and quit the game, and she'll be right waiting for you when you restart. The only way to defeat her is to delete her character file from the game. A rather clever option. You start the game over again, with Monika gone from the club, and Sayori now realizing that she can be in control of the game. To keep things from repeating themselves, Monika decides to destroy the game in its entirety. The tragedy of Monika is that all she wanted to do was be loved, but was trapped within a system where that was impossible. By the end of the game, her only true act of love is to let you go.
The visual novel,
School Days,
could be considered the spiritual progenitor to
Doki Doki Literature Club. The anime adaptation, which follows the game fairly well as a harem anime, takes on one of the "bad endings" as its finale. Makoto, the protagonist, had treated the girls around him like meat, sleeping with them and throwing them out. So one of the girls he's cheated on, Sekai, stabs him to death out of jealousy. Makoto's other girlfriend, Kotonoha, returns the favor by, not only killing Sekai, but opening her womb to ensure she wasn't carrying Makoto's child. Kotonoha then takes her dead boyfriend's head with her on a "nice boat." An ending as ridiculous as it was shocking. Some argue that
School Days is a subversion or deconstruction of harem anime and visual novels, since it features the consequences of cheating on all these girls. This interpretation gives the story far too much credit. In order to deconstruct something, you must first construct it. The
School Days anime has a superficial understanding of what draws people to the girls in visual novels. The anime assumes that we'd just all want to sleep with them like Makoto. If people only wanted to have sex with visual novel characters, they'd be watching hentai. People play visual novels because they also want an emotional connection with the personalities, but there is no intimacy in
School Days. We don't care about any of these characters. We pity them, yes, but we don't care for them.
Doki Doki strings you along long enough to make you care for Natsuki, Yuri, and Sayori. That is what makes their dark turns all the more horrifying to watch.
Doki Doki also fits well within recent trends in anime that meditate on the nature of fantasy and escapism. Porter Robinson and Madeon's
Shelter music video features a survivor of the apocalypse who lives in a simulated reality to forget her loss. Gainax also did two anime music videos of this nature during their Anime Expo. The first,
ME!ME!ME!, by Daoko and Teddyloid, was about an otaku forced to confront the virtual girls he become attached to. The second,
Girl, also by Daoko, portrayed a lonesome girl lost in her own sexual imagination. The
isekai ("parallel world") anime,
Re:Zero, stars a protagonist is transported to a fantasy world, and thinks that, knowing all the tropes, he'll waltz right into the elf-girl's lap. Yet his ego and arrogance, which often succeed in
shonen genres, lead him into disastrous choices. The game could've suffered to make better use of literary reference, being that this was supposed to be a "literature club." The best we get is a name-drop of Shel Silverstein. A shame that the game didn't mention Stephen King's
Misery, Murakami Ryu's
Audition, or Gilligan Flynn's
Gone Girl. Maybe I ask for too much, but the dearth of literature in the "literature club" is sheer wasted potential.
Regardless,
Doki Doki Literature Club is a video game that plays with the idea of video games, particularly visual novels, and what we want when we play them. For a visual novel, it's nowhere near as involving as, say,
Danganronpa, but it plays with your assumptions in how to go about playing one. It makes you stop and think.
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