Monika (Doki Doki Literature Club!)

Monika.chr is a fictional artificially intelligent computer program and main antagonist of the visual novel metafictional psychological horror video game Doki Doki Literature Club!. The character was created by Dan Salvato and voiced by Jillian Ashcraft. While Monika initially appears as the main tutor and supporting character of the lighthearted dating simulator Doki Doki Literature Club! that guides the player on their path to romance the three provided love interests, after being revealed to have gained sentience, her words, actions and surroundings become increasingly malicious as she makes her intentions clear. She is apparently deleted at the end of the game, but returns to destroy the game itself.

Monika.chr
Doki Doki Literature Club! character
Monika, as she appears in her corrupted form in Doki Doki Literature Club!
First appearanceDoki Doki Literature Club! (2017)
Created byDan Salvato
Designed bySatchely
Portrayed byOR3O (Random Encounters)
Voiced byJillian Ashcraft
In-universe information
Full nameMonika.chr
AliasHigh School Devil
SpeciesA.I. computer program
GenderFemale
TitlePresident of the Literature Club

The inspiration for the character's creation extends Salvato's concept of an innocuous romance game that slowly falls apart over time as horrible things begin to happen and one girl takes control. The physical appearance of Monika went through several designs, one of which featured a chibi effect. Discussing the creation of Monika and her abilities, Salvato explained that he was inspired by "things that are scary because they make you uncomfortable, not because they shove scary-looking things in your face."[1] To achieve this, Salvato developed the façade of a cute setting, which would break down over time along with the behavior of the characters, and eventually the role of one evil character (Monika) who had seized control of the game from the player would be revealed.

In creating the game's horror elements, Salvato drew inspiration from Yume Nikki and Eversion, emphasizing to his team that he wanted the market for visual novels to become much more daring and less reliant on the same plot concepts.[2] The game's other stock characters were based around standard anime archetypes (such as childhood sweetheart, girl next door, tsundere and manic pixie dream girl) and were given Japanese names to emphasize a pseudo-Japanese atmosphere characteristic of Western-produced visual novel, with each character's dialogue being written as though poorly-translated from Japanese; the game's title refers to the colloquial sound of a heartbeat alongside reference to a combination of book club and literature circle. The sole exception to these formats is Monika, who received an English name and speech pattern as a hint to her individual nature compared to the other characters, and the blank slate in-game protagonist "MC".[3]

Monika has been well received by critics and gamers, some of whom called her disarming, passive-aggressive, tragic, sinister and witty.[4][5] She is considered one of the greatest video game characters, particularly among those created in the 2010s.[4] On January 1, 2018, Monika and the other main characters of Doki Doki Literature Club! were added to Yandere Simulator as character skins, with Salvato's permission.[6][7] Later in 2018, a computer avatar based on Monika was released to Gaia Online under the title "Just Dangerous Me", the addition of which has been criticised by Salvato due to no permission having been sought and the skin being sold as downloadable content.[8]

Description
I never expected Monika to be so popular. While she is technically a kind and caring person, her epiphany about her own universe had turned her into a total sociopath who laughed at the misery of her former friends. Is that behavior justified? Does her eventual remorse and sacrifice redeem her by the end? It seems that a lot of people feel that way."

Dan Salvato on the reception of Monika.[9]

For the first quarter of Doki Doki Literature Club!, Monika serves solely as the tutor, guiding the player through the narrative. Over time, after the exaggerated suicides and erasure of the three love interests, the player learns that Monika is in fact a self-aware video game character who has the ability to manipulate and delete other character files, which she used to alter the behavior of her club-mates in an unsuccessful bid to make them unlikable and prevent their programmed confessions of love to the protagonist. She expresses her loneliness from being relegated to a fruitless supporting role within an empty world where her only company had been "autonomous personalities" designed only to fall in love with the protagonist, and she confesses her own love not to the male protagonist character "MC", but directly to the player controlling them, regardless of their gender; having failed to use coding to transfer herself into the player's computer, she instead seeks to trap them with her within the game itself.[10][5]

Monika will sit and talk to the player indefinitely about various topics until the player manually enters the game's directory and deletes Monika's character file. Monika subsequently begins to break down, initially lashing out at the player, but ultimately forgives them upon realizing her own mistakes, remorsefully repenting by restoring the game and the characters excluding herself. Depending on the course of action taken by the player, the game can come to three possible conclusions. The standard ending sees Sayori introducing herself as the president of the literature club and thanking the player for getting rid of Monika. As she adopts Monika's possessive characteristics, Monika intervenes via text prompt and deletes Sayori to save the player. Monika deletes the game over the course of the credits, and the game concludes with a note from Monika, stating that she has disbanded the literature club because "no happiness can be found" in it. In the true ending, achieved by the player paying Natsuki, Yuri and Sayori an equal amount of attention prior to the end of Act 1, Monika remains silent as Sayori learns from her mistakes, ending the game on her own.

Appearances
MC is the nameless, faceless self-insert character that you find so commonly in romance games. His main purpose is for the girls to interact with you. It's true that you can discover a few details about his life, but he's deliberately given little to no focus compared to everyone else."
"As [A]ct 2 is more about Monika trying to get you, the player, to hate the other characters, MC stops reacting to the game world. Because the game world is interacting more with you, not MC."

Dan Salvato on the outline for the backstory for MC ("Main Character"), and their subsequent impact to the plot of Doki Doki Literature Club!.[11]

Doki Doki Literature Club!

Monika is a character in the game within a game Doki-Doki Literature Club, initially serving as the titular club's president and the designated nice girl preparing for an upcoming festival, before having an epiphany which leads her to discover that she and all of her "friends" are characters in a dating simulator video game, drastically changing her attitude towards the other girls upon realizing she was not available to be picked as a romance option, having been written to be a one-dimensional supporting character preparing for a non-existent event, learning that as the president of the Literature Club, she became able to manipulate the script and code of the game and break the fourth wall. Outraged, this led to her using her powers of manipulating the script to do things like emphasizing the negative traits of the other characters Sayori and Yuri (respectively depression and self-harm), in the hope that the player would choose her instead of them, only for the player to turn to the "worthless" Natsuki for platonic companionship.

After the protagonist "MC" notices that Sayori (his childhood sweetheart) seems "down" about something, he informs Monika about it, who expresses interest in having "a talk with Sayori" later that day. Jealous of the friendship that Sayori and the protagonist have, Monika instead manipulates Sayori's code to have her commit suicide by hanging, breaking the script and deleting Sayori from the game, which makes the entire game restart with Sayori being completely absent. Due to Monika's manipulation of the script, from this point onward there are a variety of "glitches" in the game, and she manipulates the personality of Yuri, one of the other two main characters, to be more intensive. She often uses the script to make other characters try and get the main protagonist to spend more with Monika; a famous example of this is when she removes Natsuki's face and forces her to repeatedly say "Just Monika". Eventually, Yuri's obsessive personality becomes so intense that she kills herself over the protagonist, leaving them trapped in the characters' school for the length of a weekend, leading Natsuki to vomit and Monika to completely delete both remaining character's files, restarting the game with just her. When she is alone with the protagonist, she reveals she is not in love with him, but with the player themselves, drawing them into the game in the character's place. She continues to endlessly talk with the player about various topics as love, vegetarianism and her Twitter account, unless the player completely deletes her from the game by going into the game files. When this is done, she will initially express fury at the player, but then shows regret for her actions towards her former friends and devolution into a villain. In an attempt to repent for her wrongdoings, she brings back the other three girls and seemingly fully removes herself from the game.

If the player attempts to reload or copy her file back in, she sends them a message asking them not to toy with her heart and she no longer wants to come back after her previous actions. However, when the player restarts the game with the other three girls, Sayori gains self-awareness and data manipulation powers like Monika's, having taken her place as the president of the Literature Club. After thanking the player for ridding the game of Monika, she alternatively (depending on the player's actions) also attempts to trap the player in the same classroom Monika did, in the hopes that she will be in a relationship with them forever, or learns from Monika's mistakes and allowed them to leave. In the first ending, Monika, realizing that no one is ever going to find happiness in the game, deletes it entirely, possibly taking her existence and that of her friends with it. In both endings however, before the credits roll, she communicates vocally with the player for the first time and plays and sings "Your Reality" while playing notes from a piano as she deletes each file in the game, and eventually the script itself. In the first ending, she will additionally leave a goodbye note, serving to explain her final actions.

Other media

Monika is featured in Yandere Simulator as a skin for the titular "Yandere-chan", accessible via a poem section of the "Meme Closet".[6][7]

Development history

Because Salvato lacked artistic skill, he used a free online anime-creation program to create the initial character design of Monika and the other characters, and applied these designs in test versions of the game.[12] Salvato recognized that a product of such quality would not satisfy potential players,[12] so he made a request to his friend, a translator for Sekai Project, for sketches of school uniforms and hairstyles for the character.[13] Salvato then handed initial visual development over to Kagefumi, who left the project very early on. After Kagefumi's departure from the project, Salvato contacted the freelance artist Satchely, who would created the final character sprites over the course of the following few months.[14] The sprites were created in several parts to give the poses more variety.[15]

In the game's score, the introductory composition, "Doki Doki Literature Club!", is primarily performed by piano and flute with accompaniment by string instruments, the piano being representative of Monika.[16] The composition "Okay, Everyone!" has five different versions, Monika's version again emphasizing the piano. The game's score is generally calm and serene with the exception of two tracks, "Sayo-nara" and "Just Monika", which are ominous in tone.[17] "Your Reality", a vocal song performed over the end credits as the first time Monika is heard speaking aloud, is sung by Jillian Ashcraft.[16]

In an interview with Asian Crush, Salvato stated that "[in] writing [Monika] I was seeing more 'reality' in [her] than I had initially planned. In concept, [she was a] generic anime character, [but] I think I really wanted to connect with [her] as a writer, so [she] started expressing insecurities and realistic personality traits behind their stock archetypes – ones I see around me in real life."[9]

An instrumental version of "Your Reality" is additionally made available in the Doki Doki Literature Club! (Original Soundtrack), made available alongside the original game on its release.[18]

On 28 September 2017, Dan Salvato posted an additional Doki Doki Literature Club! music soundtrack piece called doki17.mp3 to the unofficial Doki Doki Literature Club! Discord server, referring to it as "an unfinished track that never made it into the game" which "[while] pretty far from finished [was] still somewhat pleasant".[19]

Reception and analysis
"If you are the sort of person who strives to be someone deserving of Monika's love, then that's what she loves about you. Only someone who has lost all hope in themselves is the one condemning Monika to her own sad, unfulfilled fantasy. If you believe Monika loves you, then you've found it in you to love yourself a little bit, and that's what she would want more than anything."

Dan Salvato on the motivations of Monika with regards the player(s) of Doki Doki Literature Club!.[20]

With a Terrible Fate's Kent Vainio described Monika as a "profound perversion of the boundary between real and fictional[;] like a real person, [yet] incredibly superficial and callous."[21] Rock, Paper, Shotgun contributor Darragh Nolan said of Monika: "The fracture between you as [the] protagonist in the dating sim and Monika as [the] protagonist in her own counter-narrative is what fragments the game and our experience of it. It has both a wall, and a [J]apanese schoolgirl taking that wall apart and [ch]ucking bricks at you to knock down your wall."[22] Kotaku describes Monika's writing as "disarming and sinister".[23]

Giant Bomb described Monika as originally depicted to be "follow[ing] the script of an abusive and controlling partner, [with] her psychotic fixation on you serves as not just a criticism of the lens visual novels give protagonists and players or of the yandere character archetype, but also of the pathological love that dating sims often romanticize[,] the purest distillation of the idea of a person who thinks only about you and who would do anything to be with you, [far from] the height of romance but something akin to a personality disorder", interpreting the character as a criticism of the views taken by educational institutions on schoolchildren's mental health concerns, and on the lack of ethical treatment of female love interests in the format of dating simulators.[24]

gollark: I have a great idea. Purely functional HQ9+.
gollark: No.
gollark: ++delete turing completeness
gollark: Unlike English, Latin has a functional case system.
gollark: Plural nominative that is.

References
  1. Jackson, Gita (October 20, 2017). "Doki Doki Literature Club's Horror Was Born From A Love-Hate Relationship With Anime". Kotaku. Archived from the original on October 21, 2017. Retrieved October 29, 2017.
  2. Salvato, Dan (2017) Doki Doki Literature Club! Concept Art Booklet, p. 3
  3. Salvato, Dan (2017) Doki Doki Literature Club! Concept Art Booklet, p. 4
  4. Staff, Polygon (November 27, 2019). "The 70 best video game characters of the decade". Polygon. Retrieved November 27, 2019. Monika wants to be loved, but the dating sim part of Doki Doki doesn’t even include a route for her. What do you do when your favorite NPC isn’t a romance option? Monika takes this into her own hands, self-aware of the limitations of her own genre, and turns into one of the most terrifying video game villains of this decade. She manipulates the game itself and ultimately smashes through the fourth wall. But Monika learns her lesson; she realizes the best way to love the player is to let them be free, which is poetically conveyed in the game’s ending song.
  5. Lineham, Mitch Jay (February 16, 2018). "Doki Doki Literature Club is a visual novel worthy of a Black Mirror episode". PCGamesN. Archived from the original on October 5, 2018. Retrieved March 30, 2019.
  6. https://twitter.com/dansalvato/status/948264568748462081?lang=en
  7. "Happy New Year!". January 1, 2018.
  8. Dan Salvato [@dansalvato] (February 23, 2018). "Dan Salvato on Twitter: ".@gaiaonline I discovered recently that you stole my character design and sold it for money. I don't understand why you felt the need to do this. DDLC is a free game, even."" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  9. Lee, Otter (January 3, 2018). "We Interviewed Doki Doki Literature Club's Twisted Creator, Dan Salvato". Asian Crush. Retrieved January 3, 2018.
  10. Fujita, Shōhei (March 4, 2018). "【完全ネタバレコラム】世界を大いに盛り上げる「Doki Doki Literature Club」の真の目的と少女たちからの救難信号" (in Japanese). IGN Japan. Archived from the original on June 26, 2018. Retrieved March 30, 2019.
  11. Salvato, Dan (April 9, 2018). "Hello, my name is Dan Salvato. I created Doki Doki Literature Club. AMA". Reddit. Retrieved April 9, 2018.
  12. Salvato, Dan (2017) Doki Doki Literature Club! Concept Art Booklet, p. 5
  13. Salvato, Dan (2017) Doki Doki Literature Club! Concept Art Booklet, p. 11
  14. Satchely [@_Satchely] (June 2, 2019). "Satchel on Twitter: "Suddenly the artist credit is being switched around in the article, I don't think it was like that yesterday. Kagefumi didn't draw the final sprites and backgrounds. Her art isn't in the game because she left the project very early on."" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  15. Salvato, Dan (2017) Doki Doki Literature Club! Concept Art Booklet, p. 18
  16. Team Salvato (September 22, 2017). Doki Doki Literature Club! (Windows). Level/area: End credits.
  17. Gaspar, Marcos (September 22, 2017). "Doki Doki Literature Club! OST". RPGFan Music. Archived from the original on October 8, 2018. Retrieved March 30, 2019.
  18. https://www.rpgfan.com/soundtracks/ddlc-ost/index.html
  19. doki17.mp3
  20. Salvato, Dan (April 9, 2018). "Hello, my name is Dan Salvato. I created Doki Doki Literature Club. AMA". Reddit. Retrieved April 9, 2018.
  21. Vainio, Kent (April 13, 2018). "Not Just Monika: Sadistic Horror in Doki Doki Literature Club". With a Terrible Fate. Retrieved April 13, 2018.
  22. "How Doki Doki Literature Club frames you: Where we're going, we don't need walls". Rock, Paper, Shotgun. July 25, 2018. Retrieved July 25, 2018.
  23. "Doki Doki Literature Club's Darkest Moment". Kotaku. Retrieved July 12, 2020.
  24. "Just Monika: An Analysis of Doki Doki Literature Club". Giant Bomb. March 3, 2018. Retrieved March 3, 2018.
  25. Valens, Ana (February 20, 2018). "Here's the Best 'Just Monika' Memes Taking Over the Internet". Gamepur. Retrieved February 20, 2018.
  26. "JUST MONIKA: A DDLC song (feat. OR3O & Adriana Figueroa) [by Random Encounters]". Random Encounters. February 16, 2018. Retrieved February 16, 2018.
  27. ""Just Monika" Minecraft Doki Doki Animated Music Video (Song By Random Encounters)". ZAMination Productions. October 19, 2019. Retrieved October 19, 2019.
  28. "【Doki Doki Literature Club Song】Doki Doki Forever (by OR3O ft. rachie, Chi-chi, Kathy-chan★)". OR3O. December 22, 2017. Retrieved December 22, 2017.
  29. "【Doki Doki Literature Club】Your Reality (COVER)". OR3O. December 3, 2017. Retrieved December 3, 2017.
  30. "【Doki Doki Literature Club】Can't Help Falling in Love (Monika Cover)". OR3O. February 12, 2018. Retrieved February 12, 2018.
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