The Wrong Monster

Contrary to what you might expect from its cutesy advertising, the 2017 visual novel Doki Doki Literature Club! comes with the following content warning:

This game is not suitable for children or those who are easily disturbed.

Having taken the bait, I can say that the work is indeed disturbing. Unfortunately, its perversion seeps into its very thesis, debasing the exhilaration it elicits.

(Heads up: I’d like to discourage you from reading the thing, but I’ll have to spoil it to make my case. If you’d prefer to draw your own conclusions, first, you can get it at ddlc.moe–it’ll only cost your time.)

The VN starts off strong, with a delicious tension underlying trite slice-of-life banter. None of the dialog is interesting, and true-to-form, some of the exchanges are gratingly polite. It’s thanks to that content warning (and, in an impressive show of restraint, for no other reason) you know that something is wrong. I love a story that makes me flinch.

Despite my anticipation of a ruse, I wasn’t prepared when Sayori disclosed her condition. Partly it’s because the first act is so straight-faced that it lulled me into expecting her to awkwardly reveal a crush on the player-character. Even though I knew things would turn at some point, I was anticipating something sinister. I had 2006’s Higurashi no Naku Koro ni in mind–an anime I watched with a sense of ironic detachment rather than empathy (i.e. “Wow, this is wild!”). When Sayori reluctantly admits, “I’ve had really bad depression my whole life,” the tragic yet mundane revelation had my heart in my throat.

That moment could have launched the novel into any number of meaningful themes, e.g. the male gaze, the hollowness of agency in the medium, the legitimacy of historically-stigmatized diseases, or even the invisible nature of mental disorders. The turn the story actually takes, while emotionally effective, is sensationalized and exploitive.

The second act introduces a supernatural aspect immediately following Sayori’s death via increasingly self-aware subversions of the visual-novel format. Ostensibly starting a new game, the original narrative is hastily rewritten before your eyes, with Sayori’s character sloppily removed in the first few moments. As you collect evidence that the game itself is manipulating the characters without their knowledge, the source of tension shifts from the social drama to an unidentified supernatural force.

To this end, DDLC is a very effective horror experience. The writing plays with slice-of-life tropes, veering from banal to disarmingly sincere and downright intimidating. The imagery demonstrates a similar adroitness–as cute and as sexually-charged as the genre demands yet also singularly violent. The distortions intrude unpredictably and with impressive creativity. Most of all, the pacing is flawless. I felt chills throughout the second and third acts, and the game hasn’t been far from my thoughts since I completed it. It even rewards repeated play-throughs by revealing different distortions, some dependent on the player’s choices¹.

Well-executed though it may be, the conceit of a nefarious intelligence ultimately kneecaps the game. Rather than inspiring empathy for the plight of friends, Doki Doki Literature Club! threatens players with exposure to victims. It delights in the depravity of their depiction². Psychological disorders and domestic violence are nightmarish enough on their own, so there’s no need to add a deranged artificial intelligence. The supernatural aspect isn’t merely superfluous, though; it trivializes the real-life terror on which it fundamentally depends³.

My favorite horror stories generally induce adrenaline from fear of the unknown or foster empathy for darker aspects of the human experience. Works like Alan Wake (which finds menace in illness personified) and The Bell Jar (which guides readers through a terrible breakdown) demonstrate that with some care, it’s possible to examine mental health using either of these devices. By seeking thrills from a real-world trauma, Doki Doki Literature Club! stitches together a monster from the incompatible parts of each.