Doki Doki Literature Club takes the mundane and tired tropes of typical visual novel dating sims and flips them upside-down. Fundamentally, DDLC is a game about agency – or a frightening lack thereof. The girls spend most of the game either manipulating each other or getting manipulated themselves in a bloodthirsty battle for the affection of a stereotypically bland, featureless male protagonist commonly found in dating sims. However, with a little bit of assistance from the player, the members of the literature club can find themselves in a position to free themselves from their vicious, endless, and mindless romantic pursuit.
Over the course of the game, Monika manipulates the other girls in the literature club to force the player – rather than the entirely dull player character – to have only Monika as a viable dating option, indicating that Monika’s essentially been propelled into madness by lust. She drives the other girls insane and provokes some of them to commit violent acts against themselves, but hand-waves it all away by asserting that they’re not real like she is – they’re just characters in a dating sim after all! If one were to put down the game here, and choose to embrace Monika in Act 3 in the way she desires (“If you copy my character file onto a flash drive or something, you can always keep a part of me with you…”) then the other girls truly do not get their taste of justice; their existence in the game remains one defined by a crippling lack of agency. Sayori, Yuri and Natsuki will have spent the entire game fawning over the lifeless player character (which is notably distinct from the player, whom Monika professes her love for directly and through the 4th wall) for some inexplicable reason before meeting horrible fates, all outside of their control…
However, the player can also choose to do away with Monika by deleting her .chr file in Act 1 (there are many different endings to the game, but for the sake of this critical play I’ll focus on the quick ending). After doing so, the game begins again with Sayori as the leader of the literature club rather than the omnipotent Monika. Shockingly, upon her ascendency to the role of president, Sayori gains the same level of self-awareness that Monika possessed. However, instead of leveraging her self-awareness to sabotage the other girls as Monika did, Sayori annihilates the literature club entirely to free the girls from their insane pursuit of the player (“now everyone can be happy…”)! This is where the game truly shines as a piece of feminist media in the sense that it destroys the typical dating sim paradigm in brutal fashion; through its thorough subversion of expectations does DDLC shine a light on the absurdities of the genre, specifically as they pertain to the tired trope of multi-faceted women blindly chasing a male protagonist with no personality. DDLC really drives this point home by both refusing to give the player character a face, and by making his personality that of an underachiever who would rather play video games and watch anime (read: escape) rather than build friendships. How odd it is that an entire club of girls would trample each other for the mere opportunity to date such a guy!
To summarize, DDLC lures in the typically heterosexual male audience that serves as the core market for dating sims with bubbly, lighthearted music and bright-eyed, lustful characters, and further makes them very comfortable with this premise. In fact, the entire first act plays out in as typical a dating sim fashion as any veteran to the genre may come to expect. Then, after building a great deal of trust with the player, the game totally subverts any and all expectations of the genre in a staunch effort to hold a mirror up to the player and encourage self-reflection, begging questions such as “does it make sense to think of women in this way?” or “is this a healthy way to address the loneliness you hold within?”. DDLC refuses to cater to the touch-starved escapists who frequent the dating sim genre, and instead confronts them with the absurdities of their preferred method of escape. DDLC highlights the importance of lending agency to female characters in video games and makes its players question why they would have it any other way.
