PenciltipWorkshop

The real life inspiration for Soos from Gravity Falls needs medical help. If anyone has money please donate to help this man. Every little thing counts: 

www.gofundme.com/what-would-jc…

Get the word out to as many Gravity Falls fans as possible. 

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Hey Guys! There's this Raffle if you wanna join in!

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Contains DDLC Spoilers.
If you wanna experience for yourself, go play the game first, its free on Steam
Or just watch a lets play online. 

You are free to do what you want... be sure to use it well...




   Ok. I need to write this down because ever since, I saw the story of this game unfold, its been occupying my thoughts for a while.
I need to write this and share it with others or else I won't stop thinking about it.

   So I saw the entirety of the story of Doki Doki Literature Club. As you know, its a story about a visual novel where a non-romanceable background character, Monika, becomes self aware, feels trapped, and distorts the game in her own image to get closer to the player. Surreal meta fictional horror ensues.

   Her friends, Sayori, Natsuki, and Yuri, are all romanceable, so she toys with their coding to make them unlikable, drives Sayori and Yuri to kill themselves, and deletes all the club members and the world she lives in all to have the player for herself. When you delete her, the world resets and the game wraps up. Bittersweet ending or bad ending depending on player choices and game saves.

First of all let me, just say that I can understand Monika's situation.

   She's a character who realizes her world and her friends are just a fabrication of an even more real world. When you turn off the game, she says she's in a void of flashing colors and a cacophony of sounds where she can't even think straight. It only goes away when you return to the game, like waking from a dream or a nightmare.
It's an "I have no mouth, and I must scream" situation.

   She's also upset that she is just an observer in someone else's story and can't be romanced, when she wants romance just as much as the other girls. She's aware that there isn't much to this world for her so she takes action. So to get what she wants, she toys with the game code and messes with character personalities, all to get the player for herself.

However, despite this, I cannot support any of her actions because none of them are in any way justified.

Before I go on, I need to take about nihilism. I watched a Wisecrack video on youtube where they talked about two schools of thought around nihilism, a philosophy that revolves around a void of meaning. The two schools they talked about were existential nihilism and cosmic nihilism/pessimism. 

   Existential nihilism states that life has no inherent meaning but we give it meaning by creating values to cling to. We are the heroes and the writers of our own stories. We decide what is valuable to us and we uphold those values to give our lives meaning (love, bravery, family, good will to all, determinism, religion, personal moral codes, etc.)

   Cosmic nihilism is the thought that life has no inherent meaning, and all attempts to create meaning are futile. Because all attempts to create meaning and values are little more than coping mechanisms to deal with the indifference and absurdity of universe. We create values/morals/beliefs/rules for ourselves to make sense of the world because we can't deal with the lack of inherent meaning.  The concept of self is also a coping mechanism. We are all little more than sentient pieces of meat and our consciousness is a collection of electrical impulses and chemical reactions. All values are subjective and morality is relative. Sounds bleak right?

   Personally, I prefer the first school of thought. The problem with the cosmic nihilism is that there is nothing to ground ethics or morals. If there is no meaning to existence, all morals and values are just illusion concepts, and nothing matters in a greater sense, than that means there is nothing stopping people from doing anything they want with the time they have, including terrible things. If there are no values or rules to build an ethical system, than that means individuals are free to do some truly horrendous actions. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some were to use this line of thinking to excuse their terrible actions.

So what does this have to do with the Monika and the game?

   Monika admits that she was tinkering with the game and the minds of the other girls, says their suicides weren't intentional, and brushes off their deaths and erasure from existence because "they weren't real" unlike  her (who has medium self-awareness). Her world isn't real so what's stopping her from doing anything  when nothing is real?

   Let me argue that if a someone does something in real life that would considered morally reprehensible, there's a high chance it would be terrible in fiction too.

   In the game, Monika toyed around with her friends free will. They may have been programmed to follow the game scripts and just fall in love with the player, but they still had some free will what little they had. Sayori's "Get out of my head" poem shows that's she is suffering; crying for help from Monika amplifying her depression. Natsuki writes a message saying she is concerned about Yuri, only for Monika to hijack her, remove her face, and tell the player "focus on Monika". Yuri, in the middle of a crazed fit during Act 2 instigated by Monika increasing her obsessive tendencies, admits that has really went and lost her mind. This shows that she is aware that her mind is changing but can't do anything to stop it. They may not be as self aware as Monika, but hey still make feel pain and have concerns like any real person. 

   Also, driving a person to commit suicide is still killing someone. You may not be actively taking a person's life, but if your actions did drive their deaths, you are responsible for them. Even if it wasn't intentional, it may not be murder (debatable), but many would still be ruled unintentional killing/manslaughter. Monika admits the suicides weren't intentional but she is guilty of brushing off her actions ("what's done is done", she says), possibly to remove herself from any guilt. 

   Monika repeatedly defends her actions saying "But the girls aren't real people." She brings up the analogy of violent video games. Killing characters in video games does not make a player a psychopath, because they aren't real in the player's reality and no real world harm is being done. So why should killing the girls matter if her own reality is fake? 

   Several video games these days give you the option of doing some horrendous things or a relatively morally acceptable option. In some games if you do more terrible actions (stealing, killing, etc.) other characters will call you out on your actions. It may not have any bearing on you in real life, but you can be penalized in-game. Actions have consequences. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. There may not be negative consequences to you but its still unfair that others suffer for your own gain. 

    Sayori, Natsuki, and Yuri may be little more than character sprites and deletable pieces of data, Monika herself is also  character sprites and deletable piece of data. Even though she is more self aware than her friends and could toy around her reality, she is inherently not on a higher level than any of her friends. They're all data. She's also data. Data deletes data. Erasing something from existence is, in a way, is essentially their way of killing (aside from the scenes where the data "commit suicide".

   And even though the rest of the club are just deletable data, those deletable pieces of data were the only friends she ever had in her reality. They did nothing but give her respect, companionship, and good memories. And she threw them all away because they weren't "real people". They thought they were real people. They all had the capacity to feel pain, emotional baggage, a sense of self, interests, and personality. Her actions, robbing their free will and erasing them from existence, weren't fair to any of them. They didn't deserve any of that. Did that not matter to her? 

Just because life is unfair, doesn't mean you have to be. Just because your free to do bad things, doesn't mean you should. 

   It's all fake, but she did feel joy from their company. It may not have been real, but the emotions she can't deny what she felt from them. Something she admits this when she herself is deleted and thinks back to how all her friends and all the good times they had. The world may not have been real to her but it was real to her friends. Her world was the only one she ever knew. The world was limited as a visual novel/dating sim/horror game, but Monika wasn't creating a better world. All Monika was capable of doing (because of how limited the game and herself really are) was destroying it. That's probably the most tragic thing of all. She couldn't change anything. Yeah she had the player all to herself for a short time, but she is still trapped with in the confines of the game. Even if you put her file in a USB drive to carry with you, she's still can't reach your reality.

   I will give credit where credit is due. When deleted, Monika feels remorse, sees the error of her ways and accepts her fate. She reset the world and brings all the other girls back. I can forgive Monika for what she did to me, the reader/player. As if whether the other girls would forgive her is hard to say. Brainwashing and killing your friends are some atrocious actions, and most people wouldn't forgive that. 

   By the end, all I wanted was for all the girls to be happy. Even Monika, despite her actions. As Salvato said, all these girls are deserving of love, and personally, I don't think any of these girls deserve the fates they had. I just wanted all the girls to be happy alongside one another and consult some therapy for each of them. Seriously, all these girls need psychiatric help. 

   Part of me wishes that the game was just a visual novel played straight with the twist that all the girls have emotional baggage. Like have each girl's story would tackle a different kind of emotional baggage (Sayori for depression, Natsuki with abusive household, Yuri for anxieties/self harm, and Monika for existential crisis without metafictional horror). Like all of them go through therapy, grow more as people, and slowly be more at peace with themselves. 

 The metafictional horror didn't really scare me, just unsettle me for the most part. I didn't find any of the suicides shocking or scary. I just found them immensely tragic and depressing. I will not deny the impact the game had on me. Like several people if it wasn't for its surprises I heard about, I'm sure if  I would've had an interest in the game.

I'm glad this game exists and what it gave us. It certainly got me thinking for a while.

Contains DDLC Spoilers.
If you wanna experience for yourself, go play the game first, its free on Steam
Or just watch a lets play online. 

You are free to do what you want... be sure to use it well...




  Ok. I need to write this down because ever since, I saw the story of this game unfold, its been occupying my thoughts for a while.
I need to write this and share it with others or else I won't stop thinking about it.

  So I saw the entirety of the story of Doki Doki Literature Club. As you know, its a story about a visual novel where a non-romanceable background character, Monika, becomes self aware, feels trapped, and distorts the game in her own image to get closer to the player. Surreal meta fictional horror ensues.

  Her friends, Sayori, Natsuki, and Yuri, are all romanceable, so she toys with their coding to make them unlikable, drives Sayori and Yuri to kill themselves, and deletes all the club members and the world she lives in all to have the player for herself. When you delete her, the world resets and the game wraps up. Bittersweet ending or bad ending depending on player choices and game saves.

First of all let me, just say that I can understand Monika's situation.

  She's a character who realizes her world and her friends are just a fabrication of an even more real world. When you turn off the game, she says she's in a void of flashing colors and a cacophony of sounds where she can't even think straight. It only goes away when you return to the game, like waking from a dream or a nightmare.
It's an "I have no mouth, and I must scream" situation.

  She's also upset that she is just an observer in someone else's story and can't be romanced, when she wants romance just as much as the other girls. She's aware that there isn't much to this world for her so she takes action. So to get what she wants, she toys with the game code and messes with character personalities, all to get the player for herself.

However, despite this, I cannot support any of her actions because none of them are in any way justified.

Before I go on, I need to take about nihilism. I watched a Wisecrack video on youtube where they talked about two schools of thought around nihilism, a philosophy that revolves around a void of meaning. The two schools they talked about were existential nihilism and cosmic nihilism/pessimism. 

  Existential nihilism states that life has no inherent meaning but we give it meaning by creating values to cling to. We are the heroes and the writers of our own stories. We decide what is valuable to us and we uphold those values to give our lives meaning (love, bravery, family, good will to all, determinism, religion, personal moral codes, etc.)

  Cosmic nihilism is the thought that life has no inherent meaning, and all attempts to create meaning are futile. Because all attempts to create meaning and values are little more than coping mechanisms to deal with the indifference and absurdity of universe. We create values/morals/beliefs/rules for ourselves to make sense of the world because we can't deal with the lack of inherent meaning.  The concept of self is also a coping mechanism. We are all little more than sentient pieces of meat and our consciousness is a collection of electrical impulses and chemical reactions. All values are subjective and morality is relative. Sounds bleak right?

  Personally, I prefer the first school of thought. The problem with the cosmic nihilism is that there is nothing to ground ethics or morals. If there is no meaning to existence, all morals and values are just illusion concepts, and nothing matters in a greater sense, than that means there is nothing stopping people from doing anything they want with the time they have, including terrible things. If there are no values or rules to build an ethical system, than that means individuals are free to do some truly horrendous actions. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some were to use this line of thinking to excuse their terrible actions.

So what does this have to do with the Monika and the game?

  Monika admits that she was tinkering with the game and the minds of the other girls, says their suicides weren't intentional, and brushes off their deaths and erasure from existence because "they weren't real" unlike  her (who has medium self-awareness). Her world isn't real so what's stopping her from doing anything  when nothing is real?

  Let me argue that if a someone does something in real life that would considered morally reprehensible, there's a high chance it would be terrible in fiction too.

  In the game, Monika toyed around with her friends free will. They may have been programmed to follow the game scripts and just fall in love with the player, but they still had some free will what little they had. Sayori's "Get out of my head" poem shows that's she is suffering; crying for help from Monika amplifying her depression. Natsuki writes a message saying she is concerned about Yuri, only for Monika to hijack her, remove her face, and tell the player "focus on Monika". Yuri, in the middle of a crazed fit during Act 2 instigated by Monika increasing her obsessive tendencies, admits that has really went and lost her mind. This shows that she is aware that her mind is changing but can't do anything to stop it. They may not be as self aware as Monika, but they still make feel pain and have concerns like any real person. 

  Also, driving a person to commit suicide is still killing someone. You may not be actively taking a person's life, but if your actions did drive their deaths, you are responsible for them. Even if it wasn't intentional, it may not be murder (debatable), but many would still consider it to be unintentional killing/manslaughter. Monika admits the suicides weren't intentional but she is guilty of brushing off her actions ("what's done is done", she says), possibly to remove herself from any guilt. 

  Monika repeatedly defends her actions saying "But the girls aren't real people." She brings up the analogy of violent video games. Killing characters in video games does not make a player a psychopath, because they aren't real in the player's reality and no real world harm is being done. So why should killing the girls matter if her own reality is fake? 

  Several video games these days give you the option of doing some horrendous things or a relatively morally acceptable options. In some games, if you do more terrible actions (stealing, killing, etc.) other characters will call you out on your actions. It may not have any bearing on you in real life, but you can be penalized in-game. Actions have consequences. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. There may not be negative consequences to you but its still unfair that others suffer for your own gain. 

   Sayori, Natsuki, and Yuri may be little more than character sprites and deletable pieces of data, but Monika herself is also  character sprites and deletable pieces of data. Even though she is more self aware than her friends and could toy around her reality, she is inherently not on a higher level than any of her friends. They're all data. She's also data. Data deletes data. Erasing something from existence is, in a way, is essentially their way of killing (aside from the scenes where the data "commit suicide").

  And even though the rest of the club are just deletable data, those deletable pieces of data were the only friends she ever had in her reality. They did nothing but give her respect, companionship, and good memories. And she threw them all away because they weren't "real people". They thought they were real people. They all had the capacity to feel pain, emotional baggage, a sense of self, interests, and personality. Her actions, robbing their free will and erasing them from existence, weren't fair to any of them. They didn't deserve any of that. Did that not matter to her? 

Just because life is unfair, doesn't mean you have to be. Just because your free to do bad things, doesn't mean you should. 

  It's all fake, but she did feel joy from their company. It may not have been real, but she can't deny the emotions she felt from them. Something she admits when she herself is deleted and thinks back to how all her friends and all the good times they had. The world may not have been real to her but it was real to her friends. Her world was the only one she ever knew. The world was limited as a visual novel/dating sim/horror game, but Monika wasn't creating a better world. All Monika was capable of doing (because of how limited the game and herself really are) was destroying it. That's probably the most tragic thing of all. She couldn't change anything. Yeah she had the player all to herself for a short time, but she is still trapped with in the confines of the game. Even if you put her file in a USB drive to carry with you, she's still can't reach your reality.

  I will give credit where credit is due. When deleted, Monika feels remorse, sees the error of her ways and accepts her fate. She reset the world and brings all the other girls back. I can forgive Monika for what she did to me, the reader/player. As if whether the other girls would forgive her is hard to say. Brainwashing and killing your friends are some atrocious actions, and most people wouldn't forgive that. 

  By the end, all I wanted was for all the girls to be happy. Even Monika, despite her actions. As Salvato said, all these girls are deserving of love, and personally, I don't think any of these girls deserve the fates they had. I just wanted all the girls to be happy alongside one another and consult some therapy for each of them. Seriously, all these girls need psychiatric help. 

  Part of me wishes that the game was just a visual novel played straight with the twist that all the girls have emotional baggage. Like have each girl's story would tackle a different kind of emotional baggage (Sayori for depression, Natsuki with abusive household, Yuri for anxieties/self harm, and Monika for existential crisis without metafictional horror). Like all of them go through therapy, grow more as people, and slowly be more at peace with themselves. 

The metafictional horror didn't really scare me, just unsettle me for the most part. I didn't find any of the suicides shocking or scary. I just found them immensely tragic and depressing. I will not deny the impact the game had on me. Like several people if it wasn't for its surprises I heard about, I'm not sure if I would've had an interest in the game.

I'm glad this game exists and what it gave us. It certainly got me thinking for a while.

EDIT: I put this up on reddit. Here's the link for those curious:

www.reddit.com/r/JustMonika/co…