#and being in her last year of school

[bixels]

The idea that uni protesters are "elitist ivy-league rich kids larping as revolutionaries" on Twitter and Reddit and even here is so fucking funny to me if you actually know anything about the student bodies at these unis. Take it from someone who's going to one of the biggest private unis in the US, 80% of the peers I know are either from the suburbs or an apartment somewhere in America, children of immigrants, or here on a student visa. I've heard about one-percenter students, but I've never met one in person. Like, don't get me wrong, the institution as a whole is still very privileged and white. I've talked with friends and classmates about feeling weird or dissonant being here and coming from such a different background. But in my art program, I see BIPOC, disabled, queer, lower-income students and faculty trying to deconstruct and tear that down and make space every day. So to take a cursory glance at a crowd of student protesters in coalitions that are led by BIPOC & 1st/2nd-gen immigrant students and HQ'd in ethnic housings and student organizations and say, "ah. children of the elite." Get real.

[transrevolutions]

expanding on my previous post actually every single oiar employee (including lena) is autistic they all just have different and clashing presentations. that "weird interview" celia and sam were discussing in episode 6? yeah that was just lena attempting to give a poorly-disguised diagnostic test.

[aparticularbandit]

I agree with your general critique of fourth wall breaking meta-narratives. (I love them to pieces, but can definitely see how characters being written to angst about how they're being written can be...not fulfilling because they're still being written to do that and not truly able to do it themselves the way the narrative wants the reader/player/viewer to believe.)

But if I may offer an alternative explanation re: Monika (not even addressing the console releases, which add an extra level of meta-narrative that I think explain why Monika doesn't have a route but not in a satisfactory way for your critique, I think - and besides, the original game should stand alone without the expanded content the console releases gave it - but that is not the point):

I tend to think that Monika isn't good enough at coding - or doesn't have enough time to get good at it - to make her own route. If she comes to realize over the course of the game that she's in a game and then gains access to the files and code - she has a few days, at most, to get to a level of coding where she can not only write her own route but also get the game to implement it.

Which, yes, Monika does have the initial code, so if she can read it correctly, then she should be able to change and adapt it to get it to do what she wants. But just from my own very limited experience making minor modifications to tumblr pages (and/or themes), it can take hours to try and figure out what I'm doing and how to get the new code to do what I want/need it to do - and then come to find out that no, actually, the code will expressly not do the thing I wanted it to do, even though it should do the thing I told it to do - and sometimes even just copy-pasting the code in runs into issues because there's something screwy in the code already that I have to try and finagle and fix - and then a lot of times I give up and find an easier theme/page because I do not have the coding knowledge to make it function.

Monika starts with playing with the things she has easy access to play with - changing levels in Sayori's character stats and, when she can't get Sayori to function properly, deleting her out entirely (like I do with code I just don't like - only it's easier because Monika can just delete her file). She adds in the buttons to give the player an option to choose her, and if she's following the code correctly, they should function, but they don't function like they do with everyone else, which means she's still doing something wrong, and she can't figure out what that is, which just leads to the code breaking further.

And every time the game gets completely deleted and brought back, Monika forgets all of it and starts from scratch.

That said, I also think Monika very much does have a route (the console releases do not support this, but I'm not talking about those, so!), because you're right! A character like Monika has no reason to not have a route!

Except that a lot of dating sims have a character who is only unlockable after the player has successfully romanced all of the other characters. A character who frequently fits the leadership role related to the other characters that Monika fills.

And I think the game, to an extent, supports this because Monika in her very limited attempts at coding and trying to change the game to get the player onto a route with her as the romancable character, in my opinion, never actually adds anything new to the code, just...breaks it and moves things around or deletes huge chunks of it. But when she has the player locked in the school alone with her and the player is supposed to write a poem for her, there's a chibi Monika to get excited over the not-words chosen the same way that Yuri or Natsuki or Sayori does - and Monika should in no way have the coding skill to put her there, and even if she did, I'm not sure she would have the artistic skill to make a chibi her in the same style as the other three and upload it into the game's code.

So she has to be pulling it from somewhere, which means there must be a chibi of her in the game's files already, which means she has to have a route, she just can't find it or get the player onto it.

(I also think it supports this in that to get the "Good End" of the game, you still have to successfully romance all three girls before Sayori gets deleted, which is what convinces Monika that you actually love them and the Literature Club and etc. But that's less...straight-forward? To me?)

Anyway. Monika thoughts. Which can be ignored. And I apologize if my rambling on this one in particular is. at all a nuisance. I just. have a lot of Monika thoughts.

Something I've mentioned before: I'm not really a fan of the whole fourth-wall breaking meta-awareness thing as a serious plot point. Like, I don't hate when characters break the fourth wall. I think you can get some hilarious gags and bits out of it. But the more it interweaves into the story, the more I start to have problems with it.

I thought I'd take a moment to delve a bit more into that.

Like a lot of people, I discovered Doki Doki Literature Club through word-of-mouth. I heard a lot of people gushing about it. "There's this dating sim that suddenly turns into, like, Silent Hill psychological horror!" And naturally, I had to go check that shit out. That sounds wild.

And it was. The game lived up to its hype, and Monika was every bit the charming yet dangerous menace that I'd heard her to be. At least, at the time. I played the game to its end and I felt satisfied.

But.

More and more, as years pass, I find myself thinking back on Monika. Because the more I try to understand her character, the more the gaps in her complexity become apparent.

Monika's character motivation is that she became aware of her function in a Dating Sim. As the head of the titular Literature Club that serves as the basis for the dating sim, she hosts all of the events, but is not available as a romance option herself.

Infatuation with the player and frustration with the game's design for not giving her a romance route of her own ultimate drives Monika to increasingly desperate lengths. She frantically manipulates the game code in an attempt to force the player to interact with her instead of with the other girls - With horrific consequences for the other girls.

On the surface, it's a really cool idea for a complex meta-villain driven to madness by comprehension of her role as a fictional character.

But the more I think about it? Like.

Okay. Walk with me to this pier.

Monika's sole motivation is that she was pissed off about being excluded from the dating sim's romance routes. So. Here's a question.

Why was she excluded from the romance routes? Why, in a dating sim, would the beautiful, confident, and highly intelligent leader of the girl squad not be considered a viable romance option? Who would actually make a character like Monika and not give her a route?

The answer, of course, is that Monika doesn't have a route because the game needs her not to have one, for the sake of her villainous motivation. That's it. That is the only reason she isn't romanceable: So that she can be driven to madness by not being romanceable.

Her reaction to discovering that she's fictional is similarly suspect. The problem is that she doesn't have a route. And once she obtains the ability to reprogram the game, rather than writing a route for herself, she... starts messing with the other characters' files to try and coerce the player into picking her at selection screens where she is not an option? That's pretty bonkers, Monika.

It doesn't really achieve her goal to do that at all. Because, of course, she can't be allowed to achieve her goal. She can't be allowed to make choices that might actually work. We need her to be the villain of the game. So she can't be allowed, within the constraints of her writing, to do things that might actually get her what she wants.

Are you starting to see the problem here?

Monika's fourth-wall awareness doesn't give her more agency in the story; It actually gives her less. Because she is, like every other character, still a slave to the writer's pen. But the illusion of freedom forces her to engage directly with the creative choices driving the words from her mouth, rather than sheltering under the narrative's pretense of free will. It exposes her directly to questionable creative decisions that could normally be ignored.

She is still just as much of a stick figure as Sayori, Yuri, and Natsuki. But because the game pretends that she makes choices, it lays the bare the choices that were nonetheless made for her, never giving her a chance to actually grasp for what she wants - And then ultimately punishing her for the decisions she didn't make.

This is how every character is, when you get down to brass tacks. But the fourth-wall serves as insulation between audience and creator, so that we can buy into the illusion that there are real people onscreen making real choices. But once you break that fourth wall? It becomes that much harder to take the character at face value, and to overlook the puppet strings holding them up.

And this ultimately makes the character shallower, not deeper. Monika, ultimately, did nothing wrong because Monika did nothing. She is a villain solely because she was created to be a villain; With the puppet strings so thoroughly exposed, she is capable of no more complex characterization than that.

[ms-revived-frogs]

Some guy at my school made a pornographic deepfake of one of our teachers and she might be getting fired for this... The hellworld has come ladies, any man can turn us into pornography and have us punished for it

[smallvictorianchildwhofoundwifi]

Au where middle school Ashido would go with her friend to their gymnastics lessons and would see Monoma there doing flips and stuff. Fast-forward to thr beginning of high school and Ashido was surprised to see him in her sister class at UA 'cause he thought Monoma would be a professional gymnast

[hazellvsq]

headcanon that hazel had the most parasocial beef imaginable with shirley temple. 8 year old hazel was writing hate mail to the local paper with her crayons calling the also 8 year old shirley a sellout and an industry plant. in 2010 hazel's watching nick at nite on the fifth cohort rec room tv and sees the 2 minute long shirley temple box set commercial and loses her fucking mind.

[edwinisms]

i like to think, as a hc or a theory (because it’s definitely possible), that charles has had a few kisses throughout his high school years, sure, but past that he’s undeniably a virgin– well, kind of undeniably, because I think he’d deny it if found out by trying to use technicalities (“I mean that one time there was friction involved–“), but to any reasonable person, and by occult standards (see: edwin being a virgin sacrifice), he’s a virgin.

and i think this because it seems like him to fib about his level of experience (like he did when agreeing he’d sleep with crystal, matching her level of casualness about it) when in the presence of people who do, actually, have experience, in the hopes he doesn’t come off as lame or childish. given what we know about his “friends” when he was alive, they seem like the type to have teased or bullied boys– especially in their own circle– who haven’t gotten laid, or at the very least would’ve thought less of someone for it. and given what we know about charles, i don’t think he’d be nearly as sleazy and inconsiderate as his group when it comes to landing girls with the primary intention of adding to his body count. and considering he’s only supposed to be 16? and has never mentioned any significant relationships pre-death? it just seems unlikely.

all that to say– I can see him maintaining that facade of experience and confidence literally right up until the moment it matters, and in the heat of the moment getting nervous and embarrassed because “uhhh. so I may have been exaggerating some things.” though he’s not totally clueless either, I think it’d take a bit of a soft heart to heart moment for him to be reassured enough that he won’t fuck up and hurt his partner to go any further.

anyway not sure what the relevance of this is, but it’s something.

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[apollos-boyfriend]

i probably have some sort of dissociative disorder but i have a job so idrc about that rn

[donaviolet]

Friendship is the most special thing in the world because no award could be give me bigger happiness than jumping around in my room and smiling because my pookie asked me if I wanted to match pfps

[primeministerofantarctica]

do you think kazuki and rei ever told miri they used to be hitmen or is she just going to have a VERY interesting family research project

[ecrireverie]

okay lol mini rant in the tags sorry i just HAD to get this off my chest 😭 sorry if this is very incoherent and poorly worded or structured or whatever i'm just. pretty out of it and i cannot really think to write this properly. well, that or i am probably just illiterate actually. Yeah that's it lol

[itz-pandora]

Huh. If my life was a quote, it'd be "one of those sad ones with a deceptively happy tune"

[all-seeing-ifer]

you know thinking about it i feel like in terms of cangel-and-ace-cordy-posting i have really been neglecting arguably the funniest possiblity, which is that cordy goes into that relationship still completely oblivious to the ace thing. like they decide to get together and cordy's being very magnanimous and all "well we will never be able to have sex because of the curse how tragic well it is a sacrifice i am willing to make because i love you so much" and then cut to like. two weeks into the relationship and her going "hm. for some reason this feels like it's working way better for me than any of my previous relationships. that's weird"

[curiosity-killed]

i love my sister and for the most part, we are very close and genuinely like each other a lot but the one place where i'd just really, really, really like to see inside her brain is the part where she is still incredibly comfortable and cheerful—and even thinks it's really funny—talking about how much she didn't like me as a child while I'm like. yes. I am and was aware. and it sucked so so so much

[thatone-churro]

chat. chat i have a question. i know ive always had guilt when it comes to getting things for myself, but like. would it be stupid to drop like $116 on the special editions of two games ive been wanting for a while (now because one of which is on sale)? i mean, ive been saving my money literally all summer to use for myself like i haven’t bought anything i didn’t need and i KNOW im not gonna blow through all of it in school because i don’t go anywhere & dont do shit and i know it’s my money and i can do what i want with it but. idk. it feels stupid. is it stupid or is my brain stupid??

(extra context in tags ig idk)