#they perfectly put how i feel and why

[dummerjan]

Masha Gessen in an interview with Yuri Dud

[casualavocados]

Learn from who? Learn from you?

Chen Bowen as CHEN YI & Chiang Tien as AI DI KISEKI: DEAR TO ME (2023)

[angelnumber27]

It’s so embarrassing and heartbreaking being in so much pain over losing someone while knowing they don’t give a fuck if you live or die. Your favorite person becoming a stranger is a special kind of hell.

[shiraishi--kanade]

A controversial opinion perhaps, but I actually don't enjoy ethical AI art either.

Sure, if an artist wants to draw like 200 pictures and then train an AI to reproduce their style, they can do whatever they want. If they want to sell that and are upfront about it being ethically made AI art, whatever.

But the entire notion of automating art, something that makes humans uniquely us, something we've been at for millennia, for the sake of capitalism or production or time-cost saving or whatever, makes me sick.

[sailforvalinor]

…well, turns out changing to a Jo pfp is fitting in more ways than one.

[bookishjules]

"good morning! and happy birthday to annabeth, and by extension, any part of her that lives in you" (transcribed from voice message from my best friend)

[perenlop]

books that changed my brain chemistry at age 9. tbh.

[daz4i]

daily "i wanna get back into cosplay but i'm gonna look so bad and no one will recognize who i'm supposed to be and it's gonna fit all awkward so what's the point" time

[skrunksthatwunk]

gritting my teeth so hard sparks fly out why is it so hard to ask people to sit down and watch something you like with you

[rosesradio]

wondering if the mutuals would actually try to fight me if i spoke my truth about the barbie movie…

[turtlemurmurs]

Devil’s Trill Sonata

[heartbeatbookclub]

It's 2 am as I start this, and I feel the need to put pen to paper on this thought, so to speak, because it's something I think about with relative frequency.

This is going to be more of a personal musing on my experience with Doki Doki Literature Club, and why it had such an impact on me when I first played it, as opposed to any more concrete analysis, so I guess you can keep reading if you want to know more about me as a person and my overall personal relationship to it.

Something I think about often in reference to DDLC is its status simultaneously as a satire on visual novels and all of the tropes therein, as well as a love letter to that genre, explicitly. It's very readily apparent if you've played a good few "weeb" visual novels that it very much fits that bill. I think my first experience with it makes it especially funny in that respect.

To give context, I first experienced Doki Doki Literature Club like a month or two after it came out, in a Skype call (shows how old I am) with 2 or 3 of my friends. During this period of my life, me and this small group of friends spent lots and lots of time just hanging out in Skype calls like this, doing whatever we pleased, spending time well into the next morning just enjoying each other's presence and seeing what fun shenanigans we could get into on the internet.

One frequent passtime of ours was playing visual novels. Not just any visual novels, no; we went looking for the most low effort, mediocre, low hanging fruit of visual novels we could download for free. The goal wasn't to enjoy a good story, the goal was to find something amusingly bad, whether in cliched, awkward, lazy writing, or in sheer absurdity. I still do this sometimes, though it's admittedly with a different thought in mind now.

I don't think this perception we had of visual novels, being that they're typically sloppy, cringe-inducing messes is necessarily uncommon even now, but it was especially common back then. It was "weeb shit", simple as, but even deeper than your typical weeb shit. The perception was something like watching High School DxD unironically; it's just weird.

And I don't really think the perception of visual novels being that way is necessarily inaccurate; there is a very low bar to entry to actually creating a visual novel just by the nature of the medium, so really, anyone with enough passion for a project and time on their hands can make one. As a consequence, there are a few egregiously bad visual novels, there are a few really excellent visual novels, but there are a great many just sort of okay, somewhat mediocre visual novels, and lots of visual novels created with not so honorable goals in mind.

And one thing we really enjoyed was just exploring what existed in the depths of unpopular visual novels slipping through the cracks of what people saw. For most of it, we were making fun of it, but there were a lot of points where we found stories which were mediocre, but ended up really enjoying our experience with it. I think an important thing to understand with that lower barrier to entry is that it enables people who really are passionate about telling a story to tell a story that has a lot of heart, and you can see all of that heart as a diamond within the rough of the actual construction. Even in VNs with more polish, typically there are still cracks right around the edges, where you can see just a little bit of the humanity that goes into it. It's sort of magical.

And Doki Doki Literature Club was an odd edge case, which successfully played with all of my perceptions of it. DDLC is probably the only game whose story is reliant on a plot twist where I actually went in completely blind. By all appearances, it was a silly little visual novel made with no sense of irony, and I spent a great deal of time laughing at its contents, completely unaware that they were in on the joke.

And my perception of it being this way I feel like colored a lot of what happened next when I looked into it. I forget exactly when our playthrough ended--we didn't make it to any of the deeper stuff, I watched a Let's Play for that--and I forget how the whole series of events following that went, but somehow or another, I learned of some of the true nature. Namely I saw what happened to Sayori.

It reminded me of Corpse Party, when I actually thought about it.

I'm not going to go deep in depth on all of my thoughts about Corpse Party nor any of its history, but to be frank, Corpse Party reeeally sits in that realm of "mediocre, but lots of heart" to me. I don't really think Corpse Party is very good, particularly elaborating on a lot of the lore, but I really enjoyed it when I first experienced it, and it's still something I occasionally like looking back over. It's deliciously dark, and is extremely effective at creating an oppressive atmosphere out of what's ostensibly a collection of happy warm anime character tropes with little serious personality outside them.

So when I say that Sayori's death reminded me of Corpse Party, I mean that the way it paired playing the happy warm visual novel setting straight with extremely grim subject matter was done well.

Really, there were only a few other examples of this kind of media I could think of that really effectively utilized the exact kind of gut punch that DDLC did. Everything about the way the game framed itself around it, up until the final plot twist, really did feel like they were just elements of a visual novel playing themselves out. Sayo-nara really sets that tone for me--it still gives me chills sometimes when I hear it, because it sounds perfectly like what a "Bad Ending" theme for that kind of ending would likely sound like. It plays itself remarkably well into creating the setting, it really effectively feels like it is a normal visual novel falling apart at the seams.

I think that, more than anything, is why DDLC made such an impact on me when I first experienced it (which is remarkably different than the kind of mark it leaves on me now), it played so effectively with a genre I was so familiar with, and simultaneously played "mediocre visual novel with lots of heart" straight while also completely knocking "deep and terrifying existential horror" out of the park.

It's hard to truly describe, but there's just so much that feels so right about DDLC just being as it is. There's such a unique quality to the way it's written, to the way it's constructed, that goes down to its bones. It feels like that exact brand of junk food media you go to visual novels for. You don't necessarily want to think too deeply about the characters, or the setting of the story, or any of the deeper themes surrounding it; you just want to experience a nice story with some anime girls.

And then it yanks the rug out from under you, and makes you think it's junk food media with a side of deep and disturbing horror.

And then it yanks the second rug out from under that one, making you realize it's something much, much deeper.

I think something else it really appealed to, to me, was just that sense of being on the edge of the world which most indie games of that sort always give me. There are a shitload of examples I could give for this, but this sense I'm describing is the opposite of the sense which games like Undertale give me. Undertale's world feels lived in, it feels like it exists in a much, much wider concept of a great, sprawling world where billions of people live.

DDLC feels like you and the 4 girls in it are the only people in the universe. There are all of these environments you inhabit which ostensibly have other people who pass through them, live in them, there are implications of people, but inside this world, there's only you.

I think it just appeals to my desire to be transported to a complete other world for a little while. A limited space, where only things important to this experience exist, for this pure feeling of emotional catharsis. And that's something a lot of these sorts of simple visual novels appeal to; the goal isn't necessarily to tell some deeper story, it's just to present beats as they happen. DDLC takes that, and plays with it, both in a textual sense, as though these fictional characters exist and are somehow aware they're fictional, and in a meta sense, by directly playing around with your expectations and the way the entire thing is framed.

Or something like that.

Fun fact 1: Doki Doki Literature Club (specifically Sayo-Nara, still one of the few songs I can play entirely by memory) is what got me to start learning piano. I taught myself to play, and started mostly with the DDLC soundtrack (Which is very simple to play by ear, by the way, it's pretty much entirely C major.)

Fun fact 2: What initially inspired this thought was this video, which really reminded me of other visual novels we/I played that would utilize this particular style of music.

[lesbianpegbar]

next therapy sessions gonna go crazy i can already tell

[troubadour-malin]

vent in the tags!

[lord-squiggletits]

Like I'm not one of those story "critics" who will nitpick the smallest inconsistency and call it a plot hole that ruins the whole story. I'm okay with inconsistencies and even the occasional plot hole if it ends up producing a story that's interesting, gripping, and brings up interesting things.

The problem is that suspension of disbelief only stretches so far. And secondly, stuff like character drama and themes are only as strong as the plot that supports them. If the plot is full of contrivances, plot holes, and really stupid things that make it feel like the author is just forcing something to happen to move the story along, then the themes and character drama become much less convincing.

[todayisafridaynight]

HAVE BEEN ROTATING Y7 ARAKAWA IN RGGO ARAKAWA'S DRIP IN MY MIND FOR AEONS YOU SEE THE VISION....................

Listen. I think. I think it would work. I think we could've still won. The physics probably would've been a pain, but if I think about it as an echo of the red iin his costuming in the play at the start, and link it back to how the plot of the play comes to represent part of his life, it would [unintelligible]

But no for real, the sliver you can see of the snakeskin on Jo and the fact it's the lightest thing you can see on his whole outfit feels purposeful. It's still incredibly funny to me that whole thing was treated as a twist at all. But.

And the progression on account of the timeskip is sick too from a symbolic perspective. It's things like the 2019 tie having the exact same pattern as in 2000, but it's also now the only real color in his entire ensemble, the purple from his shirt relegated to the tie and the pink completely gone. Hanging on to the past (although I guess this is more RGGJo's thing), forcing his "self" into a smaller and smaller space, that kind of thing. If we go with Sololiquy for a moment, maybe there's also something there about things being livelier when Ichi was around, for better or worse.

All the leather is ostensibly much more luxurious, befitting of his rise in status, but it's also burying him further in these additional layers of security. The gloves DO pull it together, and they also leave him basically completely covered-up from head to toe, which I can't help find fascinating.

So, you know, he looks sick with the gloves on, but there's also a different Flavor when recognizing he had them on the first battle when he was hiding so much from Ichi, but in the second battle, where he hopes to come clean, he's bare-handed ("Ichi-vision" notwithstanding).

And I think it's also worth recognizing that the gloves would've offered some protection when he went to grab the blade, but he grabs it anyway in his bare hand. With the amount of force you apply when you swing a blade and it actually connects, that'd hurt him just as bad, but it shows he's past the point of caring about what happens to him even before he says so. (I still think we should've probably seen his hand cut and bleeding when out of Ichi-vision, but y'know.)

Much to think about...

NO I SEE YOUR VISION I SEE WHERE YOU'RE GOING they could've done that.... true the physics would've been a pain but I think we can trade some of the effort that went into The Bread and put it towards the scarf and coat.....

The evolution of Jo's outfit in conjunction with the surrounding environment and circumstances really is mad interesting, and as someone who really enjoys 'storytelling' (idk if that's the exact word rn but i aint ever been good with words in the first place) through character design/wardrobe. Any note I coulda said you've already said for me, yet I still wish I had some more words to express how much I love the changes in his outfit and how it reflects himself and the story at that particular point 😷