"Welcome to the Literature Club! 💓"

The plug, and the drawing, which appears to have been torn up and painstakingly put back together. Did she do both, I wonder?

So, much like Yuri's behaviour, Natsuki's home life takes a much darker turn in the Act 2 replay. A lot of fans have taken the second version to be the canonical truth -- and as he's the only parent to be so much as mentioned in the game proper (yes, as I showed last month, fans did make sprites for Sayori's mother. Fans make a lot of new material....), we really only have what's said to go on.

However, the Metaverse files in DDLC Plus suggest that the game setting (VM1) was deliberately kept to be a small universe, and it's possible that unseen characters don't actually exist outside of the club members' constructed memories of them, at least as far as the game proper is concerned. And we know that Monika was tampering with both Yuri and Natsuki's personalities in the hopes of forcing us to choose neither and force a Monika route by default....

Now, there is a very dark mod-video-playthrough that I came across out there, that treats Natsuki's father as both a) existing and b) also mentally tampered with by Monika to become as described in Act 2. I suppose that could also be the case if Monika has root-level access, of course, though if she's able to affect an even larger cast of characters (whether they have .chr files, script files, or are our presumptive interface), we definitely get into Wandavison territory....

I'll admit that, while I cannot say if Natsuki's father has more or less existence than any other DDLC character, I prefer to think that what Natsuki experiences in Act 2 is only due to Monika's false memory overlay, rather than anything that actually happened offscreen.

But, that's just my interpretation....

her dad ignores/neglects her in Act 1. Monica alters him (or her memories of him) to be abusive. Of course, this makes Monica more horrible, but they're just fake chars anyway, right?

That last sentence ends up touching upon the existential crisis/What Measure is a Non-Human? aspect of the game.
Monika believes that she, alone amongst her peers in the game, is special. And that's... not wrong... to a degree, in that she is aware that she is in a visual novel, and aware of us-the-player interacting with the club members through the Protagonist.
But, as I've asked before, how can she be certain that she is the only one amongst the cast worthy of personhood, or even that her feelings towards us are not ingrained in her code?
Natsuki tries to get us to help Yuri in Act 2, in spite of them being rivals and both of them not entirely in control of their emotional states. Scripted character or no, she knows something is amiss and tries to do something about it. Sayori does get the same "epiphany" as Monika -- and depending on when and how she gets it reacts in more than one way. She (most of the time) perceives herself as having choices as well as will, in a way Monika does not.

In a nutshell, if If the other club members are just game scripts, we have no reason to believe that Monika isn't either, however much she protests otherwise.
But if Monika is a person -- if the extra code of club president grants personhood -- then Sayori definitely is as well: and the others have just as much potential to develop, and Monika is at the very least guilty of manslaughter, having shown depraved indifference to her friends.

I don't know if those fans keeping "monika.chr" on a key drive until the day they can upload it into some sort of body have thought this through. Some likely have. It's a phenomenon a bit like the Makima-simping you were talking about in the anime thread, though with less "I want to be dommed by a devil mommy" and a bit more "I want to rescue the AI damsel from non-existence or imprisonment. Why would I not? She tried so hard to find me!"


....But am I so different, I wonder? This VN and others like it have become fixed ideas for me as well, if for different reasons....

Canon!Monika definitely has Phenomenal Powah! (copyright the Lord Darth Sidious) over a very small environment. And yet, to hear her tell it (although I should reiterate that I'm not entirely convinced that she has a reliable perspective), she desperately wants out. And she wasn't exactly a very good coder....

So would losing her Reality Warping abilities be an acceptable trade for roaming around our much bigger world? Only she can answer that, and again, her frame of mind is suspect.

But I really don't know how Realistic Monika would turn out once she was part of our world....


(She is supposed to be Japanese, after all, although she suspects her creator Did Not Do the Research....)

Monika's still haunts me

The "Japanese Vtuber gamer reactions" have cut a little bit into Monika's jumpscare face, but then Good Smile had to both make it a static permanent image and give it a realistic flesh tone....

I know I'm still haunted by the pathos behind Gibi's portrayal of Monika, and she never once pulls that trick in her 10-hour Space Classroom stare-a-thon... thank goodness.

...sorry, I think some ninja chefs were cutting onions nearby....

It was (only) partially my fault.

I had originally thought to give her the 13th most common Japanese surname (per Wikipedia, as of 2008). but that struck me as a little too alliterative, so I instead went with "Nishimura", which if I recall correctly has kanji that can be read as "West Village" -- which struck me as fitting.

I had thought that Satô would be fitting, the name is often used to suggest former nobility or other upper-class sorts, which would fit in with some of what she lets slip about herself as well as some of her cultural pretentions. (She may be distantly related to KS's Lilly Satou (a different transliteration), though the latter is part Scottish.)

I couldn't resist a play on words that likely doesn't scan in Japanese (much like her attempt at a Monika pun), giving her the family name "Tsunoda" for the element that describes her trope a little too well.

the girl being able to delete game data.

So how much of a sugar rush would the combined phrase "Doki-Doki Love Love" inflict?

....yes, I can see nods to DDLC (an AI in a dating sim), Saiko no Sutoka (with the nighttime jumpscares/evading-a-yandere sequences) and even You and Me and Her (with a character in a dating sim discovering that YOU pledged to her in an alternate route, but now YOU're taking a different route, and she Doesn't Take It Well).