Balance App

[myliteratureclub]

	Monika: Can you hear me? Tell me you can hear me. Anything.
	APP HMD Merchant Emma

Player Name: Emma
Age: 27
Contact: sekoshi
Timezone: EST
Other character currently in game: n/a

Character name: Monika
Age: 18
Canon: Doki Doki Literature
Canon point: Post-normal ending
History: Wiki link

Three key adjectives: Charismatic, Passionate, Manipulative
Influential Events:

CW: Spoilers, Suicide / Suicide Ideation, Murder, Unreality, Mental Health Issues
Full CW/Opt out can be found here!

”Welcome to the Literature Club!”
In the world of DDLC, being the president of the Literature Club gives you insight into the game as well access to the game files. Monika realizes she’s a character in a game but still tries to play along anyway. At least at first. She wants things to play out like they’re supposed to in the script. Even though she knows she isn’t truly a part of the game’s world, it’s almost easier to play along than accept what she knows about herself and the outside world.

Monika is described as the perfect girl. She’s smart, beautiful, popular, athletic… almost as if she’s designed to be the perfect girlfriend for any lucky person! But that’s the thing… she is. Monika is designed to be one of the four girls who are datable in Doki Doki Literature Club. Yet for some reason, she doesn’t actually have a route in the game, and it doesn’t take her long to realize that. To her, that doesn’t seem fair. Why does everyone else get the chance to find love? And is she only there to watch from the sidelines? No one has the answers for her because there’s no one she can talk to about it. She’s not even sure if the player would understand where she’s coming from. Still, she does use her sweet side to try and get the MC to spend time with her with little luck since the game continues to push him (and the player) away from her in favor of the other girls. The other girls even berate her for “abusing power” to try and take up his time, so she drops it early on.

When she’s asked why she started the club, Monika admits she doesn’t like the politics of the other clubs. Really, she could have joined almost any other club easily and was even the president of the debate club. But Monika wanted to make something she was passionate about, even though she worries literature might be seen as boring. She admits that starting something brand new is difficult, but she tries to put her all into anything new she starts. Monika wants the club to grow even though she’s going to be graduating within a year, and she wants others to be able to share their passion with literature like her and her friends.

While she maintains her persona as the perfect president, internally she is in despair. She’s in a world that she doesn’t belong in with no hope of a happy ending. She’s so alone in this game. No one has free will like she does. She tries to move past this and play along with the game as is because she cares about her club and she does want to make the player happy. However as the game’s events progress, it’s clear her own chances of finding happiness are being taken away.

“But she killed herself just in time.”
While all the other girls have chances to find love, Monika is stuck on the sidelines watching. Knowing the game will end (and also any chance for her to be happy) when one of them confesses, Monika knows she needs to act. Unknown to the player or the other characters, she begins changing the game. She sees Sayori as her biggest threat on the road to love, knowing Sayori’s childhood crush on the MC. If Sayori confesses, there may not be a chance for Monika to find her happy ending, and she cannot let that happen. She’s so desperate to be loved and to find happiness that she’s willing to get rid of whoever gets in her way. Despite knowing it’s wrong (and later confesses to feeling some guilt over it), Monika begins to mess with Sayori. It’s not that she hates her friend, but Sayori isn’t even a real person. So why should it matter? In her own eyes, Monika deserves a happy ending even if the game won’t give it to her. All of the girls have their own issues before she even begins to change the game, but she uses this to her advantage by pushing those faults to an extreme.

She hopes increasing Sayori’s depression will prevent her from confessing, though that doesn’t work out like she expects. Sayori still confesses, to her distaste, and this makes Monika feel even more pressured into pushing her. This leads to Sayori killing herself, to which Monika says she was getting in the way anyway. It’d be easier if her competition is just gone, so she removes Sayori from the game and restarts.

“What if starting this club was a mistake?”
The game resets and continues as if Sayori was never in the game. The game plays mostly the same, except Monika’s meddling is making it fall apart more and more. She’s starting to get desperate, now messing with Natsuki’s and Yuri’s files too. The game is still pushing the two girls to confess to the MC, once again trying to steal her possibility at a happy ending. Like Sayori, she also starts to amplify their faults as well.

Still, Monika tries to play it off like everything is normal despite the other two girls getting worse. Monika’s usual sweet persona does start to slip, though, as she becomes more annoyed with them and the game. She starts making snide comments about them out of frustration that the game is still trying to get them to confess to the MC. She even reveals some of their darker secrets with little regard in hopes it’ll turn the player off from the two girls. Still, she desires to try to help the club grow because that’s what the game wants. But when the other two girls and the MC resist trying to help the club grow, Monika begins to question herself. She wonders if the club is meaningless... if what she’s doing is meaningless. She begins to doubt all the choices she’s made up to this point, whether it’s because it’s what the game wants or what she wants. What is her true meaning? She doesn’t know any more.

Throughout Act 1, she mentions that she doesn’t really see herself as a good leader, and with Sayori deleted, Monika realizes it’s true. She’s almost completely useless as a leader with her friend gone and this is because she acts selfishly. She’s bad at asserting herself and intervening in conflict. Sayori’s peacemaker attitude is what held the club together. Monika starts to question even more now why she’s even a part of this world.

She desperately tries to speak to the player, to get any confirmation she’s being heard. Monika’s so alone that she needs any sort of verification she’s real, but the game even denies her that solace.

Just Monika.
Unfortunately for Natsuki and Yuri, Monika ends up deleting them as well after Yuri kills herself in front of the player. She’s barely even phased by her friend’s death much like Sayori’s. After all, these aren’t real people. At this point, she understands the game is too broken to continue like this… so she decides to make it more ideal for herself.

All that remains in the game is Monika and the classroom. There, she decides to drop the facade of her being a character in the game and addresses the player directly. She sees the player as her only salvation from the hell she lives in. It’s closest she’s ever felt to having something truly meaningful in her life. So that’s why she forces the player to “date” her, even if the game isn’t really a game anymore. It’s just Monika now…

With DDLC now being a Monika talking simulator, she reveals a lot about herself. Thoughts and feelings she’s developed past what the game had planned for her. For example, she’s a vegetarian to try to help the planet, her favorite color is emerald green, she believes in God and resents Him for letting people be miserable, and she only has hazy memories of what was supposed to be her life before becoming the president.

Despite this, she doesn’t really seem happier. In fact, she practically confesses to it making her depressed because she can never truly be a part of the outside world. The closest she’ll ever get is being with the player, which is why she’s so desperate to have them listen to her even if this isn’t a real ending to the game. She does worry about the player abandoning her. Because in the end they will always have more control over her fate than she does herself. Her fears are realized when the player ends up deleting her file to continue the game.

“That’s not love…”
When the player deletes Monika, she is completely in despair. The player, her one salvation, doesn’t want her around anymore. She thinks they hate her for what she’s done to the game and characters. They’re all she knows at this point. But she does understand the horrible things she did and does express remorse for her actions. Being deleted helps her understand the pain she put her friends through at last. Maybe she has more free will and understanding than they did, but their emotions did actually matter to her. And how the player hurt her is exactly how she hurt them. It’s not that she wanted to hurt her friends out of malice, but she wanted to feel a part of something too. She wanted to feel real no matter what it took.

Unfortunately, Monika also realizes she will never be a part of this world or our world. She simply doesn’t belong anywhere. So she makes a decision: the only way the game can properly continue is without her. Her being in the game will only get in the way of her friends’ happiness because she won’t be able to control her own emotions around them no matter the facade she puts on. She will always want to be a part of something and may only end up hurting someone again. But now that Monika understands that pain, she doesn’t want that, and she also wants her friends to have a second chance. So she removes herself and restarts the game yet again.

”Goodbye Literature Club.”
The game returns to normal once again but this time without Monika. Now Sayori is the president, and everything does seem a lot happier in the game. The MC is much kinder and joins the club on his own; the other two girls are getting along and even acting like friends. If the player tries to bring Monika back, she says she doesn’t want to return and redeletes her file. She still worries about the pain she felt and also doesn’t want to interrupt them. Sayori is over the moon… but that’s when she thanks the player for deleting Monika.

Now that she’s the president, Sayori has the power and epiphany that Monika had before. She starts to lose her mind almost instantly and starts destroying the game. Before that can fully happen, though, Monika intervenes and this time decides to delete the game for real.

Monika feels a lot of guilt over what she did, but she also only did it because of the pain the game put her through. She hoped her friends could have continued to exist in happiness without her. However, it’s clear to her the game will only ever hurt them, and she doesn’t want them to go through the suffering she did. Deleting everything is the only true solution to stop the madness, even though that also hurts her.

In the end, there is no happiness in the Literature Club. She says goodbye to the club and the player, promising to leave them be. This time for good.


Link to Samples: Sample 1, Sample 2, + TDM Top Level

Chosen path: Merchant
7 Abilities: Trade Gossip, Hired Help, Identify, Mending, Insider Trading, Shrink Item, & Trade Winds
Why this path?: When you strip away Monika's control over the game, her real powers are with her words. She was even the president of the Debate Club before the Literature Club. She easily brings people into her for her goals, whether it’s through her natural charisma or her manipulative tendencies. She won’t be as interested in money making, but rather, knowledge is what she finds value in. This is why the merchant class seems to be a great fit for her, and why I picked skills such as Trade Gossip & Hired Help. Instead of having to focus on combat, Monika can focus on her stronger skills with the power of gossip and trade to get what she wants at the end of the day.

blurb code by photosynthesis