Current Events > How do people justify her? *Doki Doki Literature Club spoilers*

(+) Yeah! (+)

I always just assumed the other characters weren't actually sentient and real.

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SerperiorThanU posted...

I don't think everything the other girls did while insane was Monika herself ordering them. I doubt Monika would personally have made Yuri constantly butt into Monika and the player's conversations. There was a special font that showed up when Monika was fully controlling them. So stuff like Yuri killing herself wasn't intended by Monika although it was the result of her actions.
Anyway, of course it isn't fine, but the fact that she was able to reverse the wrong she did is better than the majority of villains who realize the error of their ways in fiction and in real life. The fact that she still kept some parts of them even after deleting them shows she didn't have the heart to fully delete them whereas a more pragmatic and evil villain would've removed them entirely.

Oh. No, Monika doesn't make Yuri do anything, besides changing her lines once in awhile(I'm pretty sure anything in the black boxes and black on white text is Monika, yeah, I agree there). But she does know what will happen to Yuri, though I don't think she was expecting the player to accept Yuri's confession. Because, of course, in her mind she likely thinks the player will be disgusted by Yuri's actions and thus Yuri will kill herself. She also wasn't planning on Yuri killing herself so she didn't hurt the MC, but it didn't affect her plan regardless.

And I also highly doubt Monika isn't constantly watching everything that's happening, and was entirely ready to swoop in and save the player should Yuri try something. She wasn't surprised in the slightest at Yuri being dead when she walked in, after all. Though I do find it odd she leaves the player to stare at Yuri for so long.

This is all speculation, obviously, but speculation driven by the concepts within the game. Either way, Monika is evil. As I said, I still enjoy her character a lot. But she's an evil bitch.

ButteryMales posted...

It is in the game.

Doki Doki Literature Club is the most hilarious thing to Occam's Razor. What's the Occam's razor for why the protagonist starts greaving for Sayori? Dan Salvato says he's not a character.

It is in the game, but so is the MC reacting to Sayori's death.

Regardless, he is a character considering her...you know, reacts to her death?
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dave_is_slick posted...

It's directly stated.

Can you provide the quote? Or at least the scene where it is? I'm having trouble finding it.

dancing_cactuar posted...

Combination of realizing that those characters to her are as real as the civilians in a GTA game, that she herself is a fictional character bound to an extremely limited realm even including her level of control over the game, and going through Bill Murray's Groundhog Day arc where he acts like a total asshole and engages in crimes when realizing that he's in a time loop.

No, she legitimately thinks of them as friends, and values them quite a bit. Otherwise she wouldn't have saved their data near the end. They hold more meaning than that to her.

She's just straight evil in what she does to them.
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Slayer_22 posted...

It is in the game, but so is the MC reacting to Sayori's death.

Regardless, he is a character considering her...you know, reacts to her death?

That goes against word of god. There's lots of debate on what is canon when word of god conflicts. Retcons happen all the time and there's no simplest answer.

ButteryMales posted...

That goes against word of god. There's lots of debate on what is canon when word of god conflicts. Retcons happen all the time and there's no simplest answer.

"Basically, as act 2 progresses, the protagonist has less and less dialogue to demonstrate that hes not a real character but merely a vehicle for Monika to reach the player. He wasnt designed to interact with anything in the game world thats beyond the expected surface level."

So Monika basically is fucking with the code in act 2. Meaning, act 1, he is still a character.

None of this has much to do with the topic at hand anyway, namely that Monika is evil as fuck and there is no justification for it.
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Slayer_22 posted...

"Basically, as act 2 progresses, the protagonist has less and less dialogue to demonstrate that hes not a real character but merely a vehicle for Monika to reach the player. He wasnt designed to interact with anything in the game world thats beyond the expected surface level."

So Monika basically is fucking with the code in act 2. Meaning, act 1, he is still a character.

None of this has much to do with the topic at hand anyway, namely that Monika is evil as fuck and there is no justification for it.

You are the one who brought up Occam's Razor inappropriately.

Having run the control simulation for a while, it's evident that a certain "character" is missing from any mention or appearance. This makes me speculate that Monika's meddling is less clumsy than we think, because she would have had to manufacture this "character" herself as a way of forcing interaction between her and the user. Could that be why the "character" has such limited and dissonant personality traits? Or am I reading too much into this?

I'll open an issue to start tracking info and observations on the anomaly of this "character" appearing.

So Monika made a character that could only fall in love with the other girls?

Most people aren't trying to justify it though, they just understand why she was driven to it. I feel like you keep forgetting she's literally mentally unstable as opposed to calmly planning everything that goes wrong.

Even when she's messing with the code, things don't quite go the way things are planned. Granted that's also due to her not being very good at programming. Otherwise she could just... say make it so none of the girls were interested in you.

But then the game is still programmed as a dating sim with the three girls as options and her left out so.....


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ButteryMales posted...

You are the one who brought up Occam's Razor inappropriately.

So Monika made a character that could only fall in love with the other girls?

Occam's Razor inappropriately? You do know what it means, right? Sayori is legitimately telling us the obvious, and you're going out of the way to say it's false.

As for that little bit of text, idk what you are trying to say with it.

SerperiorThanU posted...

Basically the only thing she actually did to the other girls was program them to be more unstable. She says in one of the secret files that "all she did was untie the knot". That itself is evil yes, but she didn't actively make them do what they did. I believe she outright tells you that it went too far and she only wanted them to seem unappealing and drive them away from you. She says something about how she was annoyed that her making them more unstable actually made them more obsessed with you and gave her less time to spend with you meaning she didn't intend most of it.

Although, yes, Monika was likely watching everything (or at least had the ability to watch everything) but she was much less hands-on than you thought. I'm guessing the Yuri thing happened because she's not always looking at you. Imagine if you had to keep opening up the source code every time you had to edit or see something you weren't supposed to see. She says something like she didn't expect the game to break that bad so I guess she just thought the game would go in a normal way and she probably didn't expect Yuri to kill herself but when she saw it she's like "oh whoops, makes sense that would've happened".
Also, something to note she says something along the lines of her being a newbie programmer so many of the horrors you see is mainly her just sucking at programming.
Anyway, I've agreed with you from the start that she's evil, insane, and a villain. But there are different degrees of evil and she's definitely on the lighter end. She falls in Affably Evil on Tvtropes.

Here's a list of her dialogue in act 3
https://pastebin.com/8RF2zPbH
https://ddlcwiki.net/wiki/Monika%27s_topics

You can see she states numerous times they're autonomous and "not real".
"It's not right for me to miss things that weren't even real in the first place".

Although I believe there's a subconscious part of her that knew she was wrong and that's why she kept them.

Monika also laughs at the fact that Yuri killed herself. Like...laughs at the fact that she's dead.

But if you make an extremely depressed person extremely depressed, I highly doubt you can't see the end result. Especially since they want to commit suicide already.

I like to think that her meddling, at first, was just to make them more unlikable. But as it continued to not work, she made it even worse. It makes sense, given Yuri gets progressively worse and worse as the game goes on, and loses more control of herself.

I think Monika was expecting Yuri's suicide in any case. All that being said, Monika is just evil. To what degree, I can't really say, I just can't stand it when people try and justify her actions or shift the blame to others, which is the whole point of the topic lol. Glad we can agree there, anyway.
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Umbreon posted...

Most people aren't trying to justify it though, they just understand why she was driven to it. I feel like you keep forgetting she's literally mentally unstable as opposed to calmly planning everything that goes wrong.

Even when she's messing with the code, things don't quite go the way things are planned. Granted that's also due to her not being very good at programming. Otherwise she could just... say make it so none of the girls were interested in you.

But then the game is still programmed as a dating sim with the three girls as options and her left out so.....

Just Google 'is Monika evil'. 90% of the posts are saying no, then going off on tangents because 'well, it's because she's in love' or 'well, she redeems herself'.

Plenty of people do think she's not evil. And the reason is usually trash.
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Slayer_22 posted...

Just Google 'is Monika evil'. 90% of the posts are saying no, then going off on tangents because 'well, it's because she's in love' or 'well, she redeems herself'.

Plenty of people do think she's not evil. And the reason is usually trash.

Well some people do simp hard.

But as for her being evil. That depends on how you define it. When you look at Plus, she isn't evil at all. When you look at the base game, she does some evil stuff.

The difference is her mental state and awareness. The difference is she didn't have awareness she never wanted thrusted upon her.

But I guess in the end is that Monika managed to get a lot of sympathy due to her situation. Some people hate her regardless, but it's hard for others to do so once they figure out the truth. So even if she can be called evil, people still feel for her.

Like, in the good ending, even Sayori seems to forgive her.

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Moinka's giggle is basically her nervous tic.


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SerperiorThanU posted...

That's not exactly an evil thing. Even in real life there are decent people who laugh at morbid things or as a defense mechanism. In Monika's case in-game it definitely doesn't feel like she legitimately found it amusing. Seems more like she was trying to put you at ease.
Agree about the depression thing. That's probably her most evil act and something she does even when Monika herself is depressed.
I don't think she intentionally made them worse. After all, Yuri became more and more obsessed and clingy which prevented Monika from interacting with the player rather than just simply acting crazy. Monika says in act 3 that what she did backfired so she didn't directly expect or plan the events to unfurl the way they did.
Anyway, yeah, you are correct that she was evil and directly responsible for everything. The blame lies on her. But it is also true that it's very understandable why she became that way and that the game portrays her as a sympathetic and tragic villain. If you've played Undertale it's similar to Asriel.

I dunno, I can't see anyone pausing and laughing at a corpse to he anything but sinister as fuck.

And honestly? Never played Undertale. I did watch a video on it, I think Dunkey's? But never played the game itself. I probably should at some point honestly lol.

Umbreon posted...

Well some people do simp hard.

But as for her being evil. That depends on how you define it. When you look at Plus, she isn't evil at all. When you look at the base game, she does some evil stuff.

The difference is her mental state and awareness. The difference is she didn't have awareness she never wanted thrusted upon her.

But I guess in the end is that Monika managed to get a lot of sympathy due to her situation. Some people hate her regardless, but it's hard for others to do so once they figure out the truth. So even if she can be called evil, people still feel for her.

Like, in the good ending, even Sayori seems to forgive her.

Like I said, I don't mind that people like her or understand her motivations. But she's still evil, which is my biggest issue, people can't accept she did wrong. Because, likely, simps as you said lol.

And in the good ending, I don't think Sayori forgives her. At least, she doesn't say as much or imply it but...eh, maybe she does. I still think Monika is 100% evil tbh.

Umbreon posted...

Moinka's giggle is basically her nervous tic.

I can't agree with that assumption though, ngl.
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Shes the only sentient/sapient being in the world she exists in. Its no different than pulling the head off a barbie doll

Kloe_Rinz posted...

Shes the only sentient/sapient being in the world she exists in. Its no different than pulling the head off a barbie doll

I, myself, would feel remorse if the barbie doll tried hanging itself because I pressed a button to make it feel depressed, and it's hands became soaked with blood because it attempted to free itself from the rope.

I would also feel remorse at the doll killing itself in an attempt to save the person it loves from it doing something to hurt them, despite me being the one to cause it.

That's just me though.
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I can write a hello world script, except instead of saying hello world it says I am sad

that doesnt make that program actually experience any feelings

if you program a RC car to drive off a cliff, you didnt just make some sort of creature kill itself.

Kloe_Rinz posted...

I can write a hello world script, except instead of saying hello world it says I am sad

that doesnt make that program actually experience any feelings

if you program a RC car to drive off a cliff, you didnt just make some sort of creature kill itself.

The Dokis pretty obviously have the capacity for self awareness, they understand things around them, and some have achieved sentience and understanding. They react to things in the world they are present in, with realistic reactions.

You are really shooting from the hip with these disingenuous strawman argument.
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hows that different than an AI in a video game? At their core they are just a mathematical algorithm. They dont feel or experience or think. They are no different than a Boston dynamics robot, or perhaps even a light switch. Only monika had any level of sentience or sapience. Trying to write this off as a strawman isnt going to work because Im just telling you how it is

Kloe_Rinz posted...

hows that different than an AI in a video game? At their core they are just a mathematical algorithm. They dont feel or experience or think. They are no different than a Boston dynamics robot, or perhaps even a light switch. Only monika had any level of sentience or sapience

"They don't feel, experience, or think".

You seriously think they were programmed to react to stuff like seeing a corpse or slowly losing their mind? Sure, at some point they were scripted, but they very clearly are at the point of being able to pass a turing test...within the lore, anyway.
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SerperiorThanU posted...

Look at the real life section of this. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LaughingMad

And yeah, you should play it, although Undertale is EXTREMELY similar to DDLC so you might compare it more than you normally would if you play it back to back.

Idk, that just doesn't seem similar to seeing the rotting corpse of someone.

I will consider it, definitely. I already have a few purchases in mind this month though lol. I will prolly end up replaying DDLC again, then pick up Undertale if the mood strikes me.
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Monika is evil because she turns a game with shockingly effective depictions of mental health into wooooo spooky glitch effects and blood wooooo

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Slayer_22 posted...

Occam's Razor inappropriately? You do know what it means, right?

ButteryMales posted...

simplest answer.

I don't know, you tell me. /sarcasm
Slayer_22 posted...

Sayori is legitimately telling us the obvious, and you're going out of the way to say it's false.

What did Sayori say exactly? From what you said there's nothing implying she remembers before the last two playthroughs. Something like she remembers when the protagonist didn't exist or everyone was happy.

SerperiorThanU posted...

Really? I think someone laughing as they're torturing someone is just as sinister as seeing the rotting corpse of someone. And yeah, Undertale was a cultural phenomenon. Experiencing it for yourself would expand your horizons.

The whole Milgram thing, evidently, had some issues with the validity of the whole thing. Or, at the very least, there is an ongoing debate with its findings. That being said, I still think Monika's laughter was more sinister than anything.

And that is always my issue, the audience behind undertale always pushed me away. But I guess the same could be said about lots of things. It is definitely something I want to try, now, though.
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ButteryMales posted...

I don't know, you tell me. /sarcasm
What did Sayori say exactly? From what you said there's nothing implying she remembers before the last two playthroughs. Something like she remembers when the protagonist didn't exist or everyone was happy.

I already posted what she said.

She legitimately says it. I responded to you with it. Here it is again.

"I know how hard you tried to keep everyone happy. I know about all the awful things Monika did to make everyone really sad..."

"I know about all the awful things Monika did to make everyone really sad..."

It's RIGHT there.
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FurryPhilosifer posted...

Monika is evil because she turns a game with shockingly effective depictions of mental health into wooooo spooky glitch effects and blood wooooo

ehh

it IS a game

you can do both

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SerperiorThanU posted...

A guy laughing out of emotional stress from thinking he's torturing someone isn't some unthinkable thing. Laughing at inappropriate times is pretty common. There are more instances of this type of laughing in the list like John Lennon laughing at hearing his friend and mom died. You can look up nervous laughter and find a lot of articles about it.

Oh, no, I was more or less saying the Milgram thing wasn't really a good thing to bring up. I fully understand what you mean, I'm just saying it what I personally think it meant as it was presented is all.
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I think ya'll are overthinking your explanations. Whether she's wrong or not, Monika thinks the other girls are just characters in a video game. Her laughing at Sayori's suicide is only mildly more fucked up than getting a chuckle out of deleting your Sims' pool ladder.

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pegusus123456 posted...

I think ya'll are overthinking your explanations. Whether she's wrong or not, Monika thinks the other girls are just characters in a video game. Her laughing at Sayori's suicide is only mildly more fucked up than getting a chuckle out of deleting your Sims' pool ladder.

Except she doesn't. She still sees them as her friends. It's an internal justification, like when a villain says 'oh, I only did this because it means I can achieve my end goal'. Otherwise she would have actually deleted their files, I would think.
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Slayer_22 posted...

I already posted what she said.

She legitimately says it. I responded to you with it. Here it is again.

"I know how hard you tried to keep everyone happy. I know about all the awful things Monika did to make everyone really sad..."

"I know about all the awful things Monika did to make everyone really sad..."

It's RIGHT there.

So that's not remembering that Monika literally made the protagonist or anything beyond the last two playthroughs.

SerperiorThanU posted...

Interesting, I'm actually curious what you mean now lol. I heard the Milgram thing was unethical but not that the results were doctored or something.

Apparently a good portion of the participants knew it was fake, according to a book on the matter by a woman named Gina Perry.

ButteryMales posted...

So that's not remembering that Monika literally made the protagonist or anything beyond the last two playthroughs.

Whatever you're arguing has nothing to do with anything. You're arguing a point I'm not even familiar with, my dude.
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I mean people play gory games all the time, but you wouldn't call most of those people evil. She reacted badly to the fact that she was in a simulation, except there was no way to reach the outer world. I know quite a few people in real life who wouldn't react well to finding out their reality wasn't real, but I'd hardly call them evil.

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Slayer_22 posted...

You seriously think they were programmed to react to stuff like seeing a corpse or slowly losing their mind?

Sure. Being digital, they were absolutely programmed that way. They are no different from a light switch, doing exactly as told. Monika was the exception

Slayer_22 posted...

Sure, at some point they were scripted, but they very clearly are at the point of being able to pass a turing test...within the lore, anyway.

Only monika, and at the end of the game sayori

Kloe_Rinz posted...

Sure. Being digital, they were absolutely programmed that way. They are no different from a light switch, doing exactly as told. Monika was the exception

Only monika, and at the end of the game sayori

Except, no, they weren't? Yuri wasn't told to kill herself? She did it out of love or sadness, depending on your choice. We JUST had an argument earlier in the topic about this.

legendarylemur posted...

I mean people play gory games all the time, but you wouldn't call most of those people evil. She reacted badly to the fact that she was in a simulation, except there was no way to reach the outer world. I know quite a few people in real life who wouldn't react well to finding out their reality wasn't real, but I'd hardly call them evil.

Perfectly fine to react badly to something. It isn't fine to do what she did.

SerperiorThanU posted...

Yeah, just learned there's been some new information that came out since I last heard of it. Looks like I've got some reading to do so I appreciate you telling me.

No problem, it's honestly quite fascinating. But oftentimes you'll see experiments intentionally skewed with bias if you read further in. And usually those results are, 9/10, going to lead to the exact hypothesis they want.
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SerperiorThanU posted...

It's evading my head right now but I remember there was a term for research that are done with a foregone conclusion.

That does sound familiar, but the word escapes me too.
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KFHEWUI posted...

Wait a sec...she straight up stole the Doki's valentine's day gifts, didn't she?

Fucking evil.
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Slayer_22 posted...

Whatever you're arguing has nothing to do with anything. You're arguing a point I'm not even familiar with, my dude.

All the posts are still there if you're off track.

The argument is Monika got groundhog day'ed and went insane.

You know after thinking about it, having amnesia and getting all memories back at once would probably be less severe than actually experiencing everything.

Amnesia is caused by emotional trauma as a defense after all.

ButteryMales posted...

All the posts are still there if you're off track.

The argument is Monika got groundhog day'ed and went insane.

You know after thinking about it, having amnesia and getting all memories back at once would probably be less severe than actually experiencing everything.

Amnesia is caused by emotional trauma as a defense after all.

Yeah, you're arguing something that isn't explained anywhere with no supporting evidence based on absolutely nothing. Directed towards nothing too. Astounding.
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Slayer_22 posted...

Yeah, you're arguing something that isn't explained anywhere with no supporting evidence based on absolutely nothing. Directed towards nothing too. Astounding.

What? Are you saying Sayori knew Monika was a god in their virtual world the whole time?

Are you talking about the endings? Cause otherwise amnesia doesn't really play into it.

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Umbreon posted...

Are you talking about the endings? Cause otherwise amnesia doesn't really play into it.

Yes, the ending where Sayori is club president so she knows about the last two playthroughs.