If you want to know my opinion on it, I highly recommend it, if you're able to play Visual Novels at all you will enjoy it. If not watch someone let's play it which is how I know the story.
This post will be all spoilers.
This is on par with what I said for my Higurashi spoiler warning. Do no read ahead if you don't already know the story.
Okay, are only people who know the story still reading??? Good.
First of all Yuri is Best Girl but Monika-Sama is also great.
Now for what I would actually like to title this Analysis.
Doki Doki Literature Club as a work of Science Fiction.
Most of the discussion around DDLC has been about how it relates to other Visual Novels and Dating Sims, and how it is as a Horror story. I want to talk about it as a work of SciFi, but don't worry the Horror will be relevant. I even chose not to include my Sci-Fi tag for the sake of not spoiling.
My previous post on Visual Novels (posted hours before this) included me saying why I prefer not to classify them as Video Games. But this one is very much about how Visual Novels and Video Games relate, and that is vital to both it's Horror and it's SciFi. And is arguably the best VN/VG experimentation with either. Higurashi is the best Horror Anime but I don't think the VN could be nearly as scary with the less detail it's bound to have.
The Science Fiction subject that is relevant here, is the subject of A.I., Artificial Intelligence, becoming Sentient. A subject that has a long history in Science Fiction, from Isaac Asimov to next year's Battle Angel Alita.
Nor is DDLC the first time we've seen A.I. at the core of the intersection between Sci-Fi and Horror. From killer robots, to 2001 A Space Oddessy where the villain is a self aware Computer Program that can only be defeated by the protagonist deleting the program.... sound familiar?
But besides A.I.'s being monsters, they've also been sympathetic characters and even heroes/heroines.
One of the most revered episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation is a depiction of a trail to determine if Data should have the same rights as other intelligent life. Voyager's attempt to revisit the same issue with it's Hologram Doctor is considered one of it's many disappointments.
Such debates in Sci-Fi are often partly meant to be allegories for the struggles to gain equal rights for real minorities that have sometimes been viewed as less human because of how they are different. But the difference between using true Sci-Fi and using Fantasy for such an allegory is that with Sci-Fi the metaphor hypothetically could become real some day. So one has to wonder how it might effect a hypothetical future civil rights movement for A.I. that we kind of fictionalized that debate in advance? Will the future bigots use that they were allegories to write them off?
What makes DDLC effective as a Horror Story is how it doesn't depict another situation like HAL in 2001 in the usual way, but literally Simulates for the player what that experience might be like. Though in a comparatively safer context.
What is further interesting however are the hints that Monika was wrong in viewing the other character as having no Free Will. The other characters may also be sentient, just not as self aware. Only the Club President can see the Fourth Wall and reach behind the scenes. But the other characters seem aware they're being messed with, that they aren't behaving normally, and even attempt to act on that.
DDLC has taken advantage of the interactive nature of it's medium to tell a story about A.I. becoming sentient in a way that feels almost real.
And this ability to think of the characters as real people in-spite of them being in universe Video Game characters, is why the glitching of the game is able to become Lovecraftian Horror.
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