YMMV / Doki Doki Literature Club!

All spoilers are unmarked.

A-M

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Has its own page.
• Anvilicious: The game drops more than a few anvils relating to interactions between dating and mental instability with no subtlety, ranging from how to properly help others suffering from depression to how dropping a Love Confession on someone when they are in a vulnerable state is a bad idea to how trying to solve someone's mental illnesses for them doesn't work and it's better to just simply understand what they're going through and so on.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Yuri. Her Shrinking Violet status earned her a lot of fans and her confiding in the player is seen as heartwarming. However, she does have detractors: her yandere tendencies are easily seen as the more Nightmare Fuel-ish parts of the game. Even before Act 2, her attitude towards Natsuki threw a lot of people off. There is a third camp that says that as long as she's kept in her Act 1 personality, she's okay. Regardless, the fanbase has been warming up to her more ever since Plus was announced, which showcased Yuri in a more positive light within the side-stories.
  • Monika. She initially garnered lots of fans for being a Magnificent Bitch and simultaneously sympathetic, but then detractors popped up, dissing her fans for downplaying her unsavory, villainous traits, as well as running the "Just Monika." meme into the ground. Some also hate her for simply being popular.
  • Natsuki. Her abrasiveness has put her off to a lot of people to the point that many choose to take the Sayori or Yuri routes, which isn’t helped by the fact that a lot of fan games and mods tend to put her front and center. However, there are a number of people who find this aspect of hers to be endearing and her status as the Only Sane Woman during Act 2 had people rooting for her. Just like with Yuri, Natsuki was given more opportunities to be fleshed-out in Plus' side-stories, which made the fanbase appreciate Natsuki more-so than they initially thought.
  • This has started to develop around MC. Despite the fact he was intended to be unlikable, he has gathered fans that sympathize him for being a socially awkward teen who witnesses the aftermath of his lifelong best friend's suicide. His detractors argue he was more an insensitive jerk than anything else and question how much he cared about Sayori (or at least how good of a friend he was).
• Better as a Let's Play: The game is most popular for its Disguised Horror Story plot twist, but most people who know anything about the game know about the twist, taking some of the impact away (though the psychological horror element still remains and there are many horrifying scenes that have not been as spoiled). Most fun comes from asking Let's Players or friends unfamiliar with the game to play it under the assumption it's just a silly dating sim, and then wait for them to reach the infamous Wham Shot and freak out. Those who find the interactions with the player too unsettling also find more security in watching others play the game. The Paranoia Fuel has gotten so bad, that players that do get the game either play up to the end of Act 1 (or before finding Sayori's body) or just get mods where the game is kept as a dating sim visual novel.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Natsuki's "PLAY WITH ME!" scene in Act 2, which manages to be weird even by the increasingly glitchy Act 2's standards—it ends quickly, is never referenced again, and unlike most of the other glitches, doesn't seem to have any real bearing on the plot.
• Broken Base: The effectiveness of Act 2 is a little bit debated on within the fandom. Act 1 benefits from having all four girls present, grounding its topics in reality, and using an effective form of Disguised Horror Story in its dark implications and its horrible ending, whereas Act 3 provides a slew of insight into Monika's character, elaborates on how the game functions, and has a satisfying ending. Act 2, on the other hand, relies on tropes all too commonly seen in web horror, including Jump Scares and visual glitches, along with massive time sinks that grind the game to a halt, not to mention how much of a Base-Breaking Character Act 2 Yuri is. That said, there are plenty of fans who will jump to Act 2's defense in saying that it builds off of Act 1's foundation and provides a smooth gateway into Act 3.
• Common Knowledge:
  • The game is often described as a "Deconstruction" of the Dating Sim visual novel genre, which is an inaccurate use of the term; while there is a level of Deconstruction in the game, it mostly involves Monika as a fourth-wall breaking side character, her interactions with the player and the game itself. In fact, the game practically plays itself straight before Monika starts messing with the code.
  • A large amount of fanworks describe Yuri as a Huge Schoolgirl and Statuesque Stunner. While she is the tallest of the girls, her official height is listed as a mere 1.65 m, or 5 feet 4 inches.
  • Whenever you see an image depicting the girls' deaths, you'll usually see Natsuki's infamous "Neck Snap" image in Act 2. The problem is, this isn't her death scene. While Natsuki is "corrupted" there, implicitly from Monika messing with the game's code, the scene's consequences are temporary and have no real bearing on the story. The player never actually gets to see Natsuki's death scene, and it's implied that she didn't really have one, since Monika wrote her out of the game.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: While Sayori is explicitly diagnosed with depression, many readings of other characters have been suggested:
  • Yuri has symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder: obsessiveness (both towards the player character and her interests), self-harm, bizarre sexual behavior, anxiety episodes, and mania-like symptoms. Monika's tampering pushes her into insanity, but she shows milder signs in the Act 1.
    • Alternatively, Yuri can also be interpreted as someone with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) due to her extreme introverted traits, her knack of being obsessed with certain things (such as knives, the horror genre, her favorite fantasy book series, etc), and the fact that she can easily get overwhelmed to the point where she has a mental breakdown as a result of it (as seen in the side-stories). All of these traits are associated with a lot of people on the spectrum.
  • Monika by the end exhibits symptoms of Narcissistic Personality Disorder: arrogance, a need for excessive validation, envy, and controlling others around her with no regard for their wishes or well-being. Sayori shows some similar signs when she becomes Club President, suggesting it is situational as much as innate.
  • MC can be interpreted as having depersonalization disorder because of his behavior through most of act 1 and 2 and how increasingly quiet he becomes over the course of the game.
• Discredited Meme: Calling Natsuki a trap^note now-controversial otaku slang for a male character, often a Wholesome Crossdresser who's oblivious to how he's perceived, who looks like a cute girl, usually in the context of an Unsettling Gender-Reveal. It got to the point where someone on Twitter tried to get Salvato to tweet the meme in confirmation for "waifu ruining purposes," but Salvato responded saying that the meme is disrespectful and couldn't believe it went on for this long. Instead, he had to confirm that all the characters in DDLC, apart from the player character, are girls.
• Draco in Leather Pants: While Monika is a sympathetic character, many fans write away her horrific actions towards her friends and portray her as completely innocent.
• Evil Is Cool: While Monika may be one of the most nightmarish video game villains, she is also loved for being a well-written, stylish and innovatively unique character.
• Fandom Rivalry: With You and Me and Her, which has a very similar Plot Twist and Genre Shift of a self-aware romance target character driven into madness, taking over the game, and forcing the player to love them while subverting various anime and visual novel clichés or using the wider implications for horror. However, this is also combined with Friendly Fandoms.
• Fandom-Specific Plot:
  • There are a significant number of fan mods that focus on resolving one or all of the girls' issues in some way or another. Popular examples include stopping Sayori from ending her life, exploring Natsuki's relationship with her father, and helping Monika deal with her jealousy and existential crisis.
  • Another popular fanwork plotline is focusing on the club with all Psychological Horror elements removed and played much more Lighter and Softer than the actual game. Usually this is either a "what-if" on Monika not tampering with the game or being meta-aware or more as a Slice of Life work.
  • A fairly common one is to focus on the game's events from the viewpoint of one of the girls. Doki Doki Rainclouds, told from Sayori's perspective during Act 1, is probably the most well-known.
  • Several crossovers exist that turn the girls (usually Monika) into AI helpers for the actual protagonist of the fic, most famously In Another World with JUST MONIKA.
• Fanfic Fuel: How would MC, Yuri, and Natsuki react if they would find out that they are in a game?
• Fan Nickname:
  • The girls, and sometimes the player character, are often collectively referred to as "Dokis" or "The Dokis".
  • Individually, "Knife Wife" (or "Knaifu Waifu") has caught on for Yuri, Sayori is known as "Cinnamon Roll" (users on the DDLC subreddit use the term "Cinnamon Bun"), Natsuki is sometimes referred to as "cupcake" (referencing both her cooking skills and her resentment at being short), and the protagonist is referred to as "dense boi".
  • In Lattice's Japanese Let's Play, "Pro-chan" is used for Natsuki, who describe herself as one. Also, watchers will ask where "BGM-san" is gone whenever the Background Music suddenly stops.
  • Thanks to the spoiler being well-known, Sayori has been referred to in Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's animation on Zero Punctuation as "Saddo McKillmyself".
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Fans of Doki Doki Literature Club! get along super well with fans of Katawa Shoujo, by virtue of both being freeware Visual Novel Gateway Series that explore characterization, personal flaws, and emotional issues in a very realistic way. Fans of both like to make comparisons between the characters of both visual novels, and have made plenty of crossover images between the two games. It gets to the point that DDLC has inspired plenty of people to try out Katawa Shoujo, leading to a small renewal in popularity for the latter. Even those who are fans of the latter but aren't into the former are pleased about its popularity because it incentivized a lot of fans to try out the latter, leading to a fresh new breath of life for the Katawa Shoujo fandom after it spent years in obscurity.
  • There's a good overlap between DDLC fans and Spec Ops: The Line fans given that both deconstruct popular video games wish-fulfilment (AAA military shooters for Spec Ops, romance games for DDLC) with Disguised Horror Story.
  • There's a somewhat-friendly relationship with the Undertale fandom, since both games have a focus on both the fourth wall and the different sides of the game's characters.
  • Fans of [redacted] Life actively recommend fellow [r]L fans to check out DDLC because of their similarities. Both are visual novels that play around with common visual novel tropes, have a character who is self-aware that they are trapped in a game, and have a metafiction narrative that requires the player to mess around with the game's files.
  • Fans from both DDLC fandom and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure seem to get along quite nicely. There have been a fair few◊ crossover arts◊ as well.
  • Another odd fandom friendship comes in the form of DDLC and Homestuck. This most likely stems from the fact that the main DDLC Discord server was created by users from the main Homestuck server. It helps that Hiveswap finally released its first act around the same time that the visual novel came out.
  • Some fans of Hotline Miami seem to get along well with DDLC fandom, having spawned dozens of crossover art and synthwave remixes.
  • A somewhat sizeable overlap exist between fandoms of DDLC and Everlasting Summer, helped a lot by similarities between the characters of Yuri and Lena. One mod for ES, "The Music Club", has a similar setup with the protagonist joining a club packed with cute girls, and features Yuri as a new character (naturally, she's the roomate of Lena) in an extended Shout-Out.
  • DDLC fans share some overlap with fans of Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning, as both games share a similar concept (both are seemingly normal games of their respective genres ^note Visual Novels/Dating Sims and Edutainment games and thinly Disguised Horror Stories), and both being released roughly around the same time. For bonus points, both games are set in a school. There’s enough overlap that some even say Baldi's Basics is a Spiritual Successor to DDLC.
• Gateway Series: Even though the game is a very non-standard twist on the genre, with some of its key elements already used by older games before it, DDLC introduced a lot of new players of the late 2010s to visual novels, by way of being short, free and generating a lot of memes.
• Genius Bonus: Monika's description of what happens to her when the game closes is more or less how RAM works.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game that parodied visual novels ended up becoming popular enough in Japan to be played by prominent Japanese Let's Players like Kizuna AI and get featured in merchandise like body pillows.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Sayori's entire characterization is this once you play through the game. She's presented as your cheerful Childhood Friend, and has typically cute and quirky flaws you'd expect from a dating sim heroine; she's clumsy, she's often late to school because of oversleeping, she has trouble staying organized, is mentioned to be a Big Eater, and relies on her relationship with the MC to make sure she's on track. These aren't just stereotypical Moe traits, but signs that Sayori has been living with depression. Once she reveals this to you, it puts much of her characterization into less "cute anime girl" and more "cause for concern". It only gets worse after she commits suicide. So, it's harder to find scenes featuring her cute or funny on future playthroughs with that in mind.
  • The entire scene where Sayori tries to trick the MC into buying her a snack is this in particular. It's played largely for laughs, as well as showing the club's dynamics between each other. However, the MC tells her that "If you feel guilty, that means you deserve to feel guilty". This statement is a lot less light-hearted when you realize that, thanks to her depression, Sayori feels like she is a terrible person and deserves to be punished. The same scene also has the rest of the club jokingly speculate that Monika ditched them to spend time with a boyfriend. This is also less funny once we know Monika's true feelings on the player and what she's willing to do because of them.
  • A good chunk of Act 1 becomes this when viewed through the lens of subsequent character reveals. Natsuki's tsundere antics take on a much darker tone when it's revealed they're an expression of insecurity driven by a bad home life and a desire for the club to be a place she can actually feel safe and secure; similarly, Yuri's Shrinking Violet tendencies are that much sadder when you learn her social anxiety has deeply isolated her and fueled a problem with self-harm. Even Monika's statements in the first and part of the second acts can be viewed this way, as they are revealed to be her increasingly-desperate attempts to forge a connection to the player - the only other person who understands the artificial nature of the game world - when the game refuses to allow her one.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The premise of Yandere Simulator was once described by its creator as, essentially, "a background character in a dating sim suddenly snaps and wreaks havoc on the narrative." It's a pretty good way of describing what happens in this game, too.
  • Monika's reaction to the player reminded a lot of Gravity Falls fans of the one-off character Giffany whose episode was essentially their version of what happens in this game. The fact that it happens twice only with Sayori the second time around only much more psychotic likewise drew parallels. Doesn't help that Monika's design is similar to Giffany's early design and Natsuki likewise has pink hair.
  • Her poor programming skills and Well-Intentioned Extremist personality is reminiscent of The Devil from Pony Island.
  • The green eyes, "glitch" aesthetic and psychopathic personality is essentially a much more mellow version of Jacksepticeye's evil persona Antisepticeye. Goes full circle when Jack does play the game and brings in Anti when the twist happens.
  • Kizuna AI figures out faster than most that Monika was behind the whole thing. Why? It takes one to know one.
  • In the scene where Natsuki falls when moving the manga in the closet she asks if Monika is trying to kill the other members which is pretty funny on a second playthrough.
  • One of the scenes in Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! involved Luhy Distone telling Mahiro about a cursed dating sim game called Doki Doki High School. They would have predicted the release of DDLC if not for the last two words of the title.
  • Natsuki talks about a character in her "Parfait Girls" manga (which has parallels to the literature) named Minori. Roughly four years later, and an anime called Tropical-Rouge! Pretty Cure features a shy character named Minori who was part of a literature club before she was told her ideas were too simple-minded.
  • A couple of months (or weeks if you include the physical edition, which actually includes a business card to the Metaverse company, mocked up with a website and everything) after the release of Plus, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook decided to rebrand the larger Facebook brand as Meta, with the reasoning to "reflecting its focus to build on the metaverse." Bonus points to "Metaverse" being one of the alternate brands as well.
• Hype Backlash: Inevitably for a game with a 97% positive score on Steam and spreading through word-of-mouth. Some believe it's just another visual novel that still uses anime clichés straight (if they don't dismiss it for being anime), some dislike it for the sudden popularity of the fandom and the memes it spreads (going so far as to declare it a "meme" game), and some dismiss its scares as cheap horror. It also has a massive hatred among the visual novel community due to massive overexposure and people feeling the game is vastly inferior to most visual novels.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: Like many other hit indie games before it, after several famous YouTubers played the game and gave it a Colbert Bump, this game swiftly grew a hatedom simply for being popular. Being anime-themed doesn't help its case, as many people decried it for only having waifus and metafiction as its main selling points, often with many of these haters completely missing the point of the former. Many fans of the series also abandoned it because it got so popular.
• It Was His Sled: If you never played this game, but later familiarized it's actually a psychological horror game, you probably will know about those scenes of the game, in most cases due to memes and "reaction compilation" videos that don't bother hiding the twists: Sayori commits suicide. Yuri is a Yandere with knives. Monika is the villain and literally deletes her rivals. Natsuki snaps her neck.
• Jerkass Woobie: Monika becomes this after her Heel Realization. Initially coming across as a monstrous yandere, deleting Monika causes her to realize the error of her ways and reveal that she didn't completely delete the other three girls, as horrifying as their deaths were. Suddenly, her loneliness and madness from knowing that she's a video game character becomes a lot more sympathetic, and everything from that point onward (right down to the ending song) paints her in a tragic light, as opposed to a horrific one.
• Les Yay:
  • Monika talks about having a sleepover with Yuri on her Twitter account. The accompanying image is mildly suggestive, with a sleeping Yuri and a half-awake Monika huddled up together.
  • The DDLC Plus side story "Trust" shows Sayori and Monika bonding as they start the Literature Club. This includes Monika calling Sayori "the sweetest girl" she's ever met, and comforting Sayori about her depression quite similarly to how the protagonist comforts Sayori in the main game. While it's a story of friendship, it thus comes across as quite intimate and romantically charged.
  • The DDLC Plus side stories in general tend to have a lot of shipping fuel between the girls, especially between Yuri and Natsuki in "Self-Love".
  • If you choose to call Sayori during the argument between Natsuki and Yuri, she says that both of them are talented in their own ways, then she lets out this little gem:
    "Also! Natsuki's cute and there's nothing wrong with that! And Yuri's boobs are the same as they always were! Big and beautiful!"
• Magnificent Bastard: Monika is the president of the Literature Club who gains Medium Awareness through her position of power. Unsatisfied with being the one girl whom the player is unable to romance, she takes matters into her own hands, manipulating the game's files to bring out the worst traits in the other girls to make them less appealing. When this doesn't work and the player reaches the end without spending time with her, she restarts the game with fewer girls, reworking the game mechanics so the player has no choice but to choose her. When she finally gets the player all to herself, she shows herself to be a perfectly decent being who's just desperate for real attention and genuinely wants to befriend the player. When her powers end up being used against her, she immediately restores her clubmates, having kept their files' backups, and swoops in to rescue the player if her successor attempts to abuse their power as club president as she did.
• Memetic Badass: Natsuki drawn in an extremely muscular weightlifter form nicknamed "Buffsuki". Powerful enough to face gods and other memetic badasses. Catchphrase: "Square up, thot."
• Memetic Loser:
  • Sayori can't catch a break in the fandom. A lot of people like to make cruel jokes and memes out of her suicide scene, and many a fan art of the game will either have her holding a noose, wearing something around her neck like a noose, or flat-out hanged in the background while none of the other characters notice her dead. Helping matters is that Sayori didn't get the same amount of fan attention as the other three girls initially, so a lot more people were willing to bulli her and a lot less people were driven to defend her. The jokes themselves vary from light-hearted banter◊, to darker jokes, to downright◊ Squicky Nightmare Fuel. However, there has been a backlash to those jokes, though, and they have gradually been declared overused and mean-spirited. Replies to them now tend to range from "no bulli" to "delete this". More sympathetic memes towards Sayori are getting more popular, although the joke is still too easy to make to go away.
  • Ironically, The player character has languished in this territory since the game first released due to initially being seen as unlikable by much of the fandom, constantly being left out of official art and Dan Salvato stating that he doesn't even see him as an actual character. And despite finally giving a canon design that he lacked before, Plus only worsened things for him as he was rendered a complete non-factor in the Side Stories outside one passing mention by Sayori in "Trust". He was made to be unhappy and never have anything good happen to him. However, like Sayori, he has garnered sympathy over the years because of his role in the game and the constant sidelining made him more of a pitiful soul. Nowadays people see him as a victim of circumstances beyond his understanding and control whose worst crime is being a stuffy teenager.
• Memetic Mutation: Has its own page.
• Memetic Psychopath: Monika and Yuri, for their Yandere tendencies.
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • For someone who drives a friend to suicide with mental manipulation and cyber bullying, exaggerates the second's odd hobby into a sexual addiction that drives her to insanity, and at the very least increases feelings of parental abuse for the third, Monika gets a lot of love because of her backstory and final scene, and fans tend to downplay her actions with her own logic that they were just game characters and weren't real — despite the fact that all the girls are supposed to be sympathetic and downplaying what they go through with this thinking goes against this notion.
  • For a game that shows how too much romantic competition can be dangerous and Dan Salvato saying each girl deserves love, there are frequent flame wars over who is "Best Girl" with people getting unhealthily obsessed over their favorite character and calling everyone else's waifu trash.
  • This game is known for its deconstructive twist on dating sims and visual novels. There are, however, tons of mods that remove all the metafictional horror elements, effectively turning it into a straight dating sim. Considering the tragedies these characters go through, however, it makes sense for people to wonder (and want) to know what would happen if it really was a dating sim.
• Moe: Every character begins the game as this; the happy-go-lucky Sayori, the sweet-and-sour Natsuki, the shy and quiet Yuri, and the kind and responsible club president, Monika. Needless to say, once you finish the game, no one is this anymore.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • By renaming the character files, it's possible to trick Monika into deleting herself.
  • In a meta-example, the game won the Matthew Crump Cultural Innovation Award at the SXSW Gaming Awards. Not bad for a freeware game that turns out to be a little Disguised Horror Story on its own!

N-W

• Narm:
  • In Act 2, Natsuki has a Jump Scare scene if you write all poems for her. However, when she rushes into the screen, it's accompanied by a few clean, short taps, which some players may find to be hilarious.
  • While Yuri's suicide is overall disturbing and shocking, the face she makes as she stabs herself is unintentionally goofy looking, especially when her eyes roll over as she dies.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • One scare in late Act 2 involves Yuri giving the player a nigh-illegible poem that is covered in red and yellow stains. That's bad enough, but Yuri then says that the paper is "endowed with [her] scent".
  • Yuri stabbing herself with a butcher knife after the player character gives his reply to her love confession. Repeatedly. This is followed by the player character watching her decaying corpse. You might expect the game to promptly go into a bad end, only for Natsuki to see her corpse and vomit shortly afterwards.
• Never Live It Down: Despite the fact that Sayori and Yuri have their qualities (especially in Act 1), people will always make jokes about how both of them died (Sayori via hanging, Yuri via stabbing herself). Doesn't help the fact that even Monika makes jokes on Sayori's death (even Team Salvato does, such as the Valentine series of pictures where Sayori is shown tying up knots). As for Yuri's death... let's just say that there are a ton of knife jokes out there. Yuri also has a disproportionate amount of jokes referring to her infamous "pen" remark. Monika has a minor case where she is associated with literally "deleting" her rivals. MC himself doesn't fair much better when most of his is based on not being able to prevent the girls from dying despite everything being out of his control.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • Some of the game's attempts at breaking the fourth wall can appear a bit too ham-fisted, be it player character suddenly reminding us that "It isn't a video game where you can reload" in front of a corpse of his best friend^note doubly strange, since the game very pointedly doesn't let you go back and prevent Sayori's suicide, or Monika explicitly telling you not to mess with her character file... all while giving you every possible hint and instruction to do just that.
  • Yuri's eyes wandering off her head due to a 'glitch' can actually be unintentionally hilarious if you're familiar with Off-Model "wall-eyed anime girl" memes from other visual novels.
  • At one point in Act 3, Monika will refer to you by name. Not the name you gave the player character, your name. While creepy, it also can lead to unintentional humor if the name on your computer isn't yours; she finds it by looking at the computer account playing the game. So if your log-in happens to be something like the name of a pet, a joke, a nickname for the device, or anything other than your actual name... And, of course, the moment completely falls flat if you've simply named your character after yourself.
  • One of Monika's poems in fullscreen pulls up a Windows 10 Blue Screen of Death. Even if you're not on Windows 10, in which case it becomes pretty self-evident what's really going on.
  • If you pick all of Yuri's words after Sayori's suicide and show the poem to Natsuki, her eyes pop out of her head. While this scares some players, most players find it hilarious how your poem was so bad that Natsuki's eyes literally popped out of her head, as if she needed Brain Bleach. And then they're back to normal when she begins to speak.
  Natsuki: "..."
  Natsuki: "...?"
  Natsuki: [eyes comically explode from her head]
  Natsuki: "[Player name], if you're not going to take this club seriously, then go home."
• Older Than They Think:
  • While Doki Doki Literature Club popularized the concept of a Disguised Horror Story in a video game (where an innocent-looking game turns out to hide a nightmarish and/or outright depressing plot twist that seemingly comes out of nowhere), it is not the first one to do it. There are several games, such as Live A Live or Fancy Island that also coat its actual, horrific undertones with innocent-looking settings and came out way before DDLC did.
  • nitro+'s You and Me and Her (or Totono, for short) follows a very similar Disguised Horror Story arc, such as:
    • What should be a normal dating sim subverting every cliche involved (such as multiple routes, saving/loading, characters who only exist to fulfill anime cliches like the moeblob, required romances, Ms. Fanservice, the Unlucky Childhood Friend, et cetera).
    • A normal, everyday girl twisted into a Medium Aware yandere driven to insanity by the player's unwitting actions (in both cases, the player character choosing a girl other than themselves), the nature of which makes them realize they're a background character in a fictional game.
    • Said yandere realizing that the boy they love is not real, and falling in love with the player themselves.
    • The girl, in a fit of madness, murdering her competitor(s) in a sudden switch to Psychological Horror and destroying any attempt to go back to normal gameplay via faux-scripting and programming, horrific glitches, save file altering, destroying the other characters, and locking the game's progress to her only.
    • The girl rewriting the game after attempts to go down alternate routes, so the player character can only come back to them, forever and ever - in both cases, featuring an impossible, non-digetic location where the girl can have their heart-to-hearts with their beloved.
    • Various commentary on the nature of their existence, down to noting how long the player's been gone, and begging them to stay with them.
    • The girl accidentally giving the keys' to the player's freedom by way of showing them where they can do some tricks of their own to return the game to normal.
    • The girl eventually accepting defeat when the player frees themselves from their grasp, giving themselves in to permanent deletion.
    • This hasn't gone unnoticed by Nitro+ themselves, as Totono's writer is currently playing and documenting his playthrough of DDLC.
    • This trope might be the reason why Totono was picked up for an official localization in mid-2018.
  • [redacted] Life, a freeware game released a year before Doki Doki, is also about a visual novel protagonist who realises they're in a game, as well as a yandere who tries to gain the affections of the player character.
  • My Harem Heaven is Yandere Hell is another "Romance Game gone wrong" example, only this time it's due to in-universe reasons instead of the more meta reasons of this game.
  • The genders are flipped in it, but Senpai, Please Look at Me! is another visual novel that's described as, and initially seems to be, nothing more than a cutesy, somewhat cliched romance visual novel... until one of the game's characters is revealed to be a medium-aware character who decides that you've been spending too much time with their romantic competition and deletes them from the game so that you have no choice but to interact with them only and also causes the game to become increasingly glitchy from their constant tampering with it. The game even has its climactic scene be a conversation between the character and the player (who's explicitly different from the player character here too) that ends with the character realizing the error of their ways and atoning by reinserting the characters they deleted back into the game. It does take a significantly Lighter and Softer approach to these otherwise-similar events, though, and makes it easier for you to get a happier ending.
  • The concept of a rogue AI with a malevolent streak manifesting as a love interest in a dating sim was previously explored in Gravity Falls.
  • The concepts of a romantic dating sim visual novel with "Groundhog Day" Loop as a key plot point, horror-like outcomes with gruesome CG images, and the rival girls suddenly disappearing out of nowhere in favor of the "final" romantic interest as the story's twists? These were already explored on the 2013 game Everlasting Summer.
  • The art styles used for the characters in the Doki Doki Literature Club Plus trailer/website aren't actually the first instances of them used. They were used in the official merchandise section six months prior, made by Satchely as well.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • The entire game runs on this. The vague content warning preceding the game leaves the player on edge throughout the entirety of Act 1 as they wait for something horrible to happen in this perfectly normal dating sim. And then Act 2 leaves the player on edge for different reasons as they wait for the game to start glitching out again.
  • Act 3 gives a good idea of what Monika is capable of. While she can't see the player directly, she can figure out your computer's log-in name, where you downloaded the game from, and if you're livestreaming the game. It's also heavily implied she has some knowledge beyond scenes with her in them, such as the bit with her towards the end of Act 1:
    "I probably know a lot more than you think."
• Portmanteau Couple Name: The four girls and one boy shipped with one another each have combination couple names:
  • Sayori and Monika are called "Sayonika."
  • Natsuki and Yuri are called "Natsuri" or "Natsyuri."
  • Sayori and Natsuki are "Sayosuki."
  • Yuri and Monika are "Yurika."
  • Sayori and Yuri are, smoothly, "Sayuri."
  • MC and Sayori are "MC Sayo"
  • MC and Yuri are "M Cyuri"
  • MC and Natsuki are M Csuki
  • MC and Monika are M Cnika
• Rainbow Lens: Natsuki's poem "Amy Likes Spiders". The poem is about a girl the narrator can't stand due to her interest in spiders, going so far as to not let her touch her, and thinks anyone who's friends with Amy will become a spider-lover, too. As such, this can be read as a metaphor for a homophobe feeling disgusted by a gay person, thinking that their mere touch and companionship will turn the people around them gay. This is, of course, helped by the fact that the narrator of the poem is intended to look like a bigot who judges people for things that don't hurt anyone.
• Realism-Induced Horror: It's well-known that DDLC undergoes a sudden Genre Shift from romance to metafictional horror after the first act. But some players, including Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation, claim that the most disturbing part of the game can be found before the twist: Sayori's depression and eventual suicide are presented in a very realistic way, making them very relatable to anyone who has suffered from depression or knows someone who has committed suicide.
• Recurring Fanon Character: The blonde-haired himedere Kaori, was created as a Graggle Simpson-like mandela effect as an April Fools event in 2024, and treated as a sixth member of the literature club, with many of the game's largest fan artists creating artwork of the character on that day. The character remained popular even after the day had ended.
• Retroactive Recognition: Dan Salvato also made a legendarily difficult Super Mario Maker level that drove Egoraptor to near-insanity in an episode of Game Grumps. The Grumps would later go on to play DDLC and in the final episode included a little Shout-Out to Salvato's previous work.
• Ron the Death Eater: On the other hand of the spectrum, while many give Monika leather pants, there are also some who exaggerate her into a stock yandere and disregard all of her sympathetic qualities.
• Ship Mates: Some people prefer to pair the four girls and one boy into two sets of two. The most common combination is MC/Sayori, Sayori/Monika, and Natsuki/Yuri.
• Signature Scene:
  • Sayori's suicide, which is what marks the game's transition from a Harem Comedy to a Psychological Horror.
  • The "date" with you and Monika in Act 3.
  • For the side-stories, there's the scene where Monika consoles Sayori in "Trust", the scene where Sayori helps Yuri get through a mental breakdown in "Understanding", and the scene in "Respect" where Monika plays "My Song, Your Note" for Natsuki.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • Some have placed it in the same category as Undertale and Pony Island as a piece of metafiction dedicated to dissecting the tropes of a particular game genre. And like Undertale, both encourage going for the best ending and then never playing them ever again, Undertale by virtue of calling you out for trying to start a new game, this one by flat-out making it impossible to replay.
  • The game shares some similarities with a story from another medium: the School-Live! manga. Both feature four stereotypical moe anime girls in a bright and cheery school environment, which is actually just a facade for the unending nightmare they live in. And, while their personalities are quite different, both groups of girls share the same hair colors (light brown, hazel, pink and purple).
  • Some have compared it to [redacted] Life, a free 2016 visual novel about a character who realises that they're in a game and try to find a way to escape it.
  • The game has a few points in common with Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion, in that they're both games with a cute animesque aesthetic that however openly and deliberately sell themselves as horror games and have a female character that talks directly to the player. And in both games the horror elements are likely not what the players think at first, playing on their expectations and lulling them in a false sense of security.
  • A few fans have even compared Monika to the villain of Wreck-It Ralph, Turbo. ^{Spoilers regarding both DDLC and Wreck-it Ralph ahead} Both are the face of their games (Turbo-Time for Turbo, the Literature Club for Monika), tried screwing with outside forces with attention as their motive, and are not afraid of killing others or sabotaging games to get what they want. Both their initial actions also involve messing up a game so much to the point of disrepair. However, while Monika ends up being a genuinely kind person, even when her true intentions are revealed, Turbo is just an outright Jerkass, even before his true colors and backstory are described. Monika is also inexperienced with coding and reprogramming (Act 2 ran ... strangely and it was obvious something was wrong), although successful with deleting characters off (albeit temporarily), while Turbo was able to reprogram an entire game to operate seamlessly, yet couldn't delete his competition (Vanellope) so he had to come up with other ways to make the game seem like it was his.
  • Many fans consider it to be an evolution of the Sonic.exe subgenre of horror, given that one of the characters gains control of the game and one by one wipes out the other characters by twisting both reality and the characters' minds. The main difference is that it's told from the perspective of a neutral unseen protagonist.
  • The game falls under a similar category of fiction to Neon Genesis Evangelion and Puella Magi Madoka Magica, as a dark deconstruction of a normally optimistic and upbeat Japanese fiction genre with a Psychological Horror twist. All three works have a heavy emphasis on cute girls meant to be endearing to the player, and the initial cutesy vibe of DDLC is very similar to that of Madoka Magica and its sequel movie before descending into darkness. DDLC stands apart from Eva and Madoka in that it's American-made, is a visual novel rather than an anime, and aims to directly disturb the player rather than merely using its shock horror elements to tell a story.
  • DDLC has its own Spiritual Successor in the form of Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning, which is also a Disguised Horror Story game (in this case, shifting to a Slender-esque Survival Horror) with a school setting. The main difference, however, is that Baldi's Basics masquerades as a terrible Edutainment Game from the mid-90s and early-2000s instead of a Dating Sim.
  • One horror game that does also masquerade as a Dating Sim is How To Date A Magical Girl!. Four of the five suitors strongly resemble the girls of DDLC, the game revolves around the protagonist's school, some of the deaths strongly resemble those of DDLC, and the villain carries a heart-shaped pen. The difference is that while Monika wanted to have the player to herself, the villain of HTDAMG was trying to make the player stop playing the game.
  • The game has been compared to a Defictionalization of Romance Academy 7 from Gravity Falls, though it's unclear whether Monika was at all inspired by .GIFfany (the eerie similarities◊ between the former and the latter's concept art certainly don't help matters).
• Spoiled by the Format: Played With. The disturbing content warnings preceding the game are a legitimate indicator that this not just a visual novel/dating sim. (DDLC Plus has an M rating on top of that.) However, the multiple warnings (as well as the game's reputation to an extent) can actually serve to attract new players by awakening their curiosity - the warnings both in-game and outside the game (such as Steam's tags list, and the marketing in the case of Plus) almost seem ironic right next to the cheery music, cute anime girls and bright colors of the title screen, baiting a new player into thinking "really, THIS is supposed to be a scary game??". Act 1 is long enough that the player will probably let their guard down and be lured into a false sense of security before Sayori's suicide. DDLC essentially spells out its true nature, constrasts it with its beginning, and masterfully utilizes that confusion to hit the player more effectively - Sayori's suicide doesn't come across as an out-of-nowhere twist due to the content warnings the player saw earlier, but has not thought about for a decent while.
• That One Sidequest: Plus has you collect data (mostly pictures) by doing certain actions in both the main game and the side stories. Collecting 100% of the data will reveal some hidden lore regarding the truth of game itself. A lot of the pictures are fairly straightforward; you can have a good chunk of your gallery complete just by getting both the normal and the Golden Ending^note though the process to get said ending might not be obvious to a new player of the game, choosing different dialogue options each time, and clearing the Side Stories. Some others, however, are not so obvious.
  • While it might not be that hard to figure out that one of the sidequests for the main game is to have a 3-poem run with Sayori/Yuri/Natsuki, have fun figuring out on your own that you also have to impress all three of them in the same run (i.e. writing a poem to impress one of them each day).
  • In Act 2, during the "Have a Nice Weekend" scene, you're required to stay with Yuri's corpse without pressing Skip at all. Even if you bump up the text speed to the highest it can go and aggressively Button Mash, it can still take upwards of twelve minutes.
  • The most troublesome unlocks are the Secrets. Firstly, you're required to witness all of the special poems that pop up between the days. From the moment the game is started in Act 1, it randomly assigns three of these poems to display during Act 2. There's 9 pictures to collect and 11 possible outcomes. The two pictures that don't count towards this? "Happy Thoughts" and the glitched Monika one. This makes this a Luck-Based Mission completely based on RNG, which ends up being fairly time consuming. But even worse than that is the "Ghost Menu". To get it, you must open and close DDLC during Act 2 over and over again until the RNG gives you this screen - something that can take multiple hours since there is only a 1/64 chance of it popping up.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Monika is sweet, good-natured, popular, likable, and beautiful. She also seems to get along great with the main character, and it's implied he has a bit of a crush on her. It's a pity you can't romance her. And as it turns out, Monika agrees with this notion wholeheartedly! Cue the Disguised Horror Story.
  • Unlike Sayori and Yuri, we don't get as deep a look into Natsuki's inner demons as the others. The second act provides hints, but she never gets to have a breakdown like Sayori and Yuri. Even Dan himself has stated that he regrets not doing more with Natsuki.
  • Unlike Natsuki, we never find about how Sayori's suicidal tendencies and Yuri's self-harm issues have manifested or how they started. Aside from Monika's tampering with the game. Or if there was a cause to begin with. Isn't it suspicious that we don't learn anything about Sayori's or Yuri's family life?
  • The MC so far is the least developed due to being intentionally relegated to stock visual novel protagonist. Some people felt he was wasted as a character and would've loved to learn what inner demon he has. It doesn't help that the game is predicated on showing how there's more to a character than their archetype and MC not getting the same treatment is seen as counterproductive.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Some players felt that it would have been better for the story to continue in the direction it was heading before the first-act-ending twist — rather than delving into metafictional horror, it could have been a more standard Visual Novel that explored the characters and their respective mental and emotional issues with more depth and sensitivity. Think Katawa Shoujo with mental illness instead of physical disability. That being said, Doki Doki Blue Skies, one of the more well-known mods for the game, manages to deliver that type of scenario to perfection.
  • Natsuki never does get a horror scenario of her own and gets deleted entirely offscreen. Coupled with a less in-depth look into her mental state, some players think she was underused.
  • No matter what happens the player will never get to play the day of the festival, even though early on it seemed like it was once a playable day within the game. In Act 1 Sayori's suicide breaks the game and causes the festival day to be unable to load, Act 2 Monika resets the game right before the festival, Act 3 Monika has broken the game so much that there is no longer any time progression, and in Act 4 either Monika will just outright delete the game, or Sayori will give the player the Golden Ending and end the game on the first day.
  • Plus reveals that the Protagonist Really Was Born Yesterday and was always just a blank vessel for you to view the game world through. Given the game places a lot of emphasis on people realizing their role in the context of the game, what little agency he does exhibit despite his origins (such as his feelings of powerlessness over unscripted events like Sayori's death) indicates that he's not as empty of a shell as described by the in-universe dev. Any further insight into his thoughts is cut off after Monika starts openly interacting with you. However, neither the story nor the devs were interested in exploring the Protagonist any further than as a vehicle. He's mostly doomed to stay that way for a life time
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: The nameless protagonist fits this wholesale. While the player character isn't a paragon of support and has a lot of snark for Sayori in particular, he does come to care for the girls in a very heartfelt manner. He's intended to be an unlikable stock VN protagonist, but this actually gives him more depth than most in the genre. He's not just out for sex and at least in the sections that are playable, does not take advantage of the girls at all. He's a genuinely Nice Guy, but isn't always the best at showing it. And even though he's Innocently Insensitive, even when Sayori reveals her depression, he still tries incredibly hard to help and wants more than anything to make her feel better. And when she commits suicide, he's so burdened with guilt he blames himself for it. At the end of the day, he seems no worse than the average teenager put in a situation he isn't equipped to handle and all he did was try to live a normal life, which honestly makes for a more interesting character.
• Watch It for the Meme: Playing this game just for the sake of seeing a cutesy, Moe Dating Sim go horribly, horribly wrong and turn into a The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You Psychological Horror game that deals with depression, self-harm, and suicide.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Just because the game is a cute anime-influenced dating sim that has four beautiful girls to date doesn't mean it's okay for kids (or at least preteens). Sure, the game looks pretty innocent until one of the main girls hangs herself. After that the game becomes a Psychological Horror and shows terrifying imagery, graphic self harm, and more. It doesn't have a 13+ warning (alongside being Rated M on the console versions of Plus!) and a Psychological Horror tag on Steam for nothing!
• The Woobie: EVERYONE.
  • Sayori, the peppy vice president of the Literature Club, is the childhood friend of the player character. Revealing her optimism as a front for her depression, Sayori commits suicide regardless of the player's choice. Possessing the chance of becoming insane and deleting the game without Monika's influence, Sayori's depression is conveyed realistically and serves as one of the first true scares of the game.
  • Yuri is extremely socially anxious, to the point that she would rather shut herself down entirely than share her true personality with anyone, even cutting herself to "calm down" if she feels she's getting too outgoing and excited. Additionally, Yuri seems to be retaining awareness of her growing psychosis but being unable to stop it.
  • Natsuki's father is neglectful (at best) and/or abusive (at worst), and she's suffering from malnutrition because he denies her both food in the house and the money to buy her own while she's at school. Natsuki is also the most able to retain her sanity, but with it comes the knowledge that Yuri's self-harm is spiraling and that Monika is somehow encouraging it, and that she's powerless to stop it.
  • Even Monika, as terrifying as she is, is driven by the knowledge that she's a fictional character in a romance game and frustration that she's doomed to never be able to spend time with the player, and finally ends up destroying the game for their happiness.
  • Even the protagonist isn't immune, since he's just as much a victim of his nature as the girls. And then there's his reaction to the suicide of Sayori, his best friend since childhood, and possibly girlfriend, depending on if you accepted her confession. No matter what, he'll blame himself for what happened. Already gutwrenching, but even worse when you consider that it was likely due to Monika's influence... How can you not want to give him a hug and tell him it's not his fault, that there was nothing he could've done?

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