Content warning: Discussion of mental illness, self-harm, suicide, and violence, including relationship violence.
For the sake of edification, I’ll admit it: I’ve played my fair share of dating sims, and they’ve been all over the board. I’ve played Japanese and Korean dating sims aimed at both boys and girls (otome games) and Western dating sims aimed at girls, those aiming for a broader experience where both player and love interest gender are across a wider spectrum. I know that much of our class was (appropriately) shocked and unsettled by Doki Doki Literature Club. From my experience, what makes Doki Doki Literature Club so unsettling (and such an effective commentary) is that it’s the tone of the game that’s really unique. The content, however, isn’t that far from what normally can happen.
In response to the person who asked me “What kind of games are you playing,” I do acknowledge that there’s been a recent trend, especially in Western dating sims, to simulate generally less dramatic, but healthier and more respectful relationships. Kudos- I think these games are a great way to fight back against the harmful dynamics many dating sims treat as normal. But from my view, these games are responding to the same sort of thing DDLC is also responding to: the otome game.
This is the other facet of DDLC’s address that it’s important to consider. Although the protagonist of the game is a boy who dates girls, the dynamics are far more similar to traditional otome games, where the protagonist is a girl who (almost always) dates boys. My reason for saying so is due to issues of agency: typically in dating sims, even in the role of protagonist, men tend to be actors, and women tend to be acted upon. While most dating sims are bland (to facilitate identification), otome games take this to the extreme: in one game, for example, the player character could only talk when responding to questions, and only ever appeared visually in romantic CGs. I align this lack of agency with DDLC, because it necessarily assigns to the player character some of the powerlessness that comes with the horror genre. Scary things happen TO the DDLC protagonist, who can do little about them until the end of the game. And the violence that happens to and in front of the DDLC protagonist is not out of character for the otome game: the games I’ve played (both mainstream and indie) have included discussions of self-harm and suicide. As the player character, I’ve been hit with cars, pushed off cliffs, kidnapped, drugged, etc.
What makes DDLC such an effective critique of this dynamic is the tone with which violence is addressed. In otome games, violence is often treated merely as a setup for being romantically saved, with the seriousness of the threat immediately forgotten. In other cases, violence is portrayed as romantic or tragic, and good endings can even consist of ending up with people who in real life would be violent abusers. By truly making violence and self-harm horrifying, DDLC confronts and undermines this dynamic by portraying a more realistic conception of what other dating sims can portray as romantic.