How okie dokie is Doki Doki’s portrayal of mental illness?

[TW self-harm, of course]

In class on Tuesday (and in a couple previous blog posts), there has been a lot of discussion about the extent to which Doki Doki Literature Club exploits mental illness as a device for its dating-sim-turned-psychological-horror narrative, and I want to continue this line of thought here. I think this question is most contentious in relation to Yuri and the portrayal of her anxiety, self-harm, and obsessive-compulsive tendencies in the second act of the game, in which the horror element of the game begins to come to the fore, so I will focus on her. Essentially, and I know this will be a bit controversial, I think Doki Doki does (although imperfectly) suggest a way in which mental illness and horror can intertwine in a non-exploitative sense. There are two general reasons I think this is the case:

1. Monika’s manipulation alters the way we understand Yuri’s portrayal.

Many works in the horror genre involve mentally ill antagonists, in doing so “other-izing” mental illness as something unsettling, foreign, dangerous, and malevolent. Yuri’s position in Doki Doki’s narrative is different: rather than an antagonist, Yuri is a victim in a broader manipulative scheme. In the second act, Monika tells you about Yuri’s self-harm, that when she gets too excited she uses a pocket-knife to cut herself, going on to imply that this is pretty “messed up” and maybe even a “sexual thing.” At another point, Monika takes control of Natsuki, who had previously expressed concern about Yuri in a letter, causing her to say "Yuri and I are too messed up for someone as wonderful as you." Both these instances (coupled with Monika’s ultimate explanation of what she’s been doing) suggest that Monika is trying to thwart any potential interest the MC might have in the other girls by other-izing mental illness, perpetuating a kind of neurotypical prejudice (i.e. people who suffer from mental illness or abuse are un-dateable). The way she pushes this upon the player makes it all the less likely that the player would actually adopt this prejudice, simply due to how imposing, unfair, and manipulative it feels, in spite of how unsettling Yuri can come across as. In fact, I think Doki Doki portrays this prejudice far more negatively than it does mental illness itself.

2. Mental illness is horrifying (sometimes).

In the second act, while explaining some of her opinions on literature, Yuri says the following: "Surreal horror is often very successful at changing the way you look at the world, if only for a brief moment." I think you can apply this in a couple different ways to the game as a whole, but in relation to mental illness, I think the surreal horror that surrounds Yuri in the second act not only contributes to the shocking, disturbing tone of the whole game, but also potentially contributes to the way players understand individuals with severe mental illness— the truth is, the experience of mental illness, especially the self-destructive anxiety and overwhelming obsessive tendencies that Yuri experiences, really does feel horrifying, disturbing, and scary for some who suffer from it. In this way, the psychological/surreal horror genre could perhaps be used to express the affective experience of having such a mental illness. Off the top of my head, other examples of this might include the movie Feed (2017) about anorexia and the video game Keep in Mind: Remastered (2018) about alcoholism/depression. Both of these are probably better examples than Doki Doki, since they're from the POV of the sufferers, but still -- the interiority we glimpse in Yuri’s increasingly chaotic, distressing poems, in addition to the way she describes (after sitting down and reading with you in the second act) how fast her heart is beating, how she can’t calm down or focus, and feels like she’s losing her mind, indicate how horrifying this experience is for her, more than just unsettling for the player. It’s true that, in addition to horror, Yuri’s mental illness also plays into the dating sim trope—she’s obsessed in an exaggerated, disturbed version of how most dating sim characters seem to be helplessly infatuated with the MC, but again, this experience is portrayed as something she cannot understand or control, something horrifying and overwhelming for her as well as the player (I think this ties in nicely with Samantha’s point in an earlier blog post about how Doki Doki illustrates how awful it would be to be an NPC in a dating sim).

Qualifying this—I certainly don’t think that Doki Doki perfectly represents Yuri's affective experience; players definitely experience her as pretty creepy at times, but I do find her to be a sympathetic character in spite of this. At any rate, with these points, I don’t want to argue that Doki Doki is a perfect representation of mental illness, because I certainly don’t think it’s trying to be— I just want to bring up some counterpoints to the prevailing claim that it exploits mental illness for its own purposes, which I don’t think is entirely the case.