a ddlc trope take most frigid

I’ll admit it. I’m part weeb on my roommate’s side, and as such, our introductions to the literature club girls really hit me like a sac of bricks. I didn’t know much about Doki Doki Literature Club aside from the “it’s psychological horror and some murder happens plus a girl gets erased from the game” premise and twist as a general hook people used to get their friends to play the game. Also, buffsuki.

But I had no idea what the game practically had in store, and I only had the general notion that Monika was in love with the player. So what was it about the character introductions that really got me?

As we’re introduced to the different characters, some basic tropes begin to form. Sayori is The Childhood Friend™®©. Yuri is The Kuudere™®©. Natsuki is The Tsundere™®©. It was very clear exactly what angles we were being told to view the characters from, but I couldn’t figure out what exactly Monika was supposed to be.

But then we get to Sayori’s suicide, and then we reach Yuri’s breakdowns and suicide, and then Natsuki just gets gone, and we’re left with Just Monika.

And that’s when I realized that we had been missing the most obvious trope of them all: the yandere character.

As a quick summary of what a yandere is (though it’s a bit culturally complicated to explain the trope without knowing its other uses in different pieces of media): a yandere is a character, typically a female character as seen in a harem or horror anime/manga/game/etc. who can, should, must, and will (in their eyes) cause harm to the people surrounding the object of their affections. The trope has been around for decades, and it is infamous to the point that there is even a Yandere Simulator that pokes fun at the yandere trope as well as the tropes that typically surround it.

But really, what more harm can be done than to induce someone to madness and suicide and to remove their existence from the universe?

Monika is the logical conclusion to the yandere trope as executed in a game. If we are taking the trope to its logical extremes, we are going to contend with exactly this. And that makes Doki Doki Literature Club feel not only extremely meta as a video game, it feels extremely meta as specifically a dating sim, and extremely meta as any commentary on a wide swath of media that employ the types of tropes that DDLC delves into as a shorthand to characterize its characters.