With a plot this complex and this meta, there are many different ways that what the game shows you can be viewed.
- Were Sayori's suicidal levels of depression, Natsuki's tsundere nature and abusive dad, and Yuri's Nightmare Fetishist and self-harming tendencies always part of their original characters that Monika simply dialed up as time went on, or did Monika make those traits up wholesale? The fact that none of them seem to be present after Monika's deletion (Yuri and Natsuki actually get along, Natsuki's tsundere tendencies are more dialed back, Yuri does not mention having an interest in horror, and Sayori mentions actually waking up on time for multiple days in a row) suggests the latter...
- The DDLC+ Side Stories (where Monika doesn't have meta-awareness and the girls are their "unaltered" selves) sort of support both possibilities. In them, Sayori has depression (although it's not as debilitating here and doesn't really come up after the first story) and Natsuki is a tsundere who clashes with Yuri (however, that is attributed to a toxic friend group). On the other hand, the situations with Natsuki's father and Yuri's self-harm are not brought up at all in Side Stories. One can argue that those traits either don't exist here or are not severe enough to leak into their school life.
- Another possible interpretation is that Sayori is the one responsible for their changes in personality. Considering the fact that one of Sayori's defining motivations is her desire to make everyone happy, it is strikingly in character for her to try and remove or downplay the parts of her friends' (and her own) personalities that make their lives difficult or cause friction.note This can be supported by the fact that, unlike in the bonus ending where Monika is deleted early, Sayori seems to have a decent (okay, comparatively decent) handle on her situation, making it entirely possible that she had been goofing around with files before the "route" even started.
- Possibility number 3: Sayori, who doesn't seem the type to try and turn her friends into someone they're not, saw the Character Development that the player unlocked during each girl's route (Yuri becomes less shy; Natsuki becomes less defensive) and simply wrote it back into their starting personalities. But then of course, as Sayori herself notes, that's the game pretty much finished...
- Meta Possibility number 4: The in-universe game was hap-hazardly created to be your average visual novel dating sim, and, in an attempt to make the game less one-note, the developers gave the girls these traits to make them less one-dimensional without really looking into how these traits would affect them realistically. After all from Monika's Date with the player we know that she took research into a lot of real-life subjects (like depression) which also explains why she would know what impact these implications would have on the girls.
- Is Monika a tragic figure trapped with the knowledge that she's a fictional character in a romance game that goes out of its way to railroad the player away from spending time with her, or just a creepy self-aware yandere who ended up corrupting and killing everyone with the justification that they're not real people, even though she's just as "real" as any of them? Instances like Sayori gaining the same medium awareness whenever she holds the club president position and Yuri's awareness of her own increasing corruption as Monika rewrites her contradict her attempts at justifying the dehumanization of her co-stars.
- Is the actual truth about everyone else really relevant to Monika's personality if she saw things in a certain way anyway?
- Does Monika genuinely believe the other characters are just code and not as real as her or is that just something she says to reassure the player? Or maybe to reassure herself?
- Which version of Monika is behind her unironically cute and endearing Twitter
Character Blog? Is it the Bitch in Sheep's Clothing Monika from Acts 1 and 2 putting on her usual facade? Or is it the redeemed Monika from Acts 3-4 expressing genuine enjoyment for the literature club — and possibly longing for her former friends who she is no longer able to interact with directly? Or is it from before she became aware to begin with? One of the emails in DDLC+ suggests that it's the Monika from the new Side Stories, since she isn't aware that she's a simulated character in them. - Is Yuri's suicide after her confession just a result of her being crazy (she stabs herself to death even if you say yes) or does she have a final moment of (sort of) lucidity and decide to just put herself out of her misery? Monika provides a third possible explanation: she claims that Yuri self-harms because of a sexual fetish, and says that the player character should stay away from her due to him being a trigger, which would also explain why she stabs herself even after you accept her confession; however, since Monika wants you all to herself, she has all the reason to lie to make Yuri look bad. The facts that all the gobbledegook Yuri's corpse spouts for the weekend is actually in Monika's perspective (check the history) and Monika treats you spending the weekend with that corpse as an accidental result of her "script" suggest her responsibility.
- Another possibility: Yuri had shown glimpses of being aware of her deteriorating mental state, so maybe she regained control of herself in her last moments and stabbed herself in order to save you from her?
- There is a more disturbing interpretation of Sayori's suicide: The "official" version (that is, what Monika claims happened in Act 3's dialogue) says the blood on Sayori's hands came from her final struggle to free herself from the rope after she changed her mind too late, or after her survival instincts kicked in. However, it has also been suggested that Monika's influence drove Sayori to hang herself, and Monika withdrew her influence at the last second, leaving a "normal", panicking Sayori struggling to escape her demise - hence explaining the bloody hands. It should be noted that Monika suddenly withdrawing her influence does happen at least once in the game (after Yuri gives you her third poem in Act 2).
- If you choose to have the player character either confess that he loves Sayori or admit they're better as friends, does he truly mean either one, or is he trying to comfort a depressed neighbor and save her? Or, for another interpretation of the "better as friends" response, does he love her but feel that saying that as this point could only make her specific issues worse?
- Do the girls have free will or not? Monika is convinced they don't (and therefore that they aren't real, like her), but that might be her misinterpreting the situation because only the head of the Literature Club has full meta-awareness. The fact that the girls can have both unscripted reactions to eventsnote and flashes of self-awareness about their changing selvesnote imply at least a portion of freedom within their personalities.
- DDLC+ suggests the following: While only main-game Monika has meta-awareness and elevated permissions, all the girls are A.I.s, none of them are preprogrammed scripts. This would explain their reactions, and how Monika can seemingly "boost" certain specific traits they have.
- How much of Monika was actually pre-programmed and how much of herself did she change to appeal to the player? Did she even change herself to appeal to the player? Think about it: Monika is introduced as being the most popular girl in class, as well "smart, beautiful and athletic". She's also sweet and polite to everyone, and the player character doesn't notice any "bad" flaws with her. At least some of these traits people would find attractive. Considering that Monika was able to change the personality traits of the other girls, it seems likely she would have changed herself to be more appealing.
- The DDLC+ Side Stories show "normal" Monika. It's pretty well summed up by the scene in the game where she says she appears confident because she has to but that doesn't mean she always feels that way.
- In one conversation, Yuri starts to explain to the protagonist that she has back problems because of her large bust, but trails off in embarrassment before she can admit that's the reason. At that point, the protagonist jumps in and suggests her back problems are due to bad posture. So, was he genuinely clueless about what Yuri was getting at, or did he realize and provide his own explanation to spare her some embarrassment?
