Tear Jerker / Doki Doki Literature Club!

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

"Why won't the rain clouds go away?"

This Visual Novel is not what it seems. Although most of the reveals are Nightmare Fuel, they also have some upsetting implications, if not outright facts.

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Game

• The reveal that Sayori has been living with depression for years. The subject of depression is one you'd hardly expect to come up in a perfectly normal romance game at all, much less in a realistic and frank discussion. The real reason why Sayori has trouble getting up in the morning is that her depression makes it more difficult for her to wake up and get ready. She puts up a Genki Girl appearance to hide it, believing that if she made others happy she has no reason to be unhappy. However, the protagonist joining the Literature Club only made it worse, because she got to see him making friends with other girls. It puts many of her personality traits into a darker perspective, and only gets worse after the player character finds that she'd hanged herself in her room. Let's put it this way, meta-aware Yandere characters who tamper with the game they're in are one thing, but this sort of thing can happen to anyone.
  • It gets sadder when you declare your love for Sayori. Despite this being pretty much what she wanted, she's still depressed, even crying as she hugs the player, as pictured above. It's absolutely heart-wrenching hearing her say "why won't the rainclouds go away?", especially when, the next day, she kills herself.
  • The Protagonist's reaction to Sayori's suicide definitely cuts deep, particularly given that regardless of the actions the player takes, the Protagonist will blame himself for causing it, either by reciprocating her affections and not realizing that "Sayori only wanted things to go back to when they were kids", or "exacerbating her depression" by turning her down. It's another unexpectedly realistic feeling that many people get after someone close to them has committed suicide: Survivor Guilt. His reaction of a near-literal Heroic BSoD coupled with the progressively glitched and then immediately depressive song that plays definitely doesn't do anything to lighten the mood, either. This also happens to fall on the day of the festival, a day which the Protagonist and the Player thought would be an entertaining outing of character growth in this lighthearted harem visual novel? Surprise Tearjerkers are typically the ones that get to be the hardest to accept as you go on.
  • Dan Salvato confirmed that the suicide occurred before the main character even woke up, so there truly is nothing he could do to prevent it, even if he wanted to.
  • Given Monika's heavily implied involvement in driving Sayori to suicide, watching Sayori confide in her about her depression during the Side Stories in Plus while Monika embraces her, supports her, and comforts her is even more of a tearjerker.
  • The track that plays over Sayori's suicide and subsequent deletion manages to be both unsettling and heartbreaking. It starts out a heavily glitched version of the main title theme, but then goes into a softer variation with a broken music box melody and One-Woman Wail. It really underscores the tragedy behind this particular Wham Shot.
  • While the poem before The Reveal is Nightmare Fuel, the last lines can hit hard even before the truth:
    But a poem is never actually finished.
    It just stops moving.
• It's heavily implied Natsuki is being physically abused and neglected at home. She doesn't usually get enough to eat, and that her father disapproves of her reading manga, which is likely her escape from her awful home life to the point where she has to keep her copies in the club room just to avoid his anger. It's also implied that she doesn't have a good relationship with the rest of her classmates, either, so the Literature Club is the only group she has to lean on. No wonder she's so cranky.
  • Natsuki's father being abusive can be somewhat mitigated when noting that this is largely present in the rewritten Act 2 and not in the original scripting. If anything, the worst thing about her father is that he is evidently a stern and somewhat absent figure who isn't helping her insecurity complex. Natsuki worries about him finding out about her "childish" manga habit and is uncomfortable about not being seen to eat plenty when he cooks. The side stories also reveal that while she does get into arguments with her father, they are over fairly typical teenage matters like grades or cleaning her room, but that's it.
  • It's worse if you go out of your way to impress Yuri as opposed to Natsuki. Everyone sees her as a nuisance, including Monika, and poor girl feels like nobody likes her at all.
    • Sadly, you don't even need to go out of your way to impress Yuri. The second act railroads you into pursuing Yuri (thanks to Monika reprograming her into being a hardcore Stalker with a Crush, making this suck for Monika as well as Natsuki). Even if all 20 words you pick in the second and third poems are words Natsuki likes, the game treats it as if you picked Yuri's words. Even the game doesn't like Natsuki much.
  • Yuri and Natsuki argue in Act 2, and Yuri tells Natsuki to go and look for coins under the vending machines. Since her abusive father never gives her enough to eat, collecting dropped change is probably the only way she can get enough money to buy food.
• Yuri in general. Everyone acknowledges that she's beautiful and intelligent, but she can't bring herself to believe it. Whenever you talk to her, she always finds ways to second-guess herself or apologizes for something inane, and the player character has to constantly reassure her that she doesn't have to be sorry and that he isn't mad at her. He doesn't do this out of exasperation but out of genuine concern. Her dark, romantic interests alienate her from most people, and she finds herself eating alone during lunchtime, which she uses as an excuse to immerse herself in her books. She tells you that she likes the characters in her books more than real people because they can never judge her.
  • During the second act, she gets excited because she gets to spend time with someone she likes and when this happens, she rushes out to get water for tea. You notice that it takes her a long time and try to find her only to hear sharp breathing noises, ending with visions of her with slit forearms. Just watching someone you've come to care about hurt herself without you being capable of stopping it is incredibly painful, especially because this act is after your best friend commits suicide.
• Yuri undergoes severe Sanity Slippage in the second act. While most of it is prime Nightmare Fuel, it's shown through her rambling and behavior that she's just aware of her deteriorating mental state and is appropriately horrified, but can't do anything about it. What's worse is that she implies she had a history of driving people away with her odd, obsessive behavior before, explaining why she's a Shrinking Violet. She also has a history of Self-Harm; it's unclear if her habit is in any way sexual like Monika claims or if she's just trying to make Yuri look worse, but make of it what you will. Eventually, she fully gives in to the madness and confesses her love, only to stab herself to death in a fit of "excitement," regardless of how the player chooses to respond. It'll likely bring back memories of Sayori.
  • The worst part about her brief moments of awareness is that, while they happened, she very likely thought that all her scathing insecurities about actually being an unlovable pervert were completely right, even though she was absolutely sane and innocent (albeit troubled) before Monika began Mind-Raping her.
• One of Natsuki's poems in the second route is a note pleading for you to help Yuri. She's horrified at the amount of Sanity Slippage Yuri has clearly undergone and feels you're best to help her get the treatment she needs. She can't do it personally because it'll only start another argument, and Monika will act like nothing's wrong. But she knows Yuri will listen to you. This nice little Friendship Moment gets ruined when Monika tampers with the code again, making Natsuki immediately tell you that she's "changed her mind" and that you shouldn't bother with her and Yuri. Just Monika.
  • What's even more heartbreaking is that she finds out you failed her. Despite her pleas to get Yuri help, Natsuki still comes to school Monday morning to find you staring at Yuri's decomposing corpse.
• Even Monika, despite all her faults, is still worthy of sympathy. Despite being a Yandere, everything about her suggests that she's not a sociopathic monster who feels entitled to the player, but a lonely girl who resents being stuck as a side character in a Dating Sim who, despite being a School Idol who the player character clearly admires, still doesn't get a route. She repeatedly asks if the player can hear her and even asks through a pop-up for the player to help her. She even acts horrified when she realizes the player hates her enough to delete her, and restores the other girls so that the player can play the game without her.
  • If you have saved a backup of Monika's character file and try to restore it before starting a new game in Act 4, you will get a message from Monika saying "Please stop playing with my heart. I don't want to come back" before she deletes her file; any subsequent attempts to restore her will result in her silently deleting the file. Keep in mind that Monika has already concluded that you loathed her enough to delete her and is still heartbroken about it.
• One example mixed with Nightmare Fuel is if you delete Monika's character data before starting a new game, the Medium Awareness baton passes to a still-depressed Sayori, who can't handle the revelation that she's a fictional character in a VN and promptly has a breakdown before immediately destroying the entire game, leaving just a black-and-white still of her suicide and (after about 10 minutes of waiting) the line "Now everyone can be happy."
• At one point after the School Festival announcement in Act 2, Monika takes you aside to have a heart-to-heart only to be cut short by the screen starting to fade to black as she pleads with the player to stay, and then abruptly cutting to the next poetry composition minigame. And then in this particular minigame, picking certain words, instead of causing Natsuki or Yuri to jump in approval, instead causes a chibi Monika to just barely jump into view before falling back below the screen. Both scenes back-to-back really encapsulate Monika's loneliness and desperation to try and bypass the game's railroading and get the player to notice her.
  • Even more heartbreaking is one thing... There is no way to do the poetry minigame with Monika able to join the other two or three girls.
• There is no way to escape a Downer Ending in this game; the best you can go for is bittersweet. This is sad for the player, but must be really sad for the characters - because of circumstances entirely outside their control, no one will ever be happy - Sayori and the Protagonist can never be happy together; at best Sayori becomes self-aware but comes to terms with it because of how happy you made everyone (temporarily). It's more of a bonus, secret ending than a Golden Ending anyway, and all it does is prevent absolutely horrible things from happening rather than make anything better. Sayori is still depressed, Yuri is still struggling with loneliness, Natsuki is still likely being abused, and Monika must cease to exist. The best that can be said is that at least you prevented Sayori from committing suicide; but even then she's now aware that the world she lives in is entirely fictional; this may be a Fate Worse than Death depending on what she does with the knowledge. This is, of course, assuming that the world in the game still continues on without the game's script; it's entirely possible that the characters are now all trapped in a Fate Worse than Death, in which the game is deleted but the character files remain. The only way to escape sadness in this game is to not play it at all.
  • This gets even sadder once you realize that even when Monika gets you all to herself, she cannot ever have a proper relationship with you. She loves you despite not knowing a thing about you, or even what gender you are. She can't see you, there's no way for you to input anything into the conversation... essentially your dates consist of you listening to her monologue to herself, with no way to truly reciprocate (that is, if you actually wanted to - which by this point you likely won't). She's convinced herself that just being in your presence is enough to satisfy her, even though she's simply talking to herself at this point.
  • Probably the worst thing about this is the fact that Monika and the protagonist are shown to be genuinely interested in each other from Act 1. So, the only thing that really does keep them apart is the programming.
  • Her situation gets even worse when her backstory is expanded on in Plus: the (in-universe) dev team know that she's sentient and wants to be free, but most of them just don't give a damn, still seeing her as little more than a lump of code they made rather than a being with aspirations, opinions and feelings of her own (if anything, they find her constant emotional turmoil funny). And she'll probably never escape this short of someone stealing her from the company, since her near-omnipotence is limited to the digital world.
• In the second act, Natsuki and Yuri's fights become far more intense, seemingly in equal parts because of Monika accentuating the more combative parts of their personalities and because Sayori isn't there to help them cool off. During their fight on the first day, it gets so heated that Monika suggests the two of you step outside. A few seconds later Natsuki runs out of the classroom with tears streaming down her face. On subsequent days, their fights don't always take the same form, but in one of them as Natsuki tries to talk to the main character, Yuri interjects with, "No one cares, Natsuki. Why don't you go look for coins under the vending machines?", causing Natsuki to once again start crying and run off.
  • The increasing hostility in Natsuki and Yuri's relationship is even more painful to watch after playing through the Side Stories in Plus, which dedicates a significant amount of time to the two girls getting past their initial poor first impressions of each other and growing to a mutual understanding and budding friendship. The player gets to watch the two of them gradually bond, look forward to each other's company, and spend time together reading during their lunch breaks. And all the while, you know full well that in the base game, the two of them will just continue to tear each other down more and more aggressively, until Yuri finally kills herself in a fit of madness.
• If you favour Natsuki in the first two days of Act 2, after she reviews your poem she will give you her own (which is actually written in Base64) and start asking why you didn't come read with her and how it was the only thing she had to look forward to all day long. This slowly drifts into a confession that her home life is a mess and that the club is the only place she feels safe and welcome, before begging the player not to take that away from her.
• Natsuki - true to her Tsundere character-type - generally comes off hostile and abrasive, but if you focus your attentions on her, she has a number of tear-jerking scenes. On their own, these scenes are painful enough, but taken together along with other details of Natsuki's troubled home life, it paints a picture of a very lonely girl desperate for some companionship and acknowledgement.
  • If you write her poems twice, you'll wind up helping her get manga down from a tall shelf. Since she doesn't want your help, she insists on standing on a wheeled office-chair, which predictably ends with her tumbling off the chair and onto the main character, dropping a box of her favourite manga in the process. When she discovers she creased one of them, the stress proves too much and she suddenly breaks down and starts crying. She explains through the sobs that every day just feels so difficult, with that day being a particularly awful one, and hints that the literature club is the only place in her life she can find some measure of comfort.
  • On the third poetry-sharing session, if Natsuki has liked all your poems to date, before she even gives you her poem to read she asks you if she thinks her poems are the best, which swiftly shifts to her begging the main character to say they are, even if he hates them, because - in her own words - she desperately needs to hear that from somebody. She then refuses to hand her poem over and confesses that she finds it so difficult to share her poems because no one ever takes her and her cutesy style seriously. When the main character assures her he does, she slowly hands the poem over before asking him to turn around because "I don't want you to... look at my face right now."
  • Natsuki is also the character Monika tampers with the least. As far as we know, all she does is make Natsuki's home life more abusive (it was slightly subtle in Act 1) and makes her forget a hurtful argument with Yuri so that Yuri starts to question herself. Monika chooses to indirectly mess with Natsuki instead through tampering with Yuri instead.
• The ending credits song, "Your Reality" is, in context, bittersweet. It's Monika post-Heel Realization singing a song to the player about whether her actions hurt people she cared about, and deciding that the player is best off without her. She'll perform it in both endings, so you'll either hear it right after Monika stops Sayori from going down the same route and then while she's deleting the game, or after Sayori thanks the player for Save Scumming to make sure all the girls are happy.
  And in your reality, if I don't know how to love you...~
  I'll leave you be.
• In Act 3, several of the "conversations" you can have with Monika really emphasize how lonely her existence and identity as a video game character is:
  Monika: It feels like everything is just there because it needs to be, and the actual setting is an afterthought. It's kind of giving me an identity crisis. All my memories are really hazy... I feel like I'm at home, but have no idea where 'home' is in the first place.
• For some, Monika's final letter to you at the very end of the credits, and then her subsequently deleting the game's files.
  This is my final goodbye to the Literature Club.
  I finally understand. The literature club is truly a place where no happiness can be found. To the very end, it continued to expose innocent minds to a horrific reality - a reality that our world is not designed to comprehend. I can't let any of my friends undergo that same hellish epiphany.
  For the time it lasted, I want to thank you. For making all of my dreams come true. For being a friend to all of the club members.
  And most of all, thank you for being a part of my literature club!
  With everlasting love, Monika
• Despite everything in the game telling you not to bother about him, the player character's situation still hurts. He wakes up, born in a world where he thinks he's been for years, only to spend a few days with some troubled girls, unable to do anything about his friend's depression and suicide, and is forced to forget her. His new friends go insane, he slowly starts disappearing, and he can't react to any of it because he was never alive at all. To be brought to life only to experience the worst life has to offer before being unceremoniously dumped back where you came from is just horrifyingly cruel.

Side Stories

• Trust: While the first half is fairly lighthearted with Sayori helping Monika to start the club, things take a dark turn when Monika sees Sayori's poetry and receives a glimpse into her inner demons. The story takes a deeper look into the depression that plagues her, with her revealing the depths with a single, harrowing written line:
  Sometimes I want to die
  • Sayori admits that she holds in all her inner anguish to avoid worrying anyone, and how difficult it was to open up about it. The chapter ends with Sayori openly crying in Monika's arms about how worthless she feels.
  • It gets worse: while Monika in this side story promises to help and support Sayori, we know that's not what ends up happening in the main game. DDLC+ reveals that the Monika in the side stories is not the Monika of the main game, but a "control" version that never gained awareness and really is as nice as main game Monika pretended to be.
• Understanding: Yuri gets a whole lot of focus here, as we see her trying her best to cope with being part of the Literature Club. Not helping things go her way is Sayori, who is just doing her job to make Yuri happy, despite being a type of person that Yuri has trouble being friends with. Yuri tries to get Sayori interested in Yuri's favorite fantasy novel series, to no avail. Eventually, Sayori decides to try and cheer her up by getting into the novel series, only for Yuri to collapse on the spot because Yuri assumed Sayori wouldn't even care to enjoy her interests, outside of pity. Luckily, this moment becomes more heartwarming as a result due to Sayori embracing her arms around Yuri and allowing all the time in the world for Yuri to properly vent her issues out to Sayori. We then learn that Yuri is too used to having people not like her for various reasons, and her reason of joining the Literature Club was due to the fact that it was one of very few places for her to try and meet new friends, and hopefully break free from social anxiety. The whole side-story is just one big deconstruction of Yuri's character that wasn't shown off enough in the main game proper, and it really hits home to those who deal with similar issues that Yuri seems to have, like social anxiety and breaking down from being too overwhelmed.
• Self-Love: This one delves deep into Natsuki's painful abusive relationship she has with her friends. She talks to Yuri about how her friends treat her rather badly, and yet despite that, she has a lot of history with them and can't bring herself to end the relationship she has with them. The anxiety and pain she feels and discusses with Yuri is one of the best examples of how the game frequently shows incredibly accurate portrayals of delicate situations, especially with how Natsuki tends to blame herself for the way the abuse carries on.
  • It gets even more heart-rending when Natsuki actually does end her abusive relationship. She confides in Yuri once again, but after a while of things seeming relatively normal, she has a panic attack. Not one of those Hollywood ones where they freak out and scream, but a real panic attack with her reduced to Broken Tears, pleading with Yuri to help her and feeling the urge to self-harm. Yet again, it's a realistic portrayal of a very, very real problem. While this does take a heartwarming turn when Yuri helps to keep Natsuki grounded, it's still a painful scene to watch, especially for those who have a history of panic attacks or abuse.

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