Doki Doki Literature Club! / Characters

The Love Interests and the player character who appear in Doki Doki Literature Club!.

WARNING: All spoilers are unmarked due to the inherent nature of discussing the game's plot twists. If you have not played to the end of the game, read at your own risk.

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Main Character

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/ddlc_mc.PNG

A sketch of what he'd look like if he were a ”real” character, as of DDLC Plus.

The player character, a typical Japanese high school student with typical otaku interests. His introduction to the Literature Club is what drives the story. You decide his name.

Accidental Pervert: Subverted. He helps Natsuki take a box of manga from a tall shelf by attempting to stabilize a swivel chair. However, he notices that he is in a position where he can look up her skirt, so he tries to look away. Unfortunately, Natsuki notices this and accuses him of setting her up... before eventually apologizing for taking out her bad day on him.
Adapted Out: He's completely absent in the side stories of Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! Instead of "Adapted-Out", he was never "Adapted-In" to the side stories' universe in the first place. In Doki Doki Literature Club Plus, an e-mail from one of the developers that created the Doki Doki universe reveals the side stories that took place in a separate control universe that they also created. It also reveals that the Main Character doesn't exist at all in the side stories' universe, as they never created him in either one. Someone else created him in the main universe. That developer suspects Monika did after she became self-aware, as an attempt to get in touch with the "user" (presumably the player). Sayori, in the first side story, does briefly reference him by mentioning a friend who likes anime, but perhaps a reference doesn't count as an actual character given the nature of things taking place in a pre-programmed artificial universe.
Anger Born of Worry: Not anger, per se, but he often seems frustrated when talking to Sayori, especially about her depression, since she claims he can't help her. He very much wants to help her, because she's his close friend and he cares about her, but unfortunately, depression isn't something one person can fix. His occasional sharpness stems mainly from wanting to help Sayori feel better, but having no clue how.
Anguished Declaration of Love: After Sayori gives her own anguished declaration of love, the player character has the option to reciprocate with one of his own.
Artificial Human: Possibly. One developer theorizes that Monika cobbled him together as a "fifth entity", giving players a proxy to interact with the world of DDLC. That being so, he still is perceived as being as human as the others by other characters of the universe, essentially making him this in the Doki Doki universe.
Ascended Extra: A retroactive example in the side stories of Plus. He was only mentioned in a passing comment by Sayori as being the "friend" that likes anime, and with him being the "Main Character" in the main game while the side stories chronologically take place before that, it would be an obvious reference. However, as revealed by the developers, he was never supposed to exist as a "character" in the first place, since they believed that Monika was responsible for cobbling together a "fifth entity" (i.e. him) for the actual players to interact with her. Meaning that while he does "technically" exist by virtue of Sayori's mentioning, he's no more than The Ghost used for flavoring purposes.
Audience Surrogate:
- Played with. He's, in a sense, even more a victim of the narrative than the girls. While the player obviously remembers and notices, the player character himself completely forgets Sayori after she's deleted along with everyone else, and in Act 2, he shows absolutely no reaction to the glitching, oddities like Natsuki forgetting her argument with Yuri, and even the more extreme outbursts by Natsuki and Yuri. By the time Yuri madly confesses her love to him in Act 2, he no longer even speaks, and when Monika finally starts addressing the player directly, he essentially ceases to exist until Act 4.
- In Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!, one of the programmers of the Doki Doki universe suspects it was Monika who created the Main Character in an attempt to contact and interact with the player. If true, that means he was created to be an audience surrogate in-universe. It would also explain why the MC never reacts to any of the Act 2 glitches or grows suspicious of Monika, while Yuri and Natsuki do.
Blank Slate:
- Despite having his own personality and traits, the Main Character is honestly nothing more than an avatar for the Players to navigate in the story. Word of God even confirms this in an anniversary stream on Twitch and his Reddit post.
  Dan Salvato: I don't imagine him as a character in the same way as the other characters. He's just a blank slate that says whatever is convenient.
  
  Dan Salvato: MC is the nameless, faceless self-insert character that you find so commonly in romance games. His main purpose is for the girls to interact with you. It's true that you can discover a few details about his life, but he's deliberately given little to no focus compared with everyone else.
- Confirmed in-universe too. One of the developers of the universe notes that he has "such limited and dissonant personality traits", and believes that's evidence Monika created him solely as a way to interact with the player.
Canon Name: He was called Ive in the DDLC Plus Gameplay Trailer.
- One of the in-universe developers of the program is named Ive. This could mean that Ive the developer was either beta testing the program during the trailer, or Ive is canonically the user who was playing as the MC, which would explain why he started being less talkative during company meetings.
Chick Magnet: Like any visual novel protagonist, all the female characters in the game are attracted to him. Most notable are Yuri and Natsuki, who only get to know the protagonist for about a week before attempting to kiss him. With the official DDLC+ sketch of him, you can really tell why the girls would find him attractive.
Closet Geek: He really likes anime and manga, but is conscious that people could look down on him for this. When Yuri asks what books he reads, he is embarrassed that he can only answer with "manga." Later, when Natsuki says that she likes manga, he is reluctant to tell her how much he likes it until he's sure that she's as into it as him. At one point, he even bemoans how difficult it is to find friends that won't judge a person's nerdy hobbies, much less ones that share them.
Decoy Protagonist: While he's set up as the protagonist at first, the story's more focused on Monika being self-aware, and the actual protagonist ends up being the player themselves when he is removed from the narrative near the end of Act 2.
Eating the Eye Candy: Appreciates the beautiful girls in the club.
Empty Shell: After Yuri's suicide, he is rendered totally mute, and by the start of Act 3, he serves as nothing more than an empty vessel Monika uses to facilitate communication with the player.
Everyone Has Standards: He's meant to be portrayed as a complete dick since that's how Salvato interprets the typical visual novel protagonist. That said, he's genuinely horrified after witnessing Sayori and Yuri's individual suicides, to the point where he has a Heroic BSoD.
Extreme Doormat: Downplayed. He mostly acts like this during the earlier parts of Acts 1 and 2. He allows the other characters to guilt him into joining the Literature Club despite his lack of interest.
The Faceless: Only once do we even see him onscreen, when Sayori hugs him toward the end of Act 1, and only the back of his head is seen. All we can see is that he has short brown hair. A possible foreshadowing of the fact that he is not truly an Audience Surrogate, although it could just as well be explained by his being a supposed audience surrogate. DDLC Plus does have a piece of unlockable artwork showing what he would have looked like (from the torso up), however.
Forced to Watch: Watches Yuri's corpse decomposing over the weekend because he can't move from his spot. Interestingly, it was because of a glitch, making this a meta version for the player.
The Gadfly: More prominently towards Natsuki, who also teases him back. This is perhaps best seen when they bake cupcakes together. At one point, they try to fling icing at each other, but the player character gains the upper hand and stops her. After Natsuki apologizes for calling him gross (the player character told her that there are guys who are into her body type) and tells him that he should not be teasing girls, the player character impishly takes Natsuki's finger and licks off the icing, flustering her.
Geek Physiques:
- From what we can see of his body in the main game, fitting with his borderline NEET status.
- Averted with his official DDLC+ sketch, however, looking much more fit and broad-shouldered.
The Ghost: This was his entire role in the side stories of DDLC+, being only a passing mention by Sayori as the "friend" who likes anime. That's also getting into the fact that he doesn't really exist as his own character in the first place.
Harem Seeker: A minor case. Even if you, the player, are focused on another girl, he will still have an obvious moment with whichever girl comes round to his house to help with the festival preparations. No doubt, walking out just in time to see them nearly kiss does no good for Sayori's already shattered confidence.
Heroic BSoD:
- When he finds Sayori having committed suicide, he is in abject horror and guilt and tries to deny that it had happened until he bitterly accepts the reality.
- After Yuri stabs herself to death, he suffers a massive one, so much so that it leaves him catatonic for the entire weekend. Of course, this only applies if you interpret the scene with him as a character being present as opposed to the game glitching while he's essentially stopped existing.
I Let Gwen Stacy Die: He feels responsible for Sayori's death and blames himself for not doing anything to prevent it. Not that he could prevent it from happening, because Sayori killed herself before he even woke up.
Innocently Insensitive: He's irritated by Sayori's arrival at the beginning of the game, and criticizes her tendency to oversleep. Her oversleeping is a symptom of her growing depression, and her friendship with the main character is her biggest coping mechanism.
Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Not so much towards the other girls, but he can be a bit of a jerk toward Sayori as he constantly criticizes her flaws such as her oversleeping, overeating, and general klutziness, to the point that the first thing he says (in his head) about her is that he considers her annoying. He does ease up on her when she opens up to him about her depression, tells her that he will always be there for her, and hugs her at one point to emphasize that. He also very much blames himself for her suicide (not that he could do anything to prevent it because Sayori killed herself before he woke up). On another note, the player character clearly sees Sayori as a good friend and admires her greatly even before he learns about her depression. When listening to Sayori's conversation with Monika about the Literature Club's activity for the festival, he notes Sayori's ability to put her mind to things and make them come to life.
Living Emotional Crutch: To Sayori. Extremely. When their relationship starts to change, she is seriously affected.
Made Myself Sad: Near the end of Act 1, when talking to Monika, he cracks another joke about Sayori oversleeping only to immediately remember what she said about her depression, causing him to shut up and feel bad about what he said.
A Man Is Always Eager: Downplayed. He's certainly pleased that the Literature Club is full of attractive girls, but this isn't his only motivation for joining.
Meaningful Name: His Canon Name is Ive, which is a written proposition of oneself.
- Ive is also the Frisian form of Ivo, which means "yew tree". In some cultures such as Celtic, the yew tree symbolizes death and rebirth. Acts 1, 2 and 3 eventually kill off the girls, while Act 4 has Sayori, Natsuki and Yuri brought back to life, only for Monika or Sayori to delete the game.
My God, What Have I Done?: No matter what, he blames himself for Sayori's suicide.
NEET: Sayori encourages him to join a club out of fear that he's destined to become one.
Nice Guy: Downplayed, as he wasn’t written to be a “real” character, but he is generally polite and considerate towards the girls in the game. Although, he's initially less so with Sayori (a lifelong friend whom he tends to take for granted and teases for her flaws, such as her constant oversleeping) and with Yuri and Natsuki's first argument (where his thought process is more about impressing one of the girls rather than defusing the argument or even saying what he really thinks). Anyhow, aside from genre inevitability, this is basically why at least Yuri and Natsuki fall for him: he's patient and considerate enough to naturally give them the opportunity to finally get close to someone in spite of their quirky personalities.
The One Guy: The only male character in an otherwise all-female cast.
Otaku: He is an avid fan of anime and manga, at one point becoming mildly annoyed that something could disrupt his daily anime watching.
Out of Focus: As the game goes on, he starts contributing less to the story and eventually more or less vanishes from the story after Yuri's suicide. On a meta note, he's also the only character in the game never to appear in any official merchandise.
Perpetual Frowner: His official DDLC+ sketch of him has this expression. Even in-game, you can pretty much guess his expression through his dialogue.
Player and Protagonist Integration: Controller type. He has his own personality and opinions, but you control his major choices. Monika can perceive this dynamic between the two of you, eventually noting that you are distinct entities. It is probably why he is eventually removed from the narrative (or merely has his voice silenced, it is somewhat unclear) near the end of Act 2, allowing Monika to address the player more directly, at which point it becomes You Are You and Monika is directly addressing the one playing the game.
Player Character: He's the avatar for the player and in fact, this is the reason why his character is not at all brought up in the end game, since the actual living player is the one Monika is after.
Pretty Boy: The official DDLC+ sketch of him as an actual character depicts him this way.
Ridiculously Average Guy: He's a typical romance visual novel protagonist. He has a (relatively) inoffensive and relatable personality, and the female characters are attracted to him despite his mundanity. This is later averted as his official DDLC+ sketch depicts him as a Bishōnen.
School Uniforms are the New Black: Judging from what little is seen of him, he appears to be wearing an (appropriately enough, black) school uniform at all times.
She Is Not My Girlfriend: With everyone interested in him, he repeatedly has to tell this to someone about someone else, although it's not always true that he's not pursuing that girl.
Took a Level in Kindness: He's a lot nicer to Sayori in Act 4, admiring her strong points and joining the Literature Club as her friend rather than for the cute girls. Sayori being the new president might have something to do with this.
Vitriolic Best Buds: A largely one-sided case with Sayori, whom he pokes fun at for her behaviors and habits in a Brutal Honesty fashion. This may come across as harsher to the player (who unlike him, is just meeting Sayori), but he clearly does mean well and tries to be there for her when she reveals to him that she suffers from chronic depression, and has a Heroic BSoD when he finds her body. In turn, Sayori can poke fun at the player character, like when she chides him for staying up late and says that he is not in the napping club.
What Happened to the Mouse?: Towards the end of Act 2, he essentially exits the narrative when he stops talking and no longer shows any reaction to anything. His apparent removal is not addressed like it is with the girls. Perhaps the only acknowledgment of this is Monika dismissing him as irrelevant next to you, the player. This is partially averted when he seamlessly returns for Act 4, but the final ending doesn't shed much light on his ultimate fate (if any).

Sayori

Bundle of Sunshine

"You're wrong. Nothing happened to me. I've always been like this. You're just seeing it for the first time."

She is your Childhood Friend who invites you to the Literature Club. Sayori has a bright, vibrant personality, even if she can get a little klutzy.

All-Loving Hero: Sayori is unfailingly kind to everyone, treating everyone as an instant friend and making it her mission to make them happy. In the side stories, this actually works against her in her first meetings with Yuri (who thinks she's just humoring her) and Natsuki (who is uncomfortable with instant intimacy) and requires a little communication to resolve.
Always Late: Sayori often sleeps in and is usually late for school. Sayori later confesses to the protagonist that she suffers from depression hence why she is frequently late for school. Because of her depression, Sayori often is unable to think of a good reason to get out of bed each morning. In act 4 of the game however, Sayori mentions that she has been waking up on time lately, implying that her depression has been alleviated to some degree.
Ambiguous Situation: The player knows that Sayori tried to tear at the rope to free herself, but it is unclear why. Monika gives two probable explanations: Sayori either changed her mind a few seconds in but was too late, or it was her survival instinct kicking in.
Anger Born of Worry: The time when Sayori scolded Yuri for bringing a bottle of wine into class can be interpreted as this, in which case, Sayori overreacted and made Yuri more reserved in the process.
Angry Cheek Puff: She tends to do this◊ when she's annoyed or embarrassed◊, typically as a result of the protagonist's teasing.
Anguished Declaration of Love: She gives one to the player character in Act 1.
Sayori: [tearfully] I like you so much that I want to die! That's how I feel! And... and...
Ascended Extra: A poem rather than a character in this case - in Sayori’s scene from Day 2, she recites part of a poem to the player, the content of which subtly foreshadows her inner conflict. In the side stories, the poem reappears in full, revealing that Sayori wrote it herself and that it is about why she tries so hard to make other people happy.
Barefoot Suicide: She's not wearing shoes when the Player Character finds her dead body hanging from the ceiling. This makes sense, as she's in her pajamas.
Beware the Nice Ones: Sayori is unfailingly kind to everyone and loves making other people laugh, but Monika can recall a time when Yuri once snuck a small bottle of wine and offered it to the class in an attempt to be nice. Sayori got really mad and yelled at her for it, and apparently, it made Yuri much more reserved in the clubroom (though that might be an instance of Anger Born of Worry).
Big Eater: It's mentioned during Natsuki's route that the player character should keep the cupcakes away from Sayori so that she won't eat them all before the festival. Overeating can be a symptom of stress and depression.
Break the Cutie: Played with a bit. Sayori is already pretty much broken at the beginning of the story, but it is heavily implied that Monika's jealousy towards her causes her to try to break her even further.
Brutal Honesty: Her reaction if you write a poem she dislikes amounts to this. While Natsuki and Yuri dance around the issue, Sayori outright declares the poem to be terrible.
Sayori: [happily] Your poem is really bad!
Came Back Strong: Sayori, as well as Yuri and Natsuki, are resurrected in Act 4. Because Monika no longer exists, Sayori gains her Club President role and everything that comes with it. This turns out badly if you get the default ending, as she quickly starts to go mad with power. In the Golden Ending, however, she thanks the player for going back to spend time with everyone and making the club a happy place.
Character Focus: In the side stories Trust, Understanding and Balance.
Character Tics: She sometimes leans forward and pokes her forefingers together while puffing her cheeks, especially when she calls the player character a "meanie".
Childhood Friend Romance: She is a romantic option for the player character. Sadly, it won't work out due to her suicide.
Clawing at Own Throat: After witnessing the aftermath of her suicide, the player can note that her fingers are covered in blood. Monika states in Act 3 that Sayori's hanging was not instantaneous and that she was conscious enough to try to claw at the rope, either through changing her mind halfway through or just natural survival instinct.
Cruel and Unusual Death: If you look closely at the picture of her hanged body, she has blood on her hands. Monika can bring up in Act 3 that Sayori's death wasn't quick and that she was conscious enough to try to tear the rope away, either out of having second thoughts or survival instinct.
Cuddle Bug: She frequently glomps the other girls, most often Natsuki, who is always mildly annoyed at being called cute. Even more so in the side stories, where it's referred to by all as her "hug energy".
Cute Clumsy Girl: She's notorious for finding ways to hurt herself or to drop things. One Noodle Incident the player character keeps heckling her about involves her accidentally starting a house fire when trying to clean up.
The Cutie: So much so that the Doki Doki Literature Club! subreddit has unofficially nicknamed her "Cinnamon Bun."
Dies Wide Open: She is found hanged with her eyes open.
The Ditz: She's often somewhat scatterbrained. This is treated as endearing and comical, like when she, after defusing an argument between Natsuki and Yuri about their poetic styles, says that there is nothing wrong with Natsuki being cute and that Yuri's breasts have always been big and beautiful or when she mixes up the words "retribution" with "restitution" or "revolution". This is perhaps yet another clue about her depression (since it often makes people forgetful), but since the side stories also mention her impeccable talent for zoning out, this might just be how she is.
Don't You Dare Pity Me!: The reason she has such a bad reaction to anyone showing concern for her is that she hates feeling like a drain on their time and effort. The side stories allude to past events, possibly when she was more open about her feelings, making her feel this way.
Driven to Suicide: Sayori hangs herself on the morning of the festival on the first playthrough, regardless of how you respond to her confession. It's implied through Sayori's last poem (which is mostly a Madness Mantra of "get out of my head" over and over) that Monika was especially triggering Sayori just to get her to kill herself.
Establishing Character Moment: We first encounter her joyfully running towards the protagonist, waving her arms and oblivious to everyone else around her.
Face–Heel Turn: In the bad ending, when she becomes the president of the Literature Club in Act 4, she too is corrupted by the knowledge of the true nature of her reality.
Fan Disservice: She's wearing a cute outfit with her top opened just enough to expose her collarbone when the player character discovers her hanged corpse.
Fiery Redhead: Has pinkish-orangeish hair and is a wild Genki Girl.
First Girl Wins: If you decide to confess your love to her, complete with a unique CG of Sayori hugging the protagonist, which is the only time a player can even vaguely see what he looks like. Sadly, it does not make her any happier...
Sayori: Why won't the rainclouds go away?
For Happiness: Her goal in life for everyone around her.
Four-Temperament Ensemble: She first appears as a Sanguine character, being a Genki Girl and The Heart of the club. Then she breaks down and confesses her depression to the player, making her Melancholic.
Freak Out: She has two of them: One if you friend zone her near the end of Act 1 (it might happen even if you confess to her as well, albeit offscreen, seeing as either option still leads to her suicide) and then another as a hidden Easter Egg if you start the game without Monika's character file.
Fun Personified: She hums to herself, dances through the corridors like no one's watching, and directs much of her energy towards making other people smile, mostly because she considers their happiness much more important than hers. In the side stories, it occasionally backfires when (as she freely admits) she has trouble being serious, including situations that might actually warrant it.
Genki Girl: Almost invariably bright, cheerful and talkative, and she seldom seems to walk anywhere (with the narration often describing her as energetically "spinning" or "prancing" instead). It's partially a coping mechanism for her depression - if she acts happy, then people don't worry about her - but she also genuinely enjoys making other people laugh.
Glitch Entity: In-Universe: After her character file gets deleted, she still occasionally appears in a glitchy manner. Inverted Trope in the sense that she was supposed to exist, and the glitches happen because she doesn't anymore.
Go Mad from the Revelation:
- If you delete Monika early, Sayori becomes the club president and has the same realization as the former, leading her to crash the game and delete everyone's character files, giving a Non-Standard Game Over in the form of a monochrome image of her hanging corpse, and if you wait long enough the following text in her handwriting will appear. It won't go away unless you have a backup. Otherwise, you have to reinstall the game:
  Now everyone can be happy.
- Implied in the game's normal ending. She once again becomes Club President, but instead of crashing the game and deleting everyone, she tries to take over, just like Monika. Based on Monika's circumstances throughout the game and Sayori's behavior in the aforementioned Non-Standard Game Over, it was likely a bumpy ride. Fortunately, a Not Quite Dead Monika intervenes before she can do anything.
Goodbye, Cruel World!: Her final poem is essentially a suicide note combined with a Madness Mantra of "Get out of my head", ending with a rather somber note:
But a poem is never actually finished.
It just stops moving.
Greater Need Than Mine: Deconstructed. As with many depressives in real life, she puts other people's comfort before her own needs, to the point of insisting that the MC not worry about her. MC even points out that her unconditional selflessness is likely to get her hurt.
Green-Eyed Epiphany: At first, she introduced the Main Character to the Literature Club so that he could have more friends. However, seeing the Main Character becoming close with the other Literature Club members causes her more grief than happiness due to her own feelings for him.
Guile Hero: She may not look it, but Sayori has a certain degree of social cunning. The plot kicks off when she convinces the player character to join the Literature Club by mentioning she'd already promised she'd bring someone and that Natsuki made cupcakes. She also tries to trick the player character into buying her a snack, but he sees right through her ruse, implying she's done this before. Sayori is also the Vice President of the club, and it's apparent how she got the position when she easily defuses the argument between Natsuki and Yuri in Act 1; Monika notes that while she may look like a good leader, Sayori is usually better when it comes to dealing with people.
Hair Color Dissonance: Occasionally, fans perceive her as having either light brown or strawberry blonde hair. The game's character artist posted a color guide for her and Monika, showing that hers is actually coral pink.
Hair Intakes: Averted. The other girls have their hair styled this way, but Sayori is the only girl whose hair is not, as it is too messy to maintain a regular shape.
Heal the Cutie: Implied to have happened to some degree in Act 4. Act 1 establishes that Sayori's depression is why she tends to oversleep and has a hard time preparing for school, while Act 4 has her consistently waking up on time. Given this, it implies that her depression has been alleviated to some degree, and it is much easier for Sayori to be genuinely happy. Also, in the side stories, Sayori's friendship with Monika allows her to open up about her depression, and thanks to the club, she has more good days than bad after that. By the time of Reflection, she can have a frank discussion about it with Natsuki, which helps the other girl with her own anxieties.
Natsuki: But... you're always so happy?
Sayori: (smiling) I am not my feelings.
The Heart: It noted that she's basically the one holding the club together when things get heated. When she goes home early in Act 1, everyone notices that Sayori is conspicuous by her absence when Yuri and Natsuki start arguing again, and Monika has trouble breaking it up. When Sayori is erased in the second cycle, arguments between Natsuki and Yuri break out more often, the warping of their personalities certainly makes it even worse, and Monika finds that she doesn't have what it takes to restore order. When Sayori is restored in Act 4 and made club president in Monika's absence, Natsuki and Yuri actually get along without any major fights.
Heavy Sleeper: Sayori is often late to school because she sleeps in. It's later revealed that this is due to her being so depressed that she has a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. This is averted in Act 4, where the main character comments that she's generally waking up on time these days.
Hidden Depths:
- Yuri has plenty of words that tend to be darker in tone in the poem minigame... but so does Sayori, of all characters. It's Foreshadowing that she's been living with chronic depression for most of her life.
- On a lighter note, Sayori may be ditzy, but the player character suggests that she might not be as oblivious as she seems. Sayori tricked Natsuki into baking cupcakes so that the player character could come over, and she attempted to trick him into buying her a snack (that the player character manages to catch her implies that she had done this before). In addition, she can be serious if she needs to be, which the player character finds surprising. Sayori easily defuses an argument between Yuri and Natsuki about their poetic styles, and the player character can listen in on a conversation between Sayori and Monika about what the literature club should do for the festival.
  Sayori: We're probably gonna seem really lame compared to all the other clubs, though...
  Monika: Hmm... Well, we can't give up. The festival is our chance to show everyone what literature is all about! The problem is that the idea of a literature club sounds too dense and intellectual... But it's not like that at all, you know? We just need a way of showing that to everyone... Something that speaks to their creative minds.
  Sayori: Mmmmmmmmmmm..... That doesn't solve the problem, though!
  Monika: Eh? What do you mean?
  Sayori: Even if we come up with the most fun thing ever... Nobody will come in the first place if it's a literature event. So it's more important to figure out how to get people to show up in the first place, you know? And after they come, we can do the thing to speak to their creative minds.
- According to Monika, Sayori once scolded Yuri for smuggling a bottle of wine into the school, making her more reserved in the clubroom. This implies that Sayori might be very serious about adhering to school rules.
- The "Trust" side story reveals that Sayori enjoyed writing poetry even before joining the Literature Club: in fact, she's responsible for piquing Monika's own interest, and subsequently the development of poetry into one of the club's main activities.
Hypocritical Humor: Sayori can rebuke the player for staying up late and dozing off in class... yet she tends to oversleep.
Idealist vs. Pragmatist: A downplayed and very low-stakes example, but she's the Pragmatist to Monika's Idealist when it comes to running the Literature Club. Sayori is fully aware of the fact that the club is a hard sell for most people, and that Monika's efforts to "speak to their creative minds" won't matter if no one shows up to begin with. As such, she prioritizes getting people through the door first and foremost, and she's perfectly willing to resort to shallow methods to do so, such as when she bribes the main character with the promise of cupcakes to get him to attend a meeting.
I Let Gwen Stacy Die: Act 1 ends with the player character finding her body and clearly undergoing Survivor Guilt over being unable to help her.
Implausible Hair Color: Japanese with coral pink hair (though less implausible than Natsuki and Yuri). Even shrugging it off as hair dye doesn't quite work, as dyed hair is frowned upon in most Japanese schools.
Innocent Blue Eyes: Has bright blue eyes and is also the most innocent character of the story.
Insecure Love Interest: Deconstructed. It's not just that Sayori doesn't think she's good enough for you... she thinks she's not good enough for anyone to care about. Even though people express concern for her or try to be her friend, she feels that they're just "wasting" their time and energy on her. The protagonist tries to tell her that this isn't true, but sadly, it doesn't take.
Kill the Cutie: Sayori has a friendly, likeable characterization; she's energetic, she's able to defuse arguments in the club easily, and deep down wants everyone to be happy. So it's painful to find that she committed suicide by hanging due to Monika's Mind Rape, especially since she confessed to having depression the day before.
Leitmotif: Sayori's version of "Okay, Everyone" features a ukulele and a soft playing flute, likely to represent her Genki Girl personality. In the side stories, her leitmotif is Peachy Pie, a more mellow version of Ohayou Sayori! which now features a piano (traditionally associated with Monika) playing along in harmony.
Love Redeems: If you've gone through all of the girls' routes in Act 1 and gotten all of their CGs, Sayori won't go crazy with her newfound Medium Awareness in Act 4, being earnestly touched by how you went out of your way to try and make all of the girls happy. This is unfortunately followed by her breaking the news that you've reached the end of the game, but unlike in the Downer Ending, she lets you go with a genuine "thank you" and without Monika intervening.
Madness Mantra: Her last poem has one. As in, truly the last.
Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get. Out. Of. My. Head.
Meaningful Name: While admittedly an uncommon name, Sayori can have several meanings depending on what kanji is being used, with the most notable being:
- "Cherry blossom, rely on" (桜依) which is indicative of Sayori's dependability as the Vice President (such as breaking up fights between club members) and her sudden, untimely death, much like how cherry blossom trees don't last long after blooming.
- "Already/now, peaceful" (早和) referring to Sayori's status as The Heart of the club.
Mid-Suicide Regret: Implied; when the player first sees Sayori's hanged corpse, blood is visible on her fingers, indicating she attempted to claw herself out of the noose. Monika notes that Sayori's hanging did not kill her instantly, so she very likely changed her mind a few seconds in, but it was too late. However, Monika also muses that Sayori very likely clawed at the rope out of survival instinct and would not have changed her mind anyway.
Never Gets Fat: She never seems to gain any noticeable weight outwardly despite her Big Eater tendencies.
Nice Girl: Sayori is kind to a fault; really, the worst thing you can say about her is that she can be a bit of a mooch and is klutzy. She has a genuine desire to make other people happy, and she's a clear factor in holding the group together which becomes even more apparent after her suicide.
Obfuscating Stupidity: Suggested by the player character more than once, both to himself and others, that Sayori probably isn't nearly as oblivious as she might seem and can actually be quite crafty, has total understanding of her actions, surroundings, and feelings of other people. When you consider that a lot of her more clumsy and airheaded moments are a result of her depression (or perhaps even an act for the player character, whom she knows likes to look after her) and that she intentionally puts up a carefree, Genki Girl facade so that no one would know what was really going on in her head, he turns out to be quite right.
O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The first sign that something is wrong is that she seems quiet and distant, even leaving the club meeting early. It's her depression acting up so badly that she can't even pretend to be happy anymore.
Pink Is Feminine: She wears a pink shirt in her casual wear.
The Pollyanna: She even tells herself to Think Happy Thoughts when things go wrong.
Ret-Gone: After her suicide in Act 1 and starting up a new game, the game initially treats her like she's still there, but every mention of anything relating to her is rendered in broken sprites and garbage text until the game resets. After the reset, all mentions of her are gone, including the player character mentioning that he walks alone to school, despite previously stating that he would walk with her in Act 1, and her position of Vice President going to Yuri with no comment from anyone. Monika does restore her after Act 3, but it comes with a case of Medium Awareness-induced Came Back Wrong.
Rose-Haired Sweetie: Her hair color is a more subdued pink than Natsuki's, but she definitely fits personality-wise.
Sacrificial Lion: Her suicide marks the point where the game begins descending into Psychological Horror.
Sad Clown: Her Genki Girl behavior is a coping mechanism for her depression. She feels that if she made everyone laugh and be happy, she'd have no reason to be unhappy - or at least, they would have no reason to worry about her or see her as a burden.
Shy Finger-Twiddling: Her tic, especially when she is embarrassed or pouting about something (such as whenever she calls the player character a "meanie").
Signature Laugh: It's written as "Ehehe~".
Sleepy Depressive: Sayori states that she oversleeps and is late for school because of her depression. This gets downplayed, if not averted, in Act 4, where she has been waking up on time on a more regular basis. This also implies that her depression has been alleviated to some degree, allowing her to wake up on time and prepare for school with less difficulty than previously.
Stepford Smiler: Her Genki Girl appearance is at least partially an attempt to hide/deal with her depression.
Sunny Sunflower Disposition: Her positive attitude brightens the club's atmosphere. An illustration by official artist Satchely actually has Sayori holding a sunflower and saying "It will be all right!"
Trademark Favorite Food: Cookies. Natsuki also (correctly!) guesses her favorite ice cream flavor is cookie dough.
Tritagonist: Her causing the MC to join the club kicks off the plot; her suicide is the game's big Wham Shot that turns the game from a harem comedy to a psychological horror game. She becomes the Club President after Monika has her Heel Realization, and her actions after becoming the president (influenced by whether or not the player does the right things) determine whether the game has a Bittersweet Ending or Downer Ending.
Un-person: Shortly after the player restarts the game after her suicide, the same opening scene is played, but her name and sprite are glitched out. The game then abruptly cuts to a different version of the opening scene, and the rest of the scenario plays out as if she never existed.
Unkempt Beauty: Besides her visibly messy hair (in the side stories, she notes to Yuri that she would love long hair, but she's terrible at taking care of it), the protagonist points out that Sayori's school uniform is worn somewhat haphazardly. Her ribbon is not straight and looks loosely tied, her shirt is slightly unbuttoned, the collar of the shirt is crooked and has a toothpaste stain, and her blazer is fully unbuttoned (though in this case, it is because her blazer is a bit too small, and the protagonist buttoned it up before admitting that it feels strange to see it that way). It doesn't harm her cuteness one bit - although it is a sign of her finding looking after herself difficult due to her depression.
Verbal Tic: Sayori's Signature Laugh.
Vitriolic Best Buds: Largely one-sided on the player character's end, as he would typically make very blunt remarks, but the dynamic is still present. Sayori is capable of sassing back at him, like flatly telling him that his poem is terrible if he writes one she does not like, or startling him awake and then chiding him for falling asleep in the club.
Sayori: Ehehe, sorry. Wait! Actually, I'm not sorry at all! It's your fault for sleeping like that! This isn't the napping club!
With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: As with Monika, it's implied that being president of the Literature Club in Act 4 gives her a certain degree of awareness of her status as a video game character, as well as the ability to modify the game itself. The result drives her to an unhealthy obsession with the player, which is only cut short by Monika's intervention and termination of the game.
Yandere: Implied in the game's default ending. After a third intro scene of the player joining the club, this time with Sayori as the President and no Monika, Sayori drops the bomb that she has also gained Medium Awareness. Once she does so, she changes the background to Monika's room in Act 3 and moves up to the screen, rambling about how she wants to be together forever. It's safe to infer that, in this ending, Sayori has the same obsession with the player. However, unlike Monika and Yuri, Sayori only becomes one if you do certain actions; if you save scum, you get a different ending where Sayori thanks the player.

Natsuki

Cute on the Outside

"I guess it's fun sharing something you like with someone else."

A small, pink-haired girl in the club who, while she appears cute, is actually quite sour and feisty. She makes excellent cupcakes.

Abusive Parents: Downplayed in the original scripting, where her dad is evidently a stern and somewhat absent figure who isn't helping her insecurity complex. She is worried about him finding out about her "childish" manga habit and is uncomfortable about not being seen to eat plenty when he cooks. However, once Monika starts rewriting the story, it's heavily implied that she alters Natsuki's father to be outright physically and emotionally abusive and neglectful. Mostly absent in the side stories, where Natsuki's main conflict is with her other friends, and the only arguments she mentions having with her dad are fairly typical teenage ones about grades and tidying her room.
Ain't Too Proud to Beg: She is not happy to ask the protagonist to do something about Yuri's obvious Sanity Slippage, but she does it anyway.
Animal Motifs: Cats. She is introduced having baked cupcakes shaped like little cats. She, like a cat, is small, mean, called cute by others, and shows fangs. Her casual outfit even includes a cat logo on the shirt.
The Baby of the Bunch: Is stated multiple times to be the youngest member of the Literature Club, and looks even younger.
Beige Prose: Compared with Yuri's style, Natsuki's poetry is shorter, with simpler words and fewer descriptions. She ends up disagreeing with Yuri about this, leading to an argument on the second day. This argument also happens in the side stories (with Monika trying and epically failing to moderate the discussion), but the two manage to work it out on their own terms later.
Berserk Button: Natsuki hates it if she isn't taken seriously, whether it's her writing, her hobbies, or just her overall demeanor.
Big Guy, Little Guy: Natsuki, who is 4'11", is the Little Guy to the 5'5" Yuri's Big Guy.
The Blank: Natsuki is reduced to an empty husk immediately after she slips the protagonist a plea for help before ordering them to disregard what her note said.
Bottle Episode: The side story Self Love features Natsuki and Yuri in an isolated stairwell (albeit over several separate days) with Monika and Sayori almost entirely absent.
Break the Cutie: While she's Out of Focus in Act 2, she still goes through hell. Arguments between her and Yuri get worse, with both sides saying cruel things to each other. The first argument ends with Natsuki running out of the room in tears; it's unclear what Yuri said or did to provoke such a reaction, but it's implied to be pretty bad based on her own behavior afterward. Natsuki then has her memory wiped of the incident but becomes increasingly neglected by the game due to Yuri and Monika. Not only that, but she watches Yuri slip deeper into mental instability, and even outright begs the player character to help her, only for Monika to interfere. The act ends with Natsuki finding Yuri's dead body and running out of the room, then getting deleted by Monika offscreen. All this, on top of her implied abuse. What's worse is that while it's heavily implied she was tampered with too, she still seems fairly stable compared with the other girls.
Brutal Honesty: She claims to be all about this, but more often than not, she has real difficulty admitting her true thoughts to everyone. In the side stories, she acknowledges that it only really comes out when she's angry, and she hates that facet of herself.
Bust-Contrast Duo: She and Yuri are the poster girls for this trope: she is a flat-chested Tsundere, while Yuri is buxom and soft-spoken.
Character Focus: The side stories Respect, Balance and Self Love.
Character Tics: She turns her head to the side, especially whenever she cries.
Clingy Jealous Girl: Downplayed, but in her route, she briefly worries when the Main Character says he's been thinking about Sayori. She quickly realizes that he's worrying about Sayori's wellbeing and calms down, but still tells him to word his sentences more carefully next time.
Closet Geek: Downplayed. She loves manga and keeps it in the clubroom. While the rest of the club obviously knows about her interest, she's still hesitant to talk about it. She and the player character can bond over this. It's implied that she's somewhat cagey about her interest because her classmates (and possibly also her father) judge her for it. In the "Side Stories", her friends even mock her for it when she tells them she joined the literature club so she could get rid of her manga.
Curtains Match the Windows: She has pink hair and pink eyes (the latter being explicitly referenced in the text at one point, to a slightly bizarre effect).
Cute Little Fangs: More clearly visible when having scenes with her.
Desperately Craves Affection: There's an Easter Egg obtainable by doing Natsuki's route in Act 2, then spending time with Yuri. After Natsuki gives you a poem in code, she'll rant about how you left her hanging in favor of Yuri and how lonely she is. She's also established to have a neglectful home life, and it's implied that she doesn't have many friends outside the club.
Ecchi: The side stories imply, rather amusingly, that she has some in her manga collection. When she offers to let Sayori pick a manga to read, we get this exchange:
Sayori: Shouldn't this woman be wearing more clothes?
Natsuki: NOT THAT ONE!
Emotional Regression: When repeatedly challenged, she often becomes awkward and tongue-tied, and then aggressive, and then often simply bursts into tears.
Emotionally Tongue-Tied: Related to the above, she often prefers passing notes or poems instead of directly talking about her feelings.
Fiery Redhead: If you can consider pink as light red, she fits the label.
Four-Temperament Ensemble: As the short-heighted and short-tempered girl of the club, she's Choleric.
Freak Out: Upon seeing a dead Yuri in the original game. In the side stories, she has a panic attack after cutting ties with her other friend group. The latter becomes a heartwarming Friendship Moment when Yuri helps her through it.
Friendship Moment: Yuri and Natsuki frequently get into arguments due to their different writing styles, which only gets worse after Act 1. That said, Natsuki seems concerned that Yuri is undergoing Sanity Slippage, and even slips you a note under the guise of a poem about asking you to find a way to help her. Unfortunately, Monika is aware of this and tampers with the game to have Natsuki tell you to disregard it.
The Gadfly: When she and the player character develop a friendship, she becomes this to him, and he also teases her back. This is perhaps best shown when they bake cupcakes together when at one point she teases him by calling him "gross".
Natsuki: (grinning mischievously) Ahaha! You get all sour when a girl calls you gross. I finally found your weakness, [player].
Protagonist: (sulky) Please spare me...
Girlish Pigtails: She has a typical "tsundere tails" hairstyle; two locks in pigtails, with the rest down. Adding to her cutesy appearance are the ribbons holding her pigtails and a cross-shaped piece holding part of her bangs.
Glurge Addict: Natsuki likes cute things, like cupcakes with cat faces. She also likes poems with cuter, happier words, though her own poems are still about things like falling short and being persecuted for your hobbies, just written with simpler, cutesier language. This is just one thing that puts her at odds with Yuri.
Hates Being Called Cute: She screams at Sayori when she calls her cute. She also really hates when Yuri calls her poems "cute", since she considers it condescending and defends the symbolic language of her poetry despite her simplistic writing choices.
Hidden Depths: She's much more comfortable exposing her cute side once she knows you'll not tease or condescend to her about it. Her Tsundere tendencies are also much more reserved in her Act 1 event outside of school.
I Just Want to Have Friends: She's visibly worried about fading into the background if more people were to join the club. In the side stories, she sticks with and defends her other (rather malicious) friend group for quite some time and has a panic attack even after deciding to cut them out of her life.
Inferiority Superiority Complex: Natsuki has a big one, and her biggest Berserk Button is not being taken seriously because of her stature or cutesy writing style. This becomes significantly more apparent if you dedicate all three of your poems to her, where she flat-out begs the player character to say he likes her poems because she badly needs that acknowledgment from someone. In the rewritten Act 2, it's strongly hinted she has an abusive father, whose attacks - physical and emotional - largely fuel this tendency. In the side stories, however, it is her other friends (who consistently treat her as the Butt-Monkey of their group) who are to blame.
Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
- Natsuki acts like a typical Tsundere - she is abrasive, sarcastic, and a bit arrogant around the player character but actually has a crush on him. Also, while she and Yuri do not always get along, she will give you a message in Act 2 where she tells you how worried she is about Yuri's mental state. Unfortunately, this sweet Friendship Moment gets ruined by Monika rewriting the game's code to have Natsuki say to ignore her and Yuri and focus on just Monika.
- Natsuki's arrogant facade is deconstructed - it's one part suspicion of people's motives, one part trying to convince people (including herself) that she's worthwhile, and her Hair-Trigger Temper alienates Yuri, who she really just wants to be friends with.
- On a more comical note, Natsuki indulges Sayori's sweet cravings and gives her a cookie, but she chucks the cookie at her. She thought it was worth seeing Sayori's bemused reaction.
  Sayori: I-Is this a miracle? It's because I paid my restitution!
  Protagonist: Retribution...
  Yuri: Actually, that one almost worked...
  Natsuki: Ahahaha! I was just gonna give it to you, but then I heard you blab about the cupcakes. It was totally worth seeing your reaction, though. Ahaha!
Kid-Appeal Character: Natsuki is the most mature and level-headed of the group, but because of her moodiness, interest in anime and manga, her diminutive stature, simple writing style, and the fact that she's been held back in school and only recently turned eighteen, she is not taken seriously. Her character seems perfectly calculated to appeal to the 18-25 year old demographic.
Killed Offscreen: She's the only one of the four who you don't see dead. Monika erases Natsuki after she witnesses Yuri's death. The hidden scene in Act 2 is possibly the closest thing, but even then, she's alive, and the game treats it like nothing.
Lady Swears-a-Lot: Probably the most foul-mouthed character. She says that she would be "pissed" if the player character only came to the literature club for the cupcakes, curses Monika for moving around her manga collection, and once calls Yuri a "wannabe edgy bitch" during one of their fights over poetic style (at least in Act 2).
Lawful Pushover: Despite being an extrovert who often claims to value honesty, she is very averse to conflict and to being seen as creating drama. The side stories show her often putting down things that upset her as no big deal.
Leave Me Alone!: The player character's first humorous Meet Cute with her is structured this way. It's Played for Laughs, but it serves to foreshadow the inferiority worries that underlie her independent streak.
Leitmotif: Natsuki's version of "Okay, Everyone!" is very simple and features a xylophone and a recorder to feature her child-like nature and simple poetic style. In the side stories, she is usually paired with the upbeat Strawberry Peppermint.
Meaningful Name: The name "Natsuki" can have multiple meanings, but the ones that relate most to this Natsuki would be as follows:
- "Summer, hope" (夏希), given her fiery personality (like the summer heat) and that she seems to be the only girl who is (mostly) resistant to Monika's influence.
- Another way Natsuki can be written is "rapeseed flower, moon" (菜月). In hanakotoba^noteLanguage of flowers, the rapeseed flower represents cheerfulness, which is indicative of her love for cutesy things and her minimalistic writing style having an almost chipper tone. She's also more friendly when she knows she won't be teased or judged.
Minimalism: Her preferred writing style uses simple words and short sentences to drive in a point. When she first shares a poem, she says that she feels the ability to say something in just a few lines is underrated. Her taste in words in the poem minigame also tend to be simple or cute. This is yet another reason she's at odds with Yuri, who has a more extravagant style.
Missing Mom: Natsuki's dad is mentioned a lot, but her mom is never really mentioned.
Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls: In the side stories, her other friends tease her about how she used to write "smutty fanfiction". She considers it an Old Shame, but it doesn't stop her from writing in the present.
The Napoleon: She's short, has a Hair-Trigger Temper, and an Inferiority Superiority Complex.
Older Than They Look: She's short, slender, and cutesy, to the point where the protagonist wonders if she's an underclassman when he first meets her. While it's never outright stated in-game just how old the characters are, other than they are in high school (and Natsuki does say at one point that she's the youngest), it's safe to assume she's not that far off age-wise from the others.^note Since she doesn't get to eat too often and (at least in Act 2) is regularly beaten by her father, this has some disturbing implications.
Only Sane Woman: She's the only one not to have a serious mental breakdown (barring a couple of scenes that are likely meant to be a fake-out by Monika), and even secretly implores you in one of her poems to tell Yuri to seek help for her mental condition.
Out of Focus: Out of all the girls, Natsuki receives the least character focus (in the main game at least). To elaborate, she never gets a major emotional breakdown tied to her issues, which, while present, never get put to the forefront like Sayori and Yuri's.
Pink Is Feminine: Wears a frilly pink outfit in her casual wear.
Precision F-Strike: Monika doesn’t directly mess with Natsuki very much over Act Two, preferring instead to torment her through her father and Yuri. In one of the few instances where Monika does directly interfere, Natsuki lets it loose.
Natsuki: fucking monikammmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Psycho Pink: Heavily downplayed in that she's just a standoffish Tsundere at worst, but she's still the most hostile member of the club initially and has a much more vibrant shade of pink hair compared to Sayori. It's played a little straighter in Act 2, where she becomes notably more abrasive and unstable—though she still ends up as the Only Sane Woman next to Yuri and Monika.
Red Oni, Blue Oni: She's the red oni to Yuri's blue. Natsuki is very aggressive and defensive and is a classic harsh Tsundere.
Rose-Haired Sweetie: While she doesn't have the kind of personality you'd expect from this, doing her events show that she can be sweet and affectionate once she opens up, as do her side stories.
Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The last we see of Natsuki in Act 2, she vomits at the sight of Yuri's dead body and runs off, understandably horrified. For this reason, she's the only member of the cast who's Killed Offscreen.
Skirts and Ladders: When the player character is helping Natsuki get a box of manga from a tall shelf by holding a swivel chair stable, he notices that he is in a position in which he can see an eyeful. He tries to look away, but Natsuki notices and quickly accuses him of setting her up anyway.
Sour Outside, Sad Inside: Has shades of this. Her usual reaction to something she feels threatened by is to put it down due to her own insecurity. If you spend time with Natsuki twice in Act 1, her second event will have her break down in tears over the stress she's under, and she will constantly drop hints about how badly she wants to have a place where people acknowledge and accept her without laughing at her or mocking her hobbies.
Stress Vomit: When she walks in to see you stuck with Yuri's dead body, she gets so horrified at the sight that she throws up.
Stronger Than They Look: After taking a heavy bag of ingredients off her hands, the protagonist wonders how she managed to carry it all the way down the road. She is quite smug about this.
Supreme Chef: Natsuki makes delicious cupcakes. Monika even makes it a point to have one before deleting her, lamenting that it'll be the last time.
Sweet Baker: She is introduced as the girl who made cupcakes in anticipation of the player character's arrival, and the game hammers in how it's not only her baking that is sweet and cutesy, but that she is too. Despite her Tsundere ways, she proves to be a secret sweetheart who writes cute, simple poems, reads cute slice-of-life manga, and cares deeply for her friends.
Technician Versus Performer: She's the performer to Yuri's technician and prefers simple but expressive word choices that plainly communicate their main idea.
Tiny Tyrannical Girl: She tries to boss around the others at times, without being too gentle about it. In "Balance", she even teases Sayori by calling her a peasant and asking for a cookie as payment.
Took a Level in Jerkass: In Act 2, she goes from a simple Tsundere to someone who has moments of full-on verbal abuse. Her argument with Yuri has her make a mocking joke about Yuri's Self Harming to her face. If you write a poem Natsuki doesn't like, she tells you to leave if you're not taking the club seriously. While it's not outright stated, it's implied that Monika is exaggerating her negative personality traits too. Ironically, despite this, she's actually one of the more stable members of the club. It's worth mentioning that she actually seems to calm down in Act 4.
Tsundere: The Harsh type. She's feisty, she's blunt, and she clearly has a crush on the protagonist. Possibly amplified by Monika, as it's more evident in Acts 1 and 2 than in Act 4, where she's more welcoming to the protagonist. The protagonist lampshades this:
Protagonist: [after eating one of her cupcakes] This is really good. Thank you, Natsuki.
Natsuki: W-why are you thanking me? It's not like I...!
Protagonist: [thinking to himself] Haven't I heard this somewhere before?
Natsuki: [resigned] ...made them for you or anything.
Protagonist: Eh? I thought you technically did. Sayori said-
Natsuki: Well, maybe! But not for, y-you know, you! Dummy...
Un-person: Monika deletes her just after deleting Yuri. This makes Monika the only girl who can be romanced. It's also notable that she's the only one of the three standard romance options who doesn't commit suicide before she's deleted.
Vitriolic Best Buds: Deconstructed with Natsuki's previous friend group, introduced in the Updated Re Release. Dan Salvato says that her previous friend group normally teases each other and is not necessarily trying to bully her; they're just stuck in that dynamic. However, Natsuki takes their teasing hard, but she cannot speak up about it because it goes against what they normally do. This is a major reason why she is a tsundere, being defensive and having a hard time expressing her emotions because of her past experiences. Once Natsuki found more considerate friends in the Literature Club, she decides to cut ties with her old friend group.
Vomit Indiscretion Shot: After you're forced to stare at Yuri's dead body for the rest of the in-game weekend, Natsuki eventually walks in on the morning of the festival to see her several days-old body. Her immediate reaction is to scream, vomit◊, and run out of the room. This also explains why she isn't there for Monika deleting her.
With Friends Like These...: The side stories effectively replace her abusive father with an abusive friend group who regularly bullies and demeans her.

Yuri

Maiden of Mystery

"I don't need to go out and do crazy things to have fun."

Yuri is a timid girl with long dark purple hair. While she is shy, she can speak up when she is passionate about something. She loves fantasy and horror novels and collects knives.

And I Must Scream: After Monika modified her to make her less appealing to the player, Yuri is completely aware that something is wrong with her but can't help herself from acting in a creepy, maniacal way.
Apologises a Lot: She says "sorry" to just about any minor flaw, real or imagined. When the main character points this out, she starts to apologize for apologizing too much before catching herself.
Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted as Yuri's body gradually decays over the weekend at the end of Act 2. That and, of course, she's torn her body open in several places with a knife.
Big Eater: Not really present in the main game, but in the Side Stories, it's noted by multiple characters that she REALLY likes Natsuki's cupcakes.
Big Guy, Little Guy: Yuri, who is 5'5", is the Big Guy to the 4'11" Natsuki's Little Guy.
Blade Enthusiast: Despite her shy demeanor, Yuri has a secret fascination with exotic knives. While this is just an oddity in Act 1, in Act 2 it gets recontextualized as her being a cutter.
Bust-Contrast Duo: She and Natsuki are the poster girls for this trope: Yuri's soft-spoken temperament and her big bust contrast with Natsuki's abrasive Tsundere personality and her small chest.
But Thou Must!: Whether or not you accept her offer to be in Act 2, she still kills herself in front of you with a butcher knife.
Character Focus: In the side stories Understanding, Reflection and Self Love.
Character Tics: She tends to hold her arms behind her back (possibly in a subconscious effort to hide the fact that she cuts herself) or place her hands, usually her left, protectively over her chest (emphasizing her shyness). She also nervously looks to the side while playing with her hair, as well.
Chekhov's Hobby: Yuri's knife collection isn't just an odd character trait. She uses knives to Self-Harm and later kill herself.
Chocolate of Romance: One cute moment during her route is the player character sharing chocolates with her as they read and drink tea together.
Chuunibyou: Monika discusses this trope about Yuri. She notes that Yuri takes her tea very seriously, and wonders if she really is passionate about it or is attempting to look sophisticated.
Monika: It's kind of funny how Yuri took her tea so seriously. I mean, I'm not complaining, because I liked it, too. But I always wonder with her... Is it truly passion for her hobbies, or is she just concerned about appearing sophisticated to everyone else? This is the problem with high schoolers... well, I guess considering the rest of her hobbies, looking sophisticated probably isn't her biggest concern. Still... I wish she made coffee once in a while!
Collector of the Strange: Yuri collects ornate knives.
Cooldown Hug: Receives one from Sayori in the side story Understanding, after a confrontation becomes too much for her to handle.
Corrupt the Cutie: Thanks to Monika literally corrupting her file, Yuri goes from a sweet Shrinking Violet whose darker traits were implied but not prominent to a full-blown Stalker with a Crush who masturbates with items belonging to her lover and tells her romantic rivals to kill themselves.
Covert Pervert:
- She says some perverted things as she undergoes Sanity Slippage, like saying that she masturbates using the pen stolen from the player character, and even before Act 2, her preferred words in the poem game include "Lust" and "Pleasure." Monika also suggests she self-harms out of a bizarre sexual fetish, but since Monika is responsible for the Mind Rape and wants you to stay away from the other girls, she could be deliberately trying to make Yuri look worse.
- In Act 1, when Yuri goes to the main character's house, she turns on a diffuser filled with Jasmine oil. Jasmine oil is often known as a natural aphrodisiac.
Curtains Match the Windows: She has purple hair and purple eyes.
Cute and Psycho: It's implied as early as Act 1 that Yuri does have some dark personality traits, but as the game progresses and the Mind Rape gets worse, she becomes a Yandere who'll happily tell her friends to kill themselves, as well as spend time just staring at the main character in the dark.
Cute Bookworm: While the whole club is this to some extent, Yuri fits this the closest.
Cute Little Fangs: Slightly less cute than Natsuki's, since they're most prominent in Act 2, when she's prone to Slasher Smiles.
Dandere: At her core, Yuri is this. She is very quiet, but her confidence really shines through when talking about topics she's passionate about.
D-Cup Distress: She's the most stacked of the girls in the club, but it's implied that she suffers back pain from her bust size, and she's been constantly teased for her figure (with Natsuki lashing out at her over that early on). Of course, the pains alluded to may be the result of her cutting herself.
Dies Wide Open: When she dies at the end of Act 2, her eyes are open.
Digging Yourself Deeper: At one point in Act 2, Yuri mentions that her mind has been hyperactive lately, so she used your pen to preoccupy herself. Then, she catches what she was saying and stumbles in attempting to clarify what she meant, but ends up making the comment sound more awkward.
Yuri: My mind has been a little hyperactive lately, so I had to take it out on your pen. Ah— That is... a-a pen fell out of your backpack yesterday, so I took it home for safekeeping and... I, um... I just... really like... the way... that it writes. So I wrote this... poem... with it. And now you're touching it... Ahaha. I-I'm okay! What did I just... can we pretend this conversation never happened? You can keep the poem, though...
Don't You Dare Pity Me!: A sympathetic example in the side stories - she knows she comes across as weird and so assumes that anyone who's actually nice to her is just taking pity. Understandably, she hates this.
Driven to Suicide: She stabs herself repeatedly with her own knife, forcing the player character to stare at her rotting body for the rest of the in-game weekend.
Dying Smirk: She has this psychotic grin on her face◊ the whole time she's stabbing herself to death.
Empty Eyes: After she kills herself, her eyes eventually go gray and empty to show that her corpse is decaying.
Fetish:
- Her cutting herself is suggested to be one. Monika tells the player to stop pursuing her because they're "enabling" her by being a trigger for it. It's unclear how true this is since the person telling you this is Monika, who has reason to make Yuri look bad. However, if it is, it'd be one possible explanation for why Yuri stabs herself even if you accept her confession. Even if it was true at that point, it might have only been true after Monika tampered with her mind.
- The festival preparation scene with her at the protagonist's house is also suggestive and could even be interpreted as implying she may be turned on by blood (hers, or other people's).
Fighting from the Inside: In Act 2, Yuri knows something is wrong with her mind and tries to fight it. Eventually, however, the high she gets from indulging the corruptive thoughts is too much for her, and she gives in.
Finger-Suck Healing: Her festival preparation interaction has her sucking on the player character’s finger when he accidentally cuts it.
Foreshadowing: A very subtle example. In Act 1, Yuri wears a long-sleeved sweater, which doesn't mean much, until you wonder why she is wearing something so warm in the first place. Then, when the protagonist leaves and comes back, the player notices her rolling her sleeves back down as if she were checking something on her wrist. At first, it means nothing, but when Act 2 hits, you start to realize what those meant...
Four-Temperament Ensemble: At first, she's the Melancholic character, being better alone with her books and extremely uncomfortable around people. When she gets more comfortable with the player character, she becomes Phlegmatic. Then when she becomes obsessed with him, she reveals a more Sanguine personality.
Good Eyes, Evil Eyes: Has normal, large, and shiny eyes that slant down as everyone else, but when she acts insane, her irises shrink and lose the shine, and her eyes slant up. Also, while staring at the player character, her eyes change from drawn purple anime-style eyes to realistic bloodshot blue eyes.
Graceful Ladies Like Purple: She doesn't actually wear purple clothing, but her hair and eyes are purple, and she is certainly described as graceful.
Hidden Depths:
- As per her Shrinking Violet archetype, she has a lot of intelligence, creativity, and sensitivity once you get to know her well enough for her to actually spit it out.
- According to Monika's Twitter, she's good at video games, considering their "study night" ended up as a Slumber Party where they talked and played games instead.
Hidden Eyes: This occurs whenever she is particularly embarrassed, like when she accidentally reveals that she took the player character's pen.
Hypocrite: A pretty harmless and well-meaning example, but she advises the player character that Natsuki can be very biased against certain types of poetry, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she herself is equally dismissive towards Natsuki's writing style.
I Just Want to Have Friends: In the side stories, she acknowledges that she's "weird" and "just doesn't get people", and she desperately wants to find a space where people treat her like a normal person.
Innocently Insensitive: She sometimes comes across as condescending or pretentious without truly meaning to, which of course, gets Natsuki's back up. This is flipped around in Act 2, where Monika's tampering makes her openly vindictive. Her accidental insensitivity is present in the side stories, too, though in this case, she and the other girls succeed in working it out.
Laughing Mad: She laughs maniacally before fatally stabbing herself.
Leitmotif: Yuri's version of "Okay, Everyone!" features significantly different instrumentals compared with her classmates' themes. Her version features a cello and harp to symbolize her sophisticated nature and poetic style. In the side stories, her leitmotif is Lavender Mist (which is a remix of Play With Me, which, according to Dan Salvato, is technically her own leitmotif), a tranquil violin piece.
Masturbation Means Sexual Frustration: Played for Horror. In Act 2, as Yuri is undergoing Sanity Slippage and becoming a yandere, she tells the player character that she will take his poem with her and repeatedly masturbate while reading it. Later, when Yuri completely loses it, she flat-out admits that she masturbates using the pen she stole from him.
Yuri: I'll even touch myself while reading it over and over.
Meaningful Name: Like many Japanese names, the meaning of Yuri's name depends on the kanji used. These are the ones that apply the most to her:
- Yuri in Japanese means "Lily" (百合), a flower associated with grace, tranquility, and the color purple, all traits Yuri is associated with. They're also associated with death. (Ironically, this is also the flower most associated with lesbian romantic relationships, to the point that it's a well-established genre. The slumber-party tweet, above, raised some eyebrows as a result.)
- Yuri can also mean "reason, logic" (由理) as she's an intelligent girl who suffers the most from Monika's tampering.
- Another meaning can also be "friend, logic" (友理) being that she really does care for her friends (when Monika is not screwing with her file) and has the most experience with books and writing.
Mysterious Purple: Yuri is a shy, enigmatic woman nicknamed a "Maiden of Mystery" and has long purple hair and purple eyes.
Nature Lover: Introduces herself to the literature club in "Side Stories" by saying she really likes the outdoors.
Nervous Wreck: Yuri has anxiety issues, based on her shyness, her tendency to overthink things and second guess herself, and her fear of coming off bad socially, in part due to her odd interests. During her Sanity Slippage, she mentions she keeps feeling like something bad is going to happen, even while confessing to the player character. Some of the things she describes (loud breathing, pounding heart, etc.) both describe the feelings of obsessive love and an anxiety episode as well. This is one of many factors that could have contributed to her suicide. Her anxiety also shows up in the side stories, though this allows her to know exactly how to help when she sees Natsuki having a panic attack.
Nightmare Face: Yuri becomes more prone to Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises, sometimes with deranged grins, as she continues to slip further. Later, she also develops a habit of moving right in front of the screen with eerily realistic eyes that move independently from her sprite. Also, during the poem minigame, there is a small chance that Yuri's chibi sticker will change to a white face with nightmarish features.
Nightmare Fetishist: Yuri loves horror novels and even gives the player character one to read. She also likes to collect knives and prefers poems with darker, more ornate words. This character trait becomes creepy in Act 2 as she starts to undergo corruption. It's foreshadowed by a small change in Monika's dialogue: instead of saying it's surprising Yuri likes horror novels as in Act 1, she says it suits her personality.
Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: During Act 2, she's clearly trying to impress the player character and let him know how she feels. The thing is, her Sanity Slippage is severe enough that she'll flat-out state squicky, uncomfortable, and unnerving thoughts. Scenes with her that were previously cute become corrupted, such as her gaining photorealistic eyes while breathing noises play. Her poems also become increasingly disturbing, with the last one being unreadable chicken scratches covered in bloodstains.
Non-Standard Character Design: When she gets moving, photorealistic eyes. The characters are never even animated normally.
Not So Above It All: Yuri laughs after witnessing the player character catch Sayori attempting to mooch off of him, and also when Sayori gives Natsuki a hug so she can take a bite from a cookie that Natsuki was saving for herself. In Act 3, Monika recalls that Natsuki and Yuri, of all people, might have made fun of her for her catchphrase. The side stories also give us this gem:
Sayori: (to Natsuki) I always judge people so hard!
Monika: No you don't, Sayori.
Yuri: (deadpan, from the back of the room) Yes she does.
"Not So Different" Remark: Sayori and Monika spot it first, but despite their arguments, Yuri and Natsuki have more in common than not. This is heartwarmingly explored in their side story together.
O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The Japanese translation has her using formal linguistics at all times. The moment she drops her politeness and speaks bluntly, it's clear that something is wrong.
Paralysis by Analysis: She tends to overthink everything. It's treated as an endearing trait in Act 1. It's then played for horror when Monika rewrites it into a full-blown obsession in Act 2.
Precision F-Strike: Tells Natsuki: "What the fuck is wrong with your head?" near the start of Act 2 and asks her to kill herself not long after. As the act progresses, it's more like Cluster F-Bomb.
Purple Prose: Her preferred writing style is wordy and detailed. She also has a preference for more complex words in the poem minigame. One of the reasons why she and Natsuki keep fighting is because of their tastes; Natsuki prefers Minimalism, and feels that Yuri's more ornate style is a pretentious way of writing. It's worth mentioning that the first time Yuri writes a poem that doesn't fit with this style is when she's just beginning her Sanity Slippage.
Psycho Knife Nut: With Monika tampering the coding, Yuri becomes this in Act 2, most notably when she stabs herself to death whether you accept her love confession or not.
Red Oni, Blue Oni: She's the blue to Natsuki's red. She is a shy, reserved, polite girl who mostly focuses on her books and poems.
Reluctant Psycho: She is to some extent aware of her Sanity Slippage, and that there's something wrong with her. Some of her rambling implies that she also has a history of driving people away with her obsessive, unstable personality, hence why she's a Shrinking Violet.
Sanity Slippage: Monika really did a number on Yuri. She goes from a Shrinking Violet to a yandere, and from a Collector of the Strange to a Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant. Disturbingly enough, Yuri seems aware that her thoughts are too dark even for her, but she can't stop them.
Self-Harm: Yuri is revealed to have a habit of cutting herself. It's unclear if this was going to be part of her route to begin with or if it was Monika's influence that created this habit. Yuri's Raccoon poem suggests the former, while the fact that it doesn't come up in the Side Stories suggests the latter. Also of note is that on Monika's Twitter account (as well as the DDLC+ gallery), there's one picture of Monika and Yuri having a sleepover, which shows both of Yuri's arms uncovered and without any visible injuries.
Shrinking Violet: She's particularly timid, Apologises a Lot, and puts herself down frequently. However, she tends to get assertive when she has a clear opinion and opens up rather easily when talking about subjects she likes, especially literary analysis and criticism.
Shy Blue-Haired Girl: More like Shy Purple-Haired Girl, but close enough.
Slasher Smile: One of her sprites mid-Sanity Slippage is a particularly creepy version, complete with Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises. She has a similar expression as she commits suicide.
Squee: In the side stories, she presses her knuckles into her cheeks and makes happy noises when talking about her favorite author.
Stalker with a Crush: Thanks to Monika's Mind Rape, her obsessive tendencies get amplified enough that she simply can't leave the player character alone.
Stress Vomit: Mentioned. At one point, while sharing a particularly disturbing poem and having an equally disturbing reaction to reading the player character's, she seems to come to her senses for a moment, then excuses herself to at least ostensibly throw up.
Suddenly Voiced: Downplayed. If you listen closely to the background score during her confession scene in Act 2, you can hear a girl gasping and giggling. Since Monika outright talks to the player in the game's ending, this raises the possibility that what we're hearing is Yuri.
Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Despite initially coming off as shy and reserved, she tends to open up considerably when talking about her interests. However, said interests are a little uncommon.
Suicide Dare: During her Sanity Slippage, she states that no one would care if Natsuki killed herself. Later, at the height of her slippage, she flat-out tells Monika to commit suicide. Monika later admits she was surprised and creeped out she would say such a thing.
Technician Versus Performer: With her preference for complex, carefully chosen words that force the reader to think deeply about their meaning to understand, she's the technician to Natsuki's performer.
The Unintelligible: The first half of her final poem in Act 2 and her dialogue over the course of two and a half days following her suicide after you confess to her or not.
Un-person: After her suicide, Monika deletes her and Natsuki from the game.
Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises: Her irises and pupils tend to shrink whenever she is scared or embarrassed. Even more so in Act 2, as she becomes increasingly obsessed.
Wine Is Classy: In Act 3, Monika can relate a tale of Yuri once sneaking a bottle of wine into the clubroom and offering to share it with the other girls. Sayori yelled at her, and Monika disallowed it, although she admitted being curious to try it (and suspected Natsuki was too).
Yandere: Subverted. She only develops tendencies once Monika exaggerates her personality. She might have obsessive tendencies to begin with, but they just got amplified. Act 1 and the Side Stories show that Yuri is more of a Dandere who is only obsessed with her hobbies at worst — and even then, "obsessed" may be a bit of a strong word.

Monika

Voiced by: Jillian Ashcraft

President of the Club

"Welcome to the club."

Monika is the Club's President, and is a sweet, friendly, and mature girl. While she does not have a route, she's happy you're here.

See the self demonstrating page if you wish to know more about me.

Adaptational Heroism: Her Side Stories counterpart is genuinely nice and caring towards her fellow club members, and even comforts Sayori during a depression vent rather than exploiting it to drive her to suicide. Justified by the fact that this version of her lacking awareness of the fourth wall and subsequently not breaking down into a murderous obsession with the player.
Aerith and Bob: Out of all the girls, she is the only one with a name that isn't explicitly Japanese and doesn't end with an "i". That said, she does use a Japanese-style spelling instead of the English standard (Monika instead of Monica).
Affably Evil: Uniquely for a Yandere, nothing about Monika's apparent kindness and politeness is an act. She really is that friendly, and she really, truly means it when she says that she loves you and that she wants to make you happy. She even offers you some genuinely good advice from time to time and sincerely opens up to you, as any good girlfriend would. The worst you can say about her is that she occasionally has trouble wrangling her clubmates when they argue. While she's later revealed to be a meta-aware yandere who will Mind Rape and delete her friends if it means getting closer to the player, she keeps her polite appearance even after she's the only girl left. She gets horrified when the player decides to delete her, even revealing that she didn't delete the others entirely and puts them back for you. Ultimately, she's just a girl who's seen things she shouldn't have seen and has Gone Mad from the Revelation.
A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The position of the president of the literature club gives anyone who has it, the ability to be self-aware of their existence as a character file. Making a character self-aware, however, had unintended consequences.
Alas, Poor Villain: When the player deletes her file in Act 3, her first reaction is to act horrified, then angrily berate the player for doing so when she realizes what's happening. However, she can't come to hate the player after all and admits that she could bring back the other girls so that you could play the game without her. If you get the normal ending, Monika is still around enough to stop Sayori from doing something similar, then deletes the game during the end credits and leaves a note saying that the club is disbanded permanently.
Ambiguously Bi: She notes in Act 3 that she honestly doesn't know your gender, but she still considers herself your girlfriend anyways. The ambiguity comes in when she generally refers to you using masculine pronouns and terms. It's unclear whether she's assuming your gender based on the player character being male or you being the kind of person who'd play a dating sim, or if it's for simplicity's sake.
- To make it even more ambiguous, her romantic attachment to you and the male player character by extension is heavily, heavily influenced by the fact that she realized that she was in a video game and you and him were her closest connections to your reality. We have absolutely no idea what her orientation would have been had she never underwent that epiphany and the game operated as it should have In-Universe. Given that she wasn't a romanceable option, we don't even know if her plotline would have been relevant enough to find out.
And I Must Scream: In Act 3, one of her conversations has her explain that she's still conscious even when the game isn't running, and where she goes when it isn't is...not pretty. She'll even complain about this the first few times you quit the game after her takeover, but she eventually adjusts to it since she wouldn't want you to waste all your time on the game in Real Life.
Anti-Villain: Of the Well-Intentioned Extremist and Woobie type. She really truly does love you, the player. She just doesn't know how to express it properly. After you delete her, she realizes that she's been doing it all wrong and bows out so that you can be with one of the other girls. This is best evidenced in her character song:
Monika: Is it love if I take you, or is it love if I set you free?
The Atoner: Deleting her during your extended conversation with her causes her to have a Heel Realization, and undelete the other girls. Likewise, as Medium Awareness seems tied to the Literature Club hierarchy (as Sayori gains Medium Awareness upon becoming president), the file created upon obtaining the Downer Ending is Monika officially disbanding the club.
The Bad Guy Wins: Entirely contingent on the player's choice. If you don't delete her character file after her Hostile Show Takeover, she'll just happily ramble on endlessly and gloat about her victory, and you can leave the game in this state permanently.
Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Likely invoked. She's the one character who manages to avoid the creepy faces and glitchiness the most throughout Act 2. Since she's behind it all, she's probably making sure she's still appealing to the player.
Big Bad: Her self-awareness as a video game character and her Yandere attachment to the player (not the protagonist, the player) is the cause of all the casts' problems not caused by preceding psychological issues.
Big Damn Heroes: Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work, actually, but in the main ending after Monika has been deleted, Sayori proceeds to undergo the same Go Mad from the Revelation situation that Monika did as Club President and is about to start doing the same things. Monika, however, turns out to be Not Quite Dead and, realizing that this same fate will befall whoever fills her position in the game, saves the player by way of a Mercy Kill to the whole game world, saying a final goodbye to the player before the game is bricked.
Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Downplayed. Monika comes off as sweet and friendly, but she's a Yandere who will Mind Rape, gaslight, manipulate, and eventually delete people who are supposed to be her friends. However, Act 3 reveals that deep down, she is a genuinely noble, loving person who has a Heel Realization and admits she didn't go through with fully deleting Sayori, Yuri, and Natsuki.
Brainy Brunette: She has brownish hair and is the multi-talented president of the Literature Club. She's also the most "enlightened" out of the four main girls, and not in a good way.
Breaking the Fourth Wall: Monika tells the protagonist to make sure to save at important decisions, then wonders who she's talking to. A good portion of her dialogue at least bends the fourth wall, even early on, and it practically falls apart entirely after Yuri's death.
Bright Is Not Good: While in the game proper she's only seen wearing her school uniform, a fact she lampshades during Act 3, there are official images of her wearing white dresses on her Twitter account. Being the Big Bad, she fits the "evil" connotations.
Broken Ace: She's a School Idol who is beautiful, kind, and intelligent, but it turns out she is aware of her status as a fictional character in a Dating Sim, and resents the fact that she is simply a side character who doesn't even get her own route. Eventually, she responds by gradually taking over the game.
Broken Pedestal: Briefly has this towards you, after she gushes endlessly about how kind and wonderful you are throughout most of Act 3 and you respond by deleting her. She's heartbroken and infuriated that you seemingly betrayed her after everything she's done "for" you. This is then subverted when she still can't really hate you. In fact, she only realizes how awful she's been because kind, wonderful you deleted her and shocked her out of it.
But Not Too Bi: After saying that she doesn't mind the gender of the target of her affections and acknowledging she doesn't know what gender you actually are, she continues to refer to you by the name you gave the player character, which suggests she might still be projecting some of her affections onto your male avatar. That's on top of some of her lines, during the extended conversation in Act 3 and the ending, specifically referring to the player as her boyfriend and singing "'write your way into his heart." Even if the name she gets from your computer is feminine it suggests at least the likelihood of a female player.
But Thou Must!:
- When discussing festival preparations in Act 1, trying to pick Monika will have Yuri and Natsuki object and talk the player character out of this decision, forcing them to ultimately choose between the two.
- A similar scene happens in Act 2, but the circumstances get turned on their head. Again, the player character has to choose between Yuri, Natsuki, and Monika for festival preparations, but the cursor will automatically be drawn towards Monika's name. Even if you use the keyboard to select another option or manage to click one of the other buttons, the choices then change to a full page of buttons that all say "Monika."
- Act 3 pays homage to the trope namer by following a single option choice with the response "I'm so happy."
- To advance the game during the endless conversation with her, she has to be deleted.
Character Blog: She has her own Twitter account, lilmonix3. She will even plug it in-game if you talk to her enough.
Character Catchphrase:
- Monika often says "Okay, everyone!" at the final scene of each day. In fact, the other girls notice on the one day she doesn't say it and Monika recounts that they might have made fun of her for her catchphrase.
- Her asking "Can you hear me?" pops up a fair bit.
- "Okay, everyone!" appears in the side stories, being the first words spoken (by a despondent Monika to an empty classroom) and then having a Triumphant Reprise once the full club is assembled.
Character Focus: In the side stories Trust, Respect and Reflection.
Character Song: "Your Reality", the end credits theme.
Character Tics: She will occasionally lean forward with her hands behind her back while speaking with the player character. She also tends to raise her finger, especially when saying: "Okay, everyone!"
Color-Coded Eyes: Monika has a pair of emerald green eyes and fits the stereotype by being the calm Club President who also has extraordinary abilities due to her newfound meta-awareness. She's also green-eyed in a different sense. She can reference this in Act 3, mentioning that her favorite color is green like her eyes, and speculates that the player must like it too since they've been sharing a Held Gaze the entire time.
Control Freak: In a much more downplayed mirror of the way she treats the other girls in the main game, Monika in the side stories is shown to struggle with wanting things to turn out exactly how she envisioned them, and with having the urge to "fix" other people's problems for them. Like all the girls' flaws, it is portrayed sympathetically, and they work things out in the end.
Cool Big Sis: Monika is the club's President and is cool, calm and mature. She gives the player character advice on how to improve as a writer, helps break up disputes, and even seems to play Shipper on Deck. While this is what she's programmed to be, it turns out she hates her status as a side character who only exists to help out the player character and doesn't even have a route of her own. She does seem to be fond of the club after all, but she's frustrated enough with her situation to pull a Hostile Show Takeover so that she could romance the player. Not the player character, the player.
Cosmic Plaything: And she knows it. Because of her Medium Awareness, she knows that she's nothing more than a side character in the game and that despite being enamored with the player character (er, make that the player themself) will never really be able to interact with them; even her efforts after "modifying" the other characters are derailed, ironically, by the game's own railroading. The only time she's allowed to get close to you is by removing everything else in the game except for herself and a single classroom, and even then, it doesn't save her from being deleted herself. Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! implies she really is this. She was given sentience by her programmers on purpose as an experiment, and they actively hid parts of the code from her to limit how much she could change. They even made an alternate universe where she didn't have sentience in order to use it as a control for the experiment (it says a lot that, in that universe, she actually gets a happy ending!).
Creative Sterility: What really constitutes the crux of her character. Despite having Medium Awareness and gaining power over the game's world, and thereby being able to redefine it as she wants — the only real hindrance being her relative lack of programming skills, Monika is still fundamentally unable to think out of the box that she exists in — that of being an NPC in a romance visual novel — so all she can think of doing with that power is pursuing the player's "love" by making herself the only romance character. It is however noted in the Developer emails that they gave her only limited control over her universe.
Declarative Finger: Tends to do this pose, usually when saying "Okay, everyone!" or "Here is Monika's tip of the day!".
Deconstructed Character Archetype: Serves as one for the common dating sim wish fulfilment trope of a character who is Yandere for the player. Monika's Medium Awareness and love for the player, not the in-universe protagonist, but the player, drives her insane and leads to a Cosmic Horror Story for the game's universe.
Despair Event Horizon: In the standard ending, she realizes that the game's world is a place where no happiness can occur. As such, she destroys everything to save her friends from her own despair.
Deuteragonist: Her actions as the Big Bad drive the plot more than the rest of the heroines. Likewise, she gets the most Character Development when she gets her Heel Realization in the end.
Digital Abomination: Like the rest of her in-universe world, she is a digital entity, and her ability to influence her world would not be out of place being held by an eldritch horror in a Cosmic Horror Story.
Dissonant Serenity: Monika normally has a calm, gentle expression. She keeps it even when she's altering the game. During Act 3, the look she gives the player is less "crazed Yandere" and more "Held Gaze."
Driven to Suicide: Interestingly, it's suggested that Monika considered ending her life if her plan to win the player didn't work. A unique text file that can be found in Act 2 has her vent to the player about why they keep trying to pursue the other girls even when she's tried to make them unappealing, pointing out the only reason she hasn't is that doing so would mean she wouldn't get to talk to the player. She also brings up in Act 3, while discussing how she managed to delete the other girls, that she had to be careful not to delete her own. However, she also points out it'd be an easy way out if nothing had worked. Ironically, she herself is responsible for Sayori and Yuri's suicides through Mind Rape.
Dull Surprise: When Natsuki screams and runs out of the club room vomiting after seeing Yuri's corpse, Monika's reaction is a simple "...Oh...".
Dying Curse: Subverted. She tries like you'd expect a yandere Big Bad to do, but ultimately can't keep up the act as she is not as resentful or insane as she wants to appear - instead, killing her causes the reverse to happen by showing her just how messed up she was, and she instead uses her last moments to try to fix everything as she reaffirms her love.
Eccentric A.I.: She is a sentient piece of programming who has recently come to the realisation that she is just a character within a game. This revelation has not done her sanity any favours and has ultimately led her to develop a psychopathic, Yandere-like obsession with the player due to them being her only connection with the real world. Her deteriorating mental state can best be seen through some of her poems:
The noise, it won't STOP.
Viol nt, grating w vef rms
Sq e king, screech ng, piercing
SINE, COSINE, TANGENT
Like play ng a ch lkboard on a t rntable
Like playing a KNIFE on a BREATHING RIBCAGE
n ndl ss
p m
Of m n ngl ss

Delete Her
Elegant Classical Musician: Practices playing the piano and is certainly an elegant girl that is considered very attractive.
Even Evil Has Standards: Despite everything she does to mess with you if you are streaming (or recording) she won’t reveal your real name to your audience. She also admits that she found it disturbing that an already insane Yuri dared her to kill herself.
Even Evil Has Loved Ones: While she claimed to have deleted the other girls, she eventually reveals it was a bluff. She couldn't bring herself to murder her friends, and when she becomes The Atoner, she restores their files. She's more willing during one of the Downer Endings, though, since it's a Mercy Kill.
Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: Her first Wham Line in Act 1 is a pun reeking of Black Comedy:
Monika: You kind of left [Sayori] hanging this morning, you know?
- She does a similar thing earlier with Natsuki, describing her as starved of social interaction. Discovering that Natsuki is malnourished later puts this line in a new light.
Evil Is Petty: While she's the game's Big Bad, there's also her initial behavior on her Twitter account; she actively mocked the other members of her club by pointing out their flaws and laughing about it. The tweets exhibiting this behavior appear to have been deleted, as they can no longer be seen in the Twitter feed.
Evil Redhead: Her hair is reddish-brown, and she's a horrifying villainess.
Evil Vegetarian: Mentions that she stopped eating meat to reduce the carbon footprint as one of the several topics she talks about during randomized dialogue in Act 3. The fact that she explicitly mentions she doesn't do this out of compassion for animal lives and justifies it by saying that people constantly kill smaller creatures like bugs and microorganisms ties in with her logic behind her crueller acts in harming characters who aren't self-aware like her.
Evil Wears Black: She's the cause of Sayori's suicide and all the subsequent nightmare fuel. And while the other girls in the game wear white knee-highs, she wears black thigh-highs, making her stand out significantly from the rest in terms of that.
Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: An adorable girl who can hack the game to erase her romantic competition.
Fantastically Indifferent: Monika reacts with little more than mild surprise at various outlandish sights, including Yuri and Natsuki's increasingly hostile fight in Act 2, various glitches affecting her poems and the other characters, and even Yuri's suicide. It's a not-so-subtle hint that there's more to her than meets the eye.
Finger-Tenting: She does a chest-level version of this during her Held Gaze by Act 3.
Foil: For they typical player of visual novels, dating sims, and similar games:
- Most people who play these sorts of games do so as a form of Escapism from the pressures and disappointments they face in the real world. Monika literally wants to escape to the real world from the simulation she's trapped in.
- Most dating sims feature some sort of mechanic that determines which girl your character appeals to, and it's not uncommon for players wishing to pursue a specific route or experience all of the game's content to resort to things like save scumming and walkthroughs to manipulate the game towards a desired outcome. Monika similarly manipulates the game from the inside to ensure that she becomes the only viable choice.
- Monika's cavalier disregard for the pain and trauma she inflicts on the other girls is mirrored by the existence and presumed complicity of most players in Video Game Cruelty Potential — specifically, of players who similarly feel no guilt about subjecting characters in similar games to abusive choices that result in Bad Ends for the sake of 100% Completion, or who assuage their guilt for accidentally doing so by going "I can just reload an earlier save, make the right choice this time, and move on like nothing happened."
Four-Temperament Ensemble: At first, she appears as a Phlegmatic character, being the distant but level-headed President of the club. She then becomes more and more assertive, revealing herself as a more Sanguine character.
Fourth-Wall Observer: Played for both drama and horror, rather than comedy. She's all too aware she's inside a work of fiction, and her desire to experience something real drives her to extremes.
The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: She's a yandere, but not for the player character. She's one for you, the player. And then it's awesomely inverted when you defeat her by deleting her character file in the game's directory.
Freudian Excuse: Despite Monika's upbeat attitude in the Literature Club, it becomes increasingly obvious that she's really sad and lonely. Being a self-aware game character who knows her whole world (friends included) is just a simulation will do that. She fixates on the player so much because they're the only "real" thing in her life. It also doesn't help that, whenever someone quits the game, Monika is trapped in a hellish void of noise, lights, colours, and screams and despite not even being able to form coherent thoughts, she remembers all of it whenever the player turns on the game again.
Fun with Acronyms: In Plus, Monika's name becomes one, as she's identified in the code of the game as Monitor Kernel Access.
Gaslighting: In a truly bizarre way. She amplifies the other girls' negative traits, to make them seem less desirable to you via tampering with their game files. Sayori is the first to suffer ("GET OUT OF MY HEAD! GET OUT OF MY HEAD!"), with terrible consequences, but she isn't the last. It's also implied she's doing this in a more traditional sense; apparently, she said something to Sayori that actively made her depression worse. It's also a possible reason why Natsuki doesn't remember the argument with Yuri in Act 2, despite having left the club in tears; Monika knows how self-conscious Yuri is, so having such an extreme argument happen only for the other person not to remember it wouldn't do well for her mental health.
Giggling Villain: One special poem simply says "Can you hear me?" If you listen closely after a few seconds, you can faintly hear a teenage girl giggling. Since it's one of Monika's catchphrases and she's later revealed to have an actual voice, it's safe to presume that this is her.
Glamour Failure: The glitches in Act 2 are caused by Monika trying to change things. By her own admission, she isn't very good at programming. At first, she doesn't acknowledge them, but eventually, she drops the act and just gives up trying to pretend things are normal. This is most visible when she tries to show you a poem, only to have it result in either a fake blue screen (if you're playing on Windows 10) or a mess of red and green boxes (if you're playing on a different OS) - after saying she didn't do a good job of "writing" that poem, she just sighs and says "Let's just move on..." before sending you back to the screen that lets you choose which girl to share your poem with.
Go-Getter Girl: She's framed as a hard-working girl who used to be in the Debate Club before starting her own, and she always arrives somewhat late due to just finishing piano practice.
Go Mad from the Isolation: One of her core motives is to talk to someone, anyone, who she thinks is real.
Graceful Loser: Takes the player's deletion of her file pretty well. Also in "Your Reality", Monika's song, she states "And in your reality, if I don't know how to love you, I'll leave you be."
Green-Eyed Monster: Monika becomes increasingly jealous of the other girls for having their own routes whereas she does not, to the point where she messes with their personalities to make them as unappealing as possible. She also earns bonus points because her eyes are indeed green.
Grew Beyond Their Programming: A deconstruction. Originally designed to merely introduce the game to the player and provide helpful tips along the way, Monika became self-aware and her attempts to move beyond her scripted role form the crux of the story. Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! reveals that she was allowed or created to be self-aware by her programmers on purpose, as part of an experiment. They even created an alternate universe where she wasn't self-aware to use as a control in this experiment. Although they didn't expect her to make an entirely new character, the Main Character, just to interact with the user.
Heel–Face Turn: After you delete her character file, she accepts defeat gracefully, saves you from the corrupted Sayori in Act 4, and bricks the game when it becomes clear it cannot provide anyone happiness.
Heel Realization: Contrasting what you'd expect from a stock yandere, deleting Monika's character data in the final confrontation drills into her head just how much harm she's done to warrant such a reprisal, and that even if everything she destroyed was simply replaceable data, they were still her friends and the world she lived in.
Held Gaze: The entirety of Act 3 has her do this with the player.
Hidden Buxom: While her uniform is tight enough to accentuate her curves to some degree, it's only in photos posted on her Twitter account like this one that it becomes clear just how stacked Monika really is. Of course, Monika is later shown to be a major subversion of the timidness that usually comes with this.
Hidden Depths: While you get a hint of this during the first two acts, such as her piano playing, she shows a lot of it during Act 3 if you let her talk long enough.
- She's a good musician. It's mentioned that the reason why she occasionally arrives late to club meetings is that she has piano lessons. She's also the one who composed, wrote, and sung the end credits theme, which she made for the player. In the side stories, she writes a piece of music for her friends in the club instead.
- She will monologue about various subjects, many of which are incredibly insightful and interesting. At one point, she even gives some genuinely great advice on depression, despite ironically being the one to drive Sayori and Yuri to suicide. A good number of her monologues can be seen here.
- She's also a vegetarian, as she offhandedly mentions in Act 3. Not for the usual reasons, though; it's less about animal cruelty and more about how meat production affects global warming.
- She respects rap music, developed after learning about the similarities between it and poetry. Ironically, she used to hate it because she believed it was intentionally designed to appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator.invoked
- She's a bit of a romantic. Monika can bring up dating ideas like sampling chocolate and snuggling while watching a movie. She even admits to finding appeal in a Housewife lifestyle, despite otherwise being a Go-Getter Girl. A lot of her dialogue after The Reveal is also overtly flirtatious.
- If you pay attention, Monika knows a lot about anime, manga, and dating sim tropes.
Hopeless with Tech: Downplayed. Though she does get the hang of it, a lot of the edits she's making to the game's coding are very obviously unstable and, in the case of editing text, very clumsily written in both formatting and staying within the character of whoever she's editing. The traceback.txt file that appears in the game's directory documents one of her attempts to edit the game's script, and the uncaught exception that results:
Monika: Oh jeez...I didn't break anything, did I? Hold on a sec, I can probably fix this... I think... Actually, you know what? This would probably be a lot easier if I just deleted her. She's the one who's making this so difficult. Ahaha! Well, here's goes nothing.
Hostile Show Takeover: Monika, fed up with being a side character who doesn't even get a romantic route, eventually deletes all the other girls from the game so that only she gets to spend time with you.
Hypocrite:
- Her statement about how the other girls are "a group of autonomous personalities, designed only to fall in love with you" feels a little hypocritical when that's exactly what she did, albeit without being created as a love interest.
- She's a vegetarian, citing concerns about global warming as her reason for not eating meat. If she's fully aware that the world she lives in is artificial and doesn't think it important enough to keep around, why does she care so much about preserving it? Though, since her epiphany was recent, she may have been referring to her reason for being vegetarian before finding out her world wasn't real.
- She claims she doesn't like horror movies because she believes they often rely on cheap tricks like bad lighting and jump scares to induce horror. This is rich coming from someone who intentionally jumpscares stream audiences.
- One of her dialogues in Act 3 has her actually discuss the yandere trope by name and how it applies to Yuri. She admits to being surprised and creeped out by Yuri devolving into one and admits that she doesn't get the appeal. She doesn't seem to get the irony and instead tries to play herself off as an Only Sane Woman. This is doubly hypocritical considering that she intentionally made Yuri go off the deep end to be less appealing to you.
I Choose to Stay: Combines with What the Hell, Player? if you try to restore her file in Act 4.
"Please don't play with my heart. I don't want to come back."
Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: The position of president of the literature club gives any of the girls the ability to know they are inside of a game and also gave them the ability to manipulate the files of the game. This position gave Monika all her abilities we can see in the game.
I Want My Beloved to Be Happy:
- After you delete her file, she tries to give a Dying Declaration of Hate, but realizes that it's empty because she still loves you. As such, Monika undergoes a Heel Realization and restores the game with all files intact (except her own, believing no one can be happy while she exists) so you and the other girls can be happy. How successful this depends on the ending: if you didn't get all the CGs it fails miserably because Sayori undergoes the same yandere insanity that Monika did. If you say all of the CGs. Sayori regretfully informs you that you've finished the game. Regardless of the ending you receive, Monika will perform "Your Reality", which is about her feelings towards the player and her actions by the time the game ends.
- During Act 3, she describes what happens when you switch off the game, which is apparently something of a living hell. Everything freezes and slowly melts into a cacophony of flashing lights and screaming sounds that are so intense she can't even think properly, which all goes away when you turn the game on again. At first, she admonishes you if you turn the game off, but then she remarks that you have a life you need to go live as well, so she encourages you not to put her before your own needs (but also requests that you not leave her like that for too long).
If It's You, It's Okay: A possible alternative to her being bisexual if she wasn't already comfortable with having feelings for both boys and girls. She seems to suspect that you are a boy judging by some of her dialogue, but admits you very easily could be a girl instead and ultimately doesn't care, as her only concern is being the best girlfriend she can to you.
Inexplicably Awesome: While it has been stated that the position of the president of the Literature Club is what made her (and later Sayori) self-aware, it's never explained why it does so. She also may have invoked this to make her look better than the other girls by presenting her as the attractive, nice, popular president, who could join any club she desires.
Interface Spoiler: Monika reveals in one of her monologues that she was the one who wrote the information for the download page. She even says that if the player had paid a little more attention this wouldn't have been so awkward.
Jump Scare:
- A subtle one for the most sensitive players: if you take Yuri's route during Act 1, you can have a romantic moment with the Cute Bookworm... which is ruined by the picture suddenly changing for Monika's dialogue box.
- A more conventional one happens during Act 3 if you record your playthrough: Monika claims to be shy on camera, before zooming, then nothing happens. She mocks the viewers... before screaming with a Nightmare Face.
Kindhearted Cat Lover: While she dips in and out of and dances around the "kindhearted" part, one of her tweets suggests she has a stereotypical love of cats.
Lack of Empathy:
- It never seems to occur to her that the player would be worried or concerned about Sayori, Yuri, and Natsuki once they start exhibiting erratic behavior. Instead, she seems to think the player would want to avoid them altogether and instead gravitate towards her.
- It also never seems to occur to her that by exaggerating Sayori's depression and Yuri's Nightmare Fetishism to their logical extremes, they would just outright kill themselves. She was just expecting Sayori to keep herself away from the player and vice versa for Yuri, not having them commit suicide. And according to some of her conversations after she deletes all of the other girls, she doesn't care.
Lawful Pushover: Monika privately admits to the player character that she may be the club president and look like a good leader, but she is terrible at moderating arguments. This is demonstrated when she tries to intervene when Yuri and Natsuki argue over poetic style, but they quickly tell her to stay out of it. She claims to be this in Acts 2 and 3; however, she briefly subverts it before Yuri and Natsuki, perhaps to portray herself as the Only Sane Woman of the class.
Monika: Some president I am, right? I can't even confront my own club members properly... I just wish I was able to be a little more assertive sometimes.
Leitmotif: Monika's version of "Okay, Everyone!" solely features a piano. Fittingly, the credits theme is a piano piece composed by her. Also fittingly, you might hear the background music add piano accompaniment when her manipulations become particularly invasive.
- Actually, there's only two pieces of music in the game that don't have a piano playing: "Ohayou Sayori!" (the song that plays at the beginning of the game, before you, the player, meet Monika), and "Just Monika.", the theme of the space room in Act 3.
Lonely Piano Piece: Despite its jaunty tempo, "Your Reality" is very much this. Monika singing about her fate as a self-aware side character in a video game, lamenting how her actions to break the status quo caused so much harm and the Heel Realization that followed, questioning if taking someone against their will (the player in this case) is really "love", and her ultimate decision to let them go.
Love Makes You Evil: Her villainy is motivated by her obsession with the player. To this end, once Monika starts editing the game's code to be with the player, she does everything in her power to make herself more appealing and the other girls less so. The morality of all this doesn't stick until Monika gets her own character file deleted.
Loving a Shadow: It's apparent that she's less in love with the player, and more in love with what they represent: a real person, with complex thoughts and feelings, who lives in "a world of infinite choices." This, of course, is a major contrast to being a side character in a Dating Sim who's only meant to root for the other girls who are programmed to fall in love with the player. At the start of Act 3, she admits she doesn't know much about the player, not even their gender.
Mask of Sanity: Prior to Act 3, Monika appeared to be mentally stable and supportive, if intrusive at times. However, they are hints spread throughout that she's forcibly trying to encourage the player to choose her instead of the other girls, no matter how impossible it is within the game's engine. In Act 3, she drops all pretenses over her unhealthy obsession with the player, and will get downright furious when the player deletes her file. For bonus points, she is aware of anyone who watches a recording for the game and briefly scream with a completely demented expression as a joke.
Matchmaker Crush: Starts out as a Shipper on Deck when she realizes that the protagonist's poems are written in a very familiar way to one of the other three girls' writing styles. She teases him about any romantic feelings he could possibly have with them. But as the story progresses, she turns out to be more sided to this as she develops romantic feelings towards the protagonist, or specifically, the player.
Meaningful Name:
- "Monika" is not a typical Japanese name. Her name was chosen deliberately by the developer to indicate that there's something off about her presence in the game.
  - It is possible to force a Japanese name out of "Monika" using Alternate Character Reading. For example: "模仁香" translates literally to "model virtuous fragrance" and "桃似花" means "peach-like flower". You can mix & match other kanji used in names with such readings to achieve a result that's not too out-there.
- Monika is Latin for "advisor" and Greek for "unique". It certainly fits.
- Monika is the only girl without an "i" at the end of her name. This is important if you realize that three girls do have I's at the ends of their names and if you know about the theory surrounding the game's hidden fascination with opening a person's "Third Eye".
- "Monika" is an anagram of "Kami no", or "God's." Monika tries playing God by altering the character files, among other things within the game.
- It's an anagram of Konami, a company that develops video games - Monika herself, naturally, dabbles in such. If it's actually a Meaningful Name, this could refer to one of two things:
  - Quite a number of Metal Gear fans are unhappy that said company fired Hideo Kojima, alleging that its meddling ruined the series. Monika's meddling, albeit of a different type, ruins her own game.
  - Konami published Tokimeki Memorial 4, a game whose most popular character becomes yandere as a result of being the un-romanceable Miss Exposition of her game, at least at first.
- If you add a vowel extender symbol to the end of her name (モニカー), it becomes the loanword "moniker", which means "name". She's the tutorial character and doesn't have a route, so the programmers didn't tie her name in with the others, making the name meaningful by being the only one without meaning.
- As Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! reveals, her name is also short for Monitor Kernel Access, referring to her elevated permissions within the game that allow her to alter the world.
Mercy Kill: During the main Downer Ending, she realizes that nobody can gain happiness in her world, so she kills the cast to spare all of them the pain she went through.
Mind Rape: She alters the other girls' personalities so that their worst traits are exaggerated, resulting in Sanity Slippage. This is so that it'll be difficult for them to confess, and that the player will find them unappealing. When that's not sufficient to drive the protagonist away from them, she drives them to suicide.
Moment Killer: Between you and the other girls, all the freaking time. It's almost like she's doing it on purpose or something.
Moral Myopia: It's fine if she kills and deletes the other club members since they're not real. Only she's real, so she deserves happiness. She does eventually have a Heel Realization to change her thinking.
Miss Exposition: Provides you with hints about the other girls' writing styles, likes, characteristics, and initial personalities. That is, until she modifies the script during Act 2, where Natsuki's and Yuri's traits are exaggerated. But on top of it all, she speaks a lot about foreshadowing the game's plot and later deconstructing tropes about typical anime characters.
Ms. Fanservice: Probably invoked. In stark contrast to the casual outfits of the other girls, Monika's white dress shows off a decent amount of cleavage and is also lacking a bra. Given her self-awareness and obsession with the player, she's very likely doing this on purpose to make herself more appealing to you.
Murder by Suicide: Immediately prior to deleting Sayori and Yuri.
Murder Is the Best Solution: Zigzagged. According to some of the edit notes in the game's logs, Monika doesn't quite jump off the slippery slope at first and sticks to modifying the other girls' personalities for a while, but her inept programming skills cause more problems than they fix until she reasons that just deleting them would be simpler. Then it's revealed in Act 3 after Monika's own deletion that she couldn't go through with fully deleting her friends and restores them… but if you get the Downer Ending, then the Not Quite Dead Monika has to commit to full deletion to save the player from a crazed Sayori.
Murder the Hypotenuse: Her deleting the rest of the girls is a variant of this, since it makes her the only girl in the game, and thus the only romantic option. However, she brings them back as part of her Villain's Dying Grace.
Must Have Caffeine: During one of her Act 3 conversations, Monika mentions that she's a big coffee drinker. Her official Twitter account also alludes to this fact.
My God, What Have I Done?: During her Heel Realization she laments the fact she destroyed the Literature Club and hurt the ones the player cared about so much, finally understanding she brought her demise at the hands of the player upon herself.
Naytheist: One of her conversations in Act III starts by asking the player if he believes in God. She states that she started to question the idea growing up, and finishes by saying that she can believe in a God that uses the earth as a plaything.
Never My Fault: Initially, Monika is perfectly happy to frame Sayori and Yuri's suicides as their own choice rather than acknowledge the Gaslighting and manipulation she used to push them to that point, even though she also asserts that the other girls don't have any free will and that she's the only 'real' being in the game.
- When the game begins to break as a result of Sayori committing suicide, Monika decides to delete her character file on the grounds that she's the one making things more difficult, never acknowledging that it was her own treatment of Sayori and sloppy code modification that caused the issue in the first place.
- This is finally subverted when you delete Monika. While she's furious about it at first, accusing you of wanting to torture her and even blaming you for killing everyone, she finally recognizes shortly afterwards that she's the one who destroyed everything and accepts her deletion, restoring the rest of the game in an effort to atone.
Non-Standard Character Design: A subtle example. While the sprites of the other girls are shown slightly side-on, Monika's usually faces the screen directly. This is a clue that she is aware of the player. She's also the only girl to be wearing longer and different-colored stockings from the standard uniform.
Not Love Interest: Despite her being a School Idol and the player character clearly admiring her, she does not have a route of her own. This is a large part of her frustration. She's envious of the other girls for having routes, while she's not only stuck knowing that she's not real, but she can't even romance the player.
Not So Stoic:
- During Act 2, it's possible to find a text file inside the game folder after the second poem minigame. In it, Monika will angrily rant that the player still pursues the other girls, no matter what she tries. She even mentions that it'd be easy to end her life, but it'd mean she wouldn't be able to talk to the player.
- Monika has a hard time wrangling Yuri and Natsuki when they start arguing, which is especially true after Sayori gets deleted from the game. At one point, she seems to break down when things get particularly bad.
- When Yuri post-Sanity Slippage tells her to kill herself, Monika's only response is to leave the room, directing a somewhat passive-aggressive quip towards the player as she does so. She later admits she found it disturbing Yuri would say that to her.
- At the end of Act 3, Monika goes from horror, to disgust, to despair, and finally resignation once her file is deleted. She tries for a Dying Declaration of Hate, but she realizes she still loves the player, no matter what.
- During Act 2, Monika makes a transparent bid for the main character's company and attention, causing a straight-up shouting match ending with the player forced to choose which girl he'll spend time with. Not only will the mouse gravitate automatically to the Monika option, but if you manage to click any other option, the game will also be interrupted by a white screen and staring eyeballs, which then generates a whole-screen list of options, all of them reading "Monika."
Not Too Dead to Save the Day: Even after having her character file deleted at the end of Act 3, Monika is still around in some form, as she pulls a Big Damn Heroes in the Downer Ending to save the player from Sayori. Presumably, she's still around in the Golden Ending, but because Sayori doesn't go crazy when she takes the reins as president of the Literature Club, she probably doesn't see a reason to intervene anymore.
Oblivious to Their Own Description: In one of her conversations in Act 3, she discusses the Yandere trope, making note of how they'll do "absolutely anything to be with you" up to and including hurting their friends. She then notes that someone in the game matches the trope:
Monika: By now, it's pretty obvious who I'm talking about. And that would be... Yuri!
Only Sane by Comparison: She attempts to portray herself as the Only Sane Woman by exaggerating the flaws of the other girls. While the other girls in Act 2 suffer from creepy glitches like their faces or sprites getting corrupted, their font abruptly changing, and their personalities and dialogue becoming more extreme, the worst Monika gets is that occasionally she'll appear in front of the interface. Basically, as everything becomes corrupted and disturbing, the game seems to try its hardest to keep Monika looking appealing and safe. Naturally, this is a huge red flag that she's behind it all.
The Perfectionist: Being the School Idol has evidently given her a complex, and the way she puts pressure on herself to do everything right and appear perfect is explored in the side stories. Sayori helps her get over it.
The Philosopher: Act 3 involves her thinking about various existential concepts and giving her thoughts on different serious subject matters.
Photo Op with the Dog: Possibly has a moment of this in Act 2. Natsuki falls asleep while reading manga as a result of not being able to eat thanks to neglect, but Monika offers her a protein bar, mentioning that she always keeps one handy for her. It's not fully clear if this was a genuine act of kindness or this trope, but the glitchiness Natsuki goes through during the scene, plus the fact that Monika wants to make the player think she's the most ideal love interest, suggests the latter.
Pungeon Master:
- She keeps associating Sayori with the word "hang", though she says it's not on purpose the last time. (Before that, by developer's comments, she was just indulging in some Video Game Cruelty Potential, but maybe she guesses the player isn't so amused after all.)
  Monika: I was thinking about Sayori earlier... I still wish I could have handled that whole thing a little more tactfully. You're not still hung up over it, right? ...Oh, my gosh, I can't believe I just said that. That pun was completely unintentional, I swear!
- She claimed that Natsuki was starved for social interaction. What makes this wrong is that it's implied Natsuki's malnourished.
Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic: Averted when Monika uses her actual voice. She clears her throat, slips into fillers like "um" and "like," and seems uncertain when she speaks. In other words, she sounds like a typical teenage girl who's trying to talk to her crush. Her singing voice is similar; she does get slightly off-key at points, but otherwise, she's still a good singer. She is still learning, after all, and didn't have much time to practice before she presented it.
- During some of her rambling during Act 3, she'll occasionally let a "like" slip into her dialogue
Reality Warper: Deconstructed. Her meta-awareness and realization that she's in a video game comes with the ability to edit the game's code. This includes changing characters' personalities, removing characters from the game entirely, editing text, and creating a Monika route and railroading you towards it. However, doing so causes glitches due to Monika's lack of experience with editing code. She's altering reality, but she's doing it in a "brute-force" kind of way that leaves a lot of glitches and errors around her.
Red Eyes, Take Warning: Her eyes briefly turn red during one of her Jump Scare scenes.
Refugee from TV Land: Her ultimate goal. Having Noticed The Fourth Wall, she has become obsessed with the player and wants to escape from the game and enter our world.
Ret-Gone: A more extreme case than with the other girls, as in both main endings after Monika has been deleted, she does not return under the pretence that a game world where someone like her exists can't truly be happy - and in one of those endings, she is tragically proven right when Sayori tries to pick up where she left off. Trying to restore her file yourself after Act 3 has her chastise you and re-delete herself.
Screw Destiny: Her underlying motive is to free herself from being a route-less supporting character, and to become the Love Interest.
Self-Harm: One of the secret poems hinted to be written by Monika suggests that she tried cutting herself to see what Yuri got out of it. While she understood, she decided she wouldn't do it again unless she was going to kill herself, because she was supposed to be "the responsible one".
Shipper on Deck: During poetry meetings, she will bring up that a poem is something a particular girl will like, provide information about them, and tease the protagonist by asking if you're writing to impress them. This aspect of her is later subverted and deconstructed. Part of her frustration is that her entire purpose in the game is to, essentially, root for the other girls as they are programmed to fall in love with the protagonist while she sits on the sidelines. At the end of the day, Monika's true ship is Monika/player.
Shutting Up Now: Oddly enough, despite being the club president, she privately admits to the player character that she is terrible at putting her foot down. Whenever Sayori isn't around to help break up arguments or to get the girls on board for the festival, she tends to get violently rebuked and then just sits dejected in a corner. This Lawful Pushover tendency is one of her main flaws in the side stories.
Significant Green-Eyed Redhead: She has bright green eyes, reddish-brown hair, is front and center on the title screen, and turns out to be the Deuteragonist despite her not having a route.
Single-Target Sexuality: She doesn't know the player's gender, and she does not care.
Sleep Cute: One of the images on her Twitter account is her half-awake while huddled up close to a sleeping Yuri. The description tells us it was taken during a sleepover between the two.
Smitten Teenage Girl: And she happens to be smitten with You.
Stalker with a Crush: Everything she does is to get closer to the player, at the expense of the rest of the game.
Staring Down Cthulhu: Her Medium Awareness makes her a Physical God within the confines of the game. That said, Act 3 involves a long one-on-one conversation with her. Goes both ways, since the player is an even greater Physical God that can end her.
Suddenly Voiced: Jillian Ashcraft voices Monika in the credits, where she speaks with the player and sings the ending song.
Suicide Dare: Implied. When the player character notices Sayori acting off in Act 1, Monika decides to have a one-on-one conversation with her. It's unclear what they talk about, but some of Sayori's comments afterwards and final poem suggest that it's, at the very least, something that made her depression worse. Ironically, Monika herself is later horrified by Yuri telling her to kill herself towards the end of Act 2.
Suspiciously Specific Denial: Repeatedly claims during her monologues that she no longer cares and isn't affected by all of her friends and literally everything is gone, which would be easier to buy if she wasn't always dwelling on things she could've done better or her past memories of them.
A Taste of Their Own Medicine: She used her Medium Awareness to delete the other girls' character files from the game. Deleting Monika's own character file is how you defeat her.
Troll: The neat trick she pulls if she catches the player streaming using programs such as OBS reeks of this, especially with her cheekily asking if she scared anyone afterwards.
Took a Level in Kindness: After being deleted at any point during Act 3, she apologizes for everything she did and reboots the game so everyone else can be happy together. She gets better by the credits though since she finally sings the song she had been practicing the whole game and depending on how you played the game; she might be the person you get the note from after the credits roll instead of the game developers.
- In the Side Stories, Monika is genuinely as nice as she tries to come across due to lacking awareness of the fourth wall. That said, Monika in the Side Stories is technically supposed to be how Monika usually would be which arguably would mean that it was her main game incarnation that deviated.
Un-person: Has been erased and forgotten by Yuri, Natsuki, the player character, and seemingly Sayori in Act 4, after the player deletes her character file and Sayori suddenly has her role instead as Club President. However, Sayori reveals she still remembers her and all her actions.
Unreliable Expositor: She's usually the one to explain some of the other girls' conditions, but considering she's Flanderizing their negative qualities to look better it's a little hard to tell how accurate she is.
Villain Protagonist: Ultimately, the story is about her, her gaining self-awareness, and her subsequent breakdown.
Villain's Dying Grace: After the player deletes her character file, she undergoes a Heel Realization and understands how terrible she must have been to drive the player to do so. She then reveals that she didn't have the heart to delete the other girls completely, and restores their character files and the game scenario while accepting her fate.
Vocal Dissonance: A mild case. Her voice sounds like a normal girl recording herself unprofessionally rather than having a polished, clearly-enunciated, distinctive and unrealistic voice like most English dubbed anime characters, which reflects her self-awareness and sentience.
Walking Spoiler: Monika isn't exactly who she seems, and is the villain of the game.
With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Of all the girls, Monika is the only one with an awareness of her status as a video game character, and that awareness also comes with the ability to (crudely) modify the game's scripts. That ability, coupled with her repeated failures to fully break out of her role as a supporting character in the game's narrative, ultimately leads to her apocalyptic obsession with the player.
Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Monika is the self-appointed president of the Literature Club. Growing insane due to her title, Monika becomes angered at not having her own route. To this end, Monika accentuates the girls' negative traits to make them less appealing before opting to delete their character files when that fails. Destroying her world so she could be the only being in the game, Monika realizes what she had become when deleted. Monika's attempts at fixing her mistake go awry, forcing her to permanently delete the game, declaring that no happiness could be found in the Literature Club.
Would You Like to Hear How They Died?: One of Monika's Act 3 conversations has her describe Sayori's last moments to you in painful detail, explaining how she didn't hang herself high enough off the ground for a quick and painless death^note and how she tried to claw her way out of the noose as a result of either Mid-Suicide Regret or survival instinct kicking in. Unusually for this trope, Monika doesn't have any malicious intent in revealing this: she sincerely believes you have the right to know due to your care for Sayori. By this point in the game, however, her Lack of Empathy for the other girls is so great that the horrific nature of Sayori's death hardly affects her.
Yandere: Monika will Mind Rape, manipulate, and flat-out delete other girls from the game, just to make sure she has you all to herself.

The Developers

Metaverse Enterprise Solutions/Team Salvato

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The mysterious company responsible for the development of DDLC. Absent from the original game, they are introduced in Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!, giving a new backstory for what's going on in the game. Team Salvato, a group within the company, created the original Doki Doki universe where the main game takes place, as well as a control universe where the side stories take place, as an experiment to see how one would deal with the situation of being trapped in an artificial universe, which they believe to be true for their own universe. Their e-mails and files are accessible as the player progresses and gets achievements throughout the game.

Ambiguous Gender: Paula is the only one of them who has a confirmed gender, since she's identified as a woman in the Developers' messages. Everyone else doesn't get this treatment.
The Dog Was the Mastermind: Team Salvato aren’t just the developers of the actual game; they turn out to be the in-universe team of developers of the in-universe game, who created it as an experiment in AI.
Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: From what their messages show, they all find Monika's suffering in the virtual world to be hilarious. They also find it funny that Monika has a Twitter account, repeatedly mocking her for trying to be something more than a program. When someone brings up the ethics of treating Monika this way, project manager Paula says that we don't feel bad for bacteria or plants; why feel bad for Monika?
The Ghost: None of them are shown onscreen. All that the player learns about them is from their text-based messages to one another.
Greater-Scope Villain: They purposefully created the Doki Doki universe as an experiment where Monika is trapped in a virtual world and aware of it, so they're really behind everything that happens there.
Hidden Depths: Paula seems to be a sociopathic project manager who has no problem tormenting sentient AI to keep her job, and almost all of her communication consists of her being cold and professional. However, the last hidden file, and the most well-hidden, reveals a whole new side to her; that she was once just a goofy college girl worried about her future and going through some rough times, who was (and still is) best friends with Ive and is grateful for her friend helping her through those dark days, putting all their interactions in a new light, and serves as the one humanizing quality Paula displays.
Jerkass Gods: They created the original Doki Doki universe, so they are the equivalent of gods to it, relatively speaking (even if it's all just programs and data to them). They are also aware that Monika is sentient as a result of the elevated programming permissions they gave her, and trapped in there. It's just that they don't care. If anything, they apparently find the whole situation hilarious, considering that one of them laughs at seeing that Monika has a Twitter account, while another is amused at the implications of various universes created (and destroyed) as a result of their actions.
Lack of Empathy: All the developers lack any sort of empathy for Monika, and are content to continue experimenting on the universe she habits and Monika herself. The only person who actually does feel guilty is Ive, and even they find her running a Twitter account and not using it to scream for help "amusing".
My God, What Have I Done?: One of project manager Paula's e-mails is in response to another developer asking about the ethics of what they're doing, implying that at least one of them is starting to feel guilty about what the Literature Club is going through. However, while Ive finds the lack of "screaming for help" on Monika's Twitter amusing, Ive also goes out of their way to conceal this information from Paula. It's implied that Ive doesn't want her to take down what's evidently a positive outlet for Monika. Another developer notices that Ive has become a lot less talkative during meetings, implying that Ive's guilt is starting to weigh on them.
Punch-Clock Villain: Team Salvato are ultimately employees of a much larger company who set up the horrible experiment in tormenting AI to save their jobs at the company. In their emails and other communications, they discuss their actions like regular employees at a tech company and do not actively display malice so much as cold detachment, which they can do because they dismiss the characters as just a bunch of code.
Queer Establishing Moment: In her secret note to Ive, Paula mentions having an ex-girlfriend back in her college days.
Token Good Teammate: Ive, while finding Monika's suffering at least mildly amusing, appears to question the ethics of what it is they're doing to Monika, even though she's not technically human. He hides his distaste for Monika's Twitter account, which is implied to be because he finds it to be a good outlet for Monika.
Villainous Friendship: Paula's one redeeming quality, as revealed in the secret file 14, is that she and Ive, who have been managing the project to create and torment self-aware AIs, have been deeply close friends since at least college, if not longer. Paula’s written reason for bringing Ive into the project (“sure... why not”) when all the other employees were brought in for practical reasons indicates she specifically wanted to invite her dearest friend to help out.
Voodoo Shark: Their implied existence explains why characters can gain Medium Awareness and the ability to mess with the game — but accepting this makes it hard to explain why this is a visual novel (pretty weird format to run artificial intelligences) about cutesy characters in high school following romance game tropes, and Monika thinks it's a "dating sim", and you are playing it after having got it from a place like the game's website or Steam (since that's explicitly a part of the plot too), and it's called Doki Doki Literature Club! (which the Medium Aware characters know it is). About the only thing that's half-explained is that Monika would have created the Player Character to interact with the user. (And that the interface is pink because some wise guy changed it.) In the original, it could be assumed it was just an otherwise normal game where one character became inexplicably Medium Aware, and that narrative is still implied within the game itself.
Walking Spoiler: While the game itself is already spoiler-heavy, the Developers' very existence spoils that Doki Doki Plus! is an artificial universe separate from actual reality.
What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Despite the Dokis clearly having sapience, especially demonstrated by Monika, the Developers don't seem to view AI as living beings, but rather as lines of code akin to insects. Project manager Paula responds to an unshown e-mail about ethics that it's not their place to judge if what they're doing to Monika is immoral on the grounds that human ethics have always been based around things that humans could feel emotionally attached to, thus trying to be ethical when dealing with a machine like Monika would be as silly as doing so with bacteria or plants, showing how little they view Monika.

Characters / Doki Doki Literature Club!

WARNING: All spoilers are unmarked due to the inherent nature of discussing the game's plot twists. If you have not played to the end of the game, read at your own risk.

Main Character

Sayori

Natsuki

Yuri

Monika

Voiced by: Jillian Ashcraft

Metaverse Enterprise Solutions/Team Salvato

Alternative Title(s): Doki Doki Literature Club Monika

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Characters / Doki Doki Literature Club!

Edit Locked

WARNING: All spoilers are unmarked due to the inherent nature of discussing the game's plot twists. If you have not played to the end of the game, read at your own risk.

Main Character

Sayori

Natsuki

Yuri

Monika

Voiced by: Jillian Ashcraft

Metaverse Enterprise Solutions/Team Salvato

Alternative Title(s): Doki Doki Literature Club Monika

Previous

Index

Next