What is the work?[]
One of my favorite games, Doki Doki Literature Club! was a 2017 visual novel released by Team Salvato on Steam where you play as a character who gets invited by his childhood friend Sayori into the eponymous literature club. Despite initially playing off as your typical romance game, the visual novel drops its facade and reveals its dark underbelly. The game is notorious for its themes of clinical depression and suicide as well as self-harm. But what many people remember the visual novel for is the meme-a-licious Monika who, despite not being one of the romantic options, gains self-awareness and edits the game's files to first make the girls' negative attributes worse before opting to delete them.
While obviously no one counts in the original with Monika herself being an incredibly tragic figure, in June 2021, DDLC was re-released, packaged as DDLC Plus (+) for PC and consoles which also included bonus content and side stories. It is from this where we get a heavy dose of lore where it turns out that it was no coincidence that Monika went crazy.
Who is she? What has she done?[]
Paula Miner works for Metaverse Enterprise Solutions as the project manager over VM1 and is responsible for a majority of the original game's tragedies. As revealed in the emails, Metaverse Enterprise Solutions' goal is to figure out whether their world was a simulation. To solve this, Paula and her team create several "worlds" including the one of Doki Doki Literature Club! (referred to as VM1) and its side story world. Paula then grants Monika elevated permissions to observe how she would react to her surroundings. Needless to say, things do not go well as Monika was driven nearly insane and corrupted the game until the player is forced to delete her.
What's worse is that she and her other teammates are hugely aware of Monika's sapience (and how the other girls do gradually start developing it as well), but they do not care with Paula herself comparing Monika to bacteria and, when questioned about the ethics of the operation, she views Monika as lines of code no less different from insects. As such, Paula remorselessly restarts VM1 over and over, one of the employees casually joking about how Monika had already destroyed her world about four or five times after being driven to madness, until she believed that they had gathered enough data to move onto a new world, a side project dubbed Project Libitina.
Freudian Excuse? Mitigating factors?[]
None. Paula is a cold, authoritative figure who views Monika as essentially a non-person due to being an AI and shows complete apathy towards her suffering. Could be a potential issue: kind of like in my Helen Vaughan blog, Paula never physically appears in the game, but the three emails does show a lot of her personality as being a heartless woman only concerned for her research even if it meant subjecting a sapient being to endless torture.
Heinous standard[]
So in the original game, Monika drives Sayori to suicide; Yuri to insanity; and in Plus if it is to be believed, Monika ended up destroying her world four times give or take. However, the visual novel does a good job at demonstrating that Monika wasn't always meant to be like that. In the side stories where Monika received no elevated permissions and was unaware of her existence as a gaming character, she is shown truly befriending and caring for her teammates. The only reason Monika became increasingly desperate was because of her acquiring knowledge that she did not ask for. She also came to regret her actions and tried to atone in Act IV only for it to end up going wrong again.
With Paula and MES, she was the one who gave Monika her heightened awareness and is indirectly responsible for all the bad things that Monika (and the other girls) had done. Worse, Paula repeatedly restarts the Doki Doki universe over and over without any pity that she was subjecting the sapient beings within to a torturous existence. And from the emails shown, it is more or less confirmed that it wasn't even the first world they were experimenting with and inadvertently destroyed nor would it have been the last.
Conclusion[]
Unsure. Leaning yes.