Doki Doki Literature Club and the Ethics of Horror
Editorial note: this article deals with death by suicide. If you are struggling with these thoughts, I recommend you not read this piece. Help can be a phone call away. If you fear you may potentially harm yourself, please consider calling the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255.
In 2007, the indie horror game Doki Doki Literature Club! was released to itch.io. This free visual novel very quickly became popular, especially in livestream and video playthroughs, due to its chaotic style of horror. What starts as a sweet and innocent anime-styled dating sim set around a high school literature club quickly dives into a tale of unimaginable psychological horror.
You play as an unnamed male protagonist. You’re invited by your childhood friend Sayori to join the school’s literature club. They need one more member to be officially recognized by the school and you seem like the perfect fit. The other members are Natsuki, Yuri, and president Monika. Each of the four girls has a distinct style and personality that different people will be drawn to.
Soon you are invited to write a poem, which is one of the more novel mechanics in the game. You choose from a set variety of words to essentially Mad Libs an original poem with no context other than picking words. Each word causes an avatar of one of the four club members to celebrate. Choose the right combination of words, and you’ll write the perfect poem to gain the interest of your ideal match.
Doki Doki Literature Club! is infamous for an early twist that is designed to throw you out of your comfort zone and keep you off balance for the rest of the playthrough. It is a powerful and effective tool, but I have questions about the decision to take that approach at all.
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Horror is a genre with a simple aim: it wants to scare you. It is one of the most personal and divisive genres because of this. What scares me isn’t going to scare you in the exact same way even if we have the same fears.
There are certain standards that have developed over time as horror has slowly grown into its own genre. The modern concept of horror has its origins in folklore and the emergence of Gothic Literature in the Romantic era. Folklore gives us the cautionary tales of how to interact with the world and its many dangers, real or imagined, in order to be safe and live a good life. Gothic Literature introduces the psychological elements of horror that dive into how our perception of reality is shaped by fear. Most horror narratives across media can be broken down into story forms, tropes, and archetypes that have existed for centuries.
Horror often deals with morality. There is usually some offense made against a societal standard, however small, that causes the terror to emerge. Characters that cannot be redeemed are destroyed, while the chosen one who is fundamentally good enough to be saved has the chance to survive. No one is innocent, though certain classes of characters are typically off limits for the worst of the worst punishments.
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Doki Doki Literature Club! is a horror narrative of destruction, not redemption. Its approach to horror is to punish you for playing. There are some beautifully executed scares that occur throughout the game, but you need to survive some deeply questionable, arguably offensive, sequences to reach those moments.
While I don’t like to hinge my online criticism on spoilers, I do not have a choice when discussing Doki Doki Literature Club! This is your warning.
The inciting incident for horror in Doki Doki Literature Club! is death by suicide. It’s actually incredibly well-written and foreshadowed. I remember trying to convince myself that this was not going to happen to this character because I could not imagine that lining up with the style and intentions of this game. I knew it was a horror game, but I did not know that it was going to be an exploitative game.
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Death by suicide is one of those topics that is very tricky to handle with sensitivity in media. It’s only in the last few years that the language surround death by suicide removed the harmful stigma of active involvement in a medical cause of death. A person “committing” suicide makes it seem like it was a simple choice that could be avoided. So much of the language around suicide prevention is simplified to “don’t do it.” It’s most commonly a symptom of actual mental wellness problems that require more treatment than shaming people for considering it.
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Doki Doki Literature Club! is a narrative horror game about choices. As a visual novel, we expect to have control over some elements of the narrative. Everything is not possible—that would actually be impossible to program—but we choose the focus. Are we going to pursue Monika or Yuri? Natsuki or Sayori? Are there characters we aren’t going to interact with unless forced to? Are we going to positively contribute to the growth of the Literature Club or do the bare minimum to keep our new friends happy?
What we learn throughout a playthrough of Doki Doki Literature Club! is how little control we have over our own narrative. That is the ultimate source of horror. We are misdirected into thinking this is one style of game, then realize as the story progresses that it’s a very different experience. As the body count grows, we realize our level of control is far less than we anticipated. Our fate and the fate of those around us are not ours to decide. Something is in control, has always been in control, and will always be in control.
This is why I believe Doki Doki Literature Club! is an unethical horror story. There are lines you do not cross in horror without the risk of alienating or even abusing a potential audience. The death by suicide in this game is written and justified by its own narrative, but that narrative is unnecessarily cruel. A force strong enough to control the entire universe around it can create whatever outcome they want and chooses to have characters die by suicide? Not just die by suicide, but do it in incredibly graphic ways and have the camera linger on the corpses as they begin to decompose? That’s a betrayal of trust.
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Horror is about building a trust with the audience. The reason why a “bad” twist ending is so upsetting is that our minds aren’t prepared for the possibility of that event happening at all. It’s a betrayal of what we’ve been led to believe is true and a sign of not trusting the audience to be scared by your original story. If you think an out of nowhere twist with no foreshadowing is your only way to get a final scare, you probably need to spend a little more time drafting the story to support that level of shock value.
When this kind of betrayal happens early on, there might be enough time to recover. However, that recovery depends on what level of trust is broken. A slasher film might end the life of a potential survivor girl before the credits run to establish the method of the killers and set you off guard. An exploitation film might assault or destroy a character just for the shock value. One is easy to overcome; the other is potentially so traumatic to an audience that they never really recover.
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Doki Doki Literature Club! wants you to be upset by that first twist. There are even fake outs of when that character will die by suicide before it happens. When it does happen, you see the body clearly and are told by dialogue that you think you could’ve done something to stop it. You literally can’t, as the game will never let you avoid it, but the game will always tell you that somehow, on some level, this is your fault.
This is what I mean about exploitation in a horror narrative. Not only did this game development team decide that multiple deaths by suicide was a great idea to ratchet up the tension in a horror game, they decided it would hit even harder if the first person narration blamed the player for it happening. It’s two levels of stigmatization in one poorly decided scare: she killed herself, and you didn’t stop her from doing it.
I think this is a case of a writer getting stuck on one idea. They knew they wanted to have that specific shocking image in their story and did not stop to consider other options that could lead them to the next plot point. This character could’ve runaway, dropped out of school, or been hospitalized (without showing exactly what she did to herself) and the story would still work the exact same way. The suggestion of wrong doing and your own role in her disappearance would be far more effective than showing exactly what happened and telling you it’s your fault.
This would also allow room for these disturbing moments to escalate throughout the narrative. As the world starts to shift beyond your focus and your new friends act like grotesque caricatures of their worst traits, a sense of foreboding doom would be unavoidable. The second death by suicide would actually be more shocking and justified by the clear escalation in the severity of scares if the first one was never definitively shown. That lingering shot on the corpse would be artistic and purposeful in the context.
All of this is not to discredit the success or quality of Doki Doki Literature Club! It is, unquestionably, a well made game. The story that develops after you get past this first questionable moment is stellar. Because it’s a visual novel, you can pause the game and take a break when you need to. Please, take a break if you think you need to. It’s no different than dog-earring a page in a book and picking it up later.
I consider myself a fan of the game. I’ve replayed it multiple times and keep finding new depth and dimension to the visual storytelling. The ever-shifting narrative of the literature club is one of the most terrifying stories I’ve experienced in a horror game since Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem on the Nintendo GameCube. That, too, played with your perception of reality, breaking the fourth wall and holding you accountable for things you could never control. It’s a style of horror I enjoy across media. I just wish that Doki Doki Literature Club! went a different direction for that first twist.
Doki Doki Literature Club! is free on PC through Steam and itch.io