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Anonymous asked: How would DDLC be better aro?
Oh good, I get to explain. You will regret this. 🌝
...On the offchance you're asking this without already knowing DDLC for some reason, I'll give a brief overview first. (Spoilers for DDLC, obviously. Can't really get around that.)
(Note: this game has... a Lot of trigger warnings. This essay will avoid just about all of them and certainly won't include any pictures of those moments, but will discuss arophobia, along with its role in Monika's suicide. Be wary if that may hit too close to home for you.)
So! This is a satire/deconstruction of the dating sim genre initially masquerading, a la Puella Magi Madoka Magica, as a sincere example. Your average schoolboy mannequin of a self-insert is pressed into joining the school Literature Club, where you'll befriend – and, inevitably, date – exactly one of the club's handful of members... excepting club president Monika, who serves as your advice corner. No matter who you choose, the game begins to devolve from there into gruesome shock horror and torture as both the love interests and the world of the game itself are maliciously edited to punish both you and the girl for your choice. After some time of this, Monika reveals that she's meta-aware and has fallen in love with you – not you, the character, but you the player – and has been driven mad by the knowledge that she's simply not coded to be romanceable, deciding that she'd rather burn the world (and all of her former "friends" in it) to the ground in order to trap you with no other options except her, even to the point of distorting her friends' issues in some really awful ways and messing with your computer files to make it look like she can really reach you beyond the game. The only way to proceed from here is to delete her file – which is to say, kill her. At which point she apologizes for going too far and brings everything back to the way it was, just without her in it... except whichever girl gets chosen to be the new president in her place is faced with the same meta-awareness – the reality that you/the player can only choose one girl – and Monika is forced to delete the world entirely because "no happiness can be found here."
Generally, so far as I can tell, this has largely been treated as an individual thing, any points to be taken from it applicable only to discrete, solitary units. Monika being "crazy" is kind of a meme, and seems to be what the bulk of the game's players walk away with. The game seems to intend itself to be a criticism of "anime" (as if this sort of "the women only exist insofar as they're 'best girl'" mentality only ever shows up in anime, or as if "anime" could be reduced to this one kind of genre, but yeah, I'll grant that there does seem to be a certain disposability promoted amongst – largely male – fans) and dating sims as a video game genre entire.
But I don't think reducing the problem to "dating sims" goes far enough. Let's talk about how an aromantic reading of this game could vastly improve how it communicates/the depths of its themes.
Who is Monika?
The game tells us she's the perfect older sister/mentor-type: pretty, popular, smart. Her understanding of herself as a character is fundamentally founded, then, in her relationships to others: you can't be popular, be good at socializing, unless you have people to socialize with. But if she's so popular, so perfect, if everyone loves her, then why are there only three other girls in the Literature Club? Because, explicitly, no one else exists. There may be silhouettes, enough nods to the outside structure of students and classes to establish this as being set in a school, but beyond the main characters here, nothing else matters. There are no classes to take, things to learn, teachers to lean on. All that matters is her friends in the Literature Club. And that's all she needs!
...Until you show up.
Suddenly, the balance is upset. Everything was fine when the club was all girls, but now there's a boy here and everything is spiraling out of control. All of her friends stop caring about anything but you. You get closer to any of them than she ever could and help them with problems they never opened up to her about. The world itself bends and contorts to shove you together with them at every opportunity, and she just... doesn't get it.
Can't get it. (There's something they have that she doesn't, something that sweeps them up in this giddy rush for your attention.) The only thing she has that matters, these relationships, and she's dropped with barely a word now that there's a romance in the offering. It's just fundamentally, metaphysically true that being chosen by a boy – to fall in requited love, to be dating – makes you more important, that anyone who loses this race may as well not exist, because being romantically chosen is the only thing that matters.
And Monika isn't a romanceable option.
The Crash-Out
It's important to remember that Monika and the rest of the Literature Club are friends. There's a rush to characterize her as evil, or sadistic, or just an outright axe-crazy murderess – you know, cruel and heartless, jealous and bitter... the usual arophobic stuff. If all she genuinely wanted was to cause the others pain, though, the entire ending totally fails. She brings the world back because she feels guilty and ashamed of having hurt them and wants them to have a happy ending. She ends the world again because she decides that's impossible so long as they're all fighting over you, and they have to fight endlessly over you. It's in their code.
So why does she do [gestures awkwardly at what happens in this game] ...all that to them, then? Half as punishment, I'd argue – see above, about them dropping her/you making them drop her without a word, as though it were simply natural consequence – and half as an outcry against romance in general. "THIS is what you want?? Look at what you're doing to them. Look at how far they'll go for your precious ~L O V E~ – look at what you're doing to them. Look at what you've turned them into." They're all crazy – they've gone nuts for this. She's the sane one. She's the only one who can see what sort of eldritch monstrosity they've admitted into their midst, the thing rewriting their happy little world.
...It looks a lot like her, actually.
(Not) Just Monika
I mean, look at it objectively. You and she both have this meta-awareness, this knowledge of what the world is really like. She can meet you on a level the other girls can't. She exists in a way they don't. Maybe it's not that you're some kind of invader. Maybe you and she are the only real ones, and everyone else is too (simple/two-dimensional/stupid/in love) to matter. Maybe she matters most of all. Maybe, if this has to be a competition, she isn't destined to lose – maybe she's special, not broken; maybe she can win. (Maybe she can find the companionship she so desperately wants, maybe she can earn a place at your side and be able to trust that you'll never walk away from her the way her friends did, that's what romance means, right, together forever and you'll always come first ––)
But you... you care more than she does. About those same friends that she was so mad at for abandoning her – didn't she just do the exact same thing? Isn't she tossing them away for the sake of your attention, too?
...She's disgusted with herself. Horrified at herself – at the monster this promise-of-romance has turned her into, same as the others. And if she can't exist without hurting her friends, if she's doomed to forever be forgotten and left behind and to know that she is inherently less of a person because she does not have the same capacity to enter a romantic relationship... Well. Why torture herself? It would just be better for everyone if she faded away now.
But that doesn't work, is the thing. Faced with the reality that nothing she's known is real, that either she'll have to steal the affections of this extraplanar entity away and consign her friends to ruin or else fall herself, the next Lit Club president lasts only a mere fraction of Monika's time in the role. It's not Monika that's the problem. It's the entire structure of the world – the dating sim, sure, but take that for what the genre itself is an expression of. Hegemonic alloromanticism. The whole concept that people don't matter unless they're dating, that dating is the only thing that matters, that you can only ever just choose one and that relationship then holds everything to you, that everything (everyone) else may as well not exist. Everyone in the Lit Club is friends with each other. None of them can bear to leave any of the others behind as soon as it becomes clear that that's what they're meant to be doing. And since we can't just snap our fingers and erase the world, since striving for better in whatever small grains of improvement we can claw out will always be worth more than destruction, that means there's only one thing we can do:
Fuck romance. Make friends instead – and befriend everybody. Break the imposition that says you can only provide emotional support and intimacy to the single person you date and give everyone the help they need. Learn what you can about all of them. Love them all – what does it matter if you aren't dating? You're friends. That's just as important. And if reality says you can't, then change reality.