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Doki Doki Literature Club Redesign Controversy as a «mise en abyme» of Certain Culture War Issues
I saw a small-scale controversy on Tik-tok (ugggggh, I know right?) recently. First let me give the background. Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC) is a knock-off visual novel, in the same way that California Champagne is a knock off of Champagne. Visual novels are the video game version of anime and manga and as a consequence, they can only be produced in the Japan region of Asia. They are not really video games, but more like something in between a manga and an anime delivered in .exe format on a computer. The only dynamic element they have is a tradition of branching choices, which anime and manga cannot do.
Anyway, it is not that important that DDLC is a knockoff, except that it provides some background for the type of people who like it. The art of this knockoff is quite faithful to the real deal, but the story is not. I have never played it and am not planning on it, because I am a snob, but from what I have gathered, it's like the anime girl version of Depression Quest. It also features a lot of annoying deconstructive quotes like, «these girls are like if you took all of the traits that make someone human and just took the cute bits» said by the player character in the middle of it. Quite rude for some foreigners to do, no? Kind of like making something in California called Champagne but you somehow criticize the concept of using Chardonnay grapes and making it have gas in it while you're at it, while taking the alcohol out of it for tee-totaling Americans. Almost like it's a product of hatred for the original thing.
Well, it will turn out that you will of course get a lot of fans that hate the fact that it comes in a wine bottle. The wine bottle of DDLC is that the characters look like cartoon, moe, teenage anime girls. They have round faces, big eyes, cute mannerisms, and wear bows and and school uniforms for most of the VN, as is customary.
Here are some examples of official art from the game.
Now, what if they were designed to look like real girls? Obviously they would look like this, right (edit: this is one of the original redesign posts)? Well no, because they obviously look like cross dressing men here. The fact that those redesigns look like men is now being denied by real girls who look nothing like those men.
I can only describe this as gas-lighting. And it perfectly parallels the way gender discourse from the left happens in the broader culture war. Transgenderism of course is the biggest gas-light of them all, but feminism broadly is filled with some of the most bald-faced untruths of any political ideology. Many feminists believe women aren't mentally different from men, and can beat men in fights, for example. On the trans issue, we are supposed to believe that people can be born the wrong sex, that sex doesn't exist, that there is, in a meaningful sense, more than two sexes, and that sex changing operations are good for people. To me, these claims are about as credible as the claim that those redesigns look at all like 16 year old girls with two X chromosomes and not cross-dressing men. It is hard for me to understand how blind or dishonest one must be to really make those claims.
That last link says "fixing this ugly ass art cause they look like men" which sounds like girls are not denying it at all.
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Something I noticed being in the Homestuck fandom for a while, during content droughts what seemed like the majority of the new fanart you’d see produced were like this; black butch Rose, trans Jade built like a linebacker, basically everyone brownwashed, visually queered, and made uglier and/or fatter. When big updates would drop, more normal people would come back to the fandom, and you’d see a lot more art that was pretty and actually representative of the characters. I think the people who are still making fan content for a more obscure piece of media that hasn’t seen updates in years are more likely to be weird, deep into queer subcultures, or have an axe to grind with representation.
It’s can get annoying, especially in the modern media environment where Twitter and other social media collapses the distance between creators and fans. Relatively small groups of very motivated people can exert surprising amounts of influence on creators these days, pushing for their preferred (queer) ships to be made canon. In the case of Homestuck, the creator would go as far as to reboot the whole story and make gay everyone who wasn’t gay yet besides. See Korra and RWBY for other, less extreme examples.
It has made me much less tolerant overall, seeing how quickly fandoms get overtaken and everything has to be made gayer to accommodate them. I don’t mind LGBT people being represented in theory, but as a straight person I don’t get any enjoyment out of reading about such relationships, and representation seems increasingly zero-sum when a property giving some gay representation inevitably leads to them demanding more and more.
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There's a conflict within the left between the faction that believes that beauty and art is acceptable, as long as it promotes the correct slogans, and the faction that glorifies the grotesque and believes that beauty is intrinsically linked with fascism.
This ain't no trans conflict. It's a conflict between these factions.
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You've been banned once for being egregiously obnoxious and this, if anything, is more obnoxious.
What is the content here? Basically "Look at these ugly trans girls" in some niche media nobody else cares about.
I know, not literally "nobody." (Yes, I am in fact familiar with
light novels[ETA:visual novels, those too] and probably many other people here are as well.) But this is still not anything of significance. It's somebody redrawing some anime characters as trans, and we should care why? Because you don't like trans? Because you want a disgust reaction?And I specifically warned you previously that "some rando on the Internet did a thing and I want to rant about it" is not worth starting a thread.
This is purely waging the culture war. What is "beliefs I don't like are stupid and bad" offering to discuss. Agree/disagree? And the feminism rant was a complete tangent from the main rant, which was "Trans bad." "Trans bad" because... someone redrew moe anime girls to look ugly.
You've run up a number of tempbans, your discourse in general is low quality dragged-in-from-some-Internet-rathole bullshit like this for you to rant about Things You Don't Like, and from a less obnoxious poster I'd just say "Knock it off" but you're already a ban evader we gave a long leash to because we dislike pulling the trigger when there is a small hope someone will actually improve this incarnation.
You're banned for a month. I should probably just make it permanent because almost certainly you will come back and do more of this and make us pull the final trigger in short order, or else you'll just roll a new account. In the extremely small likelihood that you actually care to modify your behavior and participate in a more meaningful way, know that the purpose of the Motte is not just to dump rants about things you don't like and rail about how much you hate your enemies. A disturbingly large number of posters have trouble accepting that, but few go on such a speed-run of shitting the place up every time they start a thread.
The idea that DDLC is niche media that nobody cares about is really bizarre.
This is equivalent to having someone post about Star Wars and you say 'I've heard of Star Trek but Star Wars? Yeah, you can google it up, but there's absolutely no reason to post about such a niche property. Banned for a month!'
He was not banned for posting about niche media.
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I think OP's post is a bad post, but I think your take is also a pretty bad strawman. DDLC is the most influential VN made by western devs (soon to be overtaken by TCOAAL) and arguably the most influential in the english speaking audience. When it went viral it firmly penetrated into the normiesphere.
The fansom has shrunk since then but I still think this incident is quite an interesting scissor statement that manages to piss off different people for different reasons.
Obviously I think OP is wrong but I have to accept that it's hard to grasp what is truly at the core of this situation.
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Confusing them with visual novels casts some doubt on this assertion.
I do actually know what both of them are, but you are correct, brain produced the wrong token output.
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As someone who is not familiar with this style of art, I'm having a difficult time understanding what here is meant to be sarcastic and what isn't. Would you mind laying out your point a bit more plainly?
I am being plain. The redesigns look like men. Some users pointed that out and redrew the design to look like 3d girls. Then some girls who look nothing like the men started gas lighting saying that they think they look like the men drawings and not like redrawn girl versions.
It's unfortunate that I kinda like women with features that could be described as "handsome" or "boyish." And even I can spot the gaslighting.
I honestly just chalk it up to the original fan artist not being very good at figure drawing. I read enough badly drawn webcomics in the early 2000's to not see much strange in an accidentally "mannish" or "ugly" drawing of a female.
I genuinely feel like this is people making a mountain out of a molehill. Like, do we really need to transvestigate fan art that is in no way associated with the actual game? Someone made some bad art online, and some people apparently like it. You can judge them for their bad taste, but what are we doing here?
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Are you certain that the correct response here is anything other than "take a breath, put the phone down, and go outside" ?
It's summer time, get a fishing pole and go do some catch and release.
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Not quite. It's a visual novel, but it's a lot more game-side of visual novels (failure modes, bad ends, some basic minigames, a meta bit where using out-of-game contexts matters). I won't pretend it's some great and mechanically deep game, but it's not the schlock that DQ was.
And in terms of story, it's favored among the tumblrite set because it's a metaphor for mental illness, but only one (short-lived ) character is specifically depressed. The rest are more psychotic, and the actual narrative for them is much more externally driven as to why they're going increasingly nuts. Will admit there's a very self-referential deconstructive bit, though it's less gooner or anti-gooner and more Undertale-like as a comment about video games in general.
If you want a plot synopsis, the Random Encounters song covers it in less than five minutes (and is very catchy).
I... didn't play every route (again, not a great game, I'm not in its target audience), but I don't remember seeing that quote, and it'd be a little weird in-context -- especially in the middle of the game, thesurviving girls are definitely not just the cute bits floating around dereferenced.
I'm also not sure those are official updates. DDLC had a big redraw thing (that got some controversy) in the COVID era, and some pretty slop ports, but I'm not seeing any talk on their reddit about anything new coming down or any new hires. I didn't think there was much left for them to do; the paid version already had some goofy 'explained too much about the setting' content thrown in as a 'secret'.
I agree that it's weird art, even by the modern standards (or even old Excel Saga standards).
I'd never seen that. And seeing it now leads down a rabbit hole of different original songs about Doki Doki Literature Club rendered in Minecraft style, at least half a dozen of which have tens of millions of YouTube hits each. Despite the creepiness of the game, there's something super-wholesome about these sorts of inventive fan communities going off and doing their own things, connected by and occasionally going viral on the internet. It's like the Chaotic Good version of the "toaster fucker problem".
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Strange how much pushback you are getting for reporting on a revealing example of distortion. As you have already stated Doki Doki Literature Club is a fake VN, but considered real by its fans, instead of them thinking of it as belonging to the EOVN genre. The piece of media in question is by its fans thought thusly due to them lacking direct knowledge of what it was referencing, something perhaps even its authors did.
Fans of this work are mostly consuming echoes of shadows, parodies of stereotypes they never experienced expressed sincerly. (Some French 20th philosopher probably wrote about this. Also about this specific work, some blogger, but I can't find it right now.) Because they never experienced sincerity, they can't see anything wrong with further parody. If this work is by them indistinguishable from sincere works, it stands to reason they would not perceive the difference between sincere fanart of it, and unitentional parody.
I'm a casual fan of visual novels, and I don't see much point in distinguishing visual novels this way by region of origin, the same way we do with manga vs. comics or anime vs. cartoons. Visual novels largely originated in Japan, so most will be Japanese by default, but I'm not really sure that I would call something like DDLC or works like that 4chan visual novel, Katawa Shoujo, "fake" visual novels. They're just visual novels that weren't made in Japan.
Like, we can discuss them as works of arts by region the way we do with phrases like "French cinema", or "South Indian cinema", but it would be silly to say that French films are "fake" films because the first films were screened in New York City or something.
The comparisons in the original OP to Champagne don't make sense, because I don't think even the Japanese think of "noberugēmu" as a characteristically Japanese art style, even if it is far more popular in Japan than in the West.
I have played several Japanese visual novels, and I appreciated DDLC as a fun little horror parody of the medium.
I don't actually think the existential horror ofMonika's existence as a sentient side character in a video game is nearly as good a horror beat as when the childhood friend commits suicide, and all your saves are deleted, so you can't reload from a previous save to make a different choice . As someone who had learned to play VNs a particular way, make choices, restart when I got a bad ending, the fact that the game took away that option and made you live with the consequences of a story beat was really effective meta storytelling, whether DDLC is a "real" VN or not.
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You posted all this dumb shit about anime dating games (get control of your life, for god's sake) and didn't mention who did this redesign you're shidding and farding about. It was just, literally, some guy. Why did you waste everyone's time with this? Do you have autism? I don't even care if I get banned anymore.
It's a horror game wearing the costume of a dating game. That's its claim to fame.
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Obviously this is unimportant. Just don't read if you don't like the subject matter (I don't know what it is about anime that seems to annoy so many non-fans, as if most people here don't waste their time with movies, TV, sports watching, and video games, which are all equivalent). It was just food for thought, it doesn't seem any worse to me than the median thread here in this regard? Don't we have media threads, for example, on the Odyssey movie, or gamergate++, pretty routinely? I skip more than half the threads I'd say because they don't appeal.
I don't think people are singling out anime here. I've played DDLC and enjoyed it.
But most of the other threads on the Motte touching on multimedia products are talking about the actual product itself, which is high budget, has backing by a major corporation, and there is always an opportunity cost where the resources going into these mammoth productions are not going to art that would appeal more to the non-woke or people on the right. There's more justification for them being in the culture war roundup than a "literally, who?" fan artist making bad fan art.
(I say that, even as I also tend to avoid a lot of those kinds of threads on here due to a general lack of interest.)
On one hand, I feel like I properly advertised the post as being about something unimportant and small scale. On the other, I also want to reject the attitude that individuals are categorically unimportant and worthless. The artist is a literally-who, but in the grand scheme of things, so is Blizzard corporation, or whoever. The idea that we must receive some kind of permission from above in the form of enough funding, enough recognition, enough attention, before we think, comment, and care, to me, is wrong. We should not let our minds be beholden to the collective in that way. I think we can produce fruitful thought by observing individuals who are not authorized by the blob to have millions of dollars or millions of eyes on them or dozens of published articles written on them.
I think that the issue is that the more niche you go, the sillier it seems to try and have a big hullabaloo.
To use an example from the other side. A while back feminists were up in arms on Tumblr about this picture, depicting a well-endowed, tan bimbo transforming into a more modestly endowed nerd. They said it was racist, sexist, etc.
But it was just a niche bit of fetish art, made by a niche fetish artist, that had accidentally escaped containment and reached a far larger audience than it was ever intended for. There was no larger political message in it, and the only artistic purpose was to help a small subset of fetishists get off to a debimbofication/nerdification image. I'm not even saying that that is beyond criticism or critique, but almost none of the feminist critique was coming from a well-informed place where anything they said was anything more than initial knee jerk reactions to seeing something they had no context for.
I agree with you, that people should be allowed to comment on, criticize and pay attention to small creators. There's no "you must be this big to ride", but I still think there is a discretion that is good to exercise when dealing with a strange tempest in a teapot.
As far as I can tell, this was not fetish art, and there are normal looking girls on tiktok insisting that they think they look like that. So it's a bit more normie/mainstream than your example, even if it's ultimately inconsequential.
Bit of a "lurk more" moment, I'm afraid!
It's a reversal of a older fetish meme. The original has the nerd pick up the book, turn into the bimbo. Bimbofication. Neither it, nor she, is that deep.
The reversed form ("Nerdification"? "Debimbofication"?) is perhaps making a statement (rah! Rah! Books!), but it's also a remix of the original fetish art consisting of just reversing the order of the frames.
And now there are lots of other remixes too -- they're separate people and dating!
It's true that you're not supposed to get off to either version, exactly, but the remix is 100% fetish art by volume, sssooo.
Edit: I think I have failed at reading comprehension; you didn't mean the (de-)bimbofication comic, but the original post's doki doki redraw. I'll leave my error, but apologize for my illiteracy!
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Japanese Wikipedia indicates that a few gamebook/choose-your-own-adventure manga works have been published.
Ah, good point, I remember some of those as a kid. Not manga, but paper choose your own adventure. But the base rate of branching stories in VNs is >95% I'd say and in manga it's the exception, obviously.
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So tell me if I understand this correctly. The controversy is that a fan artist, in no way affiliated with the original game, made bad Doki Doki Literature fan art where they made the teenage girl characters look mannish?
This truly seems like a tempest in a teapot to me.
Like, whenever I learn about a controversy on any social media site that I'm not on (and that's basically all of them), I always feel like I'm getting news from a parallel world slightly worse than ours. Is this seriously a controversy? Was the fan artist particularly well known or influential before this? Why should literally anyone not involved in the flame war on Tik Tok care one iota about this?
That's why I called a mise en abyme.
The idea is that it reflects greater trends.
The artist in question has about 400,000 followers, so, more than BAP on X.
My limited understand is that Tik Tok followers are different from followers on older sites like Youtube or X/Twitter. I remember hearing some influencer on a podcast or radio show say that Tik Tok follower counts are so inflated that advertisers and brand deals had to adjust in response.
I suspect a lot of Tik Tok followers are bots or fakes, more so than on other sites.
But even so. I just feel like going after a random fan artist feels like such small potatoes for the culture war in general.
Like, what does this battle accomplish in the larger culture war one way or the other? There were always going to be bad artists who made cringey art, and tried to defend it in social justice terms. Why feed the toxoplasma and take up arms in this case? When it's not even the actual video game studio doing the culture war thing, I don't see what anyone is hoping to accomplish here.
I just thought it was funny how people are gas-lighting about the art looking like men. It says something about human nature and the culture war more broadly.
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