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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.
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.
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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