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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.
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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