#IDK MAN IM POSTING IT NOW IM NOT GONNA REREAD FOR THE THOUSANDTH TIME WEEEEEEEEE

[tempestmothstorm]

Anyways here’s a long thingy about character motivations and how it influences actions and the epiphany. It’s been sitting in my drafts for months because I have no idea how to conclude it satisfyingly so here you go.

I yapped a lot in this post but basically Monika’s actions were in my eyes driven by the fact that 1. Nothing in her reality matters 2. You are the only thing that does exist and can matter, and 3. She wants more than anything to have value in life and to have a connection with someone real, and if she has no value she’s better off dead.

While base game is in caused by external factors like the epiphany, it’s also caused a lot by Monika’s own character traits that get turned into flaws when applied here. A lot of the things that drive her to do what she did was already there in the side stories. It’s one of those tragedies driven by character traits that in any other plot would have been inconsequential. Monika’s perfectionism and need to feel of value lead to her abandoning everything when her world couldn’t provide those things, seeking out you because as the only real person you are the only person she can be of service to meaningfully.

It makes me think about the rest of the club and how their big character motivations would influence them. To sum up my own ideas:

Monika is drive by a need to be useful. She may seem to be the perfect golden child who has everything she could ever want, but deep down she feels the need to prove herself for these things. She needs to be perfect, to be the best for others. Whether it be her role as club leader, model student, model citizen, or good friend, she focused on doing the best she can and proving her worth. She can’t put her own responsibilities onto others, it’s her own burden that she needs to carry for others. She knows her existence takes up thousands of resources at the cost of thousands of people, and with how privileged she knows she is, she wants to pay it back somehow, even if she knows it’s impossible. She can’t let anyone down, especially herself, she needs to prove that she’s deserving of all the things she has. She doesn’t want to be a burden to others. If she can’t pay back all the things she’s gotten from other, she’d be better off dead

Sayori is driven by the desire to make everyone happy. She says so herself so it’s pretty obvious. Surroundings herself with friends, she wants nothing more than to be there for them. She’s great with interpersonal relationships and emotions shown throughout both the main game and side stories, with her being the people person to defuse fights, boost morale, lift people up, and understand people in ways they don’t even understand themselves. it’s how she shows how much she cares, it’s one of the only things she feels she’s good at. She needs to make herself worth it for her friends, but the problem is that no amount of work she does for them will make her feel less of a burden, like she doesn’t deserve her life. But she can’t tell anyone else about these thoughts, it wouldn’t help them, it wouldn’t make them happy. Her own self hatred only grows and gets worse the more she hides it, but letting it out will only prove her self hatred right. If she can’t be useful to her friends in some way, if she ends up as a burden to everyone around her, they’d all be better off if she were dead

Yuri is driven by the want to be understood. She’s lived her life being an outsider, the weird one with interests and behaviours no one understands. She struggles with expressing herself and her feelings, only really knowing how to connect with others via her niche interests, meaning she only connects to a small amount of people. People had dismissed and made assumptions about her for so long that she just accepted that she’d always be an outsider, that she’s weird and that no one would understand the true her. So she puts up a mask, caring about her image and how she’s seen, trying her best to seem mature and wise if she can’t be loved as she is, to hide her weirder interests so she doesn’t put people off. The real her would scare off others, make people think she’s weird or gross, anything people can misconstrue as bad. People push away what they can’t understand, but on some level she might have learned to agree with these judgements. Why would people put up with someone who deserved these assumptions anyways. Maybe she could hide away parts of herself to be loved, but at some point she can’t change who she is, they’ll see something in her they don’t like and they’ll hate her. They’ll misinterpret what they don’t understand, and she’ll become something lesser in their eyes. She couldn’t stand the idea of being misunderstood and othered, so maybe she could just accept being alone instead.

Natsuki is driven to find a sense of belonging. More than anything she’s scared of being alone, left behind because she couldn’t put up with the cost of relationships. Pretty much all of her behaviour in the side stories is just her trying to open up, find new friends, but also desperately cling to old ones despite how harmful they are. She doesn’t really have good relationships with anyone outside the club. Her family life is ambiguous, but she can’t exactly leave whatever is going on with her dad. Whether or not she wants to, she’d have no other home to go back to if she leaves him, so she has to endure whatever degrading there is. No matter how she may fear her father’s judgment, she can’t survive on her own. Similarly, her friends also put her down. They judge and misinterpret her for who she is, make fun of her constantly, make her feel like she’s less, and overall make her feel worse about herself. They might not realize it, but they don’t actually like her for who she is. Yet Natsuki can’t let go because what else is there for her. She can endure the judgement because the alternative would be that she’s alone and abandoned. They might not like her for her, but at least she belongs somewhere. She worries so much about leaving them because she can’t guarantee another friendship besides them, she can’t imagine another regroup that would ever accept her. She couldn’t stand being alone like that, so instead she’ll endure being misunderstood and judged if if means she isn’t left behind.

These things pretty heavily influenced how they actually both in base game and side stories. The latter is obvious, but I think the roles they play in base game are also cool. Because Monika’s role is meant to be the helpful guide tutorial npc, fit for a person who’s desperate to be useful. Sayori is the whole trope of the heart of the team holding everyone together emotionally, breaking up fights, creating the games jokes, and even being the inciting incident. With her the game is happier and cheerful, while in act 2 her loss signals the tonal shift. Yuri is the maiden of mystery, with the first act being the part where we learn about her and her interests and understand her. In act 2 her character is misconstrued as her actions and entire being is flipped and misinterpreted into something shallow and scary just as she feared she was. Natsuki is the tsundere with the first act focusing on her opening up and finding the club as a place to be accepted and belong after pushing the others away from so long. Meanwhile act 2 has her slowly pushed away from the focus as the entire club begins to ignore and neglect her (basically that one Natsuki analysis I made once). As much as I restate my points I do it because I feel like the way character motivations here inform how they behave is so interesting and cool from a meta perspective. And I also think they’re really interesting because despite their distinctions they’re also very similar and often overlap

Sayori and Monika are about making their lives valuable and mean something by supporting others. While Monika leans to the more practical perfect golden child, Sayori acts as the heart of the team and shoulder to lean on. One’s way of proving themselves is focused on their smarts and skills while the other is all about interpersonal relationships. This is why they act as club president and vice president as they act as the guides to the other members, including the player. Part of it is them selflessly wanting to pay back to the people they care about, but part of it is also the desire for them to be needed. The problem with that framework is that being “needed” enough is both near impossible and super draining. They need to serve others, but for all their work it will never been enough for them. It’s no wonder they have self esteem issues. At least Monika still feels like she could achieve perfection (at least until act 4), Sayori has already given up and accepted that she’s a failure in her eyes. Because they need to be the best for others, they don’t like to talk about their feelings because they don’t want to be a burden on others. Talking about their own problems doesn’t help anyone, but it also doesn’t fix their problems either, so it just gets worse. Self fulfilling prophecy I guess

Yuri and Natsuki are all about finding people to trust, though their exact aims are opposites. They don’t really have actual connections, having been hurt by others in the past, and while they can be fiercely loyal once they find someone safe, they otherwise have a hard time opening up. They yearn for connections deep down, but they way of searching for it means they can’t really form stable ones. Yuri wants to be understood, but the second she feels off another person’s wavelength, she retreats, never committing to actually understanding each other better in fear that they’d hate what they’ve learned. She’s resigned herself to being alone, a fate that Natsuki spends the whole game running away from. Natsuki already has relationships, but they’re really unhealthy, with the people around her not respecting or understand her for who she is. Yet she still endures being misunderstood because the alternative is leaving them behind. She doesn’t trust she could find another place to belong anyways. They embrace each other’s worst fear in an attempt to reach their own desires, but neither approach is complete enough to get them what they need. They’re too afraid to step outside their comfort zone so they constantly accept that their loneliness and lack of acceptance is the default. Having been hurt in the past, they’re really just afraid of talking about their feelings, ironically being the one thing that can actually fulfill their needs. But they think their framework for relationships is how things have to be. They don’t realize one framework requires the other to truly work and be healthy. Self fulfilling prophecy again I think.

So yeah to boil down why the games love to pair up Monika/Sayori and Yuri/Natsuki this would probably be one of the big reasons. They all parallel each other in a million different ways, but for these specific pairings it’s the difference between being the best for your friends vs finding friendship in the first place. It’s just that both of these motivations also make them allergic to opening up about their problems in the game about hidden depths. Oops. Sure hope these things become part of a positive character arc about acceptance and relationships and not a painfully ironic downfall of a tragedy.

The thing uniting them all is that they all yearn for bonds and companionship at the end of the day, whether it’s maintaining these bonds or finding them. The problem is that they feel they aren’t good enough to deserve it, either trying desperately to disprove it by either helping others or putting up a person of confidence that they’re better.

Despite how important it is for relationships, their desire for relationships ironically lead to them having their own unique difficulties in opening up to people. It sounds contradictory, but relationships are complicated like that and it feels honest about how weird insecurity can be. But what prevents them from falling apart from miscommunication and isolation is the fact that they’re willing to try. Throughout the side stories they’re willing to be vulnerable, to open up and risk it all so that their bonds could become the best it can. Through the events of the side stories, their wish for connections can be fulfilled.

Notably due to events in base game none of these things are resolved , and if anyone ever reached the epiphany like Monika, they’d realize their wants aren’t possible in the first place (at least from the perspective of Monika’s epiphany)

Monika can never be truly meaningful if she’s just pngs and lines of text in a visual novel. Her existence can never influence the real world that matters, and with none of her friends being real, she can’t mean something to them either.

Sayori’s stuck in a horror game where everything bad happens to her friends, they all have to suffer for the epiphany. Monika directly says that no joy can be found in the literature club. If everyone is real, every is doomed to suffer with the reality that their lives are stuck in a game. If no one is real, their happiness is artificially, nobody is actually happy, happiness can only exist for someone real. Happiness can’t exist anywhere else in this world

Yuri’s whole deal in act 2 centres around her becoming mischaracterized into an unlikable person. Who she is is misinterpreted and twisted and flanderized into something she doesn’t want to be. Her worst fears are what she is now. Her problems and intentions are misunderstood to the point that she’s just a crazy yandere to everyone now, and now her image is tainted to both her friends and the player. Not that it matters, if she knew that her friends weren’t real, that they could never truly understand or comprehend who she is, that they only pretend to know how she feels, that they have no sentience and are merely lines of code, their understanding and care for her would mean nothing.

Natsuki is more alone than ever. Her one safe space becomes just as abusive as every other person in her life. They all distance from her, ignore her thoughts and needs, make her feel as if she doesn’t belong, put down her very existence in the club, and make her feel like she’s nothing. Nobody cares about her yet she has nothing else to rely on. And there’s no one else in her reality other than a club that hates her. Even then, they aren’t real. Fictional characters can only cure loneliness for so long. She’s still alone in the world with nothing real to care about her back. Shes truly alone

I think because of everyone’s need for connection being similar, they honestly would react similar to Monika if they were ever in her shoes. As the only “real” person in their world, you are the only answer to their problems left. I mean they wouldn’t reenact base game play by play or anything. I feel like some of them would be more direct in influencing the game to their needs or avoid actively affecting the other member’s mental states because it’d be a waste of time. And they’d probably be more attached to the club too (idk there’s also something about how Monika’s views on fiction also influencing her actions and how she kinda looks down on tropes and the type of stuff Yuri and Natsuki likes in base game. Overall I feel like base game would probably be slightly less murdery and manipulative but idk. if I psychoanalyzed everyone maybe I’d get a clearer idea but this is long.).

But like if the player is their only hope for real human connection, I feel like they would do anything to reach that. It might not be the same path as Monika, but if their options are either “be alone forever” or “try reaching out to the player” they’d probably make some questionable decisions at the cost of their own meaningless reality.

Act 4 Sayori had the benefit of hindsight on how best to reach the player, but if everyone started the same as Monika did, I do wonder how they would go about trying to reach the player. Maybe they’d be more similar than they’d think. Maybe that’s why they fit together so well. Maybe that’s why Monika wants to spare them from their fates. Maybe it’s part of why their isolation and dehumanization from each other becomes so painfully ironic. Ironically, they are the same deep down.