Matryoshka Stories
It’s occurred to me I never talked about a couple of projects I did earlier in the year! I suppose it will also be unusual to whoever’s following this blog purely for mystery reasons, but I promise it’s mystery related.
Sort of.
So I wrote a couple of mods for a game called Doki Doki Literature Club. I feel like if you haven’t heard of it before and/or just aren’t terminally online it sounds like I’m fucking with you, but it’s an actual visual about joining a high school literature club full of anime girls that you try to impress by writing poetry. It’s free and you can give it a try yourself if you wanna know more, but a quick Google search will probably reveal why it would’ve been of interest to me. Or you can watch Game Grumps play it.
The long and short of it is that not everything is as it seems and things take a turn.
The rest of this post, and the works I made, will presume you’re familiar with what the game is about (and require that you have it installed anyway if you want to play the mods).
Usually when I get interested in writing fanworks, it’s typically when it’s when the source material really grips me or fascinates me. I’ll admit that isn’t really the case with DDLC. I played the original game at the height of its popularity (circa 2017/2018). I actually never finished it at the time because I was at a point in my life where a certain sequence in the game was not something I could handle – the imagery shown caused me to physically recoil and shut the game off. It might be one of the few times fictional media affected me to the point where I had to stop. And, in that sense, true, the game had a certain impact on me, but certainly nothing longstanding. Certainly nothing that got my imagination running.
Sometime after, I did finish the game. It still didn’t linger.
Which is funny, looking at the kind of works I put out these days. The whole game is a metafiction piece about someone being aware they’re in a game and trying to find meaning in it – to their own existence, to the pain of other characters, and to the responsibility the player themselves takes in a situation like that. Basically right up my alley!
Whatever the case, at the end of 2023, when I was lying in bed, sick with COVID, I accidentally came across the game again and discovered it had a whole modding scene – one that is fairly active to this day.
I had a look. I remember there being two things that surprised me.
The first was that there is mod that transforms the game in its entirety and effectively lets you “date” Monika, one of the characters from the original game. There seems to be at least one such mod for all of the girls, but this one is the most popular: from having a bunch of topics you can discuss with her, to mini-games, to her being aware of how long it’s been since you last spoke to her, to giving her gifts and outfits, etc.
Now, that in itself isn’t, like, a surprise on its own. Tomodachi girlfriend isn’t a Earth-shattering concept.
It’s just that I’m pretty sure there’s, like, a subsection of that community that’s kind of actually into her and actually virtually dating her through the mod? And some of the ways in which they talk about her is a little unusual? Like, there was a post about a guy who said he had “his” Monika for years, and was now married and had a daughter, and that both were aware of Monika? As in, he introduced her to his daughter? And I can’t determine if people are just fucking around? People I spoke to assure me that these posts are very much serious, and I guess stranger things have happened.
It is what it is; I don’t really care – people can do whatever they want – I’m just slightly fascinated by it. If you’re interested in meta-commentary on the phenomenon, there is a mod talking about it – and it’s pretty good.
The second thing that surprised me were the types of stories people were writing. For a game that is essentially a meta-commentary and, to an extent, a critique on the dating sim genre – there were a lot of people that just wanted the game to be a normal visual novel. Or to have a narrative where the girls got a happy ending within the established meta-narrative rules. Or to just have more girls. Or one emotional narrative that really focuses on one of the girls.
There’s nothing wrong with that. I think, though, looking back, that aspect was a large part as to why I decided to write my own mods for it. It got me to look back on the original game and realize that I didn’t find the characters that interesting or deep to write anything new on them – but I did realize I could put my own spin on the general themes and concepts.
So, without further ado, here are the mods!
Again – you DO need to play the original game to understand any of these.
The first mod I wrote is called Clay God.
The driving thought behind the story was: “Even a character in a game is aware they’re a character in a game, and have developed ‘sentience’ to the point where they have God-like powers to control the game, a real-life person still MADE the game and WROTE the character’s sentience into it.” The breaking of the script is part of the script.
The initial plot to drive this idea was, as I remember, a bit ambitious on paper, so I gradually cut it down to something I could make in about a week: a story consisting of scenes which the player experiences in random order. The player’s goal is to figure out what’s going on until, by the end, the truth is revealed.
So, basically, I wrote a mystery story.
But, like, a Dogra Magra kind of mystery story.
As in – Dogra Magra may or may not be relevant.
I’m fairly happy with how it turned out! The feedback from the players was also almost unanimously positive, which I’m very grateful for.
Installation instructions are in the post.
The second mod was Before the Needle Lifts.
The starting idea here was: “I want to do like a Murakami-esque atmosphere and use these characters to establish it.” Like a simple conversation between two people on a restaurant date.
Then I started adding more to it – since I couldn’t actually figure out what the conversation would be about, so I started adding context to everything and then an actual plot started forming, and it kind of became a lot more than just two people talking in a restaurant. In the end, it’s a story about a lot of different smaller things – a story about dealing with grief, a story about conspiracy theories, a story about time and change, a story about the fear of the unknown. And, of course, there are the meta elements, but taken to a different kind of extreme than in Clay God.
Of course, it’s ultimately structured like a mystery, but more focused on human aspects.
It’s also pretty goofy in a lot of ways. But I think it’s fun!