lamby

i really don’t understand how anyone came to this conclusion, because first and foremost, the MC is not a character and is pretty clearly not sentient or autonomous like the girls are. he is a vessel for the player. he has no deep emotions and is written to be as generic as possible with incredibly vague or common struggles that anyone could easily relate to. he only can make obvious observations about the immediate situations happening around him and has nothing deeper to think or say about anything other than a vague statement that you, the player, would probably already think or gather. secondly, he is a narrative device made to depict the way that the patriarchy suppresses the agency and autonomy of women, reducing them to nothing more than dateable characters to be objectified for the pleasure of the man originally intended to stumble upon ddlc thinking it was just a normal dating sim.

once the mc enters the literature club, all of the girls (specifically natsuki and yuri) lose themselves in order for the game to fulfill its intended purpose, for them to love you. natsuki, while always a little fiery and combative, becomes overly angry and aggressive to yuri out of “jealousy” for yuri and the MC, or because she feels like yuri made her look bad in front of him. yuri responds the same to natsuki for the same reasons, but also becomes incredibly obsessive over him, in a way that is pointedly against her will. I don’t really want to do a long analysis of yuri’s poems because that would take a long time, but all of them are about her gradual loss of agency into becoming less of a person, and more of a dateable character on a screen. 

i’m aware that monika played a part in this, coding them to be this way, but she specifically states that she did not intend for it to get this intense, the situation spiraling out of her control. monika herself, while being the most self aware of the other girls, continues this trend. she’s aware that this is a game, and that she is a character within it made to be objectified. she knows the MC is not real, that the player is, but instead of rejecting the role of a dateable character, she wants to become one, for you, the player. she has been led to recognize the world around her and her friends as ultimately meaningless in the face of her pursuer, and is willing to destroy her entire life if it means becoming a viable option for the player, only to be ultimately disposed either when she is deleted, or when the player chooses to abandon the game, and therefore becoming just another love interest for you to dispose of when she no longer interests you.