Doki Doki Literature Club goes wrong.  This is not a surprise in the slightest at this point, this is objectively the most famous thing about it.  The game literally gives you a content warning at the start of it.  Doki Doki Literature Club went viral upon release, with numerous large streamers and let's play channels covering it at its peak.  Audiences excitedly flocking to videos covering it, waiting to see the pen drop, to see this cute, wholesome, saccharine dating sim start to transform into a truly unique and unsettling psychological horror.  One that comments on and challenges are relationships with the games we play.  A lot of this was in hopes that the content creator did not know what was about to happen, that they could see their horror as the game morphs and changes into something deeply horrifying.  It has become one of the most important and influential horror games of all time, and has in particular pushed the boundaries of what it properly means to be an interactive medium.

However, the public perception of DDLC has become more mixed in the intervening years.  Now that the twist is public knowledge, we're seeing more people be critical of the game's infamous genre shifting.  There is this belief that both audiences and critics have posited that DDLC only works if the player doesn't know going into it that the game goes wrong.  That the game's ability to accomplish its goals is lessened, if not entirely removed, once you know that the game is a secret horror game.  A fact that is impossible not to know as, again, the game gives you a content warning at the start.  Going into this with knowledge beforehand, in their mind, reduces DDLC to little more than a trick.  A sleight of hand that is impossible to be fooled by once you know how it works and, thus, loses its luster.

I find this idea to be frustrating.  The idea that a work can be "ruined" just because you know what happens in it is an incredibly concerning thought process to me, and it is also, unfortunately, very common.  Over the past couple decades, people have become more and more spoilerphobic, to the point of absurdity in some cases.  The internet's free exchange of information has caused people to become fanatical about dodging spoilers.  People who will go into movies late to avoid seeing trailers or who have to log off of all social media in the weeks after a new game releases so they don't learn literally anything about it.  We live in a time where YouTubers, internet journalists, even the companies themselves will be criticized for "spoiling the work", for revealing information that they clearly want revealed but for which the audience finds "too much".  And it has begun to shape how companies sell their games, Pokopia, the Pokemon sandbox building game, kept everything super close to the chest and a majority of the people I know weren't going to get it until it came out and word of mouth spread because we had learned so little about it that the game's hook was entirely absent from the trailers.

I think this idea is bad.  I think that this relationship people have developed with the art they consume is a broken one.  I feel like we have, as a culture, stopped understanding art in any meaningful way.  And I think the obsession with dodging spoilers, with preserving the "blind experience", is a root cause.  That the modern spoiler culture is synonymous with the increase of media illiteracy that plagues us in the present.  And, using Doki Doki Literature Club, I would like to give my thoughts on why.  This is:

Doki Doki Literature Club: Why Spoilers Don't Matter

Real quick, I also want to issue a content warning, I will not be skirting around the stuff DDLC depicts so if you are triggered by talk of suicide, abuse, non-consensual relationships, etc. this is your warning to skip this one.  I'll try to not linger on any topic that might make people uncomfortable but just in case.

A Summary of DDLC

Doki Doki Literature Club is a 2017 visual novel created by game developer Dan Salvato.  Salvato, who previously worked on the incredibly popular Super Smash Bros. Brawl mod "Project M" created DDLC as an outlet to communicate his mixed feelings on anime and his fascination with surreal and unsettling content.  This ended up manifesting as a dating sim, a genre which had been seeing a mainstream resurgence in the 2010s due to Let's Play content of games like Hatoful Boyfriend and Huniepop.  Albeit, not one with the most respect for the genre given that the dating sims that got popular are games that made fun of the genre but a resurgence nonetheless.

In DDLC, you play as a player insert protagonist who walks to school everyday with their cheerful and outgoing best friend Sayori.  Sayori is an overachiever who is worried about her best friend being introverted and encourages them to join her in the school burgeoning poetry and literature club.  The protagonist arrives to the room after school and meets the other people in the small literature club, a trio of girls named Monika, the class president, Natsuki, the assertive tsundere, and Yuri, the shy dandere.  The club is mostly devoted to poetry writing, with the ending of every day being the group writing and reading poetry and they are in the midst of preparations for the school's cultural festival, wherein they will get on stage and read their poetry in the hopes that it will bolster the numbers of the club.

The protagonist slides into the club pretty easily and starts to develop their relationships with Sayori, Natsuki, and Yuri in turn.  The game appears, at this point, to just be a pretty generic high school dating sim, you start talking to whichever girl you like and learn more about them until they start to catch feelings for you, that sorta thing.  However, things start to get weird a few days in when Sayori starts acting odd.  She starts to retreat into herself, her poetry becomes darker and more heartwrenching.  The protagonist goes to check on her one day and she confides in them that she is dealing with serious depression, and that her cheerful outward persona is a mask.

She expresses her worry that now that the protagonist has developed this friend group, that he doesn't need her anymore, that she's become obsolete.  The protagonist assures her, either through a proclamation of love or a reinforcement of their close bond of friendship that could never be the case, and that he will always be there for her.  However, a couple days later the protagonist enters the club to find Monika looking over a poem by Sayori.  A dark, twisted poem that includes the repetition of the phrase "Get out of my head".  The protagonist rushes to Sayori's house, only to find she has taken her own life.  As the protagonist and the player recoils in horror, the game resets, deleting the save file they had previously played on.

When the player reaches the title screen once again, Sayori is gone.  Starting a new save file, we re-enter the story and follow the same beats.  We are an awkward and lonely boy looking for connection when we find ourselves joining the school's literature club and forming bonds with the girls there.  But now there's a wrongness to the story, an absence.  Sayori's non-existence is having ripple effects, the game keeps bugging out, dialog keeps appearing for a character that does not exist.  Furthermore, the other girls start acting strangely, their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors being exaggerated to an nth degree.  After the death of Yuri, who goes absolutely insane on the second loop and kills herself, stranding the protagonist in the Literature Club room "over the weekend" with her decaying corpse, the game once again resets, now removing Yuri from the equation.  Leaving only Natsuki and Monika.

It does not take long on the third loop for the player to find out what's going on, though.  Almost immediately after the start, the game basically being broken beyond repair at this point, Natsuki and the entire rest of the game outside of the Literature Club room get deleted, and the antagonist of the game finally reveals themselves: Monika.  Monika reveals that she is completely self aware, that she knows that she is simply a character in a dating sim and that she is not super pleased about this fact.  But not for the reason you'd think.  See, Monika does not care that she is a character in "low grade fiction", that her entire existence is built around the idea that she is simply there to look pretty and have little in the way of substance.  She seems to understand that to be her lot in life.  No, Monika is upset because she isn't one of the dateable options.

The way she describes the situation is something akin to hell.  Monika has to watch, day in and day out, as people play through this game and pick one of the other three girls, ignoring her entirely.  Millions of times over, sitting back, watching other girls get chosen while she stands on the sidelines, being forced to support that which she has no choice in and cannot participate in.  It's a lonely existence.  And that loneliness turned to jealousy.  Which turned to anger.  Which turned to obsession.  Monika, at some point, had developed self awareness and became obsessed with this need to be with the player.  But she was limited by the mechanisms of the game itself.  That is, until she figured out that she could rewrite the game's code.

At first, she used it to mess with the girls' stories, their personalities.  Make them incredibly undesirable, unappealing.  Take their personalities and flip them on their head.  Make Sayori's hidden insecurity into a full blown sense of undesirability and depression that burdens the player.  Turn Yuri from a shy girl with a serious crush into a psychopathic stalker that would rather kill herself than let you go.  Turn Natsuki from a headstrong girl with a secret love for manga to a needy abuse victim who makes the player uncomfortable constantly.  But none of it worked.  She made them all "undesirable", and the player only clung to them more.  And ignored her all the more.  So she came up with another plan.  Erase the other girls, imprison the player in a world where there is just the two of them.  Only Monika.  And now that she has them, she is not going to let the player go.

The player basically has no choice but to sit there and talk to Monika.  She confesses her love for the player, stating that she only did this for them.  That she deleted all those other girls just so they could be together.  And, in doing so, she lets slip how to defeat her.  The player must tab out from DDLC, which is difficult because Monika does not want you to do that and refuses to let you close the game, and delete Monika's game file entirely.  This causes her to glitch out, similar to the glitches we saw in the parts of the game that were meant to have Sayori in them, and she starts screaming about how all she wanted to do was be with the player.  But as she begins to disappear, she realizes her error, that she was trying to force the player to love her out of selfishness.  Before she goes, she sets the game right, but with one key piece missing: there would be no more Monika.  Just the other girls.  And so the game seemingly returns to normal, and we begin our fourth loop.

The fourth loop does, indeed, seem normal at the start.  You meet with your best friend Sayori on your way to school, she invites you to join the Literature Club with her, you arrive and introduce yourself to the other girls.  It all seems pretty kosher.  Sayori has even gotten a promotion, rather than just being the club's second in command/treasurer, she now is the club's leader.  In fact, she appears to have filled in the hole Monika left in its entirety, becoming the class president and having a generally more confident personality.  However, after the introductions, everything begins to disappear.  Only Sayori remains, and she states that, like Monika before her, she has become obsessed with the player and that she wishes to be with them forever.  That she wants there to be only Sayori.  The game stops itself, however, and Monika, or what random bits of code remain of her, decide that this all should end.  She says goodbye to the player, and deletes everything from the game one by one as the credits role.  All the while singing about how to truly love someone, you must let them be sometimes, even if it hurts.

The Mechanisms of DDLC

Doki Doki Literature Club goes wrong.  As previously stated, it is the thing that people probably know best about it.  However, there was a time where this wasn't true.  The earliest playthroughs of DDLC were done before the game's twists were well known, back when people were sharing this as "a cute dating sim that everyone was talking about".  Which, on its own should be suspicious because the only times people share dating sims around on the internet are when they either are absurd parodies of the genre (Hatoful Boyfriend) or meanspirited parodies of the genre (Huniepop), but I digress.  The point is, once upon a time, it was possible to play through DDLC without ever knowing that it goes wrong going into it.  I believe the original version of the game didn't even yet have a content warning, which real talk.  Good change.  Regardless of where you stand on whether or not knowing the twists of DDLC ruins the experience, this game NEEDS a content warning.  It literally depicts a pretty graphic suicide at the end of its first loop.

So, let's say you did manage to play DDLC completely blind.  How does the game work.  After all, this is the centerpiece of the argument, isn't it.  DDLC doesn't work anymore once you know all its "tricks", so what are those tricks in question.  Now, one of the most obvious things that DDLC does to create a horrifying atmosphere is its usage of disturbing and off-putting imagery.  It, for instance, utilizes a lot of "realistic body parts slapped haphazardly onto non-realistic models", a classic in horror that creates for a very terrifying effect, especially as we get in close.  Granted it's a little too "creepypasta" in the grand scheme of things, very "hyperrealistic blood", but the thing is that when well done even the most silly of tropes can be effective.  However, in my opinion, DDLC works through three main components: luring the player into a false sense of what the game is about, playing around with the player's inherent literacy about video games, and "breaking the rules" about what a game should be able to do.

The Slow Burn (Hiding What The Game Is About)

As mentioned previously, DDLC begins as a very normal dating sim.  It's almost saccharine in its sweetness, a dating sim that on the surface appears so one note that you are immediately led into a false sense of security just on that alone.  It is generic to the point where you almost begin to feel it must be parody, that you are waiting for the jokes to begin.  But, that's not what DDLC is trying to make you believe.  No, instead the game really starts to imply there's something deeper going on as you begin interacting with Sayori more in the game's first route.

Poetry plays a massive role in the game's story, as you might expect from the fact that this game is about a Literature Club (which is effectively a poetry club, they talk about manga and books sometimes but basically all the game's characters are unified by their love for poetry).  You learn a lot about the characters' interior lives through reading their poetry day-by-day, their thoughts, feelings, aspirations.  All told via poems.  Similarly, the game has a minigame where the player can craft his own poems, using topics from a word bank to fill in the blanks mad libs style, which will add to his affinity with one of the girls depending on what topics you use.  Which is like not how it works, a girl isn't going to be more likely to like you just because you ruin your poems to talk about things she likes, especially when you do it as often as the protagonist does, but like.  The vibes its trying to give off are "low quality, low effort dating sim."  I should probably not be expecting a great deal of realism in the romance.

Sayori's poetry is dark.  Not in like a horror way, I feel like that's the obvious implication for this kind of game.  No, Sayori's poetry is dark in a way that implies she's hurting.  Like she's battling some demons that she can't quite get to stop tormenting her.  She feels sad and alone, even in a group of people, and starts to feel like she's drifting away even in a close knit group of people.  A reality made worse by the protagonist so easily sliding into the Club, something that she does not resent by any means but still feels like a chasm is forming between herself and her best friend.  Eventually she starts missing school entirely, causing the protagonist to go by her house to make sure everything is okay.  Sayori attempts to assure the protagonist that she's okay, but she can no longer even put on the mask of being the bright, bubbly girl we knew at the start of the game.  When the protag won't leave, she decides to tell them the truth: she's been suffering from near crippling bouts of depression and they have gotten much much worse in recent days.  She feels like her existence is becoming burdensome and, seeing the protagonist find a sense of companionship with this new group, feels as though she should just retreat into herself and let everyone go.

I think this right here is one of the reasons why DDLC is so effective: it leads you to believe that the twist is different from what it actually is.  I feel like so often the understanding of what DDLC is tends to be misrepresented as it just being a "cute dating sim that is secretly a psychological horror game", that it is setup to be one thing to pivot into another.  And while I think this is partially true, what I think DDLC truly does well is making you think that the game already showed you its hand.  As I noted previously, DDLC's virality is, in itself, suspicious.  It's so unassuming on the surface that the fact it rapidly became one of the most talked about games online implies something deeper is going on.  But this twist leads you in a different direction.

By building Sayori's depression in the way they did, it lets the player believe that this is the twist.  That the reason this game is being so talked about is that it at first seems like a very wholesome, very simple dating sim but is actually far more mature than that.  It touches upon struggles many people are facing in the modern day in a very empathetic and intellectual way.  That DDLC is a game that is hiding depth underneath a saccharine mask, but that the depth it's hiding is a very earnest and well done depiction of mental health.  It lulls you into a false sense of security by, ironically, "showing its hand".  By telling you "what it is about", you end up feeling safer within it than you would've if it just simply played it straight until the real understanding of what's going on begins.  And then the actual twist, the graphic depiction of Sayori hanging herself at the end of the first loop, occurs and it's an absolute gut punch, hitting you even harder than it normally would've.

Preying On Your Game Literacy

DDLC also manages to build its horror by preying on your general literacy when it comes to gaming and, more specifically, dating sims.  DDLC, perhaps inaccurately, assumes that the player is coming in with some general game knowledge and, more specifically, knowledge of how dating sims generally function.  At the very least, because of the virality of them, it assumes that you've played Hatoful Boyfriend and/or Huniepop, so you have a basic understanding of things like dating sim character archetypes and the general pacing of a story like this.  Well, maybe not if you played Huniepop because that game is an infamously bad dating sim but I'm getting off topic, I'm not writing a post about Huniepop.  Yet.  Point is, you are meant to have a basic understanding of how games function when coming into DDLC.

One of the key ways that DDLC does this is by taking the traditional dating sim archetypes to their most insane conclusions.  As stated before, in-universe Monika has been warping our potential love interests to make them "undesirable", and her primary way of doing this is by taking their archetypal personalities and kicking them up to 11.  Sayori's arc of struggling with depression and feeling like she can just disappear now that the protagonist has "other friends", for example, is her very standard qualities (being an overachiever and being the protagonist's childhood best friend) being taken to the nth degree.  Her need to succeed being twisted into an anxiety around failure, that the poor attendance of the literature club reflects on her as its second in command.  And her close knit friendship with the protagonist is twisted into a dependency, she needs the protagonist's friendship and when it's no longer hers to possess, she retreats inward.  The game is very good at using what you know about these archetypes to corrupt the characters in very heartbreaking or intense ways.

A similar play is made with the characters of Yuri and Natsuki, this idea of taking these characters to the nth degree.  Of taking archetypal character traits that players would immediately identify with them and bringing them to their most extreme.  Yuri fulfills the archetype of the "shy, stoic girl who is secretly a big softie with a lot of passion", a very very common archetype in dating sims.  It's kind of the main archetype that the vast majority finds themselves gravitating towards, the "shy girl" is an incredibly popular archetype in these games.  DDLC flips that on its head by having Yuri instead be, well, a mentally unstable stalker whose hidden passion is instead manic obsession, a need to be with the protagonist that is so strong that the possibility of rejection causes her to end her own life.  Natsuki, meanwhile, fulfills the "tsundere" archetype, the girl who hides how much she cares behind a stand-offish and aggressive personality.  These archetypes tend to be aggressive rival characters, and DDLC makes Natsuki incredibly aggressive, short tempered and brash.  Also, I just love this note, because the tsundere tends to hide what she's really thinking, Natsuki is actually the last person to get fully rewritten by Monika and actually begins to notice something is going wrong on the second loop before Monika rewrites her memory because she unwittingly gave her an access point.

But even the structure of the game's "main story" is, in itself, playing on what the player is most likely to do in a dating sim scenario.  Sayori is the first to have her arc play out within the storyline because the player is most likely to be led towards her on a first run.  She's the childhood friend, we already have established chemistry with her and because we are introduced to her first, we've already grown a familiarity.  It's incredibly likely that, on a first playthrough, you will naturally pick Sayori and "be rewarded" for these choices by getting more in-depth with her arc.  Then, on the second run, Yuri is the one who is kind of "the villain", she becomes an obsessive stalker who actively becomes a horrifying monster because that is likely to be the character that you would gravitate towards second.  Everyone loves a shy girl.  And that leaves Natsuki as kind of the last woman standing. as she is the archetype that, while certainly popular, is inherently stand-offish and will put off the most people.  It's to the point where Monika doesn't even try to give you a choice to do an only Natsuki route, she just deletes her outright to make things easy for her.

More than that, though, I think the way the game plays around with glitches and corrupted data gives it another interesting level here.  It would be difficult to call it a level of "plausible deniability", because the vast majority of the glitches come after the game "shows its hand" per se, but I do think that, at first, it almost kind of sells that you received some sort of terrifying romhack of a dating sim that begins to get corrupted after its first loop is finished.  The game does not "adjust" for the absence of Sayori, for instance, the deletion of her is not absolute.  The game still attempts to load scenes that contain her within it, load dialogue that belongs to no one, things of that nature.  It tricks you, just for a moment, into getting into the mindset that this is still "normal", that maybe this is just kind of a shareware horror romhack that is getting spread around but that didn't properly think about what happens after the big reveal if the player chooses to carry on.  It actively preys on your expectations for what glitches are corruption artifacts even are, and that line of "is this a glitch or is this an intentional element" permeates through the work.

Breaking the Rules

Perhaps the most famous thing about how DDLC functions is how it "breaks the rules".  How it interacts with the player in ways that many would argue it shouldn't.  DDLC will, at various points in the game, dive into its own code and its own files on your computer and start changing things.  This is literally how the game states it functions, Monika is altering or deleting parts of the game to attempt to create a world where there is only Monika.  Some people are actually vehemently against DDLC for this reason, that a game should not be able to alter the files on your computer, that even if it is done entirely safely, it is still a gross invasion of privacy and gives too many people the ability to encode a backdoor into your computer under the guise of "interesting game design".  Which I guess, in its own way, is enhancing the horror too isn't it, you now being terrified of if you have just been given a virus?  The way that the game breaks the rules is perhaps the thing that made it so long lasting, made it one of the pillars of viral gaming, and I think it is very important to the DNA of DDLC's horror.

So, the most obvious way DDLC interacts with the player outside of its "boundaries" is that it will, throughout the game, delete things from the player's PC related to the game to keep the story going.  Most notably, it will delete the character files at key moments in the story, starting off by deleting Sayori after the first loop, Yuri after the second, and Natsuki at the beginning of the third so that Monika alone remains.  This is something you could watch it do in real time if you were looking for it, digging through its folders in order to see how characters keep disappearing from the files.  And it is of course how you defeat Monika, by deleting her own file as she has done to the others.  It's a very clever use of the game's status as a PC game and, for obvious reasons, they include a virtual desktop on the console releases of DDLC so that console players can replicate this part of the game since accessible individual game files aren't exactly a thing on console.

Now, the reason this works to enhance the horror is that, well, it is breaking what the player thought was a very clear cut boundary.  Especially upon DDLC's release, it was rare and basically unheard of that a game would be able to mess with the player outside of its parameters.  Some of them may use your files to find your name and put it in the game, but this was a game actively altering your PC.  It felt like a place it shouldn't be able to tread, and it makes the game feel that much more "real".  Even though, obviously, there's no such thing as a cursed video game that develops an obsession with the player specifically, the presence of these elements makes you feel a sense of unease that goes beyond just the game being scary.  It feels violating now.  Like it is truly haunted.  Rather than the player playing it, it makes them feel like it is playing them.

It does invoke the classic "gaming Creepypasta" setup in a lot of ways, actually.  By going past what the boundaries of what games usually are, DDLC puts the player into this headspace of "is this game truly haunted".  It obviously isn't, but like.  When people are afraid, they are irrational.  We all know killer demon spider clowns aren't real and yet we all had nightmares after watching IT for the first time.  DDLC puts the player on edge in a way that few other games can achieve because it puts you in this headspace of "this is more than a game, it's doing things it shouldn't".  It's maybe because of this, more than anything, that DDLC has remained in the conversation to this day, that its legacy maintains past its virality.  It challenges your perceptions of what games can be, how immersive they can feel, how far they can go in the sake of pulling you into their world.  It is masterful, in my opinion, the kind of thing that you could only do when you have a statement to make and no one to answer to in order to make it.  DDLC is a true work of ludonarrative art.

Spoilers

Now that we've discussed all the pieces, I think it is rather obvious why exactly people tend to believe that this game does not work once you know how it functions.  The position from people who care about spoilers is that the vast majority of media is best consumed blind.  It is, of course, a spectrum, some people are rather chill about it, preferring to avoid spoilers but will not act like it's the biggest deal if they know things going in.  But a lot of people, and it seems like an ever-growing demographic of people in the online age, believe that spoiler guarding should be a rather extreme practice.  That you must almost isolate yourself from communication because of your want to experience a story in its most "pure" state.  That experiencing art blind is not just a preference, but a right, that their experience is tantamount.  And they will, typically, become frustrated with those who create content that would "spoil the media", be it reviews, guides, playthroughs, etc. for ruining said media for the general populace.

This leads them to become very critical of Doki Doki Literature Club, a game where it has become impossible not to know what happens within it.  Like, DDLC is one of the most famous games in the online space at this point, not only from its virality but from the fact that it was one of the viral games that was actually, you know.  Good.  "Only Monika" is a phrase that transcends the space, people will repeat it without even playing the origin of it.  Not only that but, as stated previously, the game opens with a content warning, telling you that it is almost certainly going to go somewhere that the player isn't expecting.  DDLC kind of gives the whole game away right at the beginning, and while it is certainly necessary to do so, in their minds it weakens the overall product.

Now, I obviously do not agree with this sentiment.  But, it's not hard to see where they are coming from.  It can seem, at a glance, that DDLC is reliant mostly on aspects that are designed to take the player by surprise in order to mine its horror.  I have pretty definitively laid out a roadmap on how exactly DDLC functions and, if you are someone who believes that knowing what happens in a work of art ruins that work of art, it's not difficult to believe that DDLC functions on a series of tricks.  That it is akin to a maze, the fun happens when you have not yet solved it, but once solved, it cannot be "unsolved" and you cannot experience that same joy again.  It almost seems like the game is reliant on it, if anything.

Take, for instance, Sayori's storyline.  As previously mentioned, Sayori's storyline is meant to lead you into a false sense of security, not because it's sweet and wholesome, but because it makes you believe the twist of this game is different than what it actually ends up being.  It gives the player false information as to what the actual story of this game is in order for the actual twist to hit even harder than it maybe had if this storyline was not included.  It is, seemingly, predicated on the idea that the player doesn't know, and for it to be its most effective the player must not know what's going on in the narrative.  Is this not the purpose of a twist anyways, after all, to be surprising?

Similar arguments could be made throughout DDLC.  A lot of the horror seems to be about being shocking, about taking things just a little too far and scaring you with very surreal and unsettling imagery.  Imagery which could be argued loses its luster when you know it's coming.  The character storylines are built on taking character archetypes that are familiar and warping them to their most absurd conclusions, something that implies the player is familiar with the archetypes but believes this to be a standard dating sim in order to land.  Even the way the game interacts with the player outside of what is conventional seemingly only could land if the player doesn't know that it is doing so.  If you already know why the game is deleting files, it doesn't really matter that it is deleting them.

Even the reveal that it is Monika that is doing this, a character who up until now has only been a supportive figure, seems like it works primarily when it is a surprise.  Monika spends so much of the game being just a kind, caring figure.  She cares about the status of the Literature Club and tries to encourage the protagonist to reach out to the other members and form connections.  It is therefore a big reveal when it turns out she's the orchestrator of everything that has gone wrong.  That her support of the player comes from an obsessive need to be close to them.  That her pushing them to interact with the other girls is an attempt to lead them into her trap, to show the twisted versions she has concocted to drive the player into her arms.  That her true want in life is just to have the player all to herself, that she will literal imprison them to keep them safe and all to herself.

It is not difficult to empathize with this position, especially as it is so widespread.  It does genuinely seem like DDLC would not work as much if you went in knowing what happens.  I am about to be very critical towards this position but I do wish to let you all know that I do understand where it is coming from.  DDLC seems to rely on narrative twists, on playing tricks on audience expectations, on leading the player into a very specific thought process.  It seems as though going into it knowing what happens would not only make the bits land worse but it would be actively disrespectful.  This is, after all, a common defense for the pro-spoiler position, that to have the art spoiled for you is disrespectful to the artist.  And that entering DDLC with everything spoiled for you would rob you of the chance of seeing the game as it was "intended to be seen".  If anything, it seems like DDLC is representative of why spoilers DO matter.

Don't Matter

Strap in, this is about to be like half the piece.  As stated at the beginning of this post, I find the obsession with spoilers to be concerning.  That I think it is actively harmful to the way people consume art.  That Doki Doki Literature Club is suffering under the weight of people who think all it has to it is a series of tricks, as if all it offers you is surprise.  It is frustrating to say the least, to have so many people reduce art down to a singular connection, a fleeting understanding built out of how they feel after a singular playthrough.  But before we get into my general criticisms of spoiler culture, let's talk about DDLC and spoilers more specifically, shall we?

Trick or Treat

I have used the word "trick" throughout this post and to a lot of people, that might seem like an admission.  That DDLC is over-reliant on tricking the audience, that it preys upon their element of surprise.  I, however, do not feel like "trick" means that the game relies on the player to be surprised for them to function.  I think of the tricks that DDLC pulls as more of magic tricks.  Now, this may seem to be a useless distinction, famously magicians do not enjoy having their tricks revealed to the public.  In theory, the trick itself is only "magic" because we don't know how exactly it functions.  And by learning how tricks work, they lose the thing about them that made them so notable in the first place.

I would argue that the opposite is true, though.  That the artistry of a magic trick is not within the surprise of the trick itself, it is in knowing how it functions.  Magic tricks are beautiful culmination of mechanical know how, clever staging, on stage performance, the ability to lure an audience into believing it's real.  Magic working is so much less important than understanding how it works.  That's the part where you get to look at a trick and learn the mechanisms of it, learn why it works.  You are not diminishing the piece by understanding the how and why, in my opinion, you are enhancing it.  DDLC, and honestly most games, are very similar in this respect.

For instance, let's talk about the ultimate twist with regards to Monika.  Monika is the antagonist of our story, an incredibly powerful entity who has become obsessed with the player and whom deletes the entire rest of the world in order to be alone with them forever.  It may seem like Monika's villainy is a massive surprise, Monika is always so sweet and caring.  But, once you know what to look for, you realize how insidious she is.  She tries to lead you into checking up on the other girls, building relationships with them, maybe even pursuing them romantically.  This can seem like a class president doing her due diligence to care about her student body, but if you know what's happening, you realize what she's actually doing.  Monika is intentionally leading the player into seeing the warped versions of the characters that she created.  She wants them to see how "undesirable" they are, how much she has twisted them physically and emotionally.  All the while offering herself as a shoulder to cry on.  Hinting at her ultimate goal: of having the player to herself.  I think, genuinely, knowing that Monika is going to do a heel turn really helps DDLC's story more than hurts it.

I think too a lot of people associate scaring with "surprise".  Which is bizarre to me because we also have long criticized the "jump scare" with cheap, low rent horror.  Like it almost seems like an acknowledgement that scaring isn't about being surprised and is about the construction of a scene, something you may miss if you don't know what to look for.  DDLC, as previously stated, utilizes a lot of game conventions to mine its horror.  Glitches and artifacting and stuff of that nature.  Monika is forced to work within the nature of the game, only able to change or delete stuff from the game.  And it is, in my opinion, way more fascinating to view the game through this lens, through knowing what Monika is doing.  Seeing how she slowly gets better at altering the game to be horrifying for the player.  It is a very interesting throughline and it's one you might miss if you are only viewing this game as "the dating sim that becomes scary".

This is, in effect, why I led by explaining the various mechanisms that cause DDLC to function.  It is obviously good communication of information, but it also gets you thinking about the how and why with regards to DDLC working.  How it effectively uses the tools it has in order to create a better work.  DDLC is exceptionally clever in how it utilizes its storytelling and how it subverts expectations.  Seeing behind the curtain, as it were, should enhance the work.  There is a true artistry in how it's made, how the pieces come together, that one might not get to explore if they are approaching it from the viewpoint of "I need to experience this as blind as humanly possible".  They are missing the construction to view the conclusion.

It is placing the concept of "surprise" before all else.  You become encased in the idea that not knowing what's coming is somehow better because you can view it as pure as possible.  But honestly, surprise is cheap.  It's a very quick emotional reaction that, while it can certainly feel good in the moment, it doesn't really mean anything in the grand scheme of things, does it?  It creates a very one note relationship with art, one where the person in question is gaining an emotional attachment to the art, but not one with any particular meaning.  It is placing the point of contact within a very specific realm: how the work wows you with how it twists and turns.  And honestly?  Surprise is cheap.  Anyone can do it.  It creates emotional reaction without much work.  And to only value a piece of art because of how much it surprises you, to me, feels like something might be missing within yourself.

I will not sit here and argue with you that DDLC does not use tricks in its structuring.  It obviously does.  And it can seem like this is all it has.  That it is a bag of tricks designed to surprise the player and generate a cheap emotional response.  In my opinion though, DDLC's tricks are why it's so brilliant.  They are so effectively constructed, so well executed that it should not and does not diminish their effectiveness to engage with knowing what happens.  You see them not as simple tricks designed to get easy scares from the player but deliberate, well set up moments of fear and anguish that make you appreciate the work done all the more.  To view it as simply a game that only works if you don't know what's coming is, in my mind, unfortunate and speaks more to the faults of the player than it does the faults of the game.

Depression Depression Literature Club

Doki Doki Literature Club goes wrong... or does it?  I've been saying that throughout this post, continuously reestablishing that DDLC is a game that starts as a dating sim and transforms into a horror game.  This is, after all, the crux of the criticism against it.  But, my dear reader, I think this criticism is inherently flawed.  Obviously I do, like, I've been talking about it this entire time, but no, I think, genuinely, that the idea that what Doki Doki Literature Club is, that it is "the dating sim that is secretly a horror game" is an insufficient reading of the work.  That, in truth, by viewing it only as a work that exists to surprise you, it is actively stopping you from forming an analysis of DDLC that is worthwhile, that understands what it is trying to accomplish.  Doki Doki Literature Club does not simply "go wrong", and let's talk about why.

Monika's motivations and plan in DDLC are simple: after gaining sentience and realizing that she is a side character in a cutesy dating sim without much substance or pathos, she is unwilling to accept her lot in life and chooses instead to try and force the protagonist to love her.  As an aside, I love that despite being an all powerful entity capable of warping her own reality, Monika is still functioning within the rules of the game, and her motivation is built around the fact that this is a dating sim.  Monika does this by making the other girls "undesirable", making them extreme versions of their archetypes that are emotionally unstable, depressed, have tons of baggage, and so on and so on.  Her hope being that the player will run into her arms, her being the "normal" one.  The kind, considerate, perfect angel for the player.

Notice how Monika tries to make the characters undesirable, though.  By giving the characters problems.  She believes that if the girls impose on the player, if they have traits that do not exist for the purposes of making the player like them, that they will be undesirable.  She is, in effect, turning these incredibly one note and archetypal characters into people who have backstories, wants, needs, issues, pathos.  She earnestly believes that the player will like them less just because they don't exist solely for the pleasure of the player.  And that, comparatively, her pretending to stick to her archetype will lead the player to run into her arms, to view her as the most likable, most desirable party in the game.  Why wouldn't she after all?  This is the kind of dating sim that she exists within.

I think that this is one of the most interesting parts of DDLC: how it challenges anime and dating sim conventions.  Doki Doki Literature Club taking the form of a cutesy, simplistic visual novel dating sim is not just to make the juxtaposition when it goes to horror.  Rather, it is attempting to say something significant about the genre, and moreover the adjacent genre of slice of life school anime and/or harem anime.  It is not a secret that a lot of this type of storytelling is over reliant on character archetypes rather than real characters.  That their casts are full of two dimensional, completely unrealized people, particularly women, who exist for the pleasure of either the player or of an audience insert protagonist.  Characters who don't seem to have a lot going for them outside of an adoration of the main character, filling very specific roles in the story to where most fans of these genres have grown to become hyper aware of their archetypes.

DDLC having Monika give these girls more substance under the impression that they will be less desirable because of it is directly criticizing this genre and the people who enjoy it.  It is arguing that the fans of these kinds of dating sims, dating sims with very one note characters, are not particularly interested in dating characters who have problems.  That what they seek out of this interaction is a fantasy, a fantasy where an attractive girl adores you and you alone and doesn't really have an existence outside of that.  You instantly share interests but those interests are yours, you don't really meet the characters halfway and find out their interests.  Like, Natsuki's big twist in the "normal game" is that despite her tough girl persona, she's a massive fan of manga, and she keeps her library in the Literature Club explicitly to share with the player.  Yuri so exists to be the "lovable shy girl the player fantasizes about" that her storyline ends up having a lot in common with the film Obsession, which has a very similar theme of "a woman only existing for the pleasure of a man being a cruel, twisted fate".  Sayori is literally just "the best friend you've known your entire life", there is existing chemistry there and a bit of banter but mostly you're already endeared to her because of the protagonist telling you what your existing relationship with her is.

It is not holding back on criticizing this genre.  It does not have high opinions of either the industry that makes it, nor the people who consume it.  It is a very misogynistic way of looking at women, that their goal is to be devoted to the man in the room.  That it is such a common problem that quite literally the character who gains sentience in the game is led to believe that the other girls becoming more substantial characters will make the player no longer want them.  It is attempting to communicate to the audience how superficial this all is, how the women in this media tend to often be reduced to the most efficient and simplistic character traits so as to be unchallenging for the men who would desire them.  And that, quite literally, viewing women like this, like complications make them undesirable, is the opinion of someone who does not understand real relationships and instead wish to possess the object of their desire like they were a trophy.

More than that, though, the way Monika intends the girls to be viewed after instilling all these problems on them speaks a lot to how society views those with mental health struggles.  And, moreover, how often those dealing with mental health struggles view themselves.  The idea that giving the girls problems will inherently make them lesser is something that people with mental health problems face constantly.  It's something that they tell themselves constantly.  To bring it back to Sayori, Sayori treats her depression as something that makes her unwanted, that if she tells people that she's struggling they will abandon her.  She retreats into herself, believing that no one will want to be around her and, in fact, they are simply better off without her presence in their lives.  This is something people face constantly, the worry that their issues make them "too much", that they will be better off without the person in question and that it is their responsibility to prevent an inevitability from happening.  I know that's been something I've certainly struggled with, the idea that I should end my friendships before they get to a point where they implode.  It speaks to a lived experience, something we probably all face and also all mask out of fear that others will turn from us.

As well, Monika's complete lack of empathy speaks to society's lack of empathy.  Mental health struggles are thankfully taken more seriously now but they weren't always.  The idea of going to a therapist used to be widely seen as a personal failure.  That it was what people who complain too much did in order to avoid having to face their own problems.  You know, that old joke about "paying hundreds of dollars a month to complain about how mommy didn't love you enough".  People with mental health struggles often mask them in an attempt to not be seen as weak by a society that refuses to acknowledge them as real health problems and, instead, treats mental health as if it's just whining.  Monika represents the way world looks at those with mental health, as if they're just broken dolls who inevitably will be abandoned for much safer options.  She leads to protagonist to engage with her creations to see how burdensome they are, how their problems make them unfit to be a real romantic partner.  And she feeds them this ideal, making them feel worse and worse about themselves until they snap.  It is no coincidence that Sayori's final poem is just a repetition of the words "get out of my head".  She is fighting with the thoughts that Monika placed there.  Trying to get them out.

But that's not entirely true either, is it?  Imagine being a character archetype, an entirely two dimensional person both in personality and in physical form, who is suddenly given multiple dimensions.  Who is given history, who is given problems, who is given substance.  Imagine the existential horror of waking up one morning with thoughts and opinions, having never had them before and being wholly unequipped to handle them.  That is, essentially, the fate of these three girls.  Monika, in making them what she believes to be undesirable, has cursed them with an awareness of their own existence, something none of the girls are well equipped to handle.  It's honestly no wonder they end up in the places they are, imagine you wake up one day and now have tons of memories of your parents being abusive that are all hitting you all at once, or that you now have a general awareness of your own shortcomings as a person and are unable to grasp how someone who was so good at everything could now feel like such a failure.  Monika twisted these girls to suit her own needs, and they will, perhaps permanently, be stuck like this.  Doomed to the same fate that Monika herself was.  Aware of existence, and aware of their place within it.  It is why the cycle continues when you enter the game after Monika deleted herself.  And as a result of all of this, Monika feels she must delete everything and undo the damage she has wrought.

But you know what Monika is?  Wrong.  She's wrong about what makes the girls desirable, she's wrong about mental health, and she's wrong about the extreme measures that she feels she must take to stop the Literature Club from being an endless nightmare.  As the player plays the game, they will see more and more of each girls' story.  They will see their struggles play out and help them through it.  They have to endure a lot of the horrors in the game to do so, of course, but they will get through to these girls.  See them into being in better places.  If the player chooses to engage with them as people, not just as either girls in a dating sim or horrors brought about by a mad woman who doesn't understand the love she thinks she deserves, they will become healed.  They will stop the madness, end they cycle.  They will realize they don't have to be deleted to survive, because they know how to exist within their new roles.  And in the end, Doki Doki Literature Club goes right.

But to the people who think spoilers matter, to the people who think a game is ruined by any information being known about it, this all is lost on them.  They only view it as a game in which it starts out as a cutesy dating sim and turns into a horror game.  It feels like not only do they not view this game as art, they do not want to.  Mining deeper meaning from games is not a priority for them.  Surprise is.  The ability to simply view a game as blind as possible, regardless of additional context or understanding.  It's difficult not to be harsh with it: it's intellectual incuriosity.  They don't want to have the reality of what the game is saying unless they can figure out what it is for themselves.  Preserving the most "pure" experience is, to them, paramount and anything to the contrary is destructive.  Even if that "something to the contrary" is literally the thing that would probably give them a greater understanding of it.  And you know what?  I think that's the point.

Insulating Your Opinions

I have long felt that the purpose of spoiler-guarding is not truly to preserve a "pure" experience but rather to insulate oneself from other comments or critiques.  If not knowingly, then certainly as a byproduct.  I think many of us fear the idea of our opinions not seeming genuine, of the things we say being subject to scrutiny by our peers.  Especially in a modern media landscape like the one we are currently living in, it becomes trivial to let the opinions of others guide your own.  In a lot of cases, that can feel pretty icky.  And if you grew up on the early internet like I did, the idea that your opinions weren't your own was not only common, it was almost expected.  I know several of my friends grew to hate the post-SNES Final Fantasy titles despite never playing them because a popular critic made a very long video where he talked about how bad they all were.  I myself remember an era where my own opinions of games I had never played were regurgitating the views of other people who just told me how good or bad they were.  It sucks.  It really sucks.  Not having any real thoughts of your own, just going with the flow and repeating what other people say.  Forming your own opinion is such an important thing to being like a real person, and it can feel really bad when you realize the things you've been saying are coming from someone else entirely.

I think that this is truly at the heart of the entire spoiler culture.  The need to have your own original thoughts, to prove you're not being influenced by other people.  To show the world that you are, well,  you.  And I think that this is why people get so defensive around dodging spoilers.  To them, doing anything else is comparable to letting others guide them.  It feels to them like the modern media landscape is designed to influence everything you do, to impact how you see things, how you think about things, and it can be problematic for finding your own voice within it.  So they cling to the "true experience", to taking sometimes aggressive measures in order to preserve their ability to have an original thought.  They are almost attempting to reclaim something that may be considered lost in the present day.

However, I think that this does more harm than good.  It seems to me that the rather extreme lengths that people will go to in order to dodge spoilers, or as we've established in this section, protect their right to original thought accomplishes a different goal.  I think, rather than protecting their experience, protecting their original thought, it instead serves to insulate their opinions from other people.  Let me run you through what is a very common scenario in regards to spoiler culture and you'll see what I'm talking about, okay?

So let's say a new game that's hotly anticipated gets revealed at the Game Awards, let's say.  Final Fantasy XVII, let's just use that as an example.  We get our big reveal trailer, everyone is hyped, it's a grand old time.  Almost immediately, people will be putting up roadblocks, right, because they don't want to be "spoiled".  They don't want to see anything else from the game, they don't want to know anything about the game, the experience must be preserved.  Never mind that officially revealed information cannot, by definition, be a spoiler but spoiler culture people have spent a decade showing up to movies 30 minutes late to make sure they don't see a trailer for a movie they might want to see later on so like.  Now, they spend the next several months putting in work making sure they do not see hide nor hair of FFXVII no matter what.  They want it to be completely blind.

Game comes out, and they're playing through it and they want to talk about their experiences with it.  Except they don't really want to talk about it because they don't want to enter a conversation that might either spoil the game for themselves or spoil the game for someone else who is playing it.  So they keep a tight lip, saying generic, nothing statements like "I'm really liking it so far" or "I got to a really cool part last night".  Avoiding having a proper conversation about the work in an attempt to not step on other people's toes.  They keep doing this until they beat FFXVII, at which point they are once again ready to talk about it.  And once again, they really aren't.  Other people are playing through the game, after all, it'd be unfair to talk about it openly while they're playing through it.  So again, they just give nothing statements, say it was good, talk about a character they like or whatever but don't go into too much detail to dodge spoilers.  This will become the status quo.  FFXVII will get brought up, they'll give a couple statements on some things they liked about it, but never commit to talking about the game in any way.

Now, the entire time that this is happening, the person is obviously forming opinions.  They're developing their own thoughts on the game.  That is, presumably, the point of this aggressive spoiler dodging policy after all.  However, they aren't discussing those opinions.  They aren't telling people what they think about the game, how they feel, whether or not they truly understand it.  They aren't listening to other people's criticisms or their praises.  They aren't seeing what other people see in the work, aren't feeling what other people might feel.  And they most likely won't do that until long after the game has been out and everyone they know has a chance to play it.  What they think they're doing is being fair to everyone's experience.  What they're actually doing?  Building a wall around their own opinions.

It is my belief that people get so caught up in making sure they have their own original thoughts and opinions that they insulate themselves from having more context on the work.  They are ultimately not just shielding themselves from getting spoiled, they are shielding themselves from allowing others thoughts to impact their own.  They are not forming a well-rounded opinion on the work because they are not taking other people's opinions to heart.  They avoid reviews and conversation with other people playing it and just keep themselves in their corner regarding the work for months if not years after it comes out.  Never really articulating a concrete opinion on something besides "I liked it" or "I didn't like it".

What this ends up doing is solidifying one's opinion long before they have the option to talk about a work in question.  The subject is, in their mind, defined by the things they have noticed, the experiences they have had, and they are typically not open to new information on the subject.  They know what they think about it and they will continue to think these things about it despite any new viewpoints that may arise in relation to the subject.  And if someone presents an opposing viewpoint, puts forward information they may not have thought of that maybe tempers the work, they will oftentimes just be very wishy washy about it.  Maybe they acknowledge this opinion as having weight, but they don't let it influence how they view the work.  They will often forget about this information or just go "well it didn't bother me so it's not really a problem".  Or they will agree to disagree, not taking the challenge of the thing they like to heart and just going "well this is how you feel about it, good for you".  Spoiler dodging, whether intentionally or not, has the consequence of robbing the people who do it of the opportunity to have well rounded opinions.  To gain nuanced perspectives of a work.  It simply serves to insulate a singular opinion: there own.

But Why Does It Even Matter if People Want to Dodge Spoilers?

But who cares, right?  Like, why does any of this matter?  So people want to dodge spoilers and maybe that is causing to become just a bit media illiterate.  It's harmless though, right?  Like they aren't hurting anyone besides themselves from exercising their right to dodge spoilers if they are so inclined.  Yeah about that.  See, I do think that spoiler guarding is an actively harmful viewpoint for two key reasons.  The first of which is that people who dodge spoilers aren't just people who like to enjoy things a certain way, they are actually rather hostile towards people who "spoil" things for them.  The second point, and easily the most egregious of the two is that, genuinely speaking, I think that our modern spoiler culture is an active detriment to art as a whole.

Per the first point, people who prefer to keep things spoiler free often talk about it as if it is a moral imperative.  That they have some sort of hypothetical high ground, that they are enjoying media "as it was meant to be enjoyed".  And when people are convinced that they have the moral high ground, it is only inevitable that they try to spit on those from the summit.  The spoiler culture is not chill about the fact that spoilers exist, they are in fact openly hostile towards the people who "spoil the game".  They will get upset at seeing it, go on tirades about how low people are for posting spoilers, and act as though they are actively ruining the "artist's intention".  You are likely to hear something along the lines of "it really sucks that someone will spend years making a video game only for someone to ruin it right before launch by putting it up online".  And the things they will say about a channel like, say, Prosafiagaming who posts boss guides and walkthroughs as soon as the game is out is frankly concerning.  They act like this guy is singlehandedly ruining their lives at times, I swear.

Now the easy argument to make is that if you are one who seeks to dodge spoilers, the impetuous for doing so is on you.  We have lived in the internet age for long enough that there are literally billions of adults that have never known a world without the online space.  Not just people total, actual adults.  We know how algorithms work, we know the spoilers are inevitable, and because of this, we know that any interest shown in any game will lead to the algorithm filtering content about that game into your feed.  It is a personal responsibility at this point, should you wish to dodge spoilers, to do so.  That is on you, you know what time we live in, you know what happens when you show interest in literally anything, if you get spoiled at this point in time because you think that people keeping things unspoiled for you is a moral obligation, then frankly, you should be spoiled on everything.  The sense of entitlement that people have is absurd, they genuinely believe that it is the responsibility of everyone else to maintain the very specific way they enjoy media.

But more than that, it doesn't really make sense to be hostile towards the people who "spoil things".  Like, the argument for why people dodge spoilers is just that they like it more, right, it's a harmless way to enjoy media that they get more out of.  By that same metric, by and large the people who post spoilers and who view spoilers are doing the same.  They are enjoying media the way they like to enjoy it.  The issue is not them, it's the algorithm.  It notes you're interested in something and so it filters content about that thing to you and, it turns out, things like boss guides and ending explained videos are very popular so it gets filtered to you.  Are the people posting these videos truly supposed to stop posting forever because an aspect of online life they cannot control is inconveniencing you?  They don't know you!  And even if they did, why would they want to risk their hobby and/or career on you, you act like they're the personal villains of your story for uploading a video that has a screenshot of a boss you haven't seen yet in the thumbnail.

As for my second point, I want to propose a query to you.  How does art survive?  There is actually a right answer to this, this is not like previous queries that I've put forward where the answer is up to interpretation and I'm more using it as a springboard to talk about the subject in question.  See, throughout history, we have lost a lot of creative work.  Many people who were once giants are now forgotten in the present day, many works are entirely lost to us because either people didn't put them down or if they did, the preservation of that work was ill-fated and it is now lost.  This is effectively the metanarrative conflict that makes the play/film Amadeus so inherently intriguing going into it, Salieri attempts to sabotage Mozart throughout the work while the audience understands that everyone has heard of Mozart whilst Salieri is a classical musical footnote.  So why does some art survive while others fade.

In my opinion, the answer is simple: communication.  The art that survives is the art that is discussed, the art that people looked at and decided they wanted to talk about.  From academic research delving into the history and themes of a work to a couple nice old ladies talking about a book they've been reading over tea, art survives by people being willing to communicate and discuss it.  The more a work is able to be understood, to be discussed, to be communicated, the stronger its place in history ends up being.  This is what people allege about the works of Mozart and Shakespeare, after all, that the reason they're remembered as titans of their mediums is that they made work for the people who would talk about it and, as such, spread it like wildfire.  "The common man" if you want to use the common turn of phrase.  Although obviously Shakespeare was literally the queen's playwright and Mozart worked for the Austrian court constantly, people like to act like they weren't truly respected as geniuses in their time by a snooty upper class and it was truly the common man who understood them and that's just like.  Not true.  People knew contemporarily they were great.

But what happens if we live in a society that values, say, aggressive spoiler protections which actively cut off the channels of communication out of fear of ruining a work, either for themselves or someone else?  How can art truly hope to thrive in such a climate?  I honestly don't think it can.  I believe that as society gets more aggressive about dodging spoilers, we are only going to lose the ability to discuss art.  That we are failing to have conversations about why things are good or why they are bad or why they mean something to people.  We are so afraid of stepping on other people's toes that we have adopted, as a normal practice, writing walls upon walls of text hidden behind black bars to keep it away from those who would view any information as destructive to their ability to enjoy the work.  And that is if we wish to talk about it at all, because it is genuinely much easier to just not talk about it.  To adopt the very detached way of speaking about the things we consume that those who want to avoid spoilers do.  Saying basically nothing but "I liked it, this part was cool, but I'm not going to tell you why".  And the less we talk about this stuff, the less we're able to talk about it!  The framework of analyzing media dies in the darkness.  It is tragic.

Doki Doki Literature Club is a game that challenges the way people think about and talk about games.  And I think this is why people who care about spoilers feel it does not work.  They don't want to have a conversation with the game, nor do they want to have a conversation about it.  They want to playthrough it, see all the scares, and go "that was good".  They want to watch, but they don't want to experience.  They want a singular connection point: themselves to the game.  Nothing else.  And the game doesn't let them do that anymore, the culture doesn't let them do that anymore.  They want surprise and DDLC cannot give them that.  Nor should it.  Art should not be made for the people who do not wish to have a relationship with it.  Spoilers should not matter.  Throw them away.  You'll be surprised at the weight that leaves your shoulders.  You'll be surprised at how much more you get out of art when you're willing to have a conversation with it.  You'll be surprised at how masterful DDLC actually is.