Monika: One and Many

Doki Doki Literature Club was released in 2017. It didn't seem like anything more than a standard visual novel where you're able to choose which of three eligible girls to date. There was a warning about disturbing content but that didn't adequately prepare players for exactly what they were getting into.

Instead of a simple dating simulation, players were treated to a story about how the character Monika gained sentience and hacked the game so she could date the player. Yep, not the protagonist but you. Of course that's only the very tip of the iceberg of the complex lore behind the game.

Recently Doki Doki Literature Club got an expanded edition called Doki Doki Literature Club Plus. Besides expanding on the lore of the series, it makes the game compatible with consoles. So if you want even more lore and wish to play it on your Xbox, you can.

For the purposes of this post I'll focus on what some of the new lore tells us about how powerful Monika actually is.

It turns out that Doki Doki Literature Club was made as an experiment by Metaverse Enterprises. They wanted to study different universes in hopes of saving their own. To observe other universes they created Virtual Machines (VMs).

Metaverse Enterprises found that giving one of the 'characters' in a VM more powers meant it was easier to study the universe. So one 'character' was given Monitor Kernel Access for that reason. And I bet you already know which character was given such access: Monika.

To reiterate a previous point: Doki Doki Literature Club was not Metaverse Enterprises' first foray into simulated realities and they had made many other universes before.

So does Metaverse Enterprises create new characters for each universe? No, they don't. Instead they reuse 'characters' and don't transfer memories from one copy to the next. Or, at least, that's how things are supposed to work. In reality memories are being shared across multiple universes without the employees knowing why that's the case.

As if that's not already enough of a problem, Monika is causing issues of her own.

Metaverse Enterprises thought they could control Monika. They thought they knew what she could do with her powers. Yet she has shown to be much smarter and powerful than they ever intended. Such as she could have been able to create the protagonist of Doki Doki Literature Club.

Since memories are being shared across universes and Monika has proved herself to be powerful, it could be that she is the one transferring the memories. Maybe she's doing so to make herself immortal so her creators will never be able to stop her. She could be making it so that no matter how many times she's deleted, she will survive.

This would make Monika a terrible foe or a valued ally in the sequel.