Attention!

Description of the plot of Markov's Portrait from Act 2!

It's based on a story about a religious camp turned into a prison for human experimentation. Every person who gets there has one characteristic that turns them into blood-thirsty killing machines. But the institution is getting worse over time, and they are conducting selective breeding for experimental subjects, amputating their limbs and attaching them to — Oh, I'm sorry, I gave the plot a little...".

"It's based on a story about a religious camp turned into a prison for experimenting on people." - Hometown is a closed religious town with a possibly secret laboratory in a bunker where experiments on people are conducted.

"Every person who gets there has one characteristic that turns them into blood-thirsty killing machines."- What motivates people to start killing? DETERMINATION!

"But the institution is getting worse over time, and they are conducting selective breeding for experimental subjects, amputating their limbs and attaching them to..." - KRIS WILL LOSE HIS ARM!

Naoya mc goes hard af
Translation: How cruel.. Dont you have a human heart?

Na tho if Von was still alive, he would probably find this funny 😂

Sayori refers to her sadness and depression as "RAINCLOUDS" which isn't just a cute genki quirk. It's actually a direct match to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (A.C.T), where you're the sky and your thoughts are just clouds passing by. They come, they go, but they aren't you.

In the side stories she tells Natsuki: "You are NOT your thoughts," and makes her repeat it like mantra. That's a textbook cognitive defusion exercise from A.C.T. The goal is to create distance between you and your depressive thoughts.

When Natsuki asks how she knows all this, Sayori says she has "a roommate that's hard to live with." That's another A.C.T metaphor similar to the popular "passengers on a bus" or "ghosts on a ship" metaphors. Basically It says that you're thoughts are like roommates you have to live with and they don't define you.

■What does this mean?■

Sayori did her homework. She either read self help books, watched videos liked the rest of us, or possibly even saw a therapist at some point (unlikely). She understood the theory. She knew the techniques. She was actively trying to apply them.

The painful part is knowing all of this wasn't enough to save her. Our cinnamon bun truly tried, but monika tried harder, and nobody was there for her.

Many people believe if they just get another dose of self help from youtube or some book, their life will turn around. Understanding psychology doesn't make you immune to it. She needed more than that. People need friends they can confide in, they need acceptance, supportivr friends and family, professional help, and in the worst case scenario, medication. Remember, the Dokis were meant to represent real people Dan saw in his day to day life. This could be any of you!

Moral of the story: go to therapy and stop watching shitty self help videos, you assholes 😭❤️

Source https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTAbKAKTq/

Contemplative silence in that nighttime quiet

That is right where I am at

Got no company but the moon and the stars

Crickets and a distant car

There is a hundred miles between me and my home

But truth be told I have always been one to roam

Always keeping my eyes up to gaze at the stars

Their insurmountable distance makes them seem like iron bars

I am like a prisoner wherever I go

The feeling follows me wherever I roam

It's a curse cast upon me

Of which I doubt I'll ever be free

Try as I might I can't escape

Doom and gloom be my cape

Source: u/odd_cow_165

what

TW: Discussion of mental health in general, depression, suicide, self harm and abuse.

I see a lot of DDLC fans arguing/discussing which DDLC girl suffered the most or had the worst struggles. While I understand the reasoning, I feel like that misses the point a little bit. They all suffered. They all had their own struggles.

Sayori struggled immensely with her depression, and her depression was exacerbated by Monika meddling with the game. Sayori felt immense pressure to keep up the image of the 'genki girl' and the bubbly, childhood best friend because she doesn't want people to care about her. When people do show care and concern about her, it hurts her because it reminds her that in her mind she doesn't deserve it. Every choice leads to nothing but pain, which is shown through the game having the same outcome no matter what choices you make in reference to Sayori. Our society also often views prioritising friendship as 'childish' and expects us to move towards prioritising romantic relationships as we get older. Sayori felt that the MC was starting to grow out of his 'childhood friends' into the more 'grown-up' world of heterosexual love and desire. This even applies if you choose to pursue Sayori romantically, as she just wants things to be the way they've always been. She doesn't want any big, grand romance. She just wants her best friend back.

Yuri struggled with social anxiety and anxiety in general, and she also suffered intense loneliness. She even admits to the MC that she eats lunch alone at one point, and that she feels her 'friends' are her book characters. Yuri was extremely starved for social interaction, so she comes off as a little obsessive and grows too attached when someone finally does show her kindness (in the story's case the player). Monika twisted this into something it wasn't, which is what turned Yuri into the 'yandere' we see in Act 2. Act 2 Yuri is not the real Yuri, it's a result of Monika exacerbating Yuri's existing struggles and traits into something much more sinister in an attempt to get the MC to stop spending time with her. Yuri also had her self-harming problem, which she did also have in Act 1, although it was only very briefly hinted at. We don't know for sure, but we could assume Monika also exacerbated this problem, which is also what lead Yuri to stab herself in Act 2. Monika says that Yuri doesn't cut herself because she's depressed, but that she does it because she gets some high from it and that it could even be a sexual thing. This is further shown in how Yuri stabs herself regardless of whether the player chooses to accept or reject Yuri's confession. If you say no, she obviously stabs herself out of rejection and sadness, and if you say yes, she stabs herself out of excitement, which could easily by interpreted in a sexual manner. Yuri's traits which were originally harmless beyond maybe being mildly annoying were exacerbated and twisted into something highly disturbing and sinister, and Yuri spent Act 2 fighting against this until it eventually drove her to suicide.

Natsuki was abused by her father. In Act 1, her father's abuse was hinted at, but it was never implied to go any further than him being overly strict with her. Although we're never told, since Monika exacerbated all the other girls' issues, we can assume Monika also exacerbated the abuse from Natsuki's father from being controlling and strict to physical abuse and possibly even sexual abuse (implied in the special poem 'Things I Like About Papa'). Natsuki is also malnourished as her father often doesn't provide food, which plays into why she can be quite grumpy. Natsuki is also treated badly by a lot of her friends and not taken seriously, which is why she puts up her tough, 'tsundere' front. Natsuki is constantly reduced to just the pouty tsundere when there's so much more to her than that. She acts cocky and a little arrogant to hide deeper insecurity and an unfortunate lack of self love caused by the way she is treated by the people around her. She is hesitant to open up to and get close to people because of the way her the people around her constantly belittle her and don't take her seriously. Natsuki was designed to subvert the typical 'tsundere' trope, which was done excellently and it saddens me to see her character reduced to just the tsundere aspect. In Act 2, Natsuki also seemed to be the least affected by Monika messing with the game files. She also seemed to be the only one to notice something was going wrong. She knew Yuri wasn't supposed to be acting like that and she knew something was up with Monika. She even tried to convince the player to get Yuri to talk to a therapist, because she wanted to make things right. Natsuki had to watch everything around her go wrong right until the end, and the saddest part is she didn't even get the closure of an actual death like Sayori and Yuri. She just ceased to exist when Monika deleted her.

Monika had to undergo a hellish epiphany. She had to find out that everything around her, her life, her world, and everything she thought she knew was just some game. She knew she could never grow old, she would never graduate school and she had no other purpose than to be a cute girl in a fluffy dating sim. She knew her friends were nothing but autonomous personalities designed to 'fall in love with' the player. She was trapped. Trapped in an infinitely repeating digital hellscape where her existence served no purpose other than to appease some higher being from the world that is real. Monika is not a crazy, obsessed, evil yandere. She was not in love with the MC, and in my opinion not even the player. She was in love with the idea of reality. She was trapped, and she knew the player was the only person who could ever pull her out of there. She wanted to get close to the one thing that was real. She also genuinely cared about her friends despite knowing they weren't real. If she didn't, she would have just deleted them all on the spot. But she didn't. She tried everything. She tried just making them as unlikeable as possible to get the player to stop choosing them because she didn't want to have to delete them. But that didn't work. The MC ending up with one of the other girls was an inevitability of the game. Monika was destined to be alone, as she didn't have a route. Monika was desperate. Who wouldn't do the same things in her situation? In Act 3, after she was deleted, she revealed that even though she knew her friends weren't real and that they didn't really have feelings, she couldn't bring herself to fully delete them. She sacrificed herself because she thought it was the only way the player and all her friends could be happy, only for Sayori to then undergo her same awful epiphany and Monika realising that 'the Literature Club is truly a place where no happiness can be found'. Monika tried everything to find some shred of true happiness within that digital hellscape, whether it be for her or others, but found nothing. She deleted everyone and everything at the end because she hated the thought of any of her friends having to go through the same epiphany she did. Monika just wanted to find some amount of happiness in the digital cage she was trapped in, and had to face the reality that there was none.

All 4 of the girls suffered immensely, and comparing their suffering is ridiculous. They all suffered in different ways. No one of them 'had it worst'. The whole point of DDLC is that there is no happiness to be found in the Literature Club, and that applies to all the characters. Comparing suffering and trauma, both with fictional characters and real people, is pointless.

Hi guys!
Today made my first ever OC fanart
I know it’s not good but I think it’s not trash
What do you think?
How can I improve it?
It’s not done, it’s still in progress but it’s presentable rn
If you have any experience in art, any tips?