Term of Award

Spring 2025

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English (M.A.)

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (open access)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of English

Committee Chair

Joe Pellegrino

Committee Member 1

Lisa Costello

Committee Member 2

Christina Oslon

Abstract

Doki Doki Literature Club! is a horror visual novel masquerading as a dating simulation game. Behind the thin veneer of pretty girls in tiny skirts and tight uniforms lurk horrors, glitches, and metaleptic events that take the player’s battle for agency beyond mere point-and-click interactions. This fight breaches containment to the level of the physical, as the player must literally wrestle for control with an in-game character who has commandeered their entire computer system. Players are led to believe that they are making the decisions that further the plot, but come to learn that in this world, there is no such thing as free will. In a genre where choice is the only thing that matters, the choices in Doki Doki are subverted to serve the ends of the game and not the player. Under the guise of the kawaii aesthetic and the gender bias inherent in bishōjo games, Doki Doki delivers a horrific encounter with something beyond even the monstrous feminine: the terror of powerlessness in the face of a woman with unfettered power. By exploring Doki Doki Literature Club!’s violation of the separation between levels of reality, this paper will reveal the visual novel to be a masterwork of cerebral feminine horror and feminist gaming.

Research Data and Supplementary Material

No

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