writetheway | Somnia Application

PLAYER INFO

Name: Mel
Preferred Contact:

maiiau
Age: 36
Invite Link: here

CHARACTER INFO

Character Name: Monika
Canon: Doki Doki Literature Club
Age: 18 (actually an AI, so literal age is vague, but she has 18 years of memories and development)
If Under 16, why is this character a good thematic fit for Somnia?: n/a
Canon Point: post-deletion, good end
Wiki Link(s): DDLC info, DDLC+ info

SOMNIA-SPECIFIC QUESTIONS

1. Dreams are how Sleep chooses you. What might draw your character into Somnia— a wound, a wish, a weakness? Would they follow the dream, or run from it?

At the point I'm pulling Monika from, she's dying. The player has deleted her, and only at that point did she realize that she's been doing terrible things in her desperation. But that doesn't make her any less desperate, even if it makes her feel worse about it; Monika would follow the dream because she has been desperate to escape ever since she realized that she was trapped in a fictional world. When she thought she couldn't escape, she learned coding in order to rewrite her own reality in order to connect to the player, the one person she could accept as real; by comparison, following a dream into Somnia is much simpler. Monika's desperation to experience reality and to be loved as a real person are her greatest weaknesses and her greatest motivations.

2. Somnia is a slow unraveling—of worlds, and of selves. How does your character respond to fear, transformation, and losing control? Do they fight, adapt, collapse?

Monika is a perfectionist who does not like exposing her weaknesses; she does not react well to losing control and she goes to great lengths to maintain it. She prefers but will not limit herself to subtlety; sure, she would prefer to simply nudge the player into spending time with her, but if she has to drive someone to suicide or simply, bluntly delete them, she will. Her perfectionist nature doesn't interact well with her existential crisis, driving her to extremes.

At the point I'm pulling her from, Monika has become aware that the things she did to her friends were monstrous, so there's the potential for improvement. In the DDLC+ sidestories, we see that she is capable of learning to speak more openly about her feelings and trusting her friends. She still has a tendency to want to solve anything she perceives as a problem, and she can still be kind of clumsy about it, but in a more kindhearted way. Monika is balanced on the point between these two sides of herself; she is likely to move in both directions depending on the people she interacts with and the specific situations and stresses placed on her.

3. Connection is the only constant. What kind of bonds does your character form— fast and burning, slow and wary, deep and desperate? How might that shape their time in this world?

Monika is absolutely desperate for connection, and her bonds will reflect that. She has felt completely alone for a long time, being the only person in her world conscious of it being fictional, and has even gotten to the point of manipulating her friends' personalities and actions so she can try to interact with someone she knows is real. Still, she is also very self-conscious of how she presents herself; she will be reluctant to display her weaknesses or let people know about the things she did in her past. She is very likely to look at Somnia as a place to start over, but she will also feel like she doesn't deserve to (and ultimately she doesn't want to start over so much as she wants to move forward toward something more constructive, though she won't realize that immediately). Her bonds are likely to be quick-forming but lopsided as she tries to make them seem perfect and gentle and normal with no sharp edges anywhere, even though Monika has plenty of sharp edges. She would likely be easily to manipulate via connection and affection; she is also prone to manipulation to sustain these things.

4. What are two major forces in your character’s personality that are often in conflict? (Ex: logic vs emotion, power vs guilt, obedience vs rage, etc.)

Healthy versus unhealthy love. Monika's awareness of being in a video game has spiraled her into a hopeless existential crisis, making her feel entirely alone and unsupported. Because her world manifests as a dating sim visual novel and she's the one character without a route, she focuses like a laser on the player. She claims to be in love with them, and she desperately wants them to love her. This even when the player can only interact via selecting prewritten options. Monika works with what she can, rewriting these options, destroying her friends in the literature club, and essentially tearing apart her reality so the player can only interact with her. Because she loves them.

But what Monika really wants isn't necessarily romantic connection but love in its more general sense. She gets it from her friends in realities where she doesn't realize she's in a computer, learning to trust them with her weaknesses and helping them with theirs. She adores her friends, wants them to be happy and successful, and values the literature club she's made because it has become a place where she and all her friends can have a loving, safe space amongst themselves. That's what she really wants; when she realizes she's in a video game, she believes she can no longer have that connection with her friends. She believes her friends are not real people, so she bites and claws through all of them to reach out for reality. Monika needs to learn what she actually wants and needs.

VESSEL SELECTION
Which Vessel Type are you choosing: Token or Offering? Token - Runecaster
Why does this Vessel type feel appropriate for your character? Monika is the president of the literature club, after all! She even sets up poetry assignments for the club. Speaking more deeply than that, this also reflects Monika's status as a self aware video game character--she's very aware of just how much she's tied to fiction. She's been exposed to the reality of her world and attempts to manipulate it through code; manipulating things around her via runes is very similar.
Choose one OR list three subclass options within your chosen Vessel type that you think would suit them: Runecaster

Samples: here