Apocalypse How Application

[writetheway]

→ PLAYER INFO

Name: Mel

Age: 32

Contact: maiiau; PMs

Character(s) in game: N/A

Permissions: here

→ CHARACTER INFO

Character Name: Monika

Age: 18 (actually a character in a simulated universe which is younger than 18, but she has 18 years of memories and development)

Canon: Doki Doki Literature Club

Canon point: post-deletion, good end

History: here

Personality:
(spoilers for DDLC and DDLC+)

❥ Perfectionist
Monika is the kind of person who wants everything she does done to her own exacting standards. Formerly in the debate club, she works to control the way people view her, and she wants to be seen as poised and put-together. While this does mean she's willing to put a lot of work in toward her goals, it also makes it hard for her to ever feel like she's meeting her own standards--both times she plays piano for someone else she prefaces it with the warning that she's not very good yet, and she considers herself to be making a pretty big mess of coding even though the fact that she's coding from inside the program at all is pretty impressive. Her perfectionism also makes it difficult for her to jump into the middle of an argument or have a conversation that isn't something she already knows how to respond to, as she doesn't want to say the wrong thing. "But she was in the debate club", you say? Exactly; a formal debate has well-defined rules. A real argument is a lawless zone.

❥ Responsible
Monika is the president of the literature club and one of the most popular girls in school. She's the one who tries to corral everyone else in the club when things are getting out of hand and the one who keeps others from doing anything too out of line. She acknowledges this herself, talking about a time Yuri brought a small bottle of wine to the club and saying she had to be responsible and say no even though she was actually curious to try some. Monika's sense of responsibility often leads her to take matters into her own hands and think that any time she needs help is a failure on her part as a leader. Still, her responsibility is of course also a positive trait: she can be very reliable, and in fact will not stand to be thought of as anything else if responsibility is placed on her shoulders. She'll go out of her way to get the skills needed to do what she needs to do.

❥ Kind
Monika loves her friends and wants the best for them. One of the reasons she forms the literature club is to be a place where people can be themselves and also discover who that person they want to be is (and, as she eventually realizes, so she can figure out who she is). Monika is always willing to listen to her friends' problems and will get to work fixing them--even if they don't actually want her to try to help, admittedly. In the DDLC+ side stories, we see Monika listen to Sayori talk about her depression and suicidal feelings and still treat her just the same, exactly how Sayori wants to be treated. Of course, we also see Monika start a whole discussion about using proper language and not judging others that goes wildly off the rails into hurt feelings. Still, Monika always tries.

❥ Judgmental
Because of her perfectionism, Monika judges herself and others. She judges herself more harshly than anyone else, of course, as that's the person she has the most control of. She tries to bury her faults and, when they're exposed, she catastrophizes them. Monika judges her own judgmentalism, too, such as when she realized she wasn't making the club a comfortable place for Natsuki just because Monika didn't view manga as real literature. Monika has a view of how everything should be, and when things don't match that vision, she tends to judge the things that settle outside of it (such as Natsuki's aforementionsed manga-reading in the literature club). Still, as mentioned, she's aware of this flaw and, with people who are her equals, she tries to avoid it (if that seems like a weird qualification, we'll get to that in just a moment.)

❥ Self-Aware (you know, the kind where you're aware your self is not real)
Monika stands for monitor_kernel_access. Because of this, she knows she's in a virtual machine, a video game, and she knows that she's the only one aware of this. This colors her entire perspective. When she starts to view everyone else in her world as not even real, as less than her, she begins to treat them as obstacles and stepping stones. It makes her desperate to connect to real people and draws her to her extremes. This is what causes Monika's absolute worst behavior, what drives her to tweak her friends' settings until they commit suicide and just murder them outright via deletion. She has no reason not to judge anyone who isn't real harshly, to view them as in the way, and she treats everyone around her like that until the user deletes her. This brings us to Monika now: aware that she's done something horrific, that she still cared deeply about her friends, that she's probably unforgiveable. And yet she's been given another chance in a place that might be real. This struggle between what she knows, what she doesn't, and what kind of person she ultimately is will be at the core of any character arc she experiences.

Suitability: Monika wants desperately to connect to real people. She's been traumatized by her canon circumstances and had a real well-deserved kick in the teeth for her awful behavior and now she's in a place where maybe she can try to live beyond that. She's reasonable enough to understand that she has no easy method of going anywhere outside Glaucester, for one, but even aside from that Monika will want to stay with the people she meets and gets to know. Even if the organization itself were to take a sudden, dramatic twist that she disagreed with, Monika would want to stay with the other player characters rather than strike out on her own (though she might move to the flophouse in that situation).

This is dependent on getting canonmates, but if any of the other literature club girls ever did drop in, Monika would refuse to stray far from the drop off point. She did a lot of awful things to her friends, but they were still her friends who she loved and she knows she treated awfully. She would go out of her way not to abandon them now, especially not if they were showing up here, verifying that feeling she had in the back of her head that they were human all along, and making her feel even worse about her canon behavior.

Additionally, while Monika's skills outside of her canon amount mostly to the skills you would expect out of a responsible high school senior, she has a lot of existential trauma and bad behavior that can easily be exploited by a horror setting. Her canon is a horror setting. Monika is in a place to want to try to be a better person than she was in her canon, and this setting sets up a very good struggle for that, as well as motivation to keep trying. Monika has a lot to work on, but she would want to keep this place even if it's scary, because at least it's more real than where she used to be. Having the whole place get ruined by an apocalypse would really ruin her plans.

Powers/Abilities: Monika's abilities are tied to her existence within her simulation; outside of it, she's an ordinary girl. However, for completion's sake, I'll write about her canon abilities.

Monika actually stands for monitor_kernel_access (MoniKA). This status grants her awareness of her status as a character in a computer game. She can edit the files of her game, although she is limited to what programming knowledge she can figure out on her own. Her greatest feat is creating a character to use to interact with the player who exists outside of the simulation, but most of her alterations involve tweaking things that are already there. She can adjust other characters, tweak the UI, alter the script, and even delete things (including characters) from the game entirely. She can view any area of her simulation without actually being there, although it's a conscious choice (she has to intentionally direct her attention, she isn't omniscient). Monika is capable of viewing other things happening on the computer (she monitors the kernel, after all), and thus is capable of seeing into other virtual machines like hers that are being run, as well as general computer processes such as the name of the computer administrator and potential streaming services. She can add and remove files from her VM's folders (which is how she deletes characters). Finally, she is aware of when the game is turned off--she experiences the memory reallocation as a terrifying confusion of static and noise that renders her unable to think until the game is turned on again.

Again, none of these abilities will be normally accessible to her, as she is no longer within her universe.

As far as non-supernatural abilities go, Monika has picked up the ability to code somewhat, though she's extremely self-taught and makes a lot of mistakes. She plays piano, was in the debate club, writes poetry, and is generally intelligent and athletic by the standards of your average 18-year-old (which, admittedly, isn't much when you compare it to a lot of other characters, but it should be noted regardless). Finally, Monika is the president of the literature club, and she's aware she's fictional besides, so she's pretty familiar with tropes and tends to look for them in things she sees to try and separate out reality and fiction. This may be useful, useless, or catastrophic!

Entity Affinity: The Eye
Monika's situation is defined by the "terror of knowing too much and finding the one piece of knowledge that may destroy you or someone you know". When she gained knowledge of her status as a game character, it caused a complete existential crisis and breakdown that led to her driving her friends to madness, suicide, and eventually to just murdering them at her own hands by way of deleting their files, convinced they weren't real like she was and didn't matter in her desperation to connect to the player, the one other being she could acknowledge as alive in a real way. You could say that The Eye has already fed on her and her entire universe.

Inventory:
-standard outfit
-pen with a heart on top
-wallet (student ID, insignificant amount of currency)
-keys (house key, clubroom key)
-protein bar (1)
-Switch Lite (turquoise); not coming from her canon, but it's the object she attaches to on arrival, so it's hers now

Samples: Sample One; Sample Two; Bonus Sample Three where Monika isn't thinking quite as much about her own situation