The Horror of Deadnaming: My Recent Replay of ‘Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!’

When I first came out as transgender, I was lucky enough to have a relatively gender neutral birth name. I didn’t, therefore, immediately scramble to change my name. In the years that I had repressed my gender struggles, I denied myself the opportunity to truly consider who I would want to be if I finally embraced them. When the door to self-acceptance finally cracked ajar, I was incredibly bashful, thinking this change would be burdensome to those around me. I didn’t want to awkwardly demand people to adopt me in a radically different light – name, pronouns, appearance, and all – so I rationalized a non-need to consider alternatives. I would just keep using my birth name because it was easier to avoid the issue; in my needlessly apologetic mind, keeping my name allowed people to focus on the pronouns. 

Around six months into my transition, after finally trying on she/her pronouns and starting hormone replacement therapy, I had drafted a shortlist of names. In this process, a Pandora’s box of creative potential had been opened. Some ideas were incredibly cheesy, literally listing off fictional heroines that had inspired me. Other ideas were more stereotypically feminine. A fair number of potential names were made up, and I now recognize a joyful number of names as stereotypically transfeminine, not knowing it at the time. 

Unlike any other name, no matter how pretty or symbolic it felt, Flora felt right in a way that my birth name never did. And though everyone in my life started calling me Flora, most of my personal accounts and devices still used my birth name by default as I guiltily waited to decide whether I truly wanted to initiate the legal name and gender change process. I thus didn’t ever think twice about renaming my computer folders despite changing how my desktop greeted me. 

Why I Decided to Replay Doki Doki Literature Club!

Fast forward to early October of this year, when my podcast decided to cover the psychological horror dating sim called Doki Doki Literature Club! I first played the original version in 2018 when I started publishing articles about video games for Epilogue, and I wrote at the time how this game is a love letter to ludonarrative, the intersection between games and stories. I was eager to return to this game with the Left Behind Game Club crew, so I picked up the newer, updated version, Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! With a roughly four year gap between my initial experience and this replay, I was delighted to rediscover that this erratic game still harbored surprises for me.

I think there’s room to reflect on the comparison between a clueless first playthrough and a replay after several years, how the game has been modified in the newer version, and so on. But the true surprise – the true horror – was experiencing a psychological mindbender for a second time where, somehow, it was scarier than the first. 

The First Playthrough of Doki Doki

At the beginning of Doki Doki, you can enter a character name for the protagonist. I used, at the time, my Twitch screen name for this playthrough. Not knowing the twists and turns of Doki Doki, I naively trod through this cutesy dating sim, writing poems for Yuri and falling for the fanservice. The assumed male gender of the protagonist did not grate on me at the time, and I didn’t think twice about my role as the player until demanded to when the game begins to break apart. 

At the end of Doki Doki, the literature club’s president, Monika, traps you in a room with her, talking endlessly for hours until you realize how to delete her from the game. In the broken “just Monika” world, Monika trails off about the fact that, despite being madly in love with you, the player, she doesn’t actually know much about you. She wonders if you are in fact a boy or a girl, despite what the game presumes. In this fourth wall break, Monika challenges the name you have entered into the game when you first started it. Instead of the Twitch username I was expecting, I was presented with the alarming dialogue box, “…Do you actually go by [birth name] or something?”

Instead of being stunned, I laughed. I was awestruck at how fascinating the game’s seeming self-awareness was. Now tuned into the reality that Doki Doki is a very file intensive game, playing with my expectations and practically begging me to dig around in its folders, the gimmick of this fourth wall break excited rather than shocked me. I was more impressed than unsettled, even if my initial laugh had been a nervous reaction.

My Second Playthrough of Doki Doki

In my recent playthrough of Plus!, enough time had passed since I had encountered any dialogue from this game. Despite generally knowing what would happen and where this would lead, Doki Doki still had an unexpected twist up its sleeve. Doki Doki proceeded to call me Flora and I happily forgot about Monika’s impending investigation for the bulk of the experience. 

The process of changing my legal name has been so recent that I’m finally coming to terms with not encountering my birth name any longer. I still have to write it out ten thousand times on each form I submit to change my name at various institutions, but otherwise there isn’t a single person who still refers to me by my birth name. I’m not used to seeing or hearing it any longer.

I eventually find myself back with Monika, vaguely remembering that I would have to delete her to progress, but also wanting to spend time with the dialogue in this scene so I’d be able to speak knowledgeably about it on my podcast. Furthermore, Plus! added Steam achievements, and one of them involves getting Monika to speak on about 40 topics, which takes longer than it sounds. I was somewhat determined to earn 100% achievements since I loved Doki Doki so much originally. But as I clicked through the endless font of Monika’s musings, she returned to the line of questioning that, at this point, might as well have never even been present in my playthrough years ago. For the second time in my life, I received the question, “…Do you actually go by [birth name] or something?” And I froze.

It’s no secret that I’m a scaredy cat with anything remotely sudden or shocking in video games, but Monika’s question, despite on some subconscious level knowing it was coming, hit so much harder on this second playthrough of Doki Doki. I felt my breaths shallow, my heart rate increase, sweat bead on my forehead, and goose bumps rise on my arms. It didn’t feel cheeky anymore, it felt aggressive – transphobic, even.

Monika’s question violated me in a way that I didn’t realize was possible at this point. If someone who I knew prior to transition messed up my name, it wouldn’t faze me and I’d gently correct them. But for this video game to directly confront me when I was shoveling the final mounds of soil on my birth name’s grave, this was unspeakable. 

“Gosh,” Monika continued, “it’s been a while since you’ve heard that name now, hasn’t it?” This felt real. I was on red alert, no longer feeling at home in this otherwise familiar game any longer. I was being read by the game, not my computer’s files, and I needed to get out. Monika’s previously whimsical line, “I don’t even know if you’re a boy or a girl…” read entirely differently in this post-transition playthrough, having just been deadnamed and mocked.

I wanted to delete her there and then, but instead, I put Monika on “Auto” and stepped away until she had worked her way through the “She will never be real” achievement. Afterwards, unexpectedly, instead of looking forward to the bonus content in Plus!, I found myself dreading it.

Recovering From The Shock

Obviously, I do not think Doki Doki Literature Club! is a transphobic game. Nor would I suggest that the authorial intention here is to unsettle transgender players specifically. But I think that transgender players like myself who unwittingly never renamed their harddrives after coming out will be uniquely shocked by Monika’s uncanny confrontation about name discrepancies. Having calmed down from the experience, no longer in fight or flight from a fictional character deadnaming me, I was able to appreciate this moment again as I originally did years ago, albeit with a newfound shiver down my spine. 

If you’re interested in hearing more about my recent experience with Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!, check out episode 153 of the Left Behind Game Club podcast. My two fellow co-hosts, Jacob and Katie, share their first playthrough reactions to the game. I also invited longtime Epilogue member and Vtuber, MissVVitch, onto the podcast, someone who has played nearly twice as many hours of Doki Doki as myself. It’s just astonishing that this surreal experience happened without me bringing it up in conversation. I wish I had, because the fondness I feel for Doki Doki will always be colored somewhat by the shock and discomfort that this deadnaming moment brought me.

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