The Coding of Natsuki DDLC

It’s weird to think that Doki Doki Literature Club! is already 8 years old. I wrote a piece for my game blog a little while ago on the anniversary talking about how much I appreciate the subtlety in the writing and subtext, but ever since I wrote that post, I’ve wanted to delve a little deeper and talk about some of those topics in more detail. I’ll be treating that post as a sort of intro to this one, so if you haven’t already, go ahead and read it here. I talked in that piece about Natsuki as a character, what she stands for, and what she faces over the course of the plot. I noted her poetry very briefly, but I think there’s a lot that can be gleaned about the characters and their surroundings when the poetry is given the room to be analyzed more closely. For this post, I want to delve into some of her writing and what exactly we can infer from them.

First, it's worth noting that the poems in DDLC are handwritten, and to acheive this visual effect, the game uses a unique font for each girl's poems as they are presented on-screen. Natsuki uses the font "Ammys Handwriting" for her poems, which is worth keeping in mind for the name alone. I'll be moving through her poem's one at a time, and discussing each one in turn. You can read all the poems I'll be talking about here.

"Amy Likes Spiders"

Let’s talk spiders… er, poetry! The poem "Amy Likes Spiders" is shown to the player on day 3, and tells the story of Amy, a girl who has an interest in spiders, told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator who refuses to be friends with Amy because she likes spiders. It follows no apparent rhyming patterns with a simple repeating pattern that makes the final stanza more impactful for breaking that pattern (similar to her previous poem from day 2, "Eagles Can Fly"). This repeating pattern drives home the line "That's why I'm not friends with her." This can be considered the primary message of the piece, the narrator explaining their distaste.

I think it's pretty clear from reading the piece that the narrator's reaction to Amy is... extreme, to say the least. The levels of hatred and vitriol that the narrator escalates to in response to Amy's arachnid hobbies is unnusual on it's own, and even if you were to substitute "Amy likes spiders" with "Natsuki likes manga" like the game on the surface intends you to do, the narrator's conclusion that "The world is better off without spider lovers" is still a bizarrely intense ending to what is altogether a very minor difference of personality. This is the main reason I believe we, the reader, are intended to dig deeper and discern a metaphorical meaning for this poem.

Doki Doki Literature Club! is a very queer-coded game, this is no secret. The base game is heavy with subtext, but the Side Stories featured in Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! further this theme with it's framing and writing. More specifically, I believe that "Amy Likes Spiders" makes more sense when read through a queer lens, specifically framing it as an allegory for homophobia.

For this reading, we can use a simple search-and-replace method to translate the metaphor into reality. Simply replace "spiders" and related concepts with "girls", and you pretty quickly start to get the picture. The stange discomfort, dislike, and even the fear of "What if her friends start to like girls too?" translates pretty directly to the idea of the narrator as a homophobic onlooker who hates the lesbian Amy. Some lines remain a little loose, like talking about "Icky, wriggly, hairy, ugly spiders", but the search-and-replace is not the only avenue you should be using to interpret the poem, and when you look at the whole, it becomes easier to see how Natsuki may be using the character of Amy and her love of spiders as an analogy for personal experiences.

"But who says that Natsuki is the titular Amy in this poem? After all, nothing so far has pointed to this specifically." This is true, however, remember when I mentioned that DDLC uses fonts to show unique handwriting? Each character uses a unique font that is only found in sections supposedly written by them, which includes Natsuki's poems. The font she uses is called "Ammys Handwriting". Call it a stretch if you must, but I feel like this stacks with everything else we've discussed, and makes it pretty apparent that Amy is Natsuki (if it wasn't already).

I also want to discuss another queer reading of "Amy Likes Spiders", specifically through a trans lens this time. Many people - myself included - read Natsuki as a very trans-coded character, coming off strongly as a trans woman to many viewers. This poem in particular supports this reading. While the metaphorical analysis isn't as straightforward as the lesbian reading. However, there is another way to interpret the piece where Amy is a trans woman, and the narrator is a transphobic onlooker. It doesn't matter if Amy "has a cute singing voice", or "has a lot of friends". It doesn't matter to the narrator "if she has other hobbies", or "if she keeps it private", or "if it doesn't hurt anyone", because in the end, Amy still likes spiders.

It's fairly clear how this reads as a trans protagonist and a transphobic narrator, especially if the protagonist is a trans woman. Trans women face constant discrimination from various parties, and "Amy Likes Spiders" hits several of these avenues by way of metaphor. The idea that "her hands are probably gross", or the fear of "What if her friends start to like girls too?" are consistent with the misinformed ways that bigots talk about trans women, and how they often push the perception that we are predators or sexually deviant, aka "gross". It's a sort of justification to allow themselves and others to continue to hate a minority without cause, especially because there is no cause that can justify such unparalleled hatred, and absolutely no reason for these bigots to say or do what they do. Despite this, they will still say that "The world is better off without spider lovers", and they're gonna tell everyone.

Regardless of whether there is a "correct" or "intended" reading of this poem, the subtext is fairly clear with its push to read Natsuki as a queer character, whether she's lesbian, trans, or both. This is not a coding that is unique to Natsuki, however I feel that the writing was especially heavy-handed with Natsuki above other characters.

"I'll Be Your Beach"

This poem is shown to the player on day 4, so long as the player did not make three poems that appeal to Natsuki. It describes an unnamed narrator and another unnamed character walking along the beach together, burying "heavy thoughts in a pile of sand", and sharing a kiss by the end. It follows Natuski's signiture style, simple repeating stanzas, though this time with a simple rhyming scheme throughout. It also features a final stanza that breaks both patterns, again following her established style.

As with all of the emotional poems written by the main characters, the reader is lead to assume that the subject of each piece is the protagonist (dubbed "MC" by the fandom). However, I think several things point to MC not being the subject for this poem, and even to another person as the specific target audience.

For starters, this poem only appear if the player has not written three poems that appeal to Natsuki, meaning that you haven't successfully followed the full Natsuki route. This means that Natsuki and MC haven't fully developed the bond that would lead to her peom written specifically to him, "Because You". This would make it strange for Natsuki to write about MC, considering that even on her own route, MC never confides in her about "heavy thoughts" or "insecurities", nothing of the sort. This obviously makes it stranger to write when not on her route at all. Furthermore, for once the poem was not written with impressive MC in mind, and was actually written for an exchange with another character: Yuri.

Yuri and Natsuki arranged to write from the same prompt, "beach", and they exchange them on the day of. Their differing styles leads to another iconic argument, but I don't think this changes the underlying subtext that Natsuki wrote this poem from her shared prompt with Yuri, knowing that she would read it. With this in mind, it seems like an interesting decision that Natsuki would write about topics like insecurities, heavy thoughts, memories that haunt, all things that Yuri struggles with. When you begin to read from this perspective, it becomes more and more obvious that MC isn't the topic of this poem, and that Yuri very well might be. This compounds with the topics and reading of "Amy Likes Spiders", and paints a picture of a girl who has faced discrimination time and time again, and is afraid to reveal her true feelings to the person she wants to the most. It's tragic, but not unheard of by far.

"The Best Place in the World"

~ Alex Amelia Pine