Dreadful, Known, Inevitable
Contains implied and direct spoilers for Doki Doki Literature Club (2017–2021), Moulin Rouge (2001), The Fly (1986), Spec Ops: The Line (2012), Red Dead Redemption (2010), Red Dead Redemption II (2018), Elsinore (2019) and William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Hamlet
Months ago, I was gifted Doki Doki Literature Club+ (DDLC), years after playing the original freeware version. It sat in my “Unplayed” folder, waiting for a revisit. But I so rarely revisit games, let alone games on a singular, narrative track. I knew the main story beats, I remembered the twists and turns, and I remembered the tragedy of the entire experience. But after so many other games have been acquired and played, I finally caved and pulled up DDLC again. I wondered, would knowing what was coming make it better, or worse?
The Known and the Unknown
When you start certain experiences, be it game, movie, or otherwise, you know what to expect vibe-wise, but not specifics-wise. In horror, or tragedy, you don’t know what’s ahead, and you dread that sense of unknown. The loss of control, the lack of agency or ability. You fear that which you can’t see and can’t fathom (yet).
But on the flip-side, knowing what’s ahead, the unknown now being a known element, is a lateral experience. Now, instead of dreading the unknown, you dread the certainty of what awaits you. Even in video games and interactive experiences, stories are constrained by development, memory, and hardware. Some stories are just inevitable.
Old-school narratives and theatrics generally operated on a duality of scale: comedy and tragedy. Whereas comedy is intended to be humorous and amusing, tragedy is designed to invoke catharsis in the wake of pain. If you went to see a tragedy in the time of Shakespeare, you had a general idea of what to expect. But now, those same tragedies are so universally ingrained in culture that we collectively know what to expect. As far back as 9th grade, my entire English class knew Romeo and Juliet ended with the titular pair dead. What helped to fill in the gaps was how they got to that irreversible point. While we might not have been as invested in the narrative, watching as disparate pieces in the middle start to fit together could illicit dread in a more invested attendee.
I’m a personal anti-spoiler proponent whenever possible. There is something so profoundly unique about experiencing a story on your own, then experiencing it again with your own awareness of what awaits.
The Inevitable
Revisiting those classic tragedies after experiencing them once hits differently. You know that Hamlet is going to be driven to madness and a murderous spiral. You know Othello will be misled by his treacherous advisor to rage, self-sabotage, and, ultimately, the death of his wife and self. Knowing the inevitable end can feel worse in subsequent experiences, because we, as audience, have to accept that there’s nothing we can do to alter the trajectory. Even experiences that provide a semblance of choice and branch need not always cater to a positive or idealized ending.
Cinematically, Moulin Rouge (2001) is my favorite example. From the start of the film, viewers know that there’s no traditional happy ending, and that the main character will end up despondent by the end: he tells viewers that outright. No matter how many absolutely bopping musical numbers there are between the 20th Century fanfare and the curtain call, it hints at tragedy throughout and always ends in melancholy, the lovers torn apart for reasons entirely out of their control. Knowing that that’s coming instills a sense of dissociative dread over the musical numbers and bright design aesthetics.
In The Fly (1986), Dr. Brundle’s teleportation experiment always fuses him with a fly, and he always breaks down as the fusion process overtakes his body and human half. He always leaves behind a trail of trauma and pain by film’s end. We wish we could reach through the screen, beg Brundle to double-check the pod before his tragic downfall, to prevent the inevitable…but it remains inevitable. The Fly is such a painful experience to revisit, not just because of the gruesome body horror, but because of inescapability of the situation. Were it not for one, little housefly, Seth Brundle could have lived a happy, successful life. The preventable tragedy is the worst to swallow, and the worst yet to consume.
In interactive situations, the inevitable stings that much more because of its interactive nature. Between all of the western frontier hijinx, the Red Dead Redemption saga follows an inevitable, tragic bend. Chronologically, players experience (deep breath here) the worsening sickness of Arthur Morgan, the mental deterioration of Dutch Van Der Linde, the violent breakdown of the Van Der Linde gang, the unavoidable death of Arthur Morgan, the eventual conscription of John Marston after he’d escaped that dangerous lifestyle, the death of John Marston after he’d completed his assignment as ordered, and John’s son, Jack, inevitably following in his father’s footsteps, empty in both relations and purpose after exacting revenge. No decisions, no choices, no upgrades, no gameplay can change that path. One can put it off for a good long time, between both games’ side missions and open worlds, but the tragedy of Red Dead Redemption’s story is fixed, and there’s no getting around it.
Lastly, Spec Ops: The Line (2012) follows Captain Martin Walker and his Delta Operator squadmates as they spiral from career soldiers to callous murderers, paranoid, destructive, and emotionally dead. Of the multiple, in-game endings, none of them can reasonably be considered happy. In all of them, Walker is alone, his squadmates dead. Walker ends his life by suicide or death-by-soldier, hunkers down in a barren and quickly-dying Dubai, or is otherwise exfiltrated, broken by everything he has witnessed and perpetuated. Similar to Red Dead Redemption, no amount of decision-making or in-game choices can alter that trajectory. By experiencing The Line subsequent times, players must accept what they’re in for. They cannot be shocked by what they didn’t expect. Now they must accept and await the inevitable story beats, knowing exactly where they all lead in the end.
The story is written, the film is cut, the game is published. There is no changing what is already certain.
Dread
Not knowing what to expect in a story can result in generalized dread, but knowing what’s coming in an experience we’re familiar with makes it more acutely dreadful. The only thing worse than knowing what the devil looks like is having to look for that devil, recognizing that devil, for the rest of your life.
I’m guilty of wishful thinking in the face of tragedy. “Maybe this time, when I play the movie, it’ll show some secret sequence where everything is okay.” Or there’s a secret input that can give a more universally happy ending to the characters I’m controlling. But that’s just deluding myself against certainty.
That brings me back to DDLC. I knew from the start how it would go. Despite my best intentions, or any decisions I made, Sayori would hang herself, Yuri would stab herself, Monika would delete everyone, I would have to delete Monika, and the cycle would threaten to repeat before Monika’s remnants would delete the game entirely. Even in the “good” ending, the experience still contains all of the hurt, all of the pain, and everything short of the game’s deletion, hardly softened by Sayori’s kind, melancholic words. It still hurts, and it was terrible knowing what was coming. I wished that the characters could find peace, that nothing could meddle with their existences, that they could just be. But they can’t. That’s not the story being told. The illusion of choice, the misdirection of genre (content warnings be damned), both make the initial tragedy of DDLC a sharp one.
But knowing what was coming in DDLC did not make the inevitable any better. It filled me with dread for what I knew was coming. But, as always, the catharsis of tragedy followed. No matter how many times we experience tragic stories, no matter how acutely aware we are of its plot threads, no matter how hard we might rail against the inevitable, all we can do accept the story as it is or leave before it ends. But if we make it to its conclusion, as much as we can’t escape the certainty of tragedy, neither can we escape the certainty of catharsis that comes after.
