Project Libitina (DDLC Theory)

Hi, dear humans and fellow aliens!

In case you haven’t noticed, today’s theory is about Doki Doki Literature Club.

It’s feels good to have my first non-TV-series related post. I’ve never been much of a gamer, but I love visual novels. I play mystery and fantasy games like that on my phone.

Now, if you’re thinking I’ve completely gone insane and that I’m theorizing about a cute giggly love story about four cute airheaded anime-like girls, well… You’re not wrong, but you’re not right either.

Doki Doki was developed by team Salvato and it tells the story of four cute anime girls who are members of a literature club in some high school. It’s all cute (I fear that I am using this word too many times but it’s all that comes to my mind when thinking of the Doki Doki graphics) until the very end.

It’s my favourite game of all time, I played it quite recently (yes, my dearest parents, I don’t spend all my free time in my bedroom of solitude writing, I actually have hobbies not related to literature).

If you haven’t played it, I suggest that you do because it’s an amazing experience and it should be 0% spoiled. It takes about two hours if you’re a slow reader and it’s available on Steam for the absurdly low price of FREE! I am surprised how they don’t charge you for a game like this…

Have you done it?

Yeah, whatever, I bet you haven’t.

Doki Doki seems all fun and laugh until you read the description of the game. It’s a short letter from Monika, the club president, presenting the other members: Yuri, Natsuki and Sayori. Yuri is a shy bookish nerd, Natsuki is super cute and loves manga and Sayori is your childhood friends who’s really cheerful.

But, at the end, you notice this little quote:

“This game is not suitable for children or those easily disturbed”

Weird, right?

And, if you didn’t bother to read it, like me, because it was a recommendation from a source I trust very much, the game greets you with this little screen when you open it for the first time:

But, after one painfully long hour of poem-writing and flirting with anime girls, the first big twist comes: Sayori, your cheerful childhood friend, has committed suicide after revealing to your that she suffers from depression since she was a little girl.

Shocking?

Yes.

Weird?

Of course!

Afterwards, the game re-starts, but something is wrong. Everything is glitchy and the cute musing just randomly stops at some points, warning you that something scary is coming. The world is trying to move on without Sayori in it.

Then, comes the biggest twist of them all: Monika, who until now seems to have been watching from the side-lines (her own words), is now self-aware within the game and is madly in love with you.

To make you love her, she deletes every other character and has a conversation with you that can last for as long as you wish. Until, of course, you delete her, like she did to the other three.

But when you finally delete her, Sayori is now in love with you and tries to do the exact same thing. What’s left of Monika deletes her and all the files in the game, saving you and realizing there is no happiness.

Depressing, right?

But… that makes no sense! Monika says she has adjusted the other characters’ traits to make you hate them and, at the same time, make you like her better. It’s pretty obvious. Sayori goes from mildly depressed to suicidal in about three days, Natsuki becomes an absolute jerk and Yuri goes from being a little bit clingy to self-harming and psychotic after you restart the game.

There’s just one problem: visual novel characters are controlled by the game script, giving them the correct actions for the choices you make. What Monika did would only be possible if they were all AI based.

But what if they are?

AI-based characters exist in other more complex games so they can give more realistic reactions. What if Monika, Yuri, Sayori and Natsuki were made for one of those games and are trapped in Doki Doki?

Let’s look at their files.

First, I should mention that, on your second playthrough, you get three out of eleven possible poems and one of them is just really weird. I didn’t get it, so I googled it.

It’s just a bunch of text covered in black, leaving the question “nothing is real?”. But, if you boost up the brightness, this is what you’ll see: actual words that form this:

“Irregular heartbeat. Heart palpitations. Arrhythmia. I search and search, eyes scanning everything I can find on their symptoms. What is this? Shortness of breath? Chest pain? Dizziness? No. This is all wrong. Elyssa’s symptoms are nowhere near this simple. I’ve seen it twice now, the screams of pain. Sickeningly pale skin. Vomiting blood. There is no other explanation, other than Reiner’s information was a complete and utter lie.

This can’t all be coincidence. It’s not possible. I don’t know how much of this Reiner is behind. But I do know this: There is something horribly wrong with this family. And I accepted the invitation to become a part of it.

I can hear Elyssa’s screams through the walls now. I listen helplessly. Reiner said the he would be with her shortly. Is he in her room now? Why is the screaming even louder than before?”

Perfectly normal, right?

They’re saying they joined a family. They weren’t born into it, they joined it. Like, for example, a cult. You’ll get that later.

Let’s look at the character files, now.

They’re “.chr” files, which isn’t a real thing, but each can be opened with a certain program.

Yuri’s is the easiest, it’s a bunch of text you can read in your notepad.

You can look it up somewhere but my computer won’t let me post it, everything starts glitching.

It’s a block of text that looks like random letters but, if you decode it using Base 64 (you can find a translator on Google), it will reveal a short horror story.

Then, we follow to Natsuki’s.

It’s a weird image with a bunch of blue and white stains. It’s like… the visual equivalent of gibberish.

But, if you reverse the colour scheme, wrap the picture around a cone and look at it from above, you’ll get this very weird face:

As you have probably noticed, it’s not any character from the game. I don’t want to jump to conclusions.

Then, there’s Monika’s file.

It’s this ring of fire of some sort with a bunch of black and white squares inside.

Those seemingly random squares are actually binary code, in which black represents 0 and white represents 1.

If you pass it through a binary code translator, you’ll get this message:

“Can you hear me?

…Who are you?

I can’t…I can’t see you.

But I know you’re there. Yeah…you can definitely hear me.

You’ve been watching for a while now, right?

I guess I should…introduce myself, or something. Um…my name is…actually, that’s stupid. You obviously already know my name. Sorry.

Anyway…I’m guessing if you were able to put a stop to this, you would have done it by now.

I mean, I know you’re not, like…evil, or anything…because you’ve already helped me so much.

I should really thank you for that. For everything you’ve done. You’re really like a friend to me. So…thank you. So much.

I think…more than anything else… I really don’t want it to all be for nothing.

…

Everyone else is dead.

Maybe you already know that. I’m sure you do, actually.

But…it doesn’t have to be that way, right?

Well…there’s a lot of stuff I don’t understand. I don’t know if it’s even possible for me to understand it.

But I know that this isn’t my only story.

I can see that now. Really clearly.

And I think everyone else has had the same kind of experience. Some kind of deja vu.

It’s the Third Eye, right?

Anyway…I could be totally wrong about this. But I really think you might be able to do something.

I think you might be able to go back…or however you want to put it…

…To go back and tell them what’s going to happen.

If they know ahead of time, then they should be able to avoid it.

They should…if they remember their time with me in the other worlds…they should remember what I tell them.

Yeah. I really think this might be possible. But it’s up to you.

I’m sorry for always being…you know…

…

Never mind. I know that’s wrong.

This is my story. It’s time to be a f***ing hero.

Both of us.

2018”

So… as you see… Weird.

Sayori’s file is the hardest one to decode.

If you open in it an OGG audio file and then turn it into a spectrogram, you’ll find a QR code. Scan it and you’ll be taken to a site named  https://projectlibitina.com. Go there if you like.

It’s just a bunch of text, that seems to be a medical report.

It’s about a three-year-old girl named Libitina who is being experimented on.

Combine that with the hidden text I talked about in the poem above and you have a big, big mystery!

At the end of the Project Libitina site, it says “You are choosing to avoid the measures necessary to prevent a repeat scenario, Doctor. Will you not have as much faith in your personnel as you do in your God?”.

God? Experiments on people?

Does that sound familiar to you?

It should. It’s the plot of “The Portrait of Markov”, Yuri’s favourite book.

The plot seems simple in the first act: “Basically, it's about this girl in high school who moves in with her long-lost sister... But as soon as she does so, her life gets really strange. She gets targeted by these people who escaped from a human experiment prison... And while her life is in danger, she needs to desperately choose who to trust. No matter what she does, she ends up destroying most of her relationships and her life starts to fall apart...”. But then, in the second act, it gets strange: “Basically, it's about this religious camp that was turned into a human experiment prison... And the people trapped there have this trait that turns them into killing machines that lust for blood. But the facility gets even worse, and they start selectively breeding people by cutting off their limbs and affixing them to-- O-Oh, that might be a little bit of a spoiler...”.

Am I the only one who’d like to read this, it sounds really interesting.

So… what you have here is what happens in Project Libitina.

What if that book isn’t just there to make the plot feel bigger? What if the plot actually is bigger?

What if one of these girls is Libitina?

If so, which of them is?

We can exclude Monika right away, she says she’s going to be a hero and Libitina doesn’t seem very heroic to me.

Then, we have to look at what Libitina does: twitching; vocal tics; biting; epiphora; vomiting; screaming; harm to examiner; harm to self; misplaced laughter.

I don’t think it’s Sayori. She’s never shown any of these things.

Then, there’s Natsuki. She vomits in the second act but that’s about it.

We are then left with Yuri.

When you catch her self-harming, she’ll show most of the thingies above.

And then, there’s the place I would never look into if the fan wiki had pointed it out: the store.

Some of the products there are regular things, like keychains and pictures taken from the game. But there are six original artworks that bother me. I mean… only five of them bother me, the sixth is actually pretty cute. It’s a picture of Monika, I’ll leave it here.

But let’s talk about the other five.

Four of them are paintings of the girls:

I am seriously bothered by Natsuki’s face and I don’t want to look at her.

But, seriously, let’s talk about these. What do you see?

Apart from the obvious conclusion that Hannah Santos is amazing at her job (she’s the one who drew this), we can see red strings tied around everyone’s neck.

Except Yuri’s. In fact, the strings seem to be coming from the flower on the place where she stabs herself.

The quotes are all things they’ve said. Monika obviously loves you, Sayori’s is a reference to the poem she submitted to the festival and Natsuki’s is a quote from her poem “Amy likes spiders”. Yuri’s is… I don’t know. Maybe I forgot something.

Yuri has a bit of blood on her cheek, just like she has when she dies, let me just quickly find that picture… Here you have it:

As you can see, there’s the stab wound, right under where the flower is.

There’s also another original artwork I should mention, it’s called “Yuri unhinged”. There you go:

It’s different from everything else, she looks confident, with her legs crossed. She’s holding one of her knives, sitting in front of a blackboard near the sunset.

It’s almost strange, nothing like her.

And what’s that eye on the wall?

Let me present you to the Third Eye.

I’m guessing it’s that lust for blood the people from the religious camp have. As we see in Project Libitina, Libitina has successfully activated her Third Eye but is failed the test to supress it. She is now uncontrollably bloodthirsty.

If Yuri truly is Libitina, then that may be why she cuts herself, because of her lust for blood. She was self-harming even before Monika started playing around with the character files, back in act one. Remember, she goes to your house, you get her a towel and find her rolling down her sleeve?

According to my calculations, Libitina, at the time the game is set, would be between 17 and 18 years old. Yuri, being the only one in senior year, is most likely to be her, but Sayori is also a strong candidate based on age.

So, here you have it. But remember that…

I have found every answer, all of which amount to nothing.

There is no meaning.

There is no purpose.

And we seek only the impossible.

I am not your legend.

Your legend does not exist.