Monika

Monika (モニカ) is the poster girl of Doki Doki Literature Club!, and one of the five members and President of the Literature Club. Monika is the driving force of the game, instructing the club members to practice writing poems until the club festival which itself facilitates and develops the characters and story.

Appearance
Monika has extensively long coral brown hair that she keeps in a high ponytail tied back with a large white bow, curled slightly at the ends. Like the other characters, she has two prominent strands of hair beside her bangs that reach slightly past her chest. Her eyes are emerald green. She is of average height by Japanese standards, believed to be the second tallest character, behind Yuri or the protagonist.

She wears the standard female school uniform consisting of a warm gray blazer, brown sweater vest, white shirt, red ribbon, dark blue pleated skirt, black thigh-high socks and white uwabaki slippers with pink tips.

Personality
Monika is noted by the other characters to be smart, confident and athletic. She is not as talkative as the other girls, but this is implied to not be through choice. Monika is also known to be quite popular, which causes the protagonist to have an admiration for her. She always has a calm, gentle expression and is portrayed as mature and hard-working.

Monika had previously been a part of the Debate Club but left due to all the inner politics and drama, highlighting a desire for order, freedom of topics and friendliness. The Literature Club, which she founded after leaving the Debate Club, is very important to her. She aspires for it to be a place to showcase and grow everyone's passion for literature. She also has a passion for piano, which she practices frequently after school.

Monika was originally a very considerate and kind person who was always thinking about other people. She openly displays care and concern for her club mates, praising each member's writing style and even comparing them to famous authors and poets. However, it is later revealed that at some time before the start of the game, she underwent an epiphany which made her discover that she was in a game and also granted her the ability to edit the game's variables, changing her attitude towards the other girls because she did not consider them as being "real". She begins taking drastic measures when the other girls prevented the player from being able to spend time with her in the scene in Act 1 where the player has to choose a girl to help for the festival.

In desperation, Monika begins trying to make the other girls unlikable by altering their traits, as she only had the ability to edit variables in the game and did not want to delete/kill the other girls right away because of her lingering attachment to them. She starts with Sayori as she viewed her as the largest threat because she was the main character's childhood friend. Monika's alterations backfire because Sayori's increased depression level causes her to confess her love to the main character in an attempt to find happiness, then commit suicide the next day, regardless of the choice the player made. Monika then decides to delete Sayori's character file because "she is the one who's making this so difficult."

From Act 2 onward, she shows a much more manipulative personality. It is revealed that Monika was self-aware all along and resented having no romantic role in the game, as that meant there was no happy ending coded for her. She also makes her infatuation with the player more obvious and urges them to spend more time with her. Her desire and ambition lead her to become obsessive in this goal, highlighted by the fact that all of her poems are about the player or her epiphany. She also starts to disregard the other characters and amplifies their traits due to the fact of them not being "real". Ultimately, Monika's attempt to make the other girls unlikable led to her accidentally driving Yuri to suicide due to alterations to her personality, then finally her deleting Natsuki in order to be able to spend time with the player alone in Act 3, creating her own "happy ending."