"A Sensation Unending" (DDLC 1)
A sensation unending
An unstable universe, a friends thing
The agonizing hope and dream I’m sending
O’er this time we journey throughI, comfort you?
We travel alone, apart, as two
And the melancholy is no less true
For my clumsy attempts at cheerBut, tenacious here
I promise that I’ll stay near
Despite the pain that is perhaps more my fear
I’ll do what I can, mendingFor I’ll count myself lucky
To count you in my family
Someone for whom I can sing
I started playing a visual novel called Doki Doki Literature Club on the recommendation of an author I follow, Stefan Gagne. So far it’s a completely upbeat story about a high school boy who’s dragged in to join Literature Club by his childhood friend; he sticks around because all four other members are cute girls. But then the game’s site and every launch of the app puts up a dire warning: “This game is not suitable for children or those who are easily disturbed.” And Gagne called it “honestly quite disturbing” and mentioned that it will take a turn into triggering territory around suicide and self-harm. So…we’ll see where this goes.
Anyway, one of the conceits in the game is that you have to “write poems” to share with the other members of the club, by choosing 20 words from selections given to you.
The main purpose of this so far seems to be to let you deliberately try to impress one of the girls in the club, but I decided to take it a step further: I’m going to actually write poems based on these words. They probably won’t be very good because this isn’t my usual process for writing poems, but hey.
And of course that’s what you see above. I didn’t write down the words I picked for the very first poem of the game, but these are the ones from the second. We’ll see how this goes.
(In order to not spam the front page of the blog, poems will be collected under the tag “Doki Doki Literature Club“…along with anything else I post related to the game.)