I knew this discussion would come -- I was sort of holding on to it in case we did in-depth looks at each club member, but no better time.
But first, acknowledgement of the artist -- Khyle's done quite a few "blursed" (both blessed and cursed) artworks of anime and anime-adjacent topics. (He recently got into some trouble when he released a Spy x Family piece where Anya was dropped off at a school with an infamous German slogan above its doors -- as the fictional nation that is the setting was patterned after East Germany, it seemed a very bizarre research failure, at best....)
The plug, and the drawing, which appears to have been torn up and painstakingly put back together. Did she do both, I wonder?
So, much like Yuri's behaviour, Natsuki's home life takes a much darker turn in the Act 2 replay. A lot of fans have taken the second version to be the canonical truth -- and as he's the only parent to be so much as mentioned in the game proper (yes, as I showed last month, fans did make sprites for Sayori's mother. Fans make a lot of new material....), we really only have what's said to go on.
However, the Metaverse files in DDLC Plus suggest that the game setting (VM1) was deliberately kept to be a small universe, and it's possible that unseen characters don't actually exist outside of the club members' constructed memories of them, at least as far as the game proper is concerned. And we know that Monika was tampering with both Yuri and Natsuki's personalities in the hopes of forcing us to choose neither and force a Monika route by default....
Now, there is a very dark mod-video-playthrough that I came across out there, that treats Natsuki's father as both a) existing and b) also mentally tampered with by Monika to become as described in Act 2. I suppose that could also be the case if Monika has root-level access, of course, though if she's able to affect an even larger cast of characters (whether they have .chr files, script files, or are our presumptive interface), we definitely get into Wandavison territory....
I'll admit that, while I cannot say if Natsuki's father has more or less existence than any other DDLC character, I prefer to think that what Natsuki experiences in Act 2 is only due to Monika's false memory overlay, rather than anything that actually happened offscreen.
But, that's just my interpretation....
So, much like Yuri's behaviour, Natsuki's home life takes a much darker turn in the Act 2 replay. A lot of fans have taken the second version to be the canonical truth -- and as he's the only parent to be so much as mentioned in the game proper (yes, as I showed last month, fans did make sprites for Sayori's mother. Fans make a lot of new material....), we really only have what's said to go on.
However, the Metaverse files in DDLC Plus suggest that the game setting (VM1) was deliberately kept to be a small universe, and it's possible that unseen characters don't actually exist outside of the club members' constructed memories of them, at least as far as the game proper is concerned. And we know that Monika was tampering with both Yuri and Natsuki's personalities in the hopes of forcing us to choose neither and force a Monika route by default....
Now, there is a very dark mod-video-playthrough that I came across out there, that treats Natsuki's father as both a) existing and b) also mentally tampered with by Monika to become as described in Act 2. I suppose that could also be the case if Monika has root-level access, of course, though if she's able to affect an even larger cast of characters (whether they have .chr files, script files, or are our presumptive interface), we definitely get into Wandavison territory....
I'll admit that, while I cannot say if Natsuki's father has more or less existence than any other DDLC character, I prefer to think that what Natsuki experiences in Act 2 is only due to Monika's false memory overlay, rather than anything that actually happened offscreen.
But, that's just my interpretation....
