King_Dom470
He/Him- 3,657
- 1,946
So yeah, I've been thinking Monika should be rated higher for a while and I finally got around to collecting some of her feats:
Rating:
"Gifted: Characters who demonstrate high reasoning ability, can master difficult concepts with few repetitions, and display high performance capability or notable mastery in intellectual or specific academic fields, which makes them equivalent to real-world experts in these areas.":
She's clearly incredibly skilled in writing/literature given that she knows several different forms of poetry, writing techniques, and shows the ability to think of figurative language for relatively complex concepts in a short amount of time. This and her ability to mentally compare the players poem to the other club members and recognize similarities in the language use and subject matter are good evidence that she blatantly stands out in several "intellectual and academic fields".
"Genius: Individuals with an exceptional capacity for knowledge and intelligence, usually in one area of varying depth. This level of intellect is the level of real-world geniuses, polymaths, and genuinely extremely prominent intellectuals, and, in the absence of better feats, should be the default intelligence category for fictional characters with exceptional or superhuman intelligence.":
As stated above, she is exceptionally gifted when it comes to anything writing based, however, she has many other feats and skills beyond that, for one she has shown the ability to learn at a near superhuman rate. Given that she could learn the piano and write her own song in what couldn't have been more than a few days for her. She was also able to develop her coding abilities to the point of considering herself a novice and not being able to even add audio files, to figuring it out in a presumably very short amount of time. She is also stated multiple times to be incredibly academically successful and a "class star" likely due to her performance in school and her ability to be a part of and even forming clubs (of which she's done twice: Debate Club and Literature Club (Both of which she was the leader of)). Due to being in the debate club she's also stated to have "picked up on" ways to sound more convincing and win arguments better, something that also likely helped her develop her charismatic personality and leadership skills, not to mention her surprisingly competent manipulation strategies and tactics, of which she employs with relatively short notice and/or adapting to a situation as it happens (showing her ability to think under pressure).
I think she's clearly at least Gifted possibly even teetering over into Genius.
Act 1:
Act 2:
Act 3
- Yuri was talking to the player character about how tea helps elevate the experience of reading a good book, Monika took notice of the player character seeming flustered/uncomfortable and took the opportunity make Yuri uncomfortable by saying that “Yuri’s just trying to impress you”, this accomplished two things; 1: it shut Yuri and MC’s conversation down soon after and 2: it allowed Monika to insert herself into the conversation, starting a dialogue between her and the player. This shows her ability to think on her feet and use the psychology of people against them (Also works as a manipulation and social intelligence feat)
- Just a few minutes later she does something very similar to Natsuki, the club members were talking about what types of literature they like to read and Natsuki states that she dislikes horror, when Yuri inquires what type of books she likes, Natsuki briefly glances at the player “for a split second” afterwards she avoids answering the question. Monika was able to pick up on this and pressed her further, she asked “you usually like to write about cute things, don’t you?”. This immediately embarrasses Natsuki and she gets defensive over it. Both Yuri and Natsuki’s moments show that Monika even at this early point in the game was trying to subtly make both of them look worse in comparison to her. This again shows her ability to think on her feet and use the psychology of others against themselves (Also works as a manipulation feat)
- Monika was only able to embarrass Natsuki in this way because of a scrap piece of paper she left behind. Given that the poems the girls write in the actual game don’t have their names signed, it’s likely that Monika was able to deduce who’s poem this was just by noticing a difference in handwriting and/or language choices. This shows her reasoning abilities as well as high perception/observation due to her ability to remember specific details about how each of her members write.
- Was able to get Natsuki to stop yelling at MC by bring up the fact that she keeps her manga collection in the club room, something Natsuki likely didn’t tell Monika about, meaning she happened upon the collection and was able to deduce who it belonged to. This shows her ability to reason based on knowledge of her club members personalities and her ability to apply that reasoned knowledge in order to regain control over social situations.
- Depending on what club member you choose to write your poem for, Monika will pick up on the language every time and mentally compare them, calling out how a certain poem reminds her of a certain members writing style. Again, this shows that she's extremely proficient in vocabulary and graphology
- The first poem she wrote, ”Hole in Wall” was a poem seemingly specifically designed for the player, and not for MC himself, she wrote the poem in such a way that the player could potentially deduce that Monika was talking to them, but abstract enough that MC wouldn’t be able to pick up on it. She only had around a day to plan this out, and that included the time taken to actually write the poem. This show's her quick planning abilities, and the poem itself shows that she's extremely well versed in figurative language, vocabulary, language, deception (as she was able to conceal the true meaning of the poem from MC), etc
Act 2:
- The whole reason she brought up getting supplies was also a subtle way to bring the club into the topic of conversation, by forcing the topic of conversation to this she could slyly mention how she desperately needs another member in order to officially be considered a club, at this point she asks if MC is still looking for a club to which she asks him to visit hers although she makes it clear that she won't ask him to join or anything. She technically kept her promise although she knew that through several manipulation techniques and interacting with the members he wouldn’t be able to refuse (similarly to act 1, except she managed to do this without a pre established relationship like Sayori). After MC agrees Monika starts praising him for doing so, already playing on MC’s terminal horniness. Given that she had literally just reset the game she wouldn't have had very long to compose herself and come up with a realistic reason for being in that room and inviting MC, meaning she managed to concoct a rational reason for why she'd be in that room in a very short amount of time, as well as convincingly act it out.
- Convinced MC to join the club by acting disheartened by his seeming reluctance to join. (Works as a manipulation feat as well)
- Yuri ran out of the room Monika told MC “not to worry” and “she does this all the time”. Which upon first glance would seem to be a good thing to say in the scenario, however Yuri’s behaviour here is clearly very strange and even causes MC some clear discomfort, so Monika saying this was definitely another tactic to get MC to try and distance himself from Yuri. (Works as a manipulation/deception feat)
- She even ended up using Yuri’s abrupt exit to her advantage and started the poem sharing without her, something that, while MC initially was against, Monika was able to convince him that it was fine. This show's her charisma/manipulation as well as her adaptability
- During this time, Monika takes advantage of her absence to subtly smear Yuri’s reputation to MC by stating that she doesn’t get any social interaction so any time she does get any, she gets overwhelmed by it. This shows her ability to employ manipulation tactics
- Even though Natsuki was able to play off asking for MC’s help by giving him a letter she wrote and acting like it was a poem, Monika was somehow able to detect this deception and forced Natsuki (and likely MC) to forget about the letter. (Now one may assume she's just omniscient within the confines of the game but there are several moments that would disagree with that assumption, such as when Yuri killed herself Monika seemed to not have known about that until she literally saw her dead body). This feat show's her ability to detect deception and observe tells on a person such as body language or facial expressions
Act 3
- Before deleting everything she put all the characters and locations on a backup folder, which was how she was able to bring everyone back in the first place.
- Once Sayori gained awareness Monika returned even after supposedly deleting herself, meaning she likely kept herself on a backup file as well just in case something went awry. Potentially implies some level of contingency preparation.
Act 1:
- Seemingly capable of remembering the player character from class last year, even remembering their name. This is despite the fact that they “rarely talked”. Shows fairly good memory as it sort of implies that she's able to remember the names of people that she's only had extremely brief contact with.
- All of Monika’s poems are very abstract in their language and have several underlying messages hidden in the poems word choice. She bases all of her poems off of her “epiphany” which was a way for her to reference her gained awareness without actually outright admitting she had awareness. This shows her ability to deceive others, displaying a fairly high level of analogical thinking, and knowledge in writing techniques and forms of poetry
- The first “Monika’s Writing Tip of the Day” focused on giving the player (or MC) a tip on how to get past a writer's block, in order to strengthen her point and make the tip easier to understand she came up with an analogy for it, presumably on the spot. Even further support for her analogical thinking and thought processing abilities
- In her second poem she continued using language with double meanings and hidden messages, she used different words to try and illustrate her experience after discovering what her world really is, even using mathematical terms like “sine, cosine, tangent” to help reinforce the line “violent, grating waveforms”. Implies a good grasp on several different concepts like mathematics and vocabulary given that she's able to recognize the similarities between these two concepts on a metaphorical level, this again shows her proficiency in writing as well as high associative/analogical thinking.
- Besides being a very proficient writer, she also knows how to use the space between the words to influence how the reader perceives the mood of the poem. Monika specifically used the space to infuse the poem with a kind of desperation, she specifically says: “The way I wrote the lines really short makes it feel like they’re trying to speak over the noise”. Show's her ability to induce emotions and knowledge on writing techniques, even using seemingly unrelated things to up the quality of a poem. All these poems are things she's able to write in under a day.
- Organized the club members into individual jobs based on each members strength, despite originally lacking a job for Yuri she could quickly come up with a job based on Yuri’s “good handwriting” and gave her the job of designing banners. This show's a good grasp on resource management, leadership, and high processing speed.
- Despite having just recently had her “epiphany” she was able to teach herself how to code/read code in that short amount of time. She was proficient enough to rewrite the code of the game and events to cause certain things to happen, manipulate characters' personalities, back up deleted code somewhere else, implement audio files, put herself in places she shouldn’t be, etc. all of which show some fairly advanced computer literacy for a “novice” as she claims to be. This shows an extremely high ability to learn and adapt, especially given how complex computer science can be.
- Even though she originally couldn’t figure out how to add music to the game, at the end given she was able to talk to the player and play the song she was writing means she must have somehow figured it out. Shows fast learning/adaptability
- Despite the game only taking place over the course of a few days total, Monika was able to learn how to play the piano to such a proficient degree that she was able to write her own song and play it perfectly, even including lyrics. Shows incredibly fast learning skills and very high musical intelligence
Act 1:
- Despite having knowledge that her reality is nothing more than a video game (a fact that through her poems we find out she’s quite distraught over) she managed to maintain her usual behaviours and personality, (this is in contrast to Sayori, who kills herself if she finds out too early) to the point that both the club members and the player never realized anything was off until far far later in the story (she was likely able to do this for a long time before the player even showed up given that she references gaining awareness prior to the games events). Shows high mental fortitude and stress
- Stated to have been the leader of the Debate Club the year prior to the events of the game and she was able to successfully start up the Literature Club mostly on her own. MC even stated that she could be “a board member for any of the major clubs”. All the club members of the literature club even stated that Monika is a great leader, this is shown seconds later after Monika rallies the other club members around the goal of growing the club, with all of them excitedly agreeing. Shows good charisma and leadership as well as high emotional intelligence
- Despite Yuri and Natsuki being extremely nervous about sharing their poems, she was able to convince everyone in the club to go home and write a poem of their own to share with everyone, this included MC. Shows good leadership and charisma
- Monika, is at several points described to be smart, academically proficient (with MC calling her a class star), and on top of all that, capable of starting and being a part of a plethora of after school activities and clubs all while maintaining her popularity. This shows how she's knowledgeable is several different things: social situations, academics, leadership, etc. while also exhibiting a good level of cognitive discipline and stress tolerance
- MC points out how she always seems confident, even in a situation where she should be nervous, to which she confirms that she “has to be confident, but that doesn’t mean she always feels that way”. Meaning she’s just naturally good at exuding confidence even when she doesn’t feel confident, which likely contributes to her charisma and leadership abilities. Along with this, it also shows her good acting skills.
- If the player writes a poem for a specific club member (notably Sayori) Monika will make the player uncomfortable by slyly implying that there’s something more between them, either this was in order to get a read on MC’s true feelings or to drive some sort of wedge between them by making MC feel bad about “not giving the other girls any attention”. This shows she has a good grasp on manipulation tactics such as guilt tripping, as well as fishing for information without making it obvious
- Despite Natsuki and Yuri’s reservations and complete lack of interest in performing at the festival, Monika was still able to convince MC and eventually everyone else to participate. She did this first through expressing understanding at both Natsuki’s and Yuri’s fears and then went on to try and get them excited by expressing confidence in their abilities and why the festival would be a good opportunity to get more members. This shows high emotional intelligence more specifically interpersonal understanding, and leadership skills
- When Monika recites her poem to the rest of the club, MC describes her inflection as “pristine” and that she knows exactly how much emotion to infuse into each word, to the point that she “brings them to life”. Even the rest of the club members who are all experienced writers and poets themselves have their focus entirely on Monika, with some of them even looking “amazed”. Shows charisma and high linguistic skills
- After Monika had finished, Sayori immediately ran up to compliment Monika and went to go next, before Yuri got up and with newfound confidence decided that she wanted to go instead. This is despite the fact that right before Monika went up she was wary about going at all, but Monika’s example was enough to inspire her to read her poem. Shows high charisma and leadership skills
- Convincingly acted as though she genuinely had no idea what was wrong with Sayori, this led to her offering to talk to Sayori herself which allowed her to manipulate Sayori’s emotions even further. Shows her ability to deceive and her impressive acting skills/emotional intelligence
- Convinced MC that the reason Sayori wouldn’t tell him what's wrong is because he was the thing that was making her upset, this led to MC (who was previously against Monika talking to Sayori for the reason that “she seemed to want to be left alone”) obliging with Monika going to talk to Sayori. Monika convincing him of this was also a clever tactic deployed in order for MC to stay away from Sayori, she even ended the conversation with a masked order: “try not to think about her right now”. This was shown to have worked due to MC later admitting that Sayori’s behaviour (which was directly made worse by her talk with Monika) made him feel as though he should stay away. This shows her charisma and social integration as well as emotional intelligence, interpersonal engagement and strategy
- The way Sayori acted after her talk with Monika implies that Monika somehow convinced her that she’s bogging MC down and making life harder for him (even saying that “if you had fun with everyone else instead… This would be so much easier”) after which she quickly leaves the club early. Potentially showcases a good grasp on psychological warfare given she was able to take advantage of her insecurities and use that to demoralize her further.
- While everyone was worried about Sayori, Monika piped up and claimed that when she talked to Sayori she confirmed that everything was fine, when MC asked what specifically she said, Monika was able to quickly shift the topic of conversation to the festival without anyone bring up Sayori again. This shows her good deception/misdirection abilities as she was able to fabricate a story and act it out well enough to convince all of the club members.
- Accidentally made reference to the fact that her world is 2 dimensional which caused MC some confusion, however Monika was able to quickly recompose herself and shift the topic of conversation. This shows how even when she makes a mistake she can quickly adapt, switching gears and changing the topic to avoid consequences.
- In Sayori’s absence Monika was forced to take her place and be the one who invited MC to the club. However unlike Sayori, Monika had no good reason to walk into MC’s classroom so she came up with the excuse of going in there to get supplies, something we know to be a lie since we already know that Sayori’s purpose for being there was purely to recruit MC. Shows good deception/acting skills as well as having the ability to formulate excuses/strategies with very little time.
- Was able to convince MC to join the club based off his pre established behaviours and small details that he mentioned prior to the game resetting, she casually mentioned that one of the members (Natsuki) keeps manga in the club room, specifically she phrased it like “One of my members even keeps her manga in the clubroom--” “--She always insists that it’s literature too”, this is relevant due to MC sharing Natsuki’s love of manga and due to one of the main reasons he was interested in joining was the fact that the club was all “cute girls” as he put it. Two things that Monika remembered and used to her advantage. This is impressive as it shows Monika's ability to retain relevant information/knowledge and apply it in appropriate situations for the purpose of manipulating others.
- Even going back to Sayori, Monika was manipulating the files of her friends, influencing their personalities and acting particularly warm and friendly to MC as a way to make herself look better when compared to the others. However even when things got really bad and the remaining two members started acting poorly to one another Monika never outright called out their poor behaviour and framed them as actually bad, she’d more try and subtly hint that if MC felt uncomfortable around them, then he could spend more time with her instead. This shows a decent grasp on indirect manipulation
- In Act 1, Monika was seemingly surprised at Yuri reading horror books, however in Act 2 she acts as though it’s an obvious statement, showing how she remembered that information and utilized it in a way that could potentially aid her. Saying “it suits your personality”, which was likely an attempt to make Yuri seem less desirable to MC.
- Even when she reads MC’s poem (provided he wrote the poem for Yuri), Monika will reference how she feels like “Yuri’s mind is completely detached from reality” and “she’s completely given up on people”. However, as she says this, she claims that she “doesn’t mean it in a bad way”. Both of these show a combination of indirect manipulation and smearing
- Due to Monika resetting time, MC would have forgotten all about seeing Yuri cutting herself, so a few minutes later when Monika brings up that he saw something he shouldn’t have, she was talking to the player specifically. This time she spoke directly, saying that being around Yuri is dangerous both for her and the player. This played on the players' seeming care for Yuri by convincing them that the only way for Yuri to be happy and healthy is to stop interacting with her. This shows her high interpersonal understanding and perception/observational abilities. It also shows her ability to quickly develop strategies based on new information.
- She further exemplifies her point by trying to stop any potential sympathy for Yuri by making it clear that she isn’t depressed, she just gets a high from it.
- Like in Act 1, Monika brought up using the festival to advertise the club and get more members, however without Sayori acting as a buffer Natsuki was much more open about not wanting anyone else in the club, saying that she just wanted a small club to hang out with a few good friends because she didn’t have anything like that anywhere else. Despite this being a fair stance, Monika was able to turn the rest of the club members against her (even Yuri who actually shared Natsuki’s opinion) just by acting upset. This again seemed to be a tactic employed to cause MC to be driven away from Natsuki as well, we can infer this was all just a tactic due to the fact that if Monika truly was upset at Natsuki’s opinion she could have simply rewritten Natsuki to agree with her. This shows an incredibly impressive use of guilt tripping, something she's able to pull off by utilizing her emotional management/engagement and facilitation
- Tried to get MC to work with her for designing the pamphlets, everyone disagreed with this since Monika “had the easiest job”, Yuri also disagreed and when Natsuki said she could use some help she turned on her saying that she needed the extra set of hands more, this caused a small argument between the two in which Monika mostly stayed out of the way, when Natsuki tried to drag Monika back into it by saying both Yuri and Monika were being problematic, Monika acted almost hurt by the statement saying that “she didn’t even do anything” despite the fact that the argument was originally started by her. This again shows a high level of adaptability, social integration and scapegoating
- It’s also worth noting that Monika didn’t mean for Yuri to become this aggressive/possessive, and despite that she could still use Yuri’s behaviour to her advantage. Which shows good adaptability
- Despite knowing that Yuri was incredibly volatile due to her manipulating her personality she continued to push her in subtle ways that eventually culminated in her going on a rant directed at Monika, saying several horrible things in the process. However Monika didn’t react towards her and simply ushered Natsuki out of the room despite the fact that mere moments ago Natsuki was also against Monika. This is likely because Monika knew that despite her lost control over Yuri, she could still utilize her unintended outburst by appearing to be the reasonable, calm, cool and collected one. This is despite her original plan being just to increase Yuri’s bad traits a little bit, but she was able to adapt her plan on the spot and use Yuri’s unforeseen behaviour to her advantage. This is the result of the previous feat, showing that her scapegoating techniques and adaptability more or less ended up working
- Was mostly unperturbed at the sight of Yuri’s dead body, in fact she actually laughed it off. Shows high mental fortitude or at the very least, a high level of ruthlessness
- States that she believes “faking confidence” to be one of the most important skills for someone to have and even cites it as the reason she was able to attract so much respect and admiration.
- In the same conversation she says that she “doesn’t show her weaknesses very often” a thing that was shown fairly consistently throughout the game, as even in high intensity situations or if a strategy/plan wasn’t working out how she wanted, she always managed to keep her demeanour consistent.
- Said that when she was in the debate club she learned a lot about arguing, and how certain behaviours/word choice make it easier to convince someone of something and bypass a person's bias towards a subject.
Rating:
"Gifted: Characters who demonstrate high reasoning ability, can master difficult concepts with few repetitions, and display high performance capability or notable mastery in intellectual or specific academic fields, which makes them equivalent to real-world experts in these areas.":
She's clearly incredibly skilled in writing/literature given that she knows several different forms of poetry, writing techniques, and shows the ability to think of figurative language for relatively complex concepts in a short amount of time. This and her ability to mentally compare the players poem to the other club members and recognize similarities in the language use and subject matter are good evidence that she blatantly stands out in several "intellectual and academic fields".
"Genius: Individuals with an exceptional capacity for knowledge and intelligence, usually in one area of varying depth. This level of intellect is the level of real-world geniuses, polymaths, and genuinely extremely prominent intellectuals, and, in the absence of better feats, should be the default intelligence category for fictional characters with exceptional or superhuman intelligence.":
As stated above, she is exceptionally gifted when it comes to anything writing based, however, she has many other feats and skills beyond that, for one she has shown the ability to learn at a near superhuman rate. Given that she could learn the piano and write her own song in what couldn't have been more than a few days for her. She was also able to develop her coding abilities to the point of considering herself a novice and not being able to even add audio files, to figuring it out in a presumably very short amount of time. She is also stated multiple times to be incredibly academically successful and a "class star" likely due to her performance in school and her ability to be a part of and even forming clubs (of which she's done twice: Debate Club and Literature Club (Both of which she was the leader of)). Due to being in the debate club she's also stated to have "picked up on" ways to sound more convincing and win arguments better, something that also likely helped her develop her charismatic personality and leadership skills, not to mention her surprisingly competent manipulation strategies and tactics, of which she employs with relatively short notice and/or adapting to a situation as it happens (showing her ability to think under pressure).
I think she's clearly at least Gifted possibly even teetering over into Genius.
