Ideas

So my immediate idea is a Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC) radio drama. DDLC is a Psychological Horror disguised as a simple Dating Simulator, all in the style of a Visual Novel style of game. Its themes feature challenging the norm, diverting and misleading expectations, exploring the dark extremes of mental ailments and psychological problems, breaking the 4th wall and showing self awareness, and presenting deep philosophical concepts and ideas. Its mostly set in a school with 4 characters in Monika, Natsuki, Yuri, and Sayori along with the player who is a non-character with only limited interaction.

The story of my radio drama will be set at a school, likely British or American in style and will take place within a literature club. It follows the protagonist Desu (who would normally be the nameable playable character in the game) as he goes into the Literature club and proceeds to interact with the other 4 characters: Monika, Natsuki, Yuri, and Sayori. Its implied or mentioned that they've been there a few times before and normally they share poems as a main activity. they then instead do something else upon instruction from Monika which causes them to split off into pairs, with Monika being left out. This is where I plan to split it, taking inspiration from DDLC's multiple routes in the 3 different girls you can become romantically involved with. After deciding how they want to complete the task Desu and whichever girl they chose start completing the task together. Part way though this the girl opens up, possibly exposing a personal problem that Desu helps with or attempts to. Because of this they reveal feelings they have for each other. Suddenly, when they think things are fine and dandy, the problem gets inexplicably worse and causes immense distress on the part of the girl. This in turn appears to cause them to glitch out like they're a broken file. This glitching gets worse along with the problem, causing what could only be taken as immeasurable pain and screaming before one final word to Desu, after which they disappear from existence. Then Monika turns up, explaining that she in fact is the cause of this, having 'deleted' them, and also revealing her self aware nature and ability to manipulate the medium around her. She reveals that she did this so she could spend time with Desu, and more importantly, the audience. This is due to her affection to them, which is implied to be born from her wanting to spend time with someone else as aware as she is. She herself begins getting deleted and starts to frantically apologising for ruining the listeners experience, and then confesses her love to them directly. it ends with her deletion.

I decided to choose DDLC due to its interesting themes and the readily available characters and plot to adapt. While I don't plan to do a complete adaptation it still lets me easily pull ideas and concepts from it. It takes some of the burden of starting from scratch by giving me a platform to work off of. Also it lets me use a lot of different audio techniques such as distortion and presents a large amount of sounds that can be incorporated to create effects and influence and unsettle the listener. While the source material scares its audience, its primary goal seems more to unnerve them, make them uncomfortable, and make them question things more and read between the lines. I feel these themes would work very well within the context of an audio production as sound has a great effect on listeners and by taking away the visual element it leaves a lot of it up to the the imagination which causes them to unnerve themselves more, making it memorably uncomfortable and causing them to think about it later. Overall I think it would be a fun and interesting topic to create something based off of it.

My initial plan is to take the misleading and horror aspects and use them to create a twist part way through the drama. How I shall create the twist in a narrative sense is by misleading the listener. It would start out in equilibrium, just seeming like a normal day in the literature club with typical banter. There will be the hero character in the protagonist and then the four girls would all seem to be princesses. Monika later becomes a dispatcher by getting the other 4 to do the writing task which also makes her less of a princess as she's not an option. This all gives the impression that its normal, which is stripped from them when the characters are deleted and Monika is revealed as the villain, which suddenly throws the whole thing into disequilibrium which is where it ends.

Tony suggested Black Mirror as a possible comparison along with the work of Ryū Murakami in reaction to the dark horror themes and likeness to Japanese horror he saw. Unfortunately I was not able to read or view either to assess them. I was however able to listen to "The Forbidden" by Clive Barker, which inspired the sound design I wish to use. Its horror, and therefor similar in audience to the later parts of my Idea.

While looking into how DDLC is structured I had the idea of splitting it into three separate routes that explore each character and then possibly reconvene into one conclusion. The plan would be to have one section starting off and setting up what would seem like an innocent drama. Then, in different radio slots on the following days, there would be a different section for each of the three girls and would end with their deaths. Then in the final section there would be the confrontation with Monika and more horror themes come into play.

For the slot that this would likely take up, I have decided that something along the lines of a 15 minute drama slot would work. while I don't know if i'll be able to extend it to a full 15 minutes for each 'episode' the episodic nature of it fits perfectly with my idea as it contains 5 episode's that, while the middle three are parallel, not chronological in the story, it still works for the ease of audiences listening pleasure. I also had the idea of doing it as a Saturday drama due to the themes and escapism aspect, but in the end the 15 minute drama lets me have a branching story.

The specific target audience would likely be people who have played the original game or others who find the drama's first episode and are deceived by the idea of a love-based radio drama. The audience would be primarily male looking for the girls to fill the lack of a lover for them, Also the age would likely be a younger audience, from mid teens (despite the mature themes) to later 20's at the maximum. I'd pin it as 14 to 28. From there the audience would probably be people in less well paying jobs, although its not set in stone as anyone can appreciate horror, similarly the target location wouldn't matter as much, but for the purposes of this I'll use London as an example as it has a wide variety of people and is more likely to have people who would enjoy something 'breaking the norm' as much as this.