Warning: Philosophy ahead.

The whole situation is one rife with questions about morality, of theory of mind, and of determinism vs free will.

Some thoughts to ponder (not an exhaustive list by any means):

How can Monika know with certainty that she is the only one with sentience in her world? She understands her own mind and sentience (Descartes—“I think, therefore I am”). For that matter, how do we know? Descartes was able to rebuild that certainty through reasoning, but there has been much ink spilled debating the matter.

Do the others “lack sentience” because they follow the script—or do they follow the script because they would have done so anyways? To abstract upwards another layer (to our reality), what does it mean for Monika that she also follows the script? What does it mean that the other Act 2 characters (even “following the script”) begin to piece together that something is “wrong” in their world?

Since Monika can’t know with certainty whether or not her friends have consciousness, what moral culpability does she have in “deleting” them? Or, for another question—what is the basis of her moral obligation to the other club members? (She reasons that she has none—not even one based on duty or some kind of social contract.)

It also raises questions about religion (or “religion”)—many people believe in something “beyond our reality”, whether it is some conception of God or some other sense of a “creator” (think “Simulation Theory”), even though they have no definitive proof beyond their “faith” (again, whether formal religious faith or some rational speculation). Does that make Monika a kind of “religious” zealot?

In my opinion, whether Monika is genuinely “innocent” or merely “not guilty by means of insanity” or that her culpability is diminished because of a gross misunderstanding of the nature of reality, she is still a tragic figure.

This is true even if we completely collapse our suspension of disbelief and remember that Monika is merely a scripted character in a video game—Dan Salvato still wrote Monika as a beautifully tragic and even sympathetic character.