not-a-catboy-i-swear

[not-a-catboy-i-swear]

im sooo fucking sick of kim dokja's stupid ass. guy who collects a family for the express purpose of walking out on it. dad who adopts children specifically so he can go buy some milk and abandon them for years. theyre a found family sure but buddy im calling cps for neglect. and when that wasnt enough he made a contract with a dokkaebi where he journeyed through the underworlds labrynth and retrieved a damaged soul to enable it to be reborn as his daughter. just to abandon her as well. i need to drown him in a well.

[not-a-catboy-i-swear]

imagine kim dokja trying to get into a car and accidentally knocking his head against the top of it. now imagine him getting caught in the rain without an umbrella. now imagine him spending too long finding the right webnovel to read while he eats and his food going cold.

[not-a-catboy-i-swear]

Hi! I'm not technically back from the dead. I don't think. But I was made aware by the lovely @furekami that I never posted my contributions to the ORV scenario zine! There's another one somewhere around here. I'll find it. In the mean time, please enjoy.

I was just listening to "Two" by Sleeping at Last and it brought back all of my very emotional feelings about ORV that I thought was dormant for two years. God I love this story so much.

[not-a-catboy-i-swear]

okay im saying this once and then im staying quiet on the topic of dokja mpreg forever. you are off your top crazy in the head if you think kim dokja is reacting to getting pregnant with anything other than setting the guiness world record for world's quickest abortion. be it magical baby be gone from the dokkaebi shop or han sooyoung getting three speeding tickets driving him to the clinic in a modern au he's getting that shit out as soon as his cycle skips come hell or high water. this is the man who murdered a teenage boy in cold blood because he reminded kim dokja a little too much of himself this is the guy who cringes away from proverbial mirrors like he's a creepypasta victim who'll get trapped in them. this is the man who adopted two children and hatched a third only to skip out on them like being a deadbeat dad was a good enough job to pay his non existent child support. this is the man who doesnt have mother issues he has mother subscriptions! i am only willing to entertain kim dokja getting pregnant and not aborting that thang posthaste if a) he's a fifty year old having a mature age pregnancy because lord knows it would take 20 years of therapy at least for him to come to terms with (gestures) all that. or b) an insane scheme for him to save yoo joonghyuk's gaming career and give him the perfect picket fence life beautiful child included by using himself as a human incubator and then leaving that kid on the doorstep to turn yoo joonghyuk's twitch channel into a baby vlogging one. THAT is the level of issues surrounding raising a kid we're talking about here. okay? ok. and now i will stay silent forever

[not-a-catboy-i-swear]

Can you just imagine ORV from Kyrgios' POV?

Some random guy you've never even seen before shows up and starts acting all friendly and familiar. He acts like he knows you. He wants to be your disciple of all things. This guy is bizarre (and therefore intriguing) and so, begrudgingly, you agree.

Terrible student. Just awful. No talent at all. He doesn't have any spots to like. Why didn't you just kill him when he first showed up? Still, you have accepted him as your disciple and so you leave him to it for now. You will return to check on him later.

Your terrible, awful disciple has run away in the middle of the night! You will hunt him down and he will be sorry.

He has somehow stolen your technique!!!

But, amazingly, your terrible disciple actually manages to save your planet with the technique he stole from you. You decide not to punish him.

You see him leaving with the rest of his companions but graciously allow him to go for now because surely after some time to reflect he'll see the error of his ways and return to his master.

He does not return.

You go to find your terrible, thieving disciple so that you can punish him.

There are, strangely, multiple people claiming to be your disciple. You kill them. Where is your actual disciple?

You find him wounded and begging for death. He has been beaten up in a distant place and is now filled with shame claiming that he has defiled the name of Baekchung. You are a good teacher so you will not punish him after all and will instead look into the situation that has caused your prideful disciple to be in this state.

.

.

.

He has tricked you into fighting an outer god with your ex.

[not-a-catboy-i-swear]

ROUND 6 MATCH 5: DOKJA VS QUILL

Kim Dokja from Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint faces Quill Kipps from the Lockwood & Co. books. Who do you like more?

Dokja Propaganda:

"hes just everything to me. you dont understand. i type out orv characters so much that my phone will autocorrect 'just' to 'hsy' and 'okay' to 'kdj'"

"vote kim dokja he lives in my brain rent free top floor penthouse suite 24/7 room service etc"

"HES JESUS FOR THE MENTALLY ILL"

"kdj sweep hes my savior hes ruined my life hes my favorite"

"dojka is a whore. vote for his scheming gay ass"

"he's literally a father figure to these kids AND he has this homoerotic rivalry"

Quill Propaganda:

"He's such a loser. Has beef with 3 16 year olds. He's like 4'10. Had one of the best character arcs ever. He almost died. His sword is bejeweled."

"guys vote for my son quilliam and his stupid little bedazzled sword"

"you wanna punch his face in in the first book and by the end you're sobbing buckets and loving and protecting him as if he were your own and my closing argument: it would be really really fucking funny"

"VOTE QUILL HE HAS FUNNY GOGGLES AND IS BEEFING WITH A TEENAGER BECAUSE THAT TEENAGER STABBED HIM IN THE ASS DURING A FENCING COMPETITION WHEN HE WAS LIKE 11 AND QUILL NEVER GOT OVER IT"

[not-a-catboy-i-swear]

What Is ORV?

The number one question I get asked on this blog, now answered better than ever. Today I am going to formally introduce you to Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint

To start off this recommendation: ORV might very well be my favorite thing I've read. Ever. If I could only reread one thing for the rest of my life it'd be this webnovel.

My elevator pitch is this: something with the cosmic-scale goofy video game nonsense and intricate setting comparable to Homestuck in its prime, paired with the deft emotional poignancy and emotionally-driven fights of Mob Psycho 100, topped off with the sort of compassionate and heartwrenching metanarrative of Undertale.

ORV is a love letter to it's own readers. ORV revels in the joy of losing yourself in fiction, even when it's the kind of fiction that tends to be considered lowbrow or worthless. It's something that dances the delicate line between recognizing the difficult nature of using media as escapism without condemning it. I've rarely seen anything else that accomplishes everything it sets out to do in its narrative with such remarkable precision. Frankly if you're reading a tumblr media recommendation post in 2023, I can almost guarantee ORV has the kind of meat you're looking for in a narrative, whatever that may be.

The story follow the antics of protagonist Kim Dokja, a 28 year old office worker on an expiring contract, whose only real joy in life is reading his favorite massively long and massively boring webnovel. One day, the novel’s events - worldwide deathmatches aired for the entertainment of mysterious higher beings called ‘constellations’ - begin playing out in reality in a sort of reverse-isekai. Kim Dokja, the only longterm reader of this webnovel, finds himself uniquely poised to succeed based on the advantages given to him by his knowledge of future events, but the webnovel’s actual protagonist, Yoo Jonghyuk, is a violent monster who will stop at absolutely nothing to complete his goals, no matter the cost to anyone else. Kim Dokja finds himself in a delicate dance of guiding the events of the story to play out more favorably than the version he read while trying to avoid being massacred in the fallout, all while trying to see it through to the story’s end. 

Below the cut I'll go into a more in-depth (but non-spoilery) explanation of what exactly makes ORV so unique and worthwhile, and what you're in for if you choose to read it.

Clocking in at 550 chapters, and over 1.3 million words in English, ORV may seem incredibly daunting to dip your toes into, but I assure you it's worth every moment. I would read 1.3 million more words if they had them for me. Here are some things about ORV I consider to be selling points, not necessarily in any particular order:

The tone. Its funny, for starters. It is extremely funny, which is very high up on my media priority list. In ORV, there will be incredibly grim things that make you laugh, and incredibly cringe and silly anime bullshit that will hurt you as heavily as any other media you’ve seen. I always love this kind of tonal whiplash when it's well executed, and ORV probably executes it better than anything else I've seen to date.

It’s got fun and fascinating worldbuilding mechanics. the core concept being ‘reality now operates on the rules of a shitty novel’ means that the worldbuilding doesn’t have to function logically, it functions thematically. It’s explicitly stated in ORV canon that some of the internal rules governing this new reality are objectively really stupid and illogical, but they just have to roll with it because that’s what was in the book, and i think it’s a really enjoyable way to do it. This may at first sound like a copout to excuse bad worldbuilding, but I promise it isn’t. The worldbuilding is actually incredibly deeply thought out, but it doesn’t exist for the sake of rational function, it exists for the sake of furthering orv’s thematic arcs. The rules by which this universe operate do a magnificent job of strengthening the core concepts the authors are exploring.

It plays with the trappings of isekai/litrpg in a really thoughtful way. These are genres I'm not super familiar with, so I can't comment on this point too heavily, but with my limited knowledge ORV feels a lot less of a deconstruction of it's genre and more of a celebration/interrogation of it. Despite that, it's still accessible to readers such as myself who are not super familiar with these genre conventions.

It deals with morality in a really wonderful and nuanced way. there are almost no characters in ORV’s extremely large cast who are just explicitly morally condemnable, and almost every conflict allows you to understand exactly why the antagonists believe they’re in the right by opposing the actions of our protagonists. The central conflicts are never pure right and pure wrong; they’re always about contrasting goals, conflicting worldviews, and different priorities between ends and means. this makes the conflicts all feel so much more dynamic and engaging than those where the only stakes are physical harm.

The characters interpersonal relationships are some of the most interesting I've ever seen. ORV is very slow burn and it takes a long time for a lot of these to come out of the woodwork, by design, but by god once they do they fucking hit. Similar to the plot conflicts, the interpersonal conflicts also almost never occur where there’s one side clearly in the wrong. The characters are almost all genuinely attempting to do their best by each other, and the tension comes from the ways in which human communication is fundamentally imperfect and part of our feelings and intentions get lost in translation. it’s very heartwrenching and heartwarming to see unfold, in equal measure.

Following from that, it’s a narrative that really meaningfully prioritizes non-romantic relationships over romantic ones as the central focus. Orv is about love, but not about romance. Obviously there’s shipbait and the ot3 is real and good and my friend but if you’re looking for deep complex platonic, (found or otherwise) familial, and antagonistic relationships that never get ruined with forced romantic arcs, we got em baby!

The pacing is unlike anything i’ve ever seen before. from a purely technical standpoint, it is genuinely a fascinating case study in how to execute a narrative that is almost constantly escalating without exception. there is very little downtime or breathing room in orv, which is insane for something that clocks in at over a million words, and somehow, it still works. i’ve never felt more like a frog in a pot of slowly boiling water than i did when i was reading orv and i can’t believe they pulled it off. it’s so interesting to read something like that.

It is a tragedy without resorting to cynicism and a very adult narrative that’s really steeped in childlike wonder. I’m a big fan of cartoons made for children. Cartoons made for children are some of my favorite things to watch, but of course children’s media will always be simplified and not very relatable to an adult audience. ORV is very much a serious and heavy adult narrative, and a deeply tragic one at that, but it never delves into torture porn. It’s a very compassionate piece of media overall, that holds a lot of reverence and sympathy for the ‘naive’ optimism of children that gets stripped down over time. if you, like me, feel more like a grown up child than an adult some days, I think it’ll hit for you.

It is extremely cathartic and meaningful. I am not exaggerating at all when I say that reading it gave me the closest thing I have ever felt to any sort of spiritual breakthrough. It helped unfuck my head a ton during some very grim times and i think the perspective it offers on the value of human life and our relationship to storytelling is a really really good one.

And if my word isn't enough, here's some reviews from satisfied customers. With that, I'll leave the rest to you, and hope you one day reach the end of the story.

[not-a-catboy-i-swear]

orv spoilers ig

the "kim dokja using jonghyuk's name all the time" gag is the best thing in fiction. orv from Jonghyuk's perspective must be so fucking funny because of how it Keeps Fucking Happening. imagine seeing your homoerotic codependent rival get thrown into a woodchipper and shredded beyond all hope of even identifying the body and then like three days later your name is trending on twitter in Missouri and you just KNOW that bitch has burned down an amazon fulfillment center and then told everyone that he's you. thats what keeps happening to yoo jonghyuk

[not-a-catboy-i-swear]

an ORV animatic I made! Spoilers for chp 188 in the novel. 

You can also the video here:

https://youtu.be/w3B8jS74PIo

[not-a-catboy-i-swear]

/ Orv novel main story + epilogue spoilers

"Did you know, Dokja-ssi?" - A Jung Heewon comic about platonic love

Thank you @princess-of-purple-prose for the ID (available in ALT text). ID was rephrased here and there according to what the panels are meant to show

[not-a-catboy-i-swear]

[not-a-catboy-i-swear]

The abbreviation of orv looks like someone collapsing onto their knees in agony because that's what it does to you

[not-a-catboy-i-swear]

dying to know who you are and why you liked a post I reblogged completely out of nowhere when you don’t even follow me (baffled not enraged)

I just found your blog through muffiln. Also I thought I followed you but apparently not. Sorry I guess?

[not-a-catboy-i-swear]

omniscient reader is genuinely so masterfully done because i have never seen a first person viewpoint story manage to obfuscate it's main character so well and in such a thematically relevant way.

like. it's not just this, but we're so used to third person viewpoints being used in books, y'know? so of course we don't know exactly what the characters are thinking at all times. we only get to see that in specific moments where the author chooses to show us the characters thoughts.

but kim dokja is the viewpoint for the vast majority of the novel, we are literally sitting there in his mind reading his thoughts on every single thing, and we still don't know what the fuck he's planning. sure we can infer it, there's plenty of flawlessly done set-up and foreshadowing orv from a writing perspective.

but kim dokja never tells us anything. not really. not without hiding behind seven proxies. we learn about him but we never truly know him.

[not-a-catboy-i-swear]

there’s gotta be fans of yoo joongyhuk’s gamer career SOMEWHERE in the world of ways of survival right. can you imagine being like a markiplier fan who likes his casual let’s plays and then the apocalypse happens and you’re just in downtown LA trying to scavenge for scraps or whatever when you spot him mowing through a horde of gang members with a sword. that would be nuts

[not-a-catboy-i-swear]

Can you imagine that sburb had a notification for when you get an achievement like

"Creating universe" "First Revival" "Guardian death" or shit like that it would be wild

[not-a-catboy-i-swear]

Jake believing anything he’s told about trolls, the kids realizing it via shenanigans and exploiting it to god tier the remaining trolls, give Karkat powers and nerf Vriska