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write on the wall

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When you, a reader who reads stories to survive, stumble upon a story and its about a guy who spent a decade reading a story to survive...

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throughout the story both kim dokja and han sooyoung define themselves in opposition to yoo sangah. kim dokja defines himself as a reader in contrast to yoo sangah as a protagonist, and han sooyoung defines herself as a villainess in contrast to yoo sangah as a heroine. outsider vs insider, evil vs good. in doing so, they dehumanize themselves and yoo sangah. kim dokja denies himself the agency that he gives a protagonist, positioning himself as merely an observer in both his life and others to cope with his mental health issues. han sooyoung denies herself any emotional or moral complexity, assigning herself a simple role she feels most comfortable in due to her own self worth issues as a way to conceptualize how her 'genre' as changed around her.

as coping strategies, these kinda suck ass. they hurt themselves in doing so, and they hurt yoo sangah. the overlapping roles they assign to her - protagonist and heroine - make unrealistic demands of her, project a perfection that isn't real, put her in a box and ignore all attempts to escape it. they distance themselves from her and damage their relationships in the process and a large part of yoo sangah's character and arc is her either fighting back against this dehumanization or just refusing to play ball as a way to deconstruct the heroine archetype. when she is dying she uses what seem to be her final moment to make one last escape attempt of kim dokja's idolization of her, reminding him of the pepper incident and forcing him to recognize her as not just a person but a friend. and during moments when she and han sooyoung are at odds, their different attitudes towards it are so stark - han sooyoung regards it as almost a battle of good and evil, whereas yoo sangah sees it as a more personal argument. han sooyoung's discomfort comes from a clashing of philosphies, whereas yoo sangah's comes from the fact han sooyoung is kind of a fucking bitch who has killed people she cares about and might again. han sooyoung leans into yoo sangah's worst thoughts about her as an 'evil', whereas yoo sangah is just trying to asses her as a person.

when kim dokja and han sooyoung categorize the world in this way, they dehumanize themselves and their loved ones. and yoo sangah refuses to play along, recognizing both her own and their humanity and forcing that same recognition onto them. when kim dokja and han sooyoung build a wall between themselves and yoo sangah, defining themselves by that distance, yoo sangah climbs it. yoo sangah doesn't just expose the dangers of the small box she gets shoved in, but exposes the others as well. she's an incredibly important character for orv because she does exactly that - it's an extension of her larger role in the narrative as someone who challenges roles and tropes of the genre, who reaches across the divide caused by these expectations we create for ourselves and others and says her, im just a person, just like you. so maybe we should hang out sometime and just be that, yeah?

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hyj and yjh treating their younger sibling as a memory instead of their younger sibling

wow. evil things are still happening in my ask box.........

but also....... heh..............

yoohyun is forever overlayed with an image of his older self, cold and alone in the snowfield. he is growing up and he will get older than he could. he is growing in a different way to the way he did without yoojin. there is no longer just one han yoohyun, and never will be. remember him sleeping in yoohyun's room. the moment his fear resistance dropped, yoohyun's ghost resurfaced with such strength he could no longer keep it as hidden as he always did.

just like yoo joonghyuk is going forwards, leaving behind so many little sisters. he says what happened in previous regressions stays there, but can it really? he is still haunted by anna croft's betrayal, he hunted down those who wronged him in the past - haven't wronged him yet - will do that in the future. it's never locked behind the doors of a subway train. he is walking forwards with a line of yoo mias watching his back. he chooses to remember,,,,,,, does he mourn every yoo mia. does he see ghosts of her while she grows up. is he bitter about her growing and changing - and her never growing. staying the same. is the last yoo mia he knows going to grow up the same as the first yoo mia.

do they hold their siblings' warm hands and remember cold ones, loose fingers on theirs. do they.

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one of my favourite parts of kim dokjas attachment to ways of survival is how unashamed he is of the webnovel itself. like he's definitely ashamed of his life and he's ashamed he has such a 'loser' hobby of reading webnovels and he fully acknowledges that ways of survival is bad. but while hes willing to deride himself for relying on it he never derides twsa in that same nasty hateful way. its like when i refer to the objectively bad media that i was extremely attached to as a young person im always like haha wasn't that media so bad isn't it so silly i was saved by that of all things but kim dokja would NEVER do that. hes embarrassed he had to be saved but he's not embarrassed that ways of survival saved him. because he loves it too much

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as per fucking usual there is a gigantic wall between kim dokja and his mother even With him having read her story through the fourth wall. incredible effort just to pass a few words through that wall. I'm going to walk into the sea

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han sooyoung (13 years old) (asshole): oh my god why do you keep harrassing me about this dumb plagarism shit like kys weirdo

han sooyoung (1863rd version) (watching her younger self suicide bait the person shes writing twsa for just so he won't do specifically that):

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I love it when two characters are completely and utterly obsessed with each other to an unhealthy degree. Utter devotion to the point of insanity. To the point the lines blur as to what the nature of their relationship even is. Romantic? Platonic? Sexual? Familial? Professional? All and none of the above, somehow. They can’t exist without each other. Being together is making them both worse. They would watch each other sleep in bed at night every night if they could. They are literally always thinking about each other. They would kill and die for each other. They resent each other. Even seperating them isn't going to fix the situation at this point. They permanently live inside each other.

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do you all see my vision here

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I kinda cooked with this on IG so it’s coming here too

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The first scenario of ORV has always fascinated me. "Kill another person to survive." It might be the most common plot point in apocalyptic stories.. Pretty much all of them feature some discussion of morality and how to define it, good and evil, played out by deeply morally grey characters who have to make a choice to kill.

But ORV is a story about stories.

The Star Stream is trying to tell 'the story of an apocalypse' and it does! But in the most crude and unpolished way.

It's almost cynical. 'We are telling an apocalypse story, what's a common plot beat in apocalypse stories? 'No one is innocent and everyone has killed to survive'. Okay, let's make it a literal requirement for everyone to have killed someone to proceed.'

It's robotic, taking a story beat and stripping it down to it's bare essentials, then forcing the incarnations to adapt to it or die.

But the thing is. That's what all writing is. ORV just pulls back the curtain, exposing the internal circutry that makes a story work. Orv doesn't lie to you about the inherent artifice of it all.

The scenarios are perfect little plot arcs, designed to test the limits and reveal the strenghs and weaknesses of incarnations - 'the characters' of the story. It's not some cruel torture, it's literally just the act of storytelling. Writing 101 is put characters through hardship to reveal certain qualities in them or to make them go through character development.

Only difference is that writers usually camouflage the 'scenarios' they give their characters until the circumstances seem 'realistic' and like they happened on their own, like the author isn't forcing their reality to bend this way at all.

Oh, one character didn't lock the door in time due and got bitten by a zombie. And so inevitably this other character has to make the choice to kill them or not. There's as many explanaitions as the author can cook up as to what lead the characters to this moment. How the zombies got there, why these two were in the same vicinity, etc etc.

But, it's all set dressing the author has added to make the audience forget that this is too a 'scenario' given to the characters to test them. There's a time limit and a description and a reward and a penalty for failure, but all of these are cleverly hidden. The time limit can be until the last helicopter leaves in 10 minutes. The unspoken penalty is death. The author arranged how the characters find out some or all of this information in convienient ways.

Star Stream just lays it all out in front you you, straight up. States 'Kill another incarnation or have them kill you' and doesn't attempt to justify the circumstances, because of course, the real reason all this is happening is because the story demands it.

It's a universe that does not hide the author's hand in every tiny little event that happens.

So this too is the question "What if the characters knew they were in a story?" asked yet again. Every single being in the ORV universe knows they are in a story. The system itself makes it obvious - you can look at your own character sheet, you obtain 'stories' when you do something impressive but are constrained by 'probability' and what the audience finds interesting. You're body is literally made up of words written about you're life!

That's why the worldbuilding is so cohesive and so so good. All of it is telling you 'the world is a novel.'

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yoo siblings

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Watching a certain subsect of manhwa-only fans reduce yoo sangah to a "love interest waifu" character is so frustrating because it literally goes against the entire point of her character. She's been trying her whole life to escape the expectations put on her just because she's a conventionally attractive woman. She went against her family's wishes for her to marry rich and got a job to become independent, only to face harassment and sexism in her male-dominated workplace. She is frequently objectified and pushed to be appealing to the male gaze. Even kim dokja initially thinks of her as less of a person and more of an archetype. Yoo sangah is a woman trying to forge her own identity within a patriarchal society that will never see her for who she truly is.

I think it says something about the way we consume media that we always assume that an attractive female character who plays a particular role in the male mc's life must be a romantic interest - that most of the fandom discussions of yoo sangah I've seen are about whether she and kdj are going to get together romantically and that so many of us complain about being "tricked" into thinking that they are when their canon relationship remains entirely platonic by the end of the novel. When yoo sangah is close to kim dokja we expect the development of a romance between the two. If a woman is close with a man then we think that's the only option for their relationship. We are taught to see female characters not as their own people, but rather mere objects for men.

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orv is a novel where the protagonists are striving towards a goal, but that goal is so broad that the author could feasibly take just about any direction to have the protagonists achieve it. okay, so they are looking for the end of the scenarios? what does that entail? how would someone achieve that? what happens after that? there's no logical steps a reader could infer have to happen. it's totally up to the author. the story is therefore pretty unrestricted in how it handles its progression.

but because its episodes could contain anything, that means that the episode contents are chosen with intention. orv's authors tend to be pretty driven to build episodes around thematic and character progression - if it doesn't seem like a particular episode is geared to that, keep reading. both the literal events in the story and the way episodes are arranged tend to be crafted to encourage thinking about parallels, and about certain themes. it's really quite brilliantly structured.

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some lee jihye doodles this past week

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Ranking every other media here on out by how much orv "it's giving"