#and for being part of this shared experience that is called orv

[sinfully02slow]

Out of my element here but

Appreciation post for those orv fans that dissect the story, analyze scenes, share their theories and perspectives here on Tumblr

It’s really cool to see how orv looks from your guys’s perspectives and realizing what some scenes meant

Heck, I believed Kdj’s narrative during the webnovel until the fandom woke me up and handed me depression word soup :)

Personally I can’t really put into words what I think and feel- being able to come across posts where it’s put into words just makes my day

Seeing the orv fandom share endless commentaries of the story, their reactions, alternate universe takes, theories and fanart- it all makes it feel like orv never really ended

But yeah, thank you

(Sorry if the post looked long, I didn’t like how the sentences touched, it looked too squished)

[ramseysramblings]

The Rescue

Patrick drove west away from the last remains of humanity on on Idyll - maybe in the universe. He patted his side where a repulsor was holstered. It was probably the third time he had checked to make sure it was charged and working. He knew what was out there. He had actually seen the beasts, the centaurs. How the hell did someone come up with that name? They were deranged killer monster ants as big as an ORV.

He knew what to do, though. He was a marine after all. Or he had been a marine 10 years ago. Now he was a security guard. He broke up fights at the bars. When there were bars. A humph escaped his lips as he thought about it, prompting a reaction from the woman seated next to him.

"You Ok Patrick?" she asked. The woman, he thought her name was Divya, was a medic, or had studied some medicine. Patrick wasn't sure. He wasn't thrilled she was coming because he considered it too dangerous.

"Fine," he said. "Just thinking about what's ahead."

"Yeah, I know," she said, looking toward the area where Lakeside had once been. "I desperately want to see it, but I also don't."

The ruin of Lakeside still smoked and the surrounding forest, lush and wet as it was, burned from the massive nuclear explosion.

Patrick grimaced and tried not to talk to himself, a bad habit he had acquired while patrolling. The big man was never quite right about how to interact with people. Far from being introverted, he loved being around people, but he seemed to always do something that caused people to raise their eyebrows, smirk or shake their heads. After nearly three decades of it, he had decided a new start on a different planet would be a good chance to embed deeply with a new family of colonists, bonded together by shared experience.

Sadly, Patrick found that many of his problems followed him 21 light years to Idyll. Unconsciously, he accelerated the ORV to nearly 60 KPH, the trailer attached to it, bouncing with the extra speed over the packed gravel road that stretched between the farm and the mine. From the mine, it would be another 15 kilometers to where the people were stranded with the other ORV.

Divya looked over at him again and appeared to be pondering whether to tell him to slow down, but instead she just grabbed the "Oh shit" bar on the A-pillar of the vehicle.

They had passed into the forest now, the massive trunks of the trees that people were calling "Jupiters," with their trunks three meters across and giant oval leaves with a smaller hole in the middle of them that resembled the eye of the great gas giant in Earth's system. Also along the road were a tangle of the beautiful Idyll flower, stretching 6 meters into the air, their blossoms stretching wide. Patrick loved them. In fact, they were the best part of the planet to him.

Soon, they came into the mine encampment. There were a few dozen structures built near the mine entrance, some for work, but mostly these were houses. Divya motioned for Patrick to stop. She went into one of the buildings and came out with boxes of what he thought were first aid and other medical supplies. She stored them in the trailer. They called out for people, knocking on all the doors in the mine settlement, but found none. The entire area had flown to the farm after the explosion.

"It's a good time to put on the suits," she said. She and Patrick pulled on the bulky and hot outfit. It was a space suit, not a radiation suit, but it was all they had available and would do the trick. The Geiger counter was starting to tick up as they had approached the mine.

Back in the ORV they sped off and soon crossed a river where the base of the enormous lake narrowed. The river would go south for a thousands kilometers to the sea. It was possible there were even boats somewhere south, Patrick thought.

They were getting close now and the radiation was rising. It hadn't reached dangerous levels yet, at least for minimal exposure, but the people out here would have been exposed awhile. They were likely going to get sick at least.

Patrick saw something ahead and almost choked. The ORV was there. The people were not, and two enormous monsters stood nearby, pushing on the vehicle with spears. As their vehicle came close they turned toward him. He suddenly saw why they called them centaurs. Reared up with a spear pointed towards him, they did appear a bit like the mythical half-man, half-horse beast, but far, far scarier.

"Holy shit," Divya gasped. "Turn around Patrick! Turn around!"

Patrick didn't turn around. He parked the ORV and jumped out, grabbing the repulsor. He knew it worked on the beasts. He charged it to full power as they turned toward him. They charged in unison, one of them launching a spear. Patrick jumped to the side and rolled. He wasn't graceful, but he managed to get upright and pull the trigger on the repulsor before the other skewered him.

Ultrasonic waves pulsed from the weapon toward the attackers and they tumbled in a mass near his feet, their momentum carrying them into him. He was knocked backwards by their hard shells and slammed to the ground, but he was ok. The centaurs were unconscious.

Patrick knew it was against the colony rules to kill the beasts, but things were desperate. He couldn't leave them here only to kill him and Divya. He grabbed a spear and plunged them into their heads several times. Instead of casting the spears away, he took them both and put them in the ORV.

When he returned to the ORV, Divya looked at him with horror and awe. "That was incredible, Patrick. Thank you."

[your--isgayrights]

just messaging to say that i really enjoy your fics, characterization, analysis/insight, and writing talks - you put out valuable work and i really admire your writing. it’s been really fun waiting for updates, it feels exciting!

since you feel like sharing, is there anything you have about one of your fics (be it a cut scene, the writing process, or so on) you’ve been dying for an opportunity to share? i love behind-the-scenes/the writing process ^^

hiii hellooo thanks for calling my gay losers fanfiction valuable work its on my emotional resume now

Hmm I don't really cut scenes as much as I just sometimes completely rewrite them and/or move them around... Like there was going to be a scene with LJY and a scene with SYS in chapter four but like for uhhh Obvious reasons I was like okay no those go in Chapter 5 now my privileges for adding scenes to chapter 4 have been revoked.

On my other fics hmmmmm.......... Um if you read the one for ORV bigbang that I pitched and wrote, the 10k one about YJH going through every regression and KDJ is always there, that one is one I like talked about in an ask way back ago on this blog... It was an AU I played around with in my head that like I pictured being like suuper long and multichaptered and going through each regression but like... A writing skill I actually learned was that... you can actually make plans about writing... so that you have to do less work...

Shocking!

Which is why when it was still going around in my head I pitched it to ORV BB and Yuu was kind enough to pick it. I initially planned two chapters in the outline submission, one chapter with the sort of YJH timeline viginettes and then a second chapter where he has to game everything to make sure KDJ lives... So in my outline process I have the end of these two chapters written, the first is the one that you see in that fic with the sacrifice and the second is a final confrontation w/ the OD AND i think that the latter will never see the light of day. My main problem with it is that even though I tried to incorporate HSY more in the planning of chapter 2, I felt like the ending I came up with didn't do her justice in the climax, it was too YJH and KDJ focused, so if I ever went back to that chapter 2 concept I'd basically be starting from scratch I think.

ALSO about that one: in the ORVBB terms Yuu only had to make one illustration for me but she really went above and beyond and did a bunch of scene sketches just before I submitted the final which was just so crazy cool. A lot of my WIPs went on hold during bigbang but it was really wroth it just to have that experience i think.

if you want some Writing Process about wall fic tho heres a fun anecdote (cw i talk about why suicide is included in the fic a bit):

so back when I put out the first few chapters of wall fic i was really not expecting the kind of response that it got because firstly i had never written a fic that got the amount of attention wall fic got from the git go before and then secondly... ok when I wrote the outline for wallfic in my head it is like. A. Comedy.

So that seems like crock because chapter one is like explicitly about Kim Dokja's suicide attempt huh. and like I knew that when I wrote it... But I didn't think it was that sad? It's hard to explain that because like. Something I encountered after publishing is that in my experience, like, attempts aren't sad. You know, I'm open about being trans and gay and like the fact of the matter is that like 50% or more of my lifelong friends from growing up have attempted suicide before like we're part of those more than 80% statistics lmao. So in my mind when I see narratives about suicide in media, I'm sort of looking at how well they represent my own or my friends' experiences. Which is why cannon ORV really struck a cord with me, because it presents KDJ's suicidal ideation as this natural part of him that's always there, and he's never portrayed as crazy or wrong for feeling and thinking in those ways. It's presented very naturally in a sort of "this is just how it is" way. Which is something that really hit me, because I think that in my experience with suicidal friends, that's how it is. It's always lurking under the surface and it's something we all have thought about. Then there are just these moments of crisis where it can't be held back anymore and then you're calling 911 at 3 am on a school night...

So when I sort of write about these adults and institutions failing KDJ in chapter one, my feeling on it was going for that "this is just how it is," and then, in setting up the YJH relationship, it represented to me the fact that there are things that can still save you, whether it be friendship or strange parasocial calling, at the core of things there's some hope for us... It seems very optimistic to me! A great set up for some gag comedy too, classic romcom misunderstandings such as... "Oh the guy who saved me from my suicide attempt doesn't actually care about me..." oh hmm.. that still sounds depressing doesn't it?

I think that one of the reasons I had to take a lot of breaks in between writing Chapter four is because around the time i was done with chapter 3, i was home for winter break and found myself calling 911 for another friend and I was like... OH. WAIT. this is like. Not something that Most People Have Done. Because I was sitting there answering the responder thinking like "🙄 ugh i hate that they always ask if the suicidal person is armed when you call 911 for attempts" and then I remembered that like the first time I called 911 on like a for real for real attempt where I 100% knew that my friend Would Die if the ambulance didn't get there on time my reaction was... not like that lmao. Like The Sheer Desperation I felt at that time would almost be impossible to explain because there's this sense of helplessness that comes from being a teenager where your friends are just physically out of your reach and it feels like there's nothing you can do for this person to change the home life that keeps bringing them to the edge so all you can do is watch your discord dms late into the night in case you need to call 911 and then once you have that's all you can do...

And then i was like hold on wait is that what wall fic is about.

So I like reread chapter 1 then and it was like kind of hard because like... Yeah huh I kind of Wrote This huh. These are kind of my Real Life Personal Experiences being projected onto my Korean Webnovel Men.

Then I reread comments that I got on that first chapter and like... people saying that they cried reading it and that it was so sad... I had kind of laughed or thought they were exaggerating the first time I read them because it's like... I didn't write anything sad though?

But then when I was rereading what I wrote with everyone else in the comment section that time I thought... it really was sad... It was sad what happened to me and my friends, wasn't it? That it's just how we grew up, thinking it was normal, getting used to it to keep each other alive... And I started crying too, because I had forgotten that it was sad, that it was terrifying, and I needed all these people on the internet to remind me...

It was a bit hard to write after that, because I realized that my own words had a lot of meaning to me... and since it was very important to me to write wall fic, I started to get a lot of anxiety about doing it right. ORV big bang helped me take a break and remember that writing is just writing... I don't have to worry too much about whether or not something I'm writing is accurately representing something important to me... because since I'm the one writing it, the things I think, my values, ideals, experiences, all these things are naturally going to be in something that I make... I don't have to express things on the axis of all these specific ideals, its enough to just put down what feels fun and good. I managed to bottle the feeling I had before of "i enjoy these guys in my head and i want to show them to people," sort of the joy of creating that got overshadowed later on.

I think that was important for me, because at the end of the day I think that wall fic is still comedy. It would be wrong to call it tragedy, because even though the beginning is sort of in this sad place, the sort of trajectory of the story is upward, you know? I think that it's also something I want to express that those of us who do have those sad lives or those tragic lives... it's still living! Too often I feel that narratives about suicide I've been subject to in media are either blink and you miss it cured (unrealistic, quick resolution that doesn't give anyone the proper building blocks for recovery) or made out to be impossible to escape from and inevitable (you're doomed the second you start feeling this way)... I would like to see more narratives that start out with suicide, take it seriously, and then go on to ask... now what? When we survive, what do we do? Because too often I think the only answer some of my friends found was "Nothing changed, but there's nothing else I can do. I'll just try again."

So with Kim Dokja, of course he still has the suicidal ideation, he still holds tightly onto "there's nothing I can do," he still doesn't value himself even though he isn't actively attempting... but even though he's Going Through it in wall fic I want to show that his life gets just a bit more beautiful every chapter. That he didn't have to change too much for his life to get better, he wasn't in the wrong for feeling the way he did... things just get better... you just have to live to see them and they will... this is something I would want to promise to a reader, so I think carefully about it while writing now.