#everything can be blamed on kdj and yjh at the end of the day

[evilkaeya]

The orv experience

[your--isgayrights]

Probably a bit silly and you’ve likely answered this before, but do you think you’re going to come back to “at the Very least, the Wall will change?” I’m just getting into ORV and I want to read some fanfic! I promise I am patient but I’m hesitant to start reading something that’s abandoned. I hope this doesn’t come off as disrespectful! I completely understand burnout (med student here hehe) and there’s no shame is shelving a project for a time if it no longer speaks to you. I just wanted to check

You're right that I've answered this before but like it's totally fair to ask me again after how long it's been lol. Bc like I think about this a lot too and thus the answer/feelings I have about it kind of changes?

Like my journey with this fic has kind of been tumultuous because I started it before I had access to ADHD medication and a lot of my life can be divided into the Before times and the like Now Times where my baseline happiness/standard of care of myself is vastly improved. I outlined all of wall fic before publishing the first chapter and then the scenes I wanted to include took up a lot more time to create than I initially thought they would and that like frustration was really harmful to like my sense of being a "writer," I guess?

Sorry, getting into this bc I'm trying to articulate my own feelings to myself, but I'll tldr; it at the end probably.

Like when I first started wall fic it had like a strangle hold on my imagination and was a way I was able to articulate feelings about things in life. Truth is, I'm someone who has called 911 for suicide/self-harm of friends/classmates like 4-5 times before turning 18. There is this feeling of helplessness I always had as a minor that the world was always ending around me but even when I was up till 5 am making sure my friend got to the hospital ok without any way of really knowing except waiting for a text back, I still had to just buck up and go to school the next day. The emotions I have towards these times in my life really latched onto omniscient reader, because the way it discusses suicidal ideation and what can help with it rang really true to me. I love KDJ a lot, part of that is, in my interactions with suicidal ideation, his sense of narrative inevitability really describes the emotions behind it well, the feeling of "this is the only Solution that will Actually work" is sewn into the fabric of the universe as "probability." And I've actually been thinking about that term "probability" a lot lately, and how it relates to ideas about Narratives. We're always estimating the likelihood of future events based on past experiences, calling things "realistic" or not. But the function of this system in my own life has often been to convince myself to 'give up' on certain things, conserve the energy it would take to try them. Sure that has helped me when Ive not had any free time/energy in crunch times or big projects, but when something is actually important, giving up feels like shit to be honest. Which is part of why I really love and kind of idealize this character of Yoo Joonghyuk, someone who 'never gives up.' To me KDJ and yjh in wall fic represent these two radical sides of a spectrum where someone becomes unhappy by giving up caring about everything and someone becomes unhappy by never giving up on anything. KDJ is then sort of this love letter to people who give up on themselves, people who could never imagine living past a certain age and yet somehow implausibly remain. YJH is a love letter to people who have been left behind and are So aware of their choices and their power over situations that they blame themselves for things that were actually out of their control in the first place. It's these two different ways of interacting with helplessness and grief and fear, giving up knowing you never could have made a difference in the first place or being convinced you could always have done Something and blaming yourself for failing, constantly stressing about what you could have done and what you ought to do the next time it happens.

Codifying these themes into Characters is originally this fun way of exploring emotions I have about them and sharing the experience of feeling them with others without having to tear too much of my self a part. I feel like when we're young it feels like a sense of self is something like a wall, an image of ourself that we have Built and must put in work to Maintain from erosion. This sense of self and protection makes us feel distinct from other people, the line we draw where we begin and end in the universe, and they become rules dictating How we will Act and Appear towards others. Drawing these walls and lines is pretty important to KDJ's perspective in wall fic, but i now realize I had sort of started doing to myself? Towards the middle of writing it?

Just because I've been on the Internet so long, I know the sort of "narratives" of being different "kinds of authors" online. Because of this, when I started posting wall fic, something that was of a lot of concern to me was how I appeared as an Author to people reading. I honestly think now that the performance of things I associated with like Being an Author were more sort of motivated by a fear of failure and disappointing others than anything else. It's kind of only been recently that I've realized that I have a choice to do things because I enjoy them instead of the fear of not doing them, which sounds a little crazy/obvious to be honest, but forcing myself to be an honor roll student for like more than a third of my adolescence while completely unmedicated kind of made that sort of intrinsic fear of disappointing others the ole'reliable of Task Motivation. Participating in ORV fandom has sort of been this emotional tight rope walk for me of like. Kind of really desperately desiring validation from others but also being afraid of receiving it bc of like the pressure it then puts on to Keep Doing the thing that Works and otherwise feeling like a Failure. But obviously like creative writing isn't going to have the same like Fear/Urgency factor as life stuff and it shouldn't feel that way, anyway, tbh. I'm kind of having to like. Re-invent the idea of writing being Fun and Relaxing for myself. And the idea that talking to other people on the internet (also like. People in general I still do this at uni even) does not actually have to have like any performative elements or factors of like? Disguise? Because like my sense of self doesn't actually have to be a wall I keep building and have to repatch whenever someone comes along with a pickaxe like my sense of self doesn't actually need a metaphor attached to it because it just is what it is lol. Like whatever I am RN is my "self" and that meaning would only suffer under the restraint of comparison, lol.

It's been easier to like feel normaler/better quicker in like my day to day stuff, but because a lot of the time I spent previously trying to write wall fic lies in that like that brain space where I felt afraid and stressed out etc I think I currently have like an aversion to sitting down with it out of like a fear of returning to that mindset. Because I'm like looking it in the face and such I do have like strategies of getting over it like doing warmups or taking time to make nice writing spaces and having a name to/strategies to access the creative part of my brain, but that stuff takes time and because it's a lot less likely I'll have writing on the brain than go through my every day life like the process of becoming normaler/feeling better goes a lot faster day to day than in my approach to writing.

Because in my brain the progress of wall fic is a sort of gentle curve I've been trying to shape the growth of upwards, I wouldn't say it's abandoned at all. But also like because the next "update" is not really guaranteed and I'm kind of hesitant to force myself to commit to a timeline for finishing/releasing it, I think it makes sense to like hesitate about starting it as a reader? In terms of a sense of completion, the chapters are organized in such a way that each one concerns a sort of complete Section of KDJ's life/relationships, tho. Like, Chapter 1 shows KDJ and YJH's first meeting as kids and establishes the "soulmate" setting. Chapter 2 shows the life KDJ carved himself to thereafter, how he and YJH's paths have diverged, established the stakes of KDJ's current "world" in a way parallel to the first few chapters of wos/orv. Chapter 3 focuses on how the soulmate worldview and KDJ + YJH's characters/past interact with the way they view children/the idea of "childhood/youth." Chapter 4 is meant to show how that worldview encounters adult life/ adult friendships/relationships, but the final part of it is something I'm still working on a bit. The structure is such that I tend to bring the end of the chapter back to a moment of peace/resolution/settling in the "new world" after the events of the chapter and then writing a one sentence cliff hanger about what the next chapter includes. So if you want to give some of it a read but don't want to be left feeling too incomplete, I'd read up till before the last sentence of Chapter 3, tho that's a bit silly, lol.

I will say again and have said before, I don't mind that much getting thoughtful comments/messages like yours at all. Thoughtful in the sense of like, desiring a response from me as a person, I suppose? Towards the start of writing online i really like needed the validation of little comments to feel good about myself/my work, but now I realize that the thing I like actually desire that ao3 comments aren't often a good format for is that I just like talking/discussing these things with other people. Sometimes comments will make me feel more like an unpaid customer service representative getting feedback or a student looking at a quick note on my report card. The kind I like most are messages where people want to ask me questions, argue with me about something, share something of their own interaction with the text that there's room for me to interact back with them as a person. The thing I hate most is feeling like I care too much about something/talk/think too much to the point that people are tired of hearing from me/form a bad opinion of me.

So like typing this all out has actually put myself in the brain space of remembering some of the things I like to write about and feel and how the current part of wall fic explores them. I'm kind of setting up my computer and such to start working on it like rn actually, hopefully the like feelings I'm having towards wall fic won't evaporate when i have to go to my class in 1/2 an hour or when i try to reread some of what I've written so far lol.

TLDR; Wall fic isn't abandoned or on hiatus or anything, but I am super slow about it lol. If you wanna give it a read I recommend stopping before the last sentence of Chapter 3 if you don't want any "cliff hangy" feelings. Questions like yours that ask me to interact with orv/wall fic/related themes do honestly help me start thinking about it again and I'll probably try to work on some of it tonight bc of you so thanks 👍

[hehearse]

Hey! Have you ever listened to "The Hearse" by Matt Maeson? I could ramble for hours about it's ORV-like qualities but I can't decide whether it's more Yoo Joonghyuk or Kim Dokja.

Right now I'm leaning towards Kim Dokja because "I am the man we both couldn't stand/ I can't wash off the dirt from my hands/ What was it like to feel in love?" which seems to match his well buried self-hatred pretty well and the chorus "I will never go backwards/ I will never be free/ I will never run faster/ will you sink down to me?"

BUT the alternate chorus "I will never go backwards/ I will never be seen/ In the wake of disaster/ will you sink down to me?" feels more Yoo Joonghyuk coded because of his regressions (especially since he's never truly "going backwards" when he regresses, he continues on while everything seemingly rewinds). The lyrics could either be "I will never be seen in the wake of disaster" or "In the wake of disaster will you sink down to me?" And I think that dual-meaning perfectly encapsulates YJH regressing vs KDJ calming him down from regression depression.

Okay maybe I'm thinking this is a Yoo Joonghyuk song now.

Sorry for filling your inbox with my rambling about song lyrics! All I meant to send was:

hehe look this song reminds me of orv and it's called hearse

Anyways have a lovely day! Your art is amazing as always bye

OHH i never heard it!! and AHHH what a nice listen huh

I MEAN. do we need to differentiate the two. both are good!!

also please bear with me, i thrive on outsourcing the smart interpretation job to people looking at my art usually my craft is easy just slap pixels on the canvas hehe

BUT if you allow me to be a devil's advocate for a bit you can completely make it out to be Kim Dokja, who doesn't seem too eager to go backwards or be seen. constantly trying to escape his own story and being it's character in the eyes of relatives/coworkers and such. he is also not. at the height of his no matter how capable he is during the scenarios, running himself into one bear trap after another. his house is also built on sand, the faulty foundation that is his mother's way of loving by taking the blame and bearing the weight alone. he is also much more of a driver of a hearse than yjh is, a reader keeping the story's engine going and taking the coffin to it's destination that is the story's perfect ending hahehe come on sink down to him, his house' foundation is not just sand, it's quicksand and he is half-buried already

ANYWAY the beauty of it's duality! one coin, two sides etc etc they are so intertvined that you can't exclude one to interprete the other all the smart words that i'm guessing apply

[sunmaylight]

ORV AU where everything is the same, but KDJ’s group picked up four preschoolers after the first scenario. 

(I got a long idea that might be a plot list, but I’ll just list the main points and some characteristics about the preschoolers)

Preschoolers (Just a few characteristics, no names yet)

- Boy with a compass (Black, stepfather-Korean)

- Girl with a stuffed animal (Korean)

- Boy with a covered bucket (Foreigner, parent’s got a job transfer to Seoul)

- Girl with a book about space (Mixed, 1/4 European)

Premise

- The preschoolers are from the same school of a group of preschoolers that were going to a special overnight field trip that day. The four somehow got separated from their assigned group and wandered from train to train until they ended up in the same train as KDJ’s group when the apocalypse started.

- The preschoolers are the only survivors of car 3907. They survived because they heard something about squishing bugs from car 3807 and one of the preschoolers who has a bucket that has bugs in it (somehow) gave some to the other preschoolers to squish.

- After the First Scenario, one preschooler screamed and that notified KDJ’s group that other survived in the next car. KDJ was the unlucky person who was sent to check and immediately got tackled by four preschoolers. He brought them back with him and after much fussing from the others, they learned that the preschoolers survived the First Scenario just like they did.

- Sponsorship time. All of the preschoolers can read, but most of them didn’t choose one because they thought the names were stupid or something. Only the girl with a book about space choose a sponsor.

- Fast forward to KDJ reuniting with his group again. He notices that there are no signs of the preschoolers. When he asked about their whereabouts, he was told that HMO saw YJH leave with the preschoolers. 

- KDJ is utterly baffled. Why would YJH take these small children who would be getting in his way? KDJ then thought YJH took them because of some remnant parental instincts YJH has from the 2nd Regression. 

- Fast forward again to KDJ and YJH meeting again and KDJ’s group getting to have access to the bathroom. KDJ is tackled yet again by the preschoolers upon reunion. He then sees the small play area with toys made from monster parts and the Wagon.

- This Wagon is a unique item that hasn’t appeared at all in WOS. It is a rare item that is ranked below a Star Relic that has the potential to become a Star Relic in future Scenarios. This super rare item is owned by the preschoolers and is equipped by YJH?

- KDJ stares at YJH for an answer and in a surprising break of character, YJH complies. After he left Geumho Station, he noticed that he was being followed by the four preschoolers. It’s too late to turn back, so he kept on walking to the next station. YJH got a message from some constellations who love/care for children to slow down for the preschoolers to catch up. He does not comply. 

- The constellations who love/care for children notice this and send down the Wagon to the preschoolers through the girl who has a book about space’s sponsor. They then induced a penalty Scenario onto YJH to pull the Wagon until they get to the next station. YJH was not happy about this development, but could not object because the preschoolers already boarded the Wagon and a rope was attached to his wrist.

- So YJH kept walking towards the next station killing any monsters along the way. One monster decided to attack the Wagon instead of YJH and he noticed this too late. Just as the monster was going to attack one of the preschoolers, a barrier appeared around the Wagon protecting the preschoolers. 

- This is followed by a message stating that the special skill [Mother Bear Instincts] is activating. YJH got a massive status boost that helped him slaughter the monsters faster than before.

- YKJ decided then that he doesn’t mind his situation anymore and went on his way like canon but with the addition of four preschoolers in a Wagon. He also forced Gong Pildu into protecting the preschoolers until he says otherwise.

- After hearing this outrageous story, KDJ decides to blame it on the protagonist power at such a weird development. But at least he doesn’t have to worry about the preschoolers as much during the future scenarios.

- Fast forward to when everyone gets separated. Because the preschoolers were in the Wagon, they got teleported to their preschool instead of each of their homes. They were soon found by the JHW and the Wandering King’s group.

(And that is about it for now on what I got canon wise)

As for the preschooler’s constellations, I have nothing concrete for most of them. But here is what I have so far

- Boy with a compass - Sponsor: Myth/Narrative Grade Constellation

- Girl with a stuffed animal - Sponsor: Narrative Grade Constellation 

- Boy with a covered bucket - Sponsor: Constellation of Frost and Snow

- Girl with a book about space - Sponsor: An Outer God

[your--isgayrights]

you mentioned in a recent ask that hyunsung and heewon's relationship is meant to parallel dokja and joonghyuk's would you like to elaborate more on that?

Oh sure! Good question :D

I feel like I've been pretty consistent with the idea of "KDJ is projecting his feelings onto everyone all of the time." It's what he does lmao. But because he lacks certain perspective on himself at times, he ends up being really hypocritical/not self aware.

So when it comes to the YJH&KDJ relationship that is integral to the fic, the sort of promise of the genre if you will, every other "soulmate" relationship included is meant to have some parallelism. They're also meant to address consistent themes.

So with JHW and LHS the aspect emphasized goes hand and hand with the sort of KDJ & JHW connection being based on the idea of "survivorship." As the first chapter goes into, KDJ was a victim of domestic abuse, and in 4.3 we get insight into the aftermath of JHW being assaulted by her coworker. These are obviously very different situations and there is no way to empirically compare trauma, but I think that when we survive traumatic events often we will look at others to judge ourselves and think how we "should have" reacted. On the matter of what I'm trying to impart to the reader, there's the admiration that Kim Dokja holds for JHW in the hospital room. He's making a comparison of her to his favorite hero, YJH. One of the issues he has with YJH is that he has the tendency to take blame onto himself for situations that most people would write off to chance or the actions of other people. YJH is arrogant, he is powerful, and therefore in his mind everything that goes wrong is his fault. This is an aspect of him I want to carry over from the original text, where in the book KDJ reads, he is a regressor whose lone actions change the course of the plot. KDJ on the other hand has the opposite perspective. His reaction to his trauma was the realization that he was powerless. The one time he does fight back, he faces the apocalypse of his mother taking the blame, and then he just ends up in another negligent relative's home going to school to get beat up by bullies every day. There are no authority figures he can trust, and he is powerless. That's the lesson that he learns, to the point that he felt the only power he had was the choice of whether or not to harm himself. Even though Yoo Joonghyuk's story saves him, gives him a reason to keep going, he still fundamentally retains this worldview, even as an adult. The idea of his inertia, his objective helplessness, is a coping mechanism that stops him from wanting so hard, stops desires for things that seem impossible like love and friendship and family from disappointing him, because that hurts too much. This is why he admires JHW who, unlike YJH, knows she isn't to blame for the fact that she was attacked, it fundamentally agrees with his worldview. He also notes that this makes her dissimilar from him, because she knows that she isn't to blame and actively seeks retribution for the harm committed against her. This is something KDJ sees her as "able to do" because he views her as being more like YJH than him.

In this vein, KDJ saw a "better version" of himself in LHS, who made the active decision to keep in closer contact with his soulmate after he saw her get hurt. I've hinted at this a bit through chapters 3 and 4, but KDJ remembers being in a similar situation, when YJH was getting into brawls in his mid twenties due to some dire emotional straights. KDJ didn't reach out to him then, so he thinks of himself unfavorably in comparison to LHS.

HOWEVER. From the perspective of the reader, perhaps things should be reversed. KDJ's instinct is to see himself in a character and then see a familiar character in a friend. I think that there can also be an interpretation of LHS as a foil to YJH, offering an insight into his perspective. In the same way that KDJ and JHW are foils in the vein of "survivorship," LHS and YJH could be seen as foils in terms of being "bystanders."

As to what I mean by that... Maybe just reread that scene with this idea in mind, haha ^^; I'd be interested to hear your thoughts if you do, tho. 👀 TBH this is just my own interpretation as an author...

Thanks for this ask!!!! :DDDD