#wow it’s my blorbos from orv!!!

[plumilia]

the hold these men and this song has on me is unbelievable

[ID: Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint fanart of Kim Dokja and Secretive Plotter drawn over part of the music video for the song "Planet of the Bass" by Kyle Gordon (featuring DJ Crazy Times & Ms. Biljana Electronica), with a reference at the top. The background is orange, and SP stares emotionlessly at the camera while Dokja is wearing sunglasses and grinning behind him. Below them is the line "Women are my favorite guy," which is turning yellow as if it's a sing-along lyric. End ID]

(ID by @princess-of-purple-prose)

[boot2004]

Ok so I’ve been reading this series called “Tyrant of the Tower Defense Game” and it’s so good

So basically a guy who was basically the best at this tower defense/almost DnD like video game beats the hardest difficulty with no savescumming (Ironman mode). He’s the first ever person to do this after years of the game coming out. He’s then sucked into the world of the game. Innovative, I know.

So he becomes the third prince Ash in the game, who sucks bad and is supposed to die in the tutorial. So now Ash has to survive the tutorial, defend the castle town of Crossroad from monsters until he’s beaten the game again, and he has to make sure people don’t realize that he isn’t the original Ash.

The characters are also really good. Ash is almost like Kim Dokja from ORV if you’ve read that (self-sacrificing, caring, uses people), Lucas, who is Ash’s bodyguard is basically a golden retriever in human form, and there’s other great characters too who you’ll get to know.

For people who care about genre I’d say it’s a mix between comedy and action (wow a manhwa that has those two? never seen before) but it definitely has its serious moments. Characters you like might die. Your blorbo might die. My blorbo (probably) won’t die because that’s Ash.

Read it read it read it read it

^This is Ash btw

[inimitablereel]

So I got to the end of the webtoon of orv and jumped back to the beginning of the novel instead of continuing from 180 whatever and it really is a very noticeable difference how much meaner and also edgier Kim Dokja feels at the start vs 180 chapters in. Some not mutually exclusive possible reasons why he's so much in these early chapters:

The obvious doylist answers: the author got better at writing and also started writing a slightly different genre over time? The beginning is both pretty heavy on the power fantasy and mass murder and it's not like those aspects go away but they stop being what the story is about as much? When I first picked up the webtoon I said oh this is a battle royale/killing game and it almost immediately is doing stuff that isn't just that genre but it still feels roughly like that. I don't really have the vocab for the genre this story is actually in because I've only really read subversions of this kind of isekai but at some point it becomes much more obvious that orv is doing something interesting and it takes a bit.

Early kdj is a lot closer to the plot of the novel and that makes him more susceptible to geeking out over things like wow my blorbo was here and did so many murders or oh look it's this fun plot point (where they take all our food away)!

Early kdj has trouble seeing people as real people he should respect and I think that's partially due to his reader's detachment. This is mostly manifesting in him being weird about people who aren't characters though? I'm only up to the second main scenario in my reread and there's been like 3 major book characters and kdj is only super weird about yjh because of course he is. But he isn't really trying to help random people because he just assumes they're all going to die and counts bloodbaths as wins because hey more people survived than in the book.

Early kdj wants to be the protagonist too much. (Ironically as he stops trying to act like the protagonist of the world he does kinda become the protagonist of the world.) His idea of protagonist behavior is being a selfish asshole (thanks yjh) and also his selfishness looks worse because he's not acknowledged as the protagonist yet (and isn't really using his good weapons/coin horde to protect people)

Early kdj hasn't figured out a good way to lie about his future knowledge (or like acknowledge that he has future knowledge) and it makes him look like a jerk, especially since in the very early story his future knowledge is mostly that things are going to keep getting worse

There's a couple of moments where kdj pulls an asshole move that he knows is good strategy and gets called out on it, so perhaps even edgelords can grow and change over time