#Kim Dokja's Past

[kimdokja-real]

Kim Dokja Was Loved

[hehearse]

I never meant to feel so dark and cold

@leejihye is back to sponsoring my alive time by commissioning me!!

the outline that makes the heart ache is by @leeseolhwa and the headcanons are from @directorofthefalselastact ! team effort indeed :3

[johnconstantinesdick]

au where for whatever reason Dokja does choose Secretive Plotter as his constellation, only for the entire Star Stream to get an error message and crash for like an hour

[71eh]

a writer and a reader

[seiseimaru]

[its-your-mind]

what the fuck the novel was his dream and his dream was the novel and he used it to escape his life except he never bothered to dream himself into a happy ending. except the novel was just her desperate, half-conscious attempts to save him, to keep him alive for just one more day so he could read the next chapter she wrote. except it wasn’t ever just a novel at all because it was the millennia-long attempt of one person to finally meet the being that so desperately wanted a person with no history and no past to have a perfect future, a happy ending.

except that novel! was never actually the point! it was just the vehicle some version of themselves all used to get everyone to the start of the story that actually mattered, the story that wasn’t pre-ordained, the story where characters became companions and the reader became the protagonist and the dream of a happy ending for all of them was possible. all of them were there - the reader, the writer, the protagonist… but the reader was just the reader, the writer was a plagiarist, and the protagonist was only at the start of his journey. this story, the real story, the story that hadn’t been written yet, was about how when the world fell to ruin, the only person with the instruction manual on how to survive decided to sacrifice himself over, and over, and over, and… and they made it. they got to their happy ending. but before they did, they learned about the dream. his escape that became a reality. and he didn’t know, he didn’t understand what it was, and so he stepped back, and watched them walk away. because it was the story written for him that caused this much damage, and he had to atone.

but the people who he saved, who he walked with to the end, who turned from characters on his screen to friends and companions who fought beside him, cried when he was gone, screamed at him when he came back, laughed with him, loved him, lived through hell with him, survived because of him… they knew that the story that defined him was not the story that saved him, that he escaped to when it was all too much, but his own story, the story he forged himself. and so dozens of them chose to dive back into hell just to forcefully turn his attempt at an ending, a sentence that ended in a period, into a promise of more to come, a clause that ended in a comma.

and then? the plagiarist who was never a plagiarist at all, but the author who saved him, she sat down and wrote his story. the one he made by their side. they compiled their memories - the memories of the author and the protagonist and heroes and villains and gods and angels and demons and dragons and prophets - into a new novel. and they sent that novel out to the stars to be told, a literal shout into the void to tell him that he was LOVED. that he deserved HAPPINESS. that it was okay for him to REST. that they were waiting for him to come HOME. and they hoped that this story would reach him just as the first had. that he would find it, and he would read it, and it would be the thing that saved him, that kept him alive, and that eventually brought him back to them.

he had promised, after all, to be the first reader of her next novel.

[unhealthyobsessiveworm]

i think a lot about that one line about how "kim dokja's salvation is saving a drowning man with a knife". like, legitimately, kdj's way of loving is,,, hard

loving someone is like sticking a knife in your own chest and hoping the other person doesn't twist it, but kdj wrenches that knife every which way just to make sure it doesn't hit your heart. he gets your blood all over his hands and then turns the knife on himself to make it better

honestly, kdj uses love as justification to sacrifice himself

[yhksweep]

recent orv stuff (+ no home and alnst ?)

[mintjeru]

chibifies your joongdoks 💕

open for better quality | no reposts

[stupidly-silly]

Shipping non-canon relationships in a series is so much more fun than when the original actually has romance

[theofficialuriel]

How’d you get to reading the orv novel?

I started reading the webtoon for a few weeks, but I was left at a cliffhanger (the episode where kdj and yjh reunite and Joonghyuk pulls out his sword at the last panel), so curiosity took over me and I opened up the novel

[pixelated-dragon]

Diversity win! The reincarnating megalomaniac obsessed with the Main-Character™ is genderqueer!

[potatoof69]

if you think about it, orv is an isekai that completely turns isekai concepts on its head.

one of the main goals of (crappy) isekai is wish-fulfillment-- it’s really easy to insert yourself into the mc’s position and imagine that you’re currently the one inserted into this new world as its op protagonist. and at first, orv seems to follow this basic trope-- kdj’s favorite novel comes to life around him and he’s literally turned from an average office worker to the most knowledgeable being in the world in mere minutes. you can see how it’s similar to a lot of other isekai expositions, and how it could be easy to make kdj a self-insert for a lot of readers.

and then as you dive deeper into the novel, it becomes clear that wish-fulfillment is not one of orv’s goals. kdj is a very unique character with an interesting backstory from before the transition to the new world, something most isekai mcs don’t have or don’t dwell on too much. the lack of backstories from their life in the old world is too make sure not to throw off the immersion of the reader into the mc for that maximum wish fulfillment. but kdj has ppl from before and backstories from before that impact him a lot and make it clear that orv is not that kind of isekai. it’s harder for him to be that sort of blank slate wish fulfillment type of character because of his unique past and motivations.

and of course, this all flips on its head again as you discover that, yeah it’s not wish fulfillment for you, but it was all kdj’s wishes coming true for him. it’s an isekai inside of an isekai, in a way. it’s an isekai wish-fulfillment self-insert fanfic not for you, but for kim dokja. which is already a pretty insane concept, but of course orv takes it even further after that. 

because in the very end, the story expands from kdj’s world to the oldest dream’s world to the readers’ world, making the ending a literal wish-fulfilling conclusion that brings the readers’ wishes for kdj’s revival to life. 

like orv is actually insane for pulling all that off.

[koipalm]

od is such an interesting scenario because i wholeheartedly took the character as literally just. kid kim dokja. like just a normal fucking kid that loved a story so much it sustained him and came to life. like i didnt see him as a collection of everything kdj dislikes about himself or some kind of child immortal omniscient narrator.... just. that it all stemmed from a kid sustaining themselves on a story that it made all of orv possible. it really resonated with me since so many of orvs readers WERE that kid, and i know that ive dreamed of being saved by characters before and have projected into stories.... idk it just felt somehow very circular and fitting, that all of orv was able to happen because when kim dokja was a kid he loved a story that much.... and that he was saved both in his imagination [i.e. kdjs company saving him in the scenarios and the epilogue] and also in his real waking life by secretive plotter and the others

[creativename87]

did you know, Kim Dokja, Your birthday has come and gone and yet everything remains the same?

Never forget that everything you try to touch you end up destroying

yesterday was a day when 28 or so years ago your mother had the final day of her 9 month journey of pain and agony to create you

was it worth it?

all you have done since then was prove her wrong when she decided twenty-eight-years, nine-months, and-one-day-or-so ago that you were worth living

you have killed your father and butchered your mother’s life away, you have ruined those that created you and yet, for a cataclysm you are too pathetic to hold any power

you are weak Kim Dokja

your birthday has gone by and you still take the same subway every day

you will never amount to anything Kim Dokja

you are not worth nine months of pain and agony

you are not even worth a single day

a single hour

A single minute, for you? the man who lives for single webnovel?

a webnovel.

do you regret it? All of it? Any of it?

do you regret that you cannot be enough?

today, twenty-eight or so years ago you were alive

was it worth it?

today, thirteen or so years ago you were still alive

please tell me it was worth it

[yuzuuu4]

reading with your eyes closed