#Web Novel Spoilers

[thewanderersminuet]

This is why you don't start shipping something as a joke

(Or I need more of whatever the hell is going on with this dumpster fire)

[the-lost-profile]

The Apothecary Diaries

This is the arc that got changed the most from WN to LN

LN4: Bath scene, Ah Duo being Jinshi's body double, snake pit, Loulan survives.

WN arc 3: Loulan/Shisui gets revealed sooner, Maomao crossdressing according to her and Gaoshun's keikaku , Maomao having an allergic reaction, Maomao getting SAd, Maomao stomping assaulter N^1 in the balls, Maomao poison maiden moment with assaulter N^2, Loulan dies.

[ship-of-skitties]

just finished the web novel

THE FAMILY ARE BACK TOGETHER

[thathilomgirl]

   Mia had certainly experienced something far beyond common sense, and she vaguely thinks that only God could do something like that. 　She was just making the most of the opportunities that she’s been given, and there's no lies here. Mia is being honest. "And the reason I started was all because of someone's prayer..." 　Mia gently closed her eyes. 　That memory is now far gone, but it’s a memory that will never fade away. 　On the day Mia was sent to the guillotine... there was someone who prayed for her in the dungeon. 　There was someone who stood by her and was kind to her until her last day... 　 Anne prayed for God's protection for me just as I was about to be executed. If you think about it, it's no exaggeration to say that everything started from then.

-Part 8, Chapter 140

[lucidloving]

Sing Shong, Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint // Black Box // R.M. Rilke, "The Guardian Angel" // George Seferis, "The Return of the Exile" (trans. Edmund Keeley) // Studio Dragon, Because This Is My First Life // John Banville, The Sea // Aeschylus, Agamemnon (trans. Herbert W. Smyth) // Anne Carson, "The Anthropology of Water" // Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life // @toupou39 on tw // Jennifer S. Cheng, "So We Must Meet Apart" // Madeline Miller, Circe // @chuunicalesimp // Richard Siken // Neil Gaiman // Richard Siken, "The Torn-Up Road" // Jamie Varon, "Does The Universe Fight For Souls To Be Together?" // Jennifer S. Cheng, "So We Must Meet Apart" // Sing Shong, UMI & Sleepy-C, Omniscient Reader (Webtoon) // Frank Bidart, "Guilty of Dust" // Lasah – Taixu // Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds // see 1 // André De Shields & Hadestown Original Broadway Company – Road To Hell (Reprise) // @toiriot on tw // Unlike Pluto – We're Screwed // @moonbends // m.h // Euripides, Herakles (trans. Anne Carson) // Unlike Pluto – We're Screwed // Google search results // @toiriot on tw // see 1 // Chxrlotte – Come With Me // @roach-works // Lasah – Taixu // Sing Shong, UMI & Sleepy-C, Omniscient Reader (Webtoon) // Chxrlotte – Come With Me // Frank Bidart, "Guilty of Dust" // @dsssctd_ion on tw // Hans Christian Andersen, "The Snail and the Rosebush" // Will Stetson – Writing on the Wall // Michael Kinnucan, "The Gods Show Up" // Richard Siken, "Planet of Love" // Sufjan Stevens – Futile Devices // Warren Zevon – Keep Me in Your Heart // Katie Maria // @SION_428 on tw // see 1 // Pablo Neruda, 20 Love Sonnets and a Song of Despair // Mitski – My Love Mine All Mine // Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Vera // Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 // Sing Shong, UMI & Sleepy-C, Omniscient Reader (Webtoon) // Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried (via @jomeimei421) // see 1 // @soracities // Black Box // see 1

[medievalthymes]

fitz & patience — the unremembered (prologue)

assassin’s quest - robin hobb / pietà by charles le brun (1644) / assassin’s quest - robin hobb / euripides, herakles tr. anne carson / anguish (detail) by august friedrich schenck (1878) / assassin’s quest - robin hobb

[sayammm]

#what do you mean i cant spoil my precious daughter whom i love very much ?

#need my precious daughter to be well fed so here’s some snack my child dont mind the dead body in the room

Fuck preserving the crime scene, amma get myself a snack

#he always uses the term “daddy” or “papa” and it’s just so funny and unnerving like here comes the most feared avoided man in the court acting like a wet omelette when it comes to his precious daughter

[reytaliation]

「 Kim Dokja will be killed by the person he loves most. 」

— Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint Chapter 165 

art by blackbox-nim

[rainfrazier]

maggie moment

[web-novel-polls]

Web Novel Weapon Tournament

[Please be courteous in the notes. Don’t make me block you.]

Wind Master Fan (TGCF)

Owner: Shi Qingxuan

[No Propaganda Submitted]

Wiki Link

A Rock from LCF

Owner: Cale Henituse 

Submission: 

[spoilers for chapters 700+] Listen there's nothing quite like having a scene where the protagonist straight up beats the main villain with a rock. A regular, averagely sized rock. And then also chucks the same rock into the face of a literal deity. It was glorious. It was therapeutic. #rocksweep

[bidokja]

I was joking a while back that the actor they have playing KDJ for the orv movie was too handsome for him and a friend who's read orv was like "KDJ is actually secretly attractive!!" And I just felt my soul leave my body right then

SIGHS...

Okay. Buckle in. I'm gonna finally actually address and explain and theorize about this whole...thing.

I'm not gonna cite any exact chapters cause it's like 11:30 and I've got an 8 hour drive in the morning but I'll at least make an approximate reference to where certain things are mentioned. Also, this post is just my personal interpretation for a good bit of it, but it's an interpretation I feel very solid about, so do with that what you will. Moving on to the meat of things:

There is one (1) instance in the web novel that I know of which describes specific features of Kim Dokja (especially ones other people notice). This takes place when members of KimCom are trying to make Kim Dokja presentable to give his speech at the Industrial Complex (after it's been plopped down on Earth). This is when they start really paying attention and focusing on Kim Dokja's appearance since they're putting makeup on him; I still don't think they can interpret his whole face, but they can accurately pick out and retain more features than usual. If I remember correctly they reference him having long eyelashes, smooth skin, and soft hair. These features can be viewed as (stereotypically) attractive.

Certain parts of the fandom have taken this scene and run with it at a very surface level, without realizing (or without acknowledging at the very least) that this scene is not about how Kim Dokja looks. This is, in part, due to not realizing or acknowledging why Kim Dokja's face is "censored" in the first place, and what that censoring actually means. I think it's also possible that some people are assuming the censorship works like a physical phenomena rather than an altered perception.

I'll address that last point first. The censorship of Kim Dokja's features is not something as simple as a physical phenomena. It's not a bar or scribble or mosaic over his face. If that were true it'd be very obvious to anyone looking at him that his face is hidden. But his face is not hidden to people. They can look at him and see a face. If they concentrate on his eyes, they can see where he's looking. They know when he's frowning or grinning. They see a face loud and clear. But what face are they seeing? Because it's not really his, whatever they're seeing.

No one quite agrees on what he really looks like. And if they try and think about what he looks like, they can't recall. Or if they do, it's vague, or different each time. We notice these little details throughout the series. Basically, Kim Dokja's face is cognitively obscured. Something - likely the Fourth Wall, though I can't recall if this is ever stated outright - is interfering with everyone's ability to perceive him properly. This culminated in him feeling off to others; and since they don't even realize this is happening, they surmise that he is "ugly."

Moving on to the other point about what the censorship means: To be blunt, the censorship of his face is an allegory for his disconnect from the "story" (aka: real life, and the real people at his side). The lifting - however slight - of this censorship represents him becoming more and more a part of the "story" (aka: less disconnected from the life he is living and the people at his side). The censorship's existence and lifting can represent other things - like dissociation or depersonalization or, if you want to get really meta, the fact that he is all of our faces at once - but that's how I'd sum up the main premise of it. (The Fourth Wall is a larger part of the dissociation allegory, but that's for another post).

So you see, them noticing his individual features isn't about the features. It's not about the features! It doesn't matter at all which features got listed. Because they could describe any features whatsoever and it would not change the entire point of the scene. Because the point isn't what he looks like. The point is that they can truly and clearly see these features. For the first time. They are seeing parts of him for the first time. Re-read that sentence multiple times, literally and metaphorically. What does it mean to see someone as they are?

This is an extremely significant turning point dressed up as a dress-up scene.

---

P.S. / Additionally, I'm of the opinion that Kim Dokja is not handsome, and he is not ugly. He is not pretty, and he is not ghastly. Not attractive, nor unattractive. Kim Dokja isn't any of these things. More importantly, Kim Dokja can't be any of these things. The entire point of Kim Dokja is that you cannot pick him out of a crowd; he is the crowd. He's a reader. He's the reader. Why does he need to be handsome? Why must he be pretty? Why is him being attractive necessary or relevant? He doesn't, he doesn't, it's not. He is someone deeply deeply loved and irreplaceable to those around him, and someone who cannot even begin to recognize or accept that unless it's through a love letter masquerading as a story he can read. He is the crowd, a reader, the reader. He's you, he's me. He's every single one of us.

[lifeof-pink]

when i first learned about how the fourth wall worked (making him view reality as a novel) the first thing i said was “…so he’s mentally ill. duh.”

because like????? “everything is awful and i am in terrible physical and mental anguish. i know how to make this better!” *enters derealization but like. magical*

[ladykyriaa]

-WN SPOILERS-

This so cruel He's on his way to grow shrooms again

[artbyblastweave]

I prompt you to elaborate on the idea of deliberately making something in a story boring, for I an always interested in your analysis.

In The Boys (Comic version, which I have complicated but more-positive-than-most feelings about) Garth Ennis very deliberately wrote most of the superhuman combat scenes as short, brutal affairs in which whoever was more powerful or better-equipped would just slaughter the other side in a matter of seconds; if the sides were more evenly matched it was then a matter of who swung first. To my memory, there were only a handful of fights blocked like fights instead of like curbstomps. This was in service to Ennis's artistic vision; violence as a swift, brutal thing, only glamourous in the sense of black-comedy dismemberments or the grim satisfaction of being alive when the other guy isn't, and with the majority of all conflicts playing out through via prep-work and intelligence-gathering done in advance of the first punch being thrown.

It was an aggressive refutation of how superhero fights go in more straightforward superhero fiction, with clever tricks, drawn-out dramatic brawls, violence as a palatable form of spectacle, something marketable after-the-fact. A lot of the fights the titular team got involved in consisted basically of jumping distracted supes; one of Homelander's jobs was to just unceremoniously decapitate any earnest upstart supervillain and then have the marketing team at Vought write a comic portraying the fight as something with genre-typical stakes. To this day, I feel like there was a level of honesty about violence in this portrayal. In real life, it's not fun!

But! It did introduce some problems. Namely, a series in which almost every single fight is something Nasty, Brutish and Short created, for me, a form of doublethink about how seriously we should even take the Vought capes as threats. A series in which every fight is deliberately uninteresting (if you aren't entertained by curbstomps) is a series in which every fight is deliberately uninteresting, and from there your enjoyment of the series rides or dies on how interesting you find the non-fight political intrigue, character dynamics, and so forth. The version of Garth Ennis who isn't writing capes is, in my opinion, pretty damn good at that other stuff, so I inched through.

The show patched the majority of my difficulties. It retained the broad thesis that cape fights would largely be curbstomps, and the other broad thesis that capes would largely be useless or counterproductive at their supposed role, but combined this with a number of actual fight scenes. It made Butchers team significantly less powerful, with a significantly greater focus on the sneaky bastardry necessary to flip assets and find weaknesses. It made killing any given supe much, much more of an endeavor, something genuinely very difficult and impressive, and it made every given supe death much more of a plot point or a character beat than it would have been in the comic. The supes being less interesting than typical for their genre, that was preserved- but the situations involving supes that we, the audience, are privy to? All very interesting still!

Now on the other side of the spectrum, you've got Worm, and you've got Jack Slash-as-an-examination-of-Joker. "Your philosophy is ill-considered and fake deep, and you aren't funny" is actually a fairly common clapback against The Joker within officially published DC comics properties, but it butts up against the fact that he's taken pretty seriously as a threat regardless of that fact! Jack Slash is an attempt to reconcile that, to figure out how someone as LOlrandom as Joker could last longer than three minutes as a serious contender, and the answer is "subtle secondary powers that puff up his win rate, in a way that his self-absorption prevents him from recognizing as anything but his own innate talent." He's blatantly shallow. Everyone talking to him is palpably rolling their eyes within the text, but he's got the brute-force necessary to undercut anyone trying to one-up him (Theo's interlude, Tattletale in the parking garage.) It's called out multiple times that's it's mysterious that he's doing so well when he's so mediocre. The candidate he picks for the 9 is a dud. He can't come up with anything more interesting for Cherish than having her do all the other tests over a second time. His big comeback is just Slaughterhouse 9! But More of them! Fuck Yeah!

But! Despite the text being aware of how shallow he is and how thin his ideas are, all of his ideas keep working. It doesn't matter that it's edgelord bullshit- it's edgelord bullshit that everyone else is forced to take seriously and respond to, which is where the actually-great character work in the S9 arc happens. And at this point I think there are basically two camps within the audience. Camp one consists of people who, despite Jacks clear shallowness, nonetheless are entertained and engrossed by the batshit combat scenarios he masterminds, even if he shouldn't be able to mastermind them. I am a counselor at Camp One. Camp Two consists of people who call bullshit on the ability for such a shallow guy to mastermind all that crap and bend everyone to his will, who don't really find anything redemptive in the eventual reveal that it was powers-enabled because they still had to sit through the implausible bullshit. This is a position I have no choice but to respect because it's the position of my cousin, who I adore and want to remain on good terms with at family gatherings. The things we do in service of family, amiright

[thathilomgirl]

Okay, let's see where the Tearmoon web novel's at right now:

Fascinating...

[itskittenss]

Spoilers for arc 7 side story “Brotherhood of Pleiades - Part 4”

SUBARU X CECILUS DYNAMIC IS SO CUTE???? WHAT THE HELL

Even if ceci is a brat sometimes (more like all the time) it’s so fun to see the results of his unpredictable behavior, like wdym in his attempt to test subaru’s resolve he somehow ends up helping establish Pleiades battalion identity as a group and unlock cor leonis?? It’s so good to see those two chaotic creatures managing to surprise each other

ALSO THE PINKY PROMISE SCENE IS TOO WHOLESOME

They’re so ridiculous and silly like you guys are in a middle of a war be fr

YEAH HE IS A GODDAMN IDIOT AND SO ARE YOU😭