one thing about ham dani that nobody seems to get and why I'm always fighting for my life in the webtoon's comment section is that in all her fear and reticence around opening herself up with her friends, believing she belongs in this world, trusting in her place and relationships is that SHE'S NEVER WRONG ABOUT THE NEGATIVES. i think it's very easy to look at dani a hundred chapters in still going on about her place as a side character and what she can expect from them realistically, what she can allow herself to feel for them, and feel frustrated, like she's being deliberately obtuse. but dani. is. not. wrong.
one thing that many isekais do is that they will take the premise of "being transported to a novel" and use that simply as a vehicle for the FL to use her knowledge of the future to her advantage and turn the odds on their head. beyond the initial "ehhh why is the ML flirting with me??" which tends to wear off rather easily, there is little questioning about what being in a story means. and inso's law takes that question seriously. because dani IS inside a story, her friends ARE characters AND THIS IS EASILY PROVABLE SINCE THE BEGINNING. How? because she leaves.
it has happened to her before! It happens multiple times in the novel! that's why march 2nd is SO terrifying for her, because everything she's built can be taken from her in the blink of an eye and SHE will be called crazy and SHE will be left grieving and nobody else will remember what ONLY SHE LIVED. she is effectively, practically, tangibly separate from each world by this experience. when dani insists on the labels of main character, side character, the tropes and the narrative possibilities happening within them SHE'S NOT WRONG!! because those things are TRUE!!! I know it's easy to gloss over it bc we as readers just take everything in as a story, but the crazy plot points? they're insane to her too because SHE is a real person and others are not! They're characters! That's why it's called The Law of Webnovels because dani is making sense of the rules of a world which factually functions distinctly different from hers. she's not making that shit up, it's not (entirely) an emotional hold up. that's shit's fucking real.
the nuance is brought on by the fact that the characters are, in fact, also people. they behave like people (albeit inside the margins of wild webnovel logic), they feel like people and they see her as a person. but she does not entirely reciprocate, because to view them as people means assuming the hurt that will inevitably come when 1) she gets sent back into the real world and loses them all or 2) the plot to the novel finally kicks in and who knows if the guy she liked was the ML and will end up with her best friend and all her love and all her trying were for nothing. No matter what, dani loses.
there's also the fact, which i think is exemplified very clearly in her feelings towards her grades and being compared to yeoryung, that even outside the character/real person dichotomy, ham dani and the boys come from WILDLY different backgrounds. when they graduate high school, they will go to different colleges and they will get different jobs and the wide wide gap which dani had managed to bridge due to the magic of webnovel rules will be opened once again. in the social hierarchy of modern korean society, dani will be left behind. ban yeoryung is somewhat immune to this despite sharing similar socioeconomic status because she has 1) better social capital in the form of her beauty and intelligence and 2) plot armour immunity bc she's destined to be with one of the boys anyway (and again it IS destiny bc she's the FL and according to the genre clues dani's been gathering that seems to be the most likely outcome). yeoryung has resources and tools beyond the story that dani cannot access. even IF this wasn't the world of a webnovel, if they existed in the real world, yeoryung COULD feasibly climb her way up but dani? she's realistic about her prowess and she knows very well that being a good friend and a good person does not mean she will get to remain close to her friends who are much much much richer. my point here being that even if she weren't under the assumption (WELL TESTED!!! SCIENTIFIC, EVEN!!!) that she's in the world of a story ruled by story laws, she wouldn't be silly for guarding her heart against the possibility of drifting away from byr+the boys.
all of this is why i love dani's character arc and her as a person. she doesn't act irrationally. she only acts very, very humanly. it's why i loved the kidnapping arc and her confrontation with choi yuri. she has to learn to treat them seriously, as human beings, because despite factually being characters, they don't have the awareness of it and their lives are every bit as real as any other to them. it's part also of dani learning how to be a person herself, because she's still a kid growing up and learning what's what, and doing so in an environment much more stressful than the usual. i think people are being irrationally mean towards her simply because they do not make the effort to understand her.
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My Favorite webnovels/Webtoons/Webcomic/Whatever;
The Remarried Empress
My Gently Raised Beast
I Became the Villain’s Stepmother
Born as the Second Daughter
My In-Laws are Obsessed with Me
The Tyrant Wants to be Good
Men of the Harem
The Matchmaking Baby Princess
Who Made Me a Princess
For my Derelict Favorite
I Thought My Time Was Up
I’m the Queen in This Life
Tricked into the Heroine’s Stepmother
Woes of a Male Lead
Baby Tyrant
Hello Baby
Go Away Romeo
Monster Duke’s Daughter
Divorcing My Tyrant Husband
From a Knight to a Lady
The Male Lead’s Girlfriend
When the Third Wheel Strikes Back
A Heart for the Emperor
My Husband Changes Every Night
Edit to add(I’m constantly updating this);
The Twins New Life
I Got Pregnant with the Tyrant’s child
I’ll Raise You Well in This Life, Your Majesty!
The Evil Princess Dreams of a Gingerbread House
I’m the Soldier’s EX-Girlfriend
I Adopted the Male Lead
Villains Are Destined to Die
The Crown Princess Scandal
Marry My Husband
Perfect Marriage Revenge
Boyfriend of the Dead
Refund High School
Siren’s Lament
Empire’s Cutest Little Hostage
A Tender Heart; The Story of How I Became A Duke’s Maid
I Hold the Tyrant’s Heart
Lout of the Count’s family
I Am the Villain
The Crown Princess Scandal
The Dragon King’s Bride
Please Kill My Husband
The Reason Why Raeliana Ended up at the Duke’s Mansion
Am I Your Daughter?
Taming the Marquess
Pricilla’s Marriage Proposal
Crowning my Feral Prince
Under the Oak Tree
Finding Camellia
I Raised a Black Dragon
Adeline’s Darkest Night
Wish Upon a Husband
My Husband, My Sister, and I
I’m Being Raised By Villians
Talented Baby Squirrel
The Greatest Estate Developer
The Little Princess and Her Monster Prince
Surviving as the Tyrant’s Daughter
Father I Don’t Want This Marriage
Ten Ways to Get Dumped by a Tyrant
I Will Live The Life of a Villainess
Vampire Husband
Cursed Princess Club
What the Evil Dragon Lives For
1HP Club
Days With You
Batman: Wayne Family Adventures
Love Me to Death
Suitor Armor
I’ll Be the Matriarch in This Life
If anyone wants a one-shot based on a character from any of these, let me know
If anyone know where I can continue reading these for free, pls let me know (I’m broke);
Empire’s Cutest Little Hostage
A Tender Heart; The Story of How I Became A Duke’s Maid (nvm. About this one, I’ve been told that the child IS the Ml)
I Hold the Tyrant’s Heart
Lout of the Count’s family
Crowning my Feral Prince
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hi! i know that i'm fated to read your every work despite not knowing the media half the time. this time i would like to finally be one step ahead. so uhh. where do i read orv? do i go for the webtoon or the novel? to clarify, i did try to search, but got confused by reddit. also i am going to watch trigun. i've been eyeing animorphs too but the 54 (?) books are making me go hmm. thank you for existing you're pretty great. you're like the spiderman of writing but instead you got asbestos rat'd.
THIS ASK IS INSANE. WE'RE REFERENCING MY LORE NOW?
But thank you, you're insane. People ask why I have stupid high standards for the fics i post on AO3 and it is because there are people like you who will just read whatever regardless of whether or not it's good. I have a responsibility.
This ask also made me wonder if I have good taste. Because every time somebody says this my first reaction is "oh god and the source materials aren't even good". I read a lot of trashy stuff (but, like, define trashy), and I consume too many bad things to be able to say I have discerning taste. If I enjoy something I almost never call it bad, because things were made to be enjoyed and I enjoyed them then they had value in at least one aspect. If you were to ask me if my favorite TV show of all time the Incredible Hulk 1974 was actually, unironically, good, then I'd break into a cold sweat. Is somebody bad because it's camp? Is something bad only if it's unintentional camp?
Regardless, I never write fic for something that isn't only like 80% good - there's a sweet spot of 'good enough for me to obsess over' and 'bad enough that I'm rewriting it in my head'. It's rare I write for anything I find completely good. Which is why I feel bad when people say that they're reading this thing I'm writing fic for jalksdf there's better things out there I SWEAR.
ORV is in the sweet spot of "this isn't high literature" and "this has given me brain worms". Definitely for sure start with the webtoon - the webnovel is clunkily translated, you don't read it for the writing at all, and it is also a literal million words. Don't read the webnovel unless you're like "I'm going insane and I need more of this". It starts off kind of slow ("This is a well executed very banal isekai") and you're like a frog in the pot of it slowly going more insane until you're a ways in and you are in a tangle of ridiculously complicated gambits and convoluted storytelling. There is literally no other way to describe it than the Homestuck of webnovels. If you're completely unfamiliar with isekai that's fine, but as a warning - ORV being your first webtoon/webnovel isekai is like your first shoujo manga being Ouran High Schol Host Club, or your first magical girl show being Madoka, or your first mecha anime to be Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's one of the best works in its genre but it's supposed to be viewed in context of the genre. Or maybe it's more like if Homura starred in Evangelion, which was Ouran. I'm just saying words.
Animorphs is kind of like Mother 3 in which everybody who has ever read/played it said that it changed them as a person, it changed their relationship with media and storytelling forever, if you read/play it you will be born again from the world's egg, etc. Works that genuinely become part of your personality. I also never recommend it to people because it is incredibly hit or miss. I remember using a spreadsheet of just "what books are skippable or not" because some of them are incredibly weird and some of them are incredibly weird in the bad way. The only Animorphs fic I've ever written is from 2019 so it's also not that great. Each book only takes an hour to read and the pdfs are free online, so it's incredibly accessible in terms of the reading experience, but it's kinda the Animorphs gestalt that changes you forever and not the individual books. I try not to recommend stuff that's like 25% bad.
Watch Trigun if you like what Trigun is - it's not going to deliver on something it's not. Also watch 98 first. Watch Stampede/read Trimax if you want more Trigun. The Trigun fic is based off Stampede but refer to my "I only write fic for smth that's 80% good and not 100% good" statement.
Also I think being bit by an asbestos rat just means that I probably have mold and drywall in my lungs, which would explain a lot about this blog. Thanks for the ask I love it.
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@cat-tyy I have. no idea what I just wrote. Enjoy.
“AAAAH!”
“Zion. Zion! Let’s calm do—oof.”
“Zion-ssi, I think—‘ack!’—it would be best if you—‘Did you just bite me?!’—both just stayed still—‘Get away from me!’ ‘I can’t!’—for a moment,” Eugis finishes weakly.
She glances to their right where Serpens is fretting over them (one more than the other, actually, but that’s not the point), looking very much like a weeping angel.
“Do you want me to calm your mind, Zion?” he offers tearfully, his palm alight with divine power.
“No. Just get him away from me!”
“I told you, he can’t,” Humanus interjects, fending off Zion’s pinwheeling arms. “He’d have to slice us up first.”
Zion pauses in his assault against the crown prince and takes a moment to absorb his words. He then turns to Serpens with conviction.
“Will you be able to do that painlessly if you used a divine blade?”
Serpens begins to sob.
Eugis watches Zion hug him as best as he can and silently brings her hands together, asking the goddess Luxmea if she could perhaps break the spell presently so they could all be rescued from their current predicament.
You see, at the moment, Zion and Humanus are—quite literally—attached at the hip.
It all began with Humanus bragging about his tree house.
“It was our favorite hangout back when we were little,” he said around a mouthful of cookies.
“Really,” Zion said doubtfully.
“Yeah. We used to play there all the time.” They both turned towards Serpens.
Serpens took a sip of his tea and placed it back on the table without a sound. “We did.”
“Can we go see it?” Zion and Eugis asked in tandem, the former asking Serpens and the latter asking the actual owner.
Humanus clapped his hands excitedly. “Sure! Let’s go right now.”
“Ahem,” Winston cleared his throat. “Sunbae, I believe you said you were ‘swamped with work’ today.”
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Zion said with a flippant wave of his hand, already pushing Serpens towards the door. “I’ll just do it later.”
Winston mutely held his gaze, and Eugis once again found herself marveling at how Zion could brush off the pressure coming from the 7 foot-tall knight without breaking a sweat.
“Let’s go!” he cheered, and on they went.
They arrived at the base of a magnificent tree behind the crown prince’s palace. The sight of it sent a pang to Eugis’s heart, the towering trees of her own kingdom brought to the forefront of her mind. Dozens of feet above the ground, a tree house sat snugly between thick branches, looking well-maintained and not at all like it had been abandoned for a decade.
“Is this sturdy enough for Winston and me?” Zion asked, inspecting the rope ladder that hung before them.
“Pretty sure it can handle Winston’s weight,” Humanus said with a quizzical tilt of his brow. “But why do you say it like that?”
“What, you expect me to climb this myself?”
“Uh, yeah? Serpens and I did it all the time when we were kids.”
Zion stared at him incredulously, then began pointing at all of them starting with Humanus. “Divine power.” At Serpens. “Divine power.”
“Elf!” Eugis said helpfully once it was her turn, earning an appreciative nod from her friend.
“Muscle,” he continued, pointing at Winston’s scowling face. Then at himself. “Puny human.”
“It’s just a ladder,” Humanus said, unmoved.
Zion took a deep breath, and Eugis hurriedly grabbed him in a bridal carry before he could start insulting his future king. “We’re off first~”
And with the help of her wind spirit, the two of them shot up in the air towards the open doorway of the tree house, Zion screaming all the while and clutching at her neck hard enough to tickle (he was puny like that).
By the time the rest of them had reached the tree house, Zion had regained his wits and was back to being his jovial, energetic self.
“Look at all this stuff!”
“I know, right?” Humanus said, dragging Zion towards a rocking horse bedecked with jewels. “Here, this was one of my favorites.” As was typical, he failed to notice the mildly disgusted look Zion threw his way when he caught sight of the colorful gems and missed his muttered “Rich people”.
Serpens, not wanting to be outdone, quickly searched for other toys to present to him. Winston opted to pretend to stand guard near the entrance, resignedly looking on as his illustrious master tried to get Zion off the rocking horse by tempting him with a miniature holy sword.
Eugis took it all in with a contented smile. With a happy sigh, she calmly walked around the spacious room, studying each item and wondering which of them Serpens could have genuinely enjoyed. She gravitated towards a shelf full of books, running her fingers against their spines and picturing a young Serpens reading them (prolific her imagination though may be, she couldn’t quite bring herself to imagine Humanus ever cracking open a book outside of his princely classes). Picking a book at random—a tome bound by warm brown leather, the color of Zion’s eyes—she perched on the windowsill and began to read.
It was several minutes later when the outside world filtered into her senses.
“Serpens, what’s this for?” Zion asked, holding a nondescript key in his palm.
“Um... I’m afraid I don’t know.”
He turned to Humanus next. “Your Highness?”
“Hmm?”
Zion held the key towards him and repeated the question.
“Huh...” Humanus said, pondering for a moment, taking it from Zion’s hand and turning it this way and that, before giving it back with a shrug. “Dunno.”
“But this is yours, isn’t it? It was in your toy chest.”
“Must be, yeah.”
Zion clicked his tongue.
“Did you just—”
“Never mind, Your Highness. I’ll figure it out myself.”
Contrary to his words, Zion immediately asked for Serpens’s help, and together they began to look about the room searching for its lock. Eugis joined them soon after—
“Perhaps it’s for a secret door that leads to the heart of the castle, but His Majesty the king had thought you unprepared for such knowledge so he asked a mighty wizard to wipe it from your memory!”
—and Winston saw it his duty to help his master as well. They scoured every inch of the tree house, leaving no furniture or stuffed animal unturned.
Finally, after nearly a quarter of an hour, Humanus let out a triumphant shout, holding something up as he sat on the floor.
“Found it!”
“Don’t be so proud, Your Highness, you were supposed to know to begin with.”
Humanus threw Zion a hurt look. “At least congratulate me...”
“Yes, yes,” Zion said obediently, already sidling up to him to see it for himself. “Congratulations, Your Highness. You’re very smart. Good job remembering what you forgot.”
“...”
Eugis approached them and stood over them to find the keyhole... in the middle of a toy knight’s chest.
“What the heck is that?” Zion asked as he knelt next to him, resting a hand on his shoulder for balance and looking at the strange doll askance.
“It’s a doll I commissioned,” Humanus explained unhelpfully—Zion’s distrustful gaze turned to him. “Why are you suddenly looking at me like that?”
“... Anyway, is it a wind-up toy or something?”
“A what?”
“Never mind. Just put the key in the keyhole already.”
Zion handed the key over to him, and the three of them—Serpens had joined Eugis to stand over the two, and Winston had gone back to his station next to the doorway—watched in rapt attention as Humanus slotted it into the keyhole and gave it a single twist. There was a soft click, and for a short, awkward moment nothing happened, and Eugis was left wondering if the crown prince of the kingdom had somehow commissioned a fraud.
But then a blinding light swallowed Humanus and Zion whole, and she could do nothing but cry in alarm as the two disappeared in a flash of green.
The brilliant light disappeared as quickly as it came, and an unbelievable sight revealed itself before her.
Eugis stared in abject horror.
Serpens started mewling.
Humanus screamed so loudly Euges’s ears folded against her head of their own accord.
And Zion stared down at his—and now Humanus’s—body and was only able to let out a soft “what the fu-” before he promptly fainted.
Eugis must’ve dissociated for a bit, because she can’t recall what happened while he was passed out. But now Zion’s awake, and Eugis is lucid again, and all she can do as they wait for the magic scroll to expire is to prevent her friend from committing regicide.
She gently encloses his wrists in her grasp to stop him from pulling at Humanus’s luscious goldfish locks again.
“It was supposed to be a prank, but Serpens never asked what the key was for and after awhile I just forgot!”
“You forgot you commissioned a doll to be booby trapped with a merging scroll?!” Zion all but shrieks, his voice reaching new decibels and causing Humanus to hold up a glowing hand against the ear closest to him. “Get on your knees!”
“What?” Humanus asks in bewilderment, then repeats it a second time with more fervor when Serpens—as if on instinct—folds his legs beneath him and raises both arms above his head, his angelic face full of contrition.
Eugis lets go of Zion with a sigh and watches him comfort the now crying Serpens. She’s quite certain elves don’t get migraines—she hasn’t had one herself despite having lived for hundreds of years—so the building ache behind her eyes must be a side effect from the scroll’s magic. Right?
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