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throughout the story both kim dokja and han sooyoung define themselves in opposition to yoo sangah. kim dokja defines himself as a reader in contrast to yoo sangah as a protagonist, and han sooyoung defines herself as a villainess in contrast to yoo sangah as a heroine. outsider vs insider, evil vs good. in doing so, they dehumanize themselves and yoo sangah. kim dokja denies himself the agency that he gives a protagonist, positioning himself as merely an observer in both his life and others to cope with his mental health issues. han sooyoung denies herself any emotional or moral complexity, assigning herself a simple role she feels most comfortable in due to her own self worth issues as a way to conceptualize how her 'genre' as changed around her.

as coping strategies, these kinda suck ass. they hurt themselves in doing so, and they hurt yoo sangah. the overlapping roles they assign to her - protagonist and heroine - make unrealistic demands of her, project a perfection that isn't real, put her in a box and ignore all attempts to escape it. they distance themselves from her and damage their relationships in the process. and a large part of yoo sangah's character and arc is her either fighting back against this dehumanization or just refusing to play ball as a way to deconstruct the heroine archetype. when she is dying she uses what seem to be her final moment to make one last escape attempt of kim dokja's idolization of her, reminding him of the pepper incident and forcing him to recognize her as not just a person but a friend. and during moments when she and han sooyoung are at odds, their different attitudes towards it are so stark - han sooyoung regards it as almost a battle of good and evil, whereas yoo sangah sees it as a more personal argument. han sooyoung's discomfort comes from a clashing of philosphies, whereas yoo sangah's comes from the fact han sooyoung is kind of a fucking bitch who has killed people she cares about and might again. han sooyoung leans into yoo sangah's worst thoughts about her as an 'evil', whereas yoo sangah is just trying to asses her as a person.

when kim dokja and han sooyoung categorize the world in this way, they dehumanize themselves and their loved ones. and yoo sangah refuses to play along, recognizing both her own and their humanity and forcing that same recognition onto them. when kim dokja and han sooyoung build a wall between themselves and yoo sangah, defining themselves by that distance, yoo sangah climbs it. yoo sangah doesn't just expose the dangers of the small box she gets shoved in, but exposes the others as well. she's an incredibly important character for orv because she does exactly that - it's an extension of her larger role in the narrative as someone who challenges roles and tropes of the genre, who reaches across the divide caused by these expectations we create for ourselves and others and says hey, im just a person, just like you. so maybe we should hang out sometime and just be that, yeah?

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These two inages on the same chapter is so powerful

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BIYOO ILLUSTRATED FINALLY HERE

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yoo joonghyuk remembering kim dokja making him eat dirt means he must also remember kim dokja gently stroking his hair and telling him to remember happy things. canonically. btw

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decided to double post

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hold up. chapter 188 (ebook version) got me thinking about something. so we know the prophecy is "incarnation Kim Dokja will be killed by the person/existence he loves the most" (although the edits around it are way too sloppy so im gonna go with 'person' about it. bear with me) and as it climaxes, kim dokja says:

"i had forgotten. in star stream people are stories. the sentences that would kill me approached slowly.

the story that was once my parents, friend, and lover. it wasn't the ways of survival that i knew but it was a story even more beautiful than ways of survival."

"[where does a story that has left the author's hands go?]

it becomes my (the reader's) story."

my god, in the story that has become his, kdj chose yoo joonghyuk to be the existence that delivers the sole blow that can kill him, yjh was the only one who could realize the fate in the definitive way that would erase his resurrection and remove kdj's evil mark/target. was it casual that kdj used his companions to lighten his load, was it casual that yjh was in possession of the only weapon that can kill him and ended kdj with a mere stab when even eternal flames of hell and a dragon's breath couldnt

im gonna lie down, kim dokja you asshole 😭😭

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different flavors of the same feeling

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i just couldn't stop thinking about six pack KDJ and soon this came to me in a vision

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thinking once again about how kim namwoon is happy in the underworld and thanks kim dokja for sending him there because it's better than his previous life. like genuinely, actually thanks him, in the sincere and oblivious way only a kid could. thanks him for sending him to this place where he's fed regularly and there's no school and the work isn't too hard and he gets to build a cool robot. what if you just thought hell was a pretty cool place because you weren't used to anything that was genuinely pleasant and you just don't notice the absence of anybody caring about you because you've never had that to begin with. what if, in a world of killers, the actual crime you've been found guilty of is not attempted murder, but the crime of being too unsightly for god to care for you.

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my point is you know him! you know kim dokja! you've had someone you wanted to know better who slipped by, you've had a friend who didn't take the best care of themself, you've seen someone so lost in a book the outside world seems irrelevant to them. he's a painfully realistic figure. and all of those little pieces of him you see in the people around you, orv reminds you of their importance. orv allows you to imagine if only for a moment that all those people have happy endings.

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never before has this type of self-insert fantasy ever sold me on a main character's powers like omniscient reader's viewpoint does. normally when the main character recieves some kind of insanely powerful skill due to their previously useless/cringe/lame/etc hobby or career i have a reaction of like. ok sure. yoo joonghyuk was a pro gamer so now in the star stream he has a pro gamer attribute that lets him fight like he's playing a video game. ok sure! not exactly difficult to grasp.

but kim dokja's skills are so clearly not just based in his favourite hobby but like. reflective of his entrenched ideas about himself and the world. there's a moment in chapter 2 where yoo sangah sees that kim dokja is feeling down about not getting his contract renewed (unlike her, who as a Heroine would obviously be better than him and be recognized for her talents), so she offers to send him a link to her language learning app in an attempt to connect with him and cheer him up. and this immediately sends kim dokja into intense dissasociation because he interprets it as her trying to make him like her - a protagonist, a hard worker, someone of value, all of which can be summed up in this case as an active 'Character' and all of which kim dokja has strictly barred himself from. he sees it as yoo sangah trying to pull him from his place in the story as just a reader who lets things happen to him into a proper character role and this is something his mind rejects almost violently. and its like oh! hello fourth wall! i see you! cause thats exactly what the fourth wall does! it protects him from becoming a 'Character' and therefore having to get hurt as characters (people who try hard, interact with the world, and thereby impact it) do by rejecting any notion of him being an actual part of the story, rather than the useless bystander he's always characterised himself as. which is what he's doing here. this dissasociation and that dissasociation are so clearly linked.

and its just one example i can see of how kim dokjas neuroses and issues are so clearly displayed to the reader (disguised as the typical eye-rolling self-deprecation we expect from these sort of self-inserts, almost on par with isekai fl's who proclaim they will never attract the attention of the ml). and then they go on to so clearly build his skills in a way that makes you go oh yeah i guess i get it on a first read and make you want to chew glass on a second. the way his abilities aren't just deus ex machinas he gets as a reader and instead so clearly foreshadowed in and influenced by his psyche........ough. did you guys know this book is good actually.

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I know this absolutely did not happen but I think it would be so funny if when kdj was in the demon realm and no one knew whether he was alive, Lee Sookyung suddenly got a notification like [Congrats on becoming a grandmother!] and she just had to be like well. Dokja is probably alive but I don't know what the fuck he's doing

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kim dokja voice kim namwoon you are too chuuni. you need to become more like the evil cool guy standing behind me, who is a different type of middle school power fantasy and wears a kirito fit instead of a komaeda fit. You will become cooler if you emulate him

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feeling so fucked up over kim dokja and yoo sangah. what if you cracked your soul open and shoved me inside of it to keep me safe. what if I got cozy inside your soul and read every page of the story that makes you who you are. and we were both coworkers.

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Day 6: Role Reversal AU - If it weren't for that reader, I'd probably have died back then