thinking about how Kim Dokja and Anna Croft are nearly perfect narrative foils. The Prophet and the Reader, she who sees the events to come and he who knows of all that has happened, Humanity's Hero and the Demon King of Salvation, the Opponent of all the Stars and the Most Ancient Dream.

For as long as Yoo Jonghyuk had been a regressor, Anna Croft was the only person who had been by his side through everything because she was the only one who could remember. Although Kim Dokja would never admit it, she was to Yoo Jonghyuk what Kim Dokja wished to become, to take the place of and steer him towards a better path, one that Anna could never prophecise.

Anna found reprieve in forgetting Yoo Jonghyuk but it was Kim Dokja's worst nightmare.

Anna Croft would sacrifice anything and anyone she has ever loved if it meant that she could save the world because she's a gambler and she knows how to calculate the risks. She sees value in numbers and abundance.

Kim Dokja still saved the world, but if it came down to it, he would sacrifice the world to save his loved ones because, to him, they are his world.

also sorry kdj but yjh and anna were the og toxic doomed yuri

i love seeing out of context posts about long-running stories with deep lore because it's always shit like "MAJOR SPOILER WARNING!! i can't believe that the metallic athenaeum's envoy actually used never-ending dance of the 57th universe on rionne as if she's not LITERALLY the incarnate of august?!?!" it's like buddy boy thank you for the spoiler tag but all of those words are incomprehensible without at least 5 years of foreshadowed knowledge, 7 different fan theories, and 21 wiki entries

orv is horrible in that you fully trust the narrator. even by the end, you know kim dokja is a liar to both himself and therein his readers. but you still choose to believe his words. you choose to love him because he is so fundamentally wounded by the narrative. it's hard not to fall for a narrator of whom you know has no capacity to love himself, despite being love's incarnate.

it's just because he believes in readers that the readers believe him.

I have now read up to the part in the ORV novel where the webtoon is at currently.. the edge of no return.... here I go <3

how cruel of them to do this

Notes on swords

Orv said hey what if you accidentally created a clone of yourself that went rogue with some of your memories and ended up time travelling to a different world line and becoming the leader of the main characters and helping them reach the ending of the story while being hotter and more powerful and competent than you and developing a chain smoking habit to deal with the stress and then still not satisfied that clone went back in time in your original worldline to meet the man you love when you were both children and ended up becoming the architect and creator of the world, dooming millions as she writes the story of the apocalypse using your possessed sleeping body, all to keep the boy you love alive. What if she becomes the most tragic narrative figure in the whole story, working every night for years and years to keep him alive only to fade away out of existence and remain only as a part of your memories once you reach the end. And what if before you know she exists you end up reading the story she's writing and being like "damn this sucks", unaware that she's the reason your own writing talent has bloomed just like she's the reason you're constantly exhausted and you found this novel in the first place and also the reason you're addicted to sucking candy because she needed a child friendly substitution to her cigarettes.

Orv dares ask "What if your accidental clone is the God of this universe and within this universe you are the narrative's favourite little jester?" and the answer it discovers is that you become the best tritagonist in fiction.

the funny thing about kim dokja is that he's constantly claiming to 'know yoo joonghyuk best from anyone in the world' and okay maybe he's not wrong but he's not exactly right because he doesn't know yoo joonghyuk to the great extent he thinks he does. we see this through the 'understanding' of the omniscient reader's viewpoint skill. in the beginning of the story, when joonghyuk somewhat follows the paths of the third regression, dokja has a great understanding! and really, that works for him. but also, as orv goes on, he is so constantly reminded that he now affects the story but also that the story can grow without him, a reader, to observe it. he loses so much understanding of joonghyuk in the dissonance of the story together that he can't even predict the blows that the guy is about to hit- and then, only as his most broken, can dokja understand joonghyuk again, can he suitably predict his moves.

One of my favorite ORV headcanons is that TWSA has as much practical living advice as it does the metaphorical.

There's a 3-page long description of lsh dressing and bandaging yjh's wounds in the early rounds, intimately describing all the bruises and cuts and scrapes and the way they were handled. Kdj saw this as a humanizing moment for yjh and shipping fuel, but the next day he gets beat up by bullies and decided to dress his wounds himself since the school nurse isn't around (and they were getting tired of him anyway). It's sloppy and he had to rebandage himself after it unravelled, but it prevented an infection, and he got better over time.

In another chapter, yjh notices ljh having panic attacks in the middle of battle and teaches her a few tricks to steady your breathing and center herself faster as part of combat training. The description feels like text you'd see in a training handbook and completely breaks any sense of pacing. Kdj remembers it the next time he has one and was able to calm himself down before his relatives find him and punish him like they did before.

There was a chapter that came out around the time kdj was job hunting, where the party gets tangled in a subscenario involving securing a position through interviews. It felt contrived even with kdj's tolerance to TWSA shenanigans, but he takes note of what everyone does anyway and tries some of them in his job interviews. He comments that some of the actions felt unrealistic with his own experiences in job interviews; tls123 replied with a lighthearted apology (she's never had to bother with interviews, and she doubts she'll ever get to; she's grateful that it was still useful.)

In yet another chapter, yjh avoids the eyes of fellow incarnations and picks his words correctly in a game of three questions with nosy constellations. They were oddly dry and mundane for an apocalypse setting with superhuman powers. Kdj remembers them the next time he spots paparazzi lurking around the corners.

A chapter has yjh instructing knw, ljh and yma on how to make do with instant ramyun and add a few things to it to keep it somewhat nutritious (yjh isn't happy about it but it's the least he can do since they're gonna split for a multi-day scenario and he can't cook for them). Kdj remembers it when he tried to make ramyun for the first time in his new place after moving out of his relatives'. He remembers curling his hand to chop the scallions because knw got scolded for improper knife handling, and he remembers when to put in the egg because ljh got sternly corrected for confidently shouting out the wrong answer. Kdj didn't injure himself, and it was the fanciest and most delicious meal he ate in a while. (He remembers yjh patting his sister's head for getting everything right, and almost brings his own hands to his head before stopping; no one's gonna praise a college student for making ramyun right.)

(Kim Dokja, rereading TWSA over and over again in the train, feels the love and has no idea what to do with it.)

(05/06: added the food segment because i loved all the food-related notes <3)

that part where kim dokja realizes he only knew the lee sookyung that was his mother, he doesn't know what kind of person she is outside of that role and what kind of person she was to the wanderers and the other party members.... she's so much more than just his mother but he doesn't know anything else about her at all

And hsy comes in and says that he doesn't always know everything and that he's not a god aaugghhh........

orv you are so special to me!!!!!!!!!! the major whiplash i got from this... it's so obvious but i never thought about it seriously. You only know them as the person they present to you as, it's not possible to know everything of a single person

i saw you once in a dream

I think Yoo Jonghyuk hates the subway more than anyone in ORV. Even with Kim Dokja, although he was stuck for like an eternity on that train, it was still almost like a home to him, in some fucked up bittersweet way. Sure, he was basically withering away but I think he loved Yoo Jonghyuk so much, loved that even in this purgatory he could still be by his side, that he was still happy.

But the subway is where Yoo Jonghyuk winds up again after every failed regression, after every death. He snaps back to consciousness after every terrible end like waking up from a nightmare but what he sees isn't the comfort of his own home. Not even the face of his sister who he would give everything to see alive and well. Just a hall of white walls about to be painted with blood and strangers who he'll watch die in a matter of minutes. He wants to run, to cry, to scream at all the passengers around him to jump off the train and escape the hell that was about to be unleashed upon them. But the dokkaebi will come anyway, the scenarios will still commence, and people will still die.

The show must go on, and so must Yoo Jonghyuk.

For Kim Dokja, the subway signified the start of a beautiful story. For Yoo Jonghyuk, it was an inescapable ending.

thinking about how kim dokja's constant self-sacrifice is really just his form of showing love because that's all he's ever known and grew up with. he realized it when he read stories of yoo jonghyuk's countless regressions as he threw away his life time and time again in hopes that he can finally save the world, but it really started with his mother when she took the blame for killing his father and lived the rest of her life in jail. how she threw away everything and how she sold their lives as a story that he hated so much just so the world would never know that kim dokja was the one who murdered his father

he might've not known why she did this, but maybe somewhere, maybe the same place where he locked the memory of killing his father, he knew subconsciously she wrote that book for him. and he might've hated her for it, but, after growing up neglected and unloved, it was the only form of love he understood and clung to. and sacrificing himself for the world, just like how he read yoo jonghyuk has for 13 years, was just his own profession of love for the world

i still cannot believe orv exists like. yes all my friends were nuts about it and they've been right about other stuff i liked before but every time it really is like. surely it can't be that good. and then i read orv and it IS that good. it's life-altering.

YES i am the target audience YES i'm literally a professional writer who has ALSO defined my life by the stories i read and love. i was raised by books i was raised by silly little roleplays on the internet with my favorite little guys. my favorite story-heavy franchise is one i've literally been obsessed with for the last 15 years. i dreamed through them.

my god if you are a person who loves stories about stories you have to read orv. if you're a person who has lived and breathed your blorbos you have to read orv. if you have ever felt like a worthless teen and/or adult and drowned your sorrows in a good or even cringe ass story you have to read orv. at least try and see if it speaks to you

i am not kidding in that this is the first story that has grabbed me through the pages and made me wholly believe a book character is just straight up real. kim dokja is not just a fictional guy to me he is real. and he lives in my heart.

also jung heewon is really hot. that's all

HELP

NOT ONLY DID VOX WIN AGAINST FUCKING LUCIFER HOTTEST BIBLICAL ANGEL MORNINGSTAR

I GOT HIT WITH THE 49/51 ORV STYLE TOO

WHAT TIMELINE IS THIS

I expect double fanarts btw y'all artists, take responsibility and give me hot Vox art to mend my soul

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