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May. 24th, 2022 08:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsIf you happen to have thought to yourself 'skygiants hasn't been posting very much about books recently!', well, a.) that is because life has been quite hectic and I remain very behind but b.) it is ALSO because most of my reading for the last month-approximate has been the FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-ODD chapters of Omniscient Readers Viewpoint, a Korean webnovel that I ... okay, this is very 'person who has only seen Princess Tutu getting real Princess Tutu vibes off this narrative' but I am VERY sorry I CANNOT help it although to be clear that actual experience of this book is almost nothing like the experience of watching Princess Tutu in any respect and is actually much closer to, like, the X-Men.
Okay, so the plot of Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint is that Kim Dokja, a twentysomething underachieving QA professional who has spent the past two decades of his life deeply obsessed with a lengthy and highly mediocre webnovel about the world entering a stage of divine narrative apocalypse where everyone gets superpowers and has to constantly undergo deadly challenges, is taking the subway home when all of a sudden the first scene of the webnovel begins to happen! The divine narrative apocalypse is right here, right now, and Kim Dokja -- the only person who actually read all three thousand chapters all the way to the end, and found it ultimately disappointing -- is not going to miss this opportunity to grab control of the narrative ... the thing is he read the whole book and while the protagonist is of course his boy and he loves him very much, he's pretty sure that given a chance he can do better.
The protagonist of the actual book, by the way, is a regressor -- he's Yoo Jonghyuk, a former pro gamer who after the apocalypse hits gains the power of infinite timeloop, i.e. every time he dies he simply returns to the starting point and gets to try again, thus gaining his own form of semi-omniscient knowledge. By the time the original novel ends, he's done over a thousand runs, seen all his friends and companions die multiple times over, and is incredibly grim and depressed! But at the time the book begins, which is where Kim Dokja enters the story, Yoo Jonghyuk only on regression 3 and is ... still grim and depressed, but hey, not nearly as much as he's going to be in the future!
A fun element for Kim Dokja: he knows that every time something goes terribly wrong Yoo Jonghyuk is going to be tempted to simply die and reset. However, he doesn't know what's going to happen to him if Yoo Jonghyuk dies and resets, so his mission is a.) convince an already-jaded Yoo Jonghyuk to team up with him and stay alive b.) also keep all his other favorite characters alive c.) get the good ending, he's plotted it all out in his head so many times over the years, and before the apocalypse he might just have been Some Guy but with his dedicated fan knowledge and his new narrative apocalypse superpower of Fourth Wall (which protects him by keeping him at a safe emotional distance from otherwise incapacitating things like 'painful wounds' and 'really sad events') he's really sure he can do it.
But of course as soon as Kim Dokja starts messing around with the plot, things start changing in ways even he can't predict -- and also, although originally his plan is to simply keep his favorite characters alive, there are also, like, real people here? Like, his coworker was on the subway with him, and his mom is running around somewhere (and the Fourth Wall gets extremely shaky whenever he interacts with her), and if those people are real what does it mean about the people he thinks of only as characters? What does it mean about his decision to orchestrate his own version of a Correct Ending? Is having a knowledge of somebody's narrative role and character traits the same thing as actually understanding them, as being able to communicate with them on a human level?
... so the thing about this book is that every arc is like '[heartfelt interrogation of the inherent impossibility of interpersonal understanding and the desperate act of faith that is communication] & that's why we need to convince three Monkey King clones to lend us Infinite Power Punch 3000 to use on Poseidon,' like I love the themes enormously but also the whole plot is highly dramatic nonsense and in the back half they end up having to fight every divine being that ever existed in any pantheon in existence 3x over, which is why the thing is five hundred and fifty chapters long.
BUT, ALSO, 'let's get real up our own navels about the role that narrative plays in human interaction and also fight God along the way' is essentially Becca's poison, the poison for Becca, so here we are.
Also the characters are good! Other than Kim Dokja and Yoo Jonghyuk, the other main party members include:
- Kim Dokja's polite and accomplished coworker from HR; she possesses the valuable apocalypse skills of 'studied business Spanish' and 'thinks murder is bad a normal amount'
- a former bartender/waitress turned ferocious avatar of Absolute Good; cool with (and good at) murder if it's for Justice, which does not stop her from feeling somewhat embarrassed that her main attack power requires her to declare 'JUDGMENT TIME'
- the party tank, a former soldier with undefined backstory trauma around his military service who finds specific instructions soothing; his arc involves developing an independent moral center and also learning how to turn into metal
- sad snarky mean teen who is the only apocalypse survivor of her high school class; favored by a famous Korean naval military god and will be super powerful if she ever stops being nervous around water -
- two small children with Talk To Insect Powers and Talk To Monsters Powers respectively; rescued by Kim Dokja at different points in the narrative and constantly up in arms over Who Has Cooler Powers and Who Is Kim Dokja's Favorite Adoptee
- a tired transmigrator who gets acquired from an alternate universe halfway through the narrative; special powers of Divine Internet; she is trans and the narrative/Kim Dokja is pretty weird about it for a while but eventually settles into the correct pronouns etc
- Kim Dokja's Plagiarist Rival who did NOT finish reading the book but DID read the first 100 chapters and promptly plagiarize them in order to write another, better, much more popular webnovel and Kim Dokja was the ONLY one who called her out on it and NOBODY believed him -- anyway now she can perform trope-based fortune-telling, among other things, and good for her
- Kim Dokja's Mom; it's fraught; also it's very important to the narrative that she has a role and a plot and a life separate from being Kim Dokja's Mom and I appreciate that very much
(There is no canon romance, btw; most people ship Kim Dokja/Yoo Jonghyuk, including some of the characters, but other people ship various other configurations and the book itself is primarily interested in Various Forms of Complicated Friendship.)
And although the plot goes on too long many of the plot points are also extremely good! Some of my favorites
- the mysterious wanderer leading a gang of women's prison convicts who also knows the future is Kim Dokja's mom, who never read the book but just had to listen to him describe it to her incessantly
- after 'dying' and getting sent to an alternate dimension, Kim Dokja uses Yoo Jonghyuk's name to lead a revolution; Yoo Jonghyuk starts hearing about 'his' exploits, figures out that Kim Dokja is not dead, and promptly goes to lead a revolution in a different alternate dimension city in Kim Dokja's name, after which they awkwardly have to switch back, and that's Romance
- Kim Dokja's horrible former boss, who has 'betray the party' flags all over him, gets attacked by an evil tentacle bug, disappears for 200 chapters and returns as a consistently helpful member of the party with the explanation that the bug got him pregnant with a demon baby and after giving birth he is a changed man ... parenting is magic ... he cares only for the safety of his body horror mpreg daughter ...
- Kim Dokja dies again and goes to another alternate dimension where his plagiarist friend has taken over the narrative, nurtured all the characters to their full potential, and led them to their most successful round yet, except for the protagonist who in this world is public enemy #1 because she simply does not care about him
- Kim Dokja orchestrates the death of his least favorite character, a teen psychopath, in chapter 2; 300 chapters later he meets an alternate dimension of him who survived and got character development and is like 'damn ... now I feel kind of bad for character bashing ......'
- after his longest death yet, Kim Dokja has to convince his friends that he is not a giant squid
- Kim Dokja heroically yet annoyingly smugly sacrifices himself for his friends so many times and after a while they get SO fed up with it that they put the Monkey King's headband on him as a kind of bad cat spritz bottle to force him to stop it already
- eventually everyone including and especially Yoo Jonghyuk not only learn that Kim Dokja read about them in a book but also get the opportunity to read about Kim Dokja in a book, which I find enormously satisfying after finishing Scum Villain in a state of deep dissatisfaction at the fact that no one ever learned who Shen Yuan actually was
- okay I don't even know if I LIKE the ending but I DID exclaim "Homeward Bounders ending? literally the Homeward Bounders ending?" out loud the moment I hit the pre-epilogue finale, which I realize is ALSO 'person who has only read Diana Wynne Jones getting real Diana Wynne Jones vibes off this narrative' but I am sorry! I am who I am!
Anyway! This post has gotten very long, but I beg you to forgive me, because 550 chapters is simply so many chapters to try and discuss. Am I going to also read the webtoon? Yes, God help me, but there's only 100 chapters of that at present, so presumably it won't take up quite as much of my life.
skygiants hasn't been posting very much about books recently!', well, a.) that is because life has been quite hectic and I remain very behind but b.) it is ALSO because most of my reading for the last month-approximate has been the FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-ODD chapters of Omniscient Readers Viewpoint, a Korean webnovel that I ... okay, this is very 'person who has only seen Princess Tutu getting real Princess Tutu vibes off this narrative' but I am VERY sorry I CANNOT help it although to be clear that actual experience of this book is almost nothing like the experience of watching Princess Tutu in any respect and is actually much closer to, like, the X-Men. Okay, so the plot of Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint is that Kim Dokja, a twentysomething underachieving QA professional who has spent the past two decades of his life deeply obsessed with a lengthy and highly mediocre webnovel about the world entering a stage of divine narrative apocalypse where everyone gets superpowers and has to constantly undergo deadly challenges, is taking the subway home when all of a sudden the first scene of the webnovel begins to happen! The divine narrative apocalypse is right here, right now, and Kim Dokja -- the only person who actually read all three thousand chapters all the way to the end, and found it ultimately disappointing -- is not going to miss this opportunity to grab control of the narrative ... the thing is he read the whole book and while the protagonist is of course his boy and he loves him very much, he's pretty sure that given a chance he can do better.
The protagonist of the actual book, by the way, is a regressor -- he's Yoo Jonghyuk, a former pro gamer who after the apocalypse hits gains the power of infinite timeloop, i.e. every time he dies he simply returns to the starting point and gets to try again, thus gaining his own form of semi-omniscient knowledge. By the time the original novel ends, he's done over a thousand runs, seen all his friends and companions die multiple times over, and is incredibly grim and depressed! But at the time the book begins, which is where Kim Dokja enters the story, Yoo Jonghyuk only on regression 3 and is ... still grim and depressed, but hey, not nearly as much as he's going to be in the future!
A fun element for Kim Dokja: he knows that every time something goes terribly wrong Yoo Jonghyuk is going to be tempted to simply die and reset. However, he doesn't know what's going to happen to him if Yoo Jonghyuk dies and resets, so his mission is a.) convince an already-jaded Yoo Jonghyuk to team up with him and stay alive b.) also keep all his other favorite characters alive c.) get the good ending, he's plotted it all out in his head so many times over the years, and before the apocalypse he might just have been Some Guy but with his dedicated fan knowledge and his new narrative apocalypse superpower of Fourth Wall (which protects him by keeping him at a safe emotional distance from otherwise incapacitating things like 'painful wounds' and 'really sad events') he's really sure he can do it.
But of course as soon as Kim Dokja starts messing around with the plot, things start changing in ways even he can't predict -- and also, although originally his plan is to simply keep his favorite characters alive, there are also, like, real people here? Like, his coworker was on the subway with him, and his mom is running around somewhere (and the Fourth Wall gets extremely shaky whenever he interacts with her), and if those people are real what does it mean about the people he thinks of only as characters? What does it mean about his decision to orchestrate his own version of a Correct Ending? Is having a knowledge of somebody's narrative role and character traits the same thing as actually understanding them, as being able to communicate with them on a human level?
... so the thing about this book is that every arc is like '[heartfelt interrogation of the inherent impossibility of interpersonal understanding and the desperate act of faith that is communication] & that's why we need to convince three Monkey King clones to lend us Infinite Power Punch 3000 to use on Poseidon,' like I love the themes enormously but also the whole plot is highly dramatic nonsense and in the back half they end up having to fight every divine being that ever existed in any pantheon in existence 3x over, which is why the thing is five hundred and fifty chapters long.
BUT, ALSO, 'let's get real up our own navels about the role that narrative plays in human interaction and also fight God along the way' is essentially Becca's poison, the poison for Becca, so here we are.
Also the characters are good! Other than Kim Dokja and Yoo Jonghyuk, the other main party members include:
- Kim Dokja's polite and accomplished coworker from HR; she possesses the valuable apocalypse skills of 'studied business Spanish' and 'thinks murder is bad a normal amount'
- a former bartender/waitress turned ferocious avatar of Absolute Good; cool with (and good at) murder if it's for Justice, which does not stop her from feeling somewhat embarrassed that her main attack power requires her to declare 'JUDGMENT TIME'
- the party tank, a former soldier with undefined backstory trauma around his military service who finds specific instructions soothing; his arc involves developing an independent moral center and also learning how to turn into metal
- sad snarky mean teen who is the only apocalypse survivor of her high school class; favored by a famous Korean naval military god and will be super powerful if she ever stops being nervous around water -
- two small children with Talk To Insect Powers and Talk To Monsters Powers respectively; rescued by Kim Dokja at different points in the narrative and constantly up in arms over Who Has Cooler Powers and Who Is Kim Dokja's Favorite Adoptee
- a tired transmigrator who gets acquired from an alternate universe halfway through the narrative; special powers of Divine Internet; she is trans and the narrative/Kim Dokja is pretty weird about it for a while but eventually settles into the correct pronouns etc
- Kim Dokja's Plagiarist Rival who did NOT finish reading the book but DID read the first 100 chapters and promptly plagiarize them in order to write another, better, much more popular webnovel and Kim Dokja was the ONLY one who called her out on it and NOBODY believed him -- anyway now she can perform trope-based fortune-telling, among other things, and good for her
- Kim Dokja's Mom; it's fraught; also it's very important to the narrative that she has a role and a plot and a life separate from being Kim Dokja's Mom and I appreciate that very much
(There is no canon romance, btw; most people ship Kim Dokja/Yoo Jonghyuk, including some of the characters, but other people ship various other configurations and the book itself is primarily interested in Various Forms of Complicated Friendship.)
And although the plot goes on too long many of the plot points are also extremely good! Some of my favorites
- the mysterious wanderer leading a gang of women's prison convicts who also knows the future is Kim Dokja's mom, who never read the book but just had to listen to him describe it to her incessantly
- after 'dying' and getting sent to an alternate dimension, Kim Dokja uses Yoo Jonghyuk's name to lead a revolution; Yoo Jonghyuk starts hearing about 'his' exploits, figures out that Kim Dokja is not dead, and promptly goes to lead a revolution in a different alternate dimension city in Kim Dokja's name, after which they awkwardly have to switch back, and that's Romance
- Kim Dokja's horrible former boss, who has 'betray the party' flags all over him, gets attacked by an evil tentacle bug, disappears for 200 chapters and returns as a consistently helpful member of the party with the explanation that the bug got him pregnant with a demon baby and after giving birth he is a changed man ... parenting is magic ... he cares only for the safety of his body horror mpreg daughter ...
- Kim Dokja dies again and goes to another alternate dimension where his plagiarist friend has taken over the narrative, nurtured all the characters to their full potential, and led them to their most successful round yet, except for the protagonist who in this world is public enemy #1 because she simply does not care about him
- Kim Dokja orchestrates the death of his least favorite character, a teen psychopath, in chapter 2; 300 chapters later he meets an alternate dimension of him who survived and got character development and is like 'damn ... now I feel kind of bad for character bashing ......'
- after his longest death yet, Kim Dokja has to convince his friends that he is not a giant squid
- Kim Dokja heroically yet annoyingly smugly sacrifices himself for his friends so many times and after a while they get SO fed up with it that they put the Monkey King's headband on him as a kind of bad cat spritz bottle to force him to stop it already
- eventually everyone including and especially Yoo Jonghyuk not only learn that Kim Dokja read about them in a book but also get the opportunity to read about Kim Dokja in a book, which I find enormously satisfying after finishing Scum Villain in a state of deep dissatisfaction at the fact that no one ever learned who Shen Yuan actually was
- okay I don't even know if I LIKE the ending but I DID exclaim "Homeward Bounders ending? literally the Homeward Bounders ending?" out loud the moment I hit the pre-epilogue finale, which I realize is ALSO 'person who has only read Diana Wynne Jones getting real Diana Wynne Jones vibes off this narrative' but I am sorry! I am who I am!
Anyway! This post has gotten very long, but I beg you to forgive me, because 550 chapters is simply so many chapters to try and discuss. Am I going to also read the webtoon? Yes, God help me, but there's only 100 chapters of that at present, so presumably it won't take up quite as much of my life.
