Made Another Batch Of These

persona 3 + wolf pupy

bonus:

thought this was a cute idea yellow with poliwag :-D

Permit Office

I love the use of the phrase 'some strange alchemy' as a descriptor for a process you don't understand.

'Through some strange alchemy(crochet) they turned a bundle of yarn into a stuffed giraffe'

'Through some strange alchemy(bad cooking) they turned a perfectly marinated steak into a charcoal briquet'

'Through some strange alchemy(good cooking) they turned a pile of slop into the fluffiest bread loaf I'd ever seen'

'Through some strange alchemy(bad reading comprehension) they took my polite statement and turned into a disgusting act against the poor'

and so on

Trying to convince my dnd friends to watch dungeon meshi...

one thing i enjoy about orv is how morally grey kim dokja is, especially in the beginning. during the beginning of the novel kim dokja seems to have almost no empathy for the people around him, and his number one priority is progressing the scenarios with himself being a secondary priority and saving others coming later. he does undeniable good, like saving jung heewon and caring for lee gilyoung - and he does some much more questionable things, like selling his food for coins knowing that it will disappear soon and people need the coins to survive.

this part of orv gets ignored a lot and chalked up to kim dokja's self-hatred, which i disagree with. yes he hates himself and yes he's an unreliable narrator who paints his actions in a worse light because of it but sometimes he just does objectively bad things. and it's interesting when he does! particularly in the beginning, he is focused completely on self-preservation and often steps on others in the process. his actions force you to ask questions like how responsible is kim dokja for those deaths on the subway car, or at that first subway station? is he obligated to try and save the people around him? how strong is that obligation? is it right of him to use his future knowledge the way he does, to decide who lives and dies? they're fairly basic questions, and orv doesn't particularly insist on answering them, but i enjoyed thinking about them nonetheless. the fact is kim dokja was often cruel, to strangers and his companions both, if different types. and you lose these questions when you ignore that. and thats not even to discuss the parallels between his exploitation of yoo joonghyuk's story and the way constellations gobble up incarnations while enjoying their pain. even if yoo joonghyuk eventually decides he considers it worth it, kim dokja still subsisted off of a living being's immeasurable pain for years, and that's a fucked up thing!

and to ignore kim dokja's less-than-moral actions also ignores kim dokja's character arc! kim dokja feels guilt at the end of orv for actions he wouldn't have thought twice about at the beginning and that is because he has changed and matured over the course of the novel and pretending he was always that way erases that. and i dont see why you would want to!! his journey towards seeing his companions as human and learning to care about the 'extras' he previously discarded and coming to understand the damage he inflicts with his self-sacrifice is interesting to watch and discuss. i've seen the stark contrast in empathy from early kim dokja to later kim dokja chalked up to sinshong not being quite sure how to write him yet and while i think that may have played a role i also think they did a good job of building and showing these changes through arcs like the demon world arc, the fruit of good and evil arc and the journey to the west arc

i think i lost my point somehwere but in summary kim dokja does some fucked up shit and some of it is basic edgelord apocalypse murder and some of it is genuinely interesting to contemplate and all of it is important to his character

Rating korean webnovels' protagonists' reaction to meeting another version of themselves for the first time

Kim Roksu: 10/10, very polite and helpful, worked to save his other self's world while also being thoughtful not to mess up his life and personal connections Kim Dokja: 0/10 tried to stab himself Han Yoojin: 0/10 tried to stab himself

i love alberu and raon's dynamic so much,,

secretive plotter asks the awesome question what if you were born with a hole inside of you and you knew it was there and you did not know how to fill it so you spend lifetimes chasing the one thing that might give you just a hint of a clue of why you were made like this. and you do all of that waiting just to be told you are still too early. so you wait some more. you wait eons, alone, drifting through an endless void until finally you find - something. something that you think might just be what you were made for. but he's not for you. so you get to see the being you were made for curl up inside someone else when you know you could hold them too. and then you have to live with that!

i love jang hayoung because of the frankly twilight zone ass question she poses to kim dokja with her mere existence which is "what if as a teenage boy you made a self insert oc into your favorite story and then years later you were transported to the world of the story and you met your self insert and she had gotten herself on estrogen"