Orv - Blog Posts

and on that note!!!! the reason i am so immediately put off whenever any fic or art or anything mentions how thin kim dokja is like. objectively kim dokja is a very thin and frail person removed of his powers this is mentioned multiple times throughout the novel. and this is obviously because he was very poor and didn't have the money to eat well. AND because he was very suicidal and a) did not care enough about himself to do things like cook himself nice meals or give a shit about his health. and b) could not envision a future where his poor treatment of his body would actually matter because he could not envision a future period. and it's also representative of how he had no one to teach him to eat well he was kicked out onto the street at 17 with no one to show him how to cook healthy enjoyable meals or to impress on him the importance taking care of yourself. the closest he had were the passages han sooyoung wrote in twsa to try and make him eat.

like his thinness represents how utterly alone he was and how difficult his life was and how little he cares about himself. so from that perspective its something i would usually like to see explored in orv fic. but instead i instinctively cringe at any mention of it because its almost always used as shipping fodder. its almost always used from a 'wow he's so skinny and frail and twinkish doesn't yoo joonghyuk just want to feed and take care of him and rail his flat ass simultaneously' and its like. sigh. if your perception of yoo joonghyuk is that he would be attracted to the idea that kim dokja is smaller and weaker than him sure i don't care its not my perception but it's a valid one or whatever. but if thats the only context you're willing to think or care about kim dokja's thinness i am biting and killing you with hammers.

its so representative of how aspects of kim dokja's character and story get reduced to JUST being joonghyuk's twink bf. im not saying your smutfic where yoo joonghyuk can reach his hands entirely around kim dokjas waist has to have a mediation on kim dokja's shitty childhood or whatever that would actually be worse but you have to CARE about it you have to think about it at least a little. all of your interpretations of his character are going to be shallow and boring if you've never thought about him outside of those shipping goggles.

Readers from different genres

it’s doksoo week and i’m thinking of how the endless loop starts and ends with kdj on a hospital bed and hsy looking over him

doksoo week day 7: 😏

one of the most powerful messages orv has tbh is "your self-loathing behavior badly hurts other people who want to care for you." a lot of depictions of depression, suicidality, issues with self-esteem, etc. focus near-exclusively on the person who suffers from them, which is understandable, but I love that orv is commited to showing how SELFISH kdj's behavior can be. he tends to trample over other people's desperate wishes to connect to him and love him because he doesn't think he's worthy of it, and it ends up being some of the worst pain those people have ever experienced when he won't let them reach him! he's of course a sympathetic character but he still has this horrible habit of disregarding other people's emotions in ways that are unintentionally awfully cruel!

like idk i don't think anything's ever put a silver bullet through a martyr complex quite like the message of "you hurt people SO MUCH WORSE by harming & isolating yourself than any pain you could potentially cause them by sharing your burdens with them." it's realistic and kind while still being the brick upside the head some people need to snap em out of it lmao

han sooyoung (13 years old) (asshole): oh my god why do you keep harrassing me about this dumb plagarism shit like kys weirdo

han sooyoung (1863rd version) (watching her younger self suicide bait the person shes writing twsa for just so he won't do specifically that):

The next Big Arc I'm excited for the webtoon to adapt is Kaizenix arc for multiple reasons but one of them is that I'm VERY curious about what they will do about heesung.

because heesung have a romance arc in kaizenix right. I don't think I need to prove it's canon like a fujoshi talking about her favourite M/M ship, red yarn and cork board style - we're all on the same page here, this is a completely uncontraversial take on the token het couple in orv, right? kim dokja sees them in kaizenix and thinks "damn I'll have to allow interpersonal dating in kimcom now" I don't think anyone is arguing for a platonic explaination here (het ship advantages etc) HOWEVER.

Jung Heewon looked like a man at the time.

"She's mentally a woman so it's fine and not gay" is a much easier pill to swallow when it's words in a novel and her appearence isn't described, and the flashbacks appear as disconnected lines of dialogue so you don't really think of them as looking like Erich and Bilston and imagine them as Jung Heewon and Lee Hyunsung regardless of their actual appearence.

But the webtoon is a visual format and that won't fly. They physically can't be non-committal about this, they have to draw SOMETHING and I can't WAIT to see what it will be, because whatever they decide to do will be massively entertaining to me.

Do they say fuck it, heesung yaoi canon? I can't imagine they want on screen (apparent) gayness in their male power fantasy manhwa, but they might bet on the 'she's a woman on the inside' cognative dissonance 'it's anime bullshit, don't question it' logic will win over in most dudebro heads, as with it did in the novel.

Or they might decide that it WON'T fly with the dudebros actually and they shouldn't risk it and-this is where it gets really funny- try to make heesung less gay.

They could tweak their scenes to downplay the romance aspect (make them more humorus or cut some parts). They could keep Jung Heewon's face and hair the same as usual except she's in armor don't worry about what's under it ok. To 'keep her recognizable' even though they're not usually afraid to make the designs temporarily unrecognizable (KDJ's YJH cosplay moment for example), or some combination of both, which is what I'm betting on.

Just friends-ing their scenes...... changing her design to a woman's...... All of this would be, and I can't believe I'm saying this, gay censorship.

heesung about to be the first het couple to experience gay erasure. that's awesome I love orv

That's why I NEED all of us to have a countdown to heesungs schrödinger's yaoi event the same way some people had for joongdok demon king stabbing scene. the POTENTIAL IS THERE OPEN YOUR EYES PEOPLE!!!

yoohankim is kim dokja laying in bed thinking god im a dogshit human being and soon these two will figure it out and leave me and han sooyoung laying in bed thinking god im a dogshit human being im so lucky that ive managed to find these people willing to be with me and i will never let them go and yoo joonghyuk laying in bed thinking well we might have enough onions for that onion soup i wanna make tomorrow night but i should probably stop by the store in the morning and grab some extra just in case. also if either of these people leave me i will kill myself

absolutely obsessed with early jongdook bc yjh is really trying to do the whole brooding protagonist thing “nobody understands what i’m going through and i have the burden of saving the world etc etc)” and then this guy (clown) bursts on to the scene, calls you a bitch to your face, tells you he can predict the future and basically turns your world upside down while stealing your name and he’s just like ???? ???? ???? and then it turns out the guy is even more messed up than you the tortured protagonist and he’s like damn it you bastard you can’t die i’m attached now you have changed me irreparably

jumping in on the trend

lee jihye side story where she experiences yuri again. i just think after years of hanging out with literal children and Hot Milfs In Her Area she deserves some good standard wholesome university au yuri. is this anything

[ The constellation 'Demon King of Salvation' is looking at you ]

idk if y'all remember that instance when yoo sangah decided to read all of dokja's memories, a move which made a lot of people hate her, but, here's my take on that: yoo sangah is a person who knows how to take risks, or at least she tries to know how to assess them correctly, and, you know, to have a relationship it is necessary to take those risks, especially if you want to get closer to someone else, if you want to let them know you're there for them. Then, what if the person you wanted to get closer to and so badly understand is Kim Dokja? The guy who's so deeply ashamed of himself he has to hide behind a wall, the guy who feels so proud of not letting anyone get to know him because he believes no one can nor will ever understand him so it's better to push them away, the coworker who paired up with you on your first interview, the coworker who kept quiet while you put pepper onto the coffe machine and even took the effort to move the cameras so that they wouldn't fire you, he, the one who talks to you without the intention to get something back nor seeing you as an object, and who also seems to be okay with you despite feeling so distant, Dokja, Kim Dokja, your dear friend.

And then he sacrifices himself. Over and over again. What would you do then? Yoo Sangah can't just stand there doing nothing, watching him suffer silently. She's an empath, she wants to be there for people, and he's her friend, she has to do something about it, let him know all KimCom is there for him, that she's there for him, but he's being so stubbornly distant with everyone. It is also at this point of the novel where Dokja's debating whether to tell them that they're all characters of a novel, and therefore being much more distant. What is there to do for yoo sangah? It's a desperate situation, and such desperate times require bigger risks to take in for the relationship; to read dokja's memories is dangerous, it is to overstep his boundaries and privacy, dokja may never want to talk to her again, because it is a betrayal in itself. Yoo sangah knows all of this, but she's willing to take the risk, for him. It is incredibly selfish as well, but it is the only way out for her, the only way she feels she can reach out to him beyond that wall.

/ORV SPOILERS/

one thing i cant pinpoint about Kim Dokja is his view on himself. Its either he full on hates himself.

or

he has the causal disinterest in himself. Where, yeah he doesn't /hate/ himself. (dislike maybe?) but if he could be someone else that would be better. if he was a better person. wouldn't he be more lovable that way? like that odd feeling where you look at others and think...if only i was that funny/that good looking/ that popular... like its not full on hate but if you think about yourself for too long your self disgust starts to show. and you get sad and 'im so unlovable' (thinking of where all of kimcom talk around the fire about the house.. and kdj starts to question if someone like him deserves it... -hmmm ill have to go back and reread that to make sure thats true.) "wouldn't it be better if I was someone else?/I want to be someone else." > 49% <

on my reread i noticed the decline of his thoughts towards himself really starts to show during in the Demon Realm arc. Where his "I am Yoo Joonghyuk." habit is fully revealed. Which is super fucking sad actually. To have so little confidence in yourselves to the point where you need to act like someone else to speak up for yourself

banging my head against a wall... Kim Dokja i love you. im sorry for threatening to put you in a blender. please live a good life..

Forget touch-starved Kim Dokja, I want touch adverse Kim Dokja.

Give me KDJ who flinches at physical contact since he never learned how to receive it positively.

Give me KDJ who has to remind himself not to brush the kids off when they come over to hug him.

Give me KDJ whose personal bubble is so huge and subconsciously apparent it may as well serve as another wall.

Give me KDJ who apologizes for shying away from friendly and platonic gestures, and is visibly uncomfortable trying to act 'normal' about physical touch.

Give me KDJ who hates himself for not liking hugs, or hand holding, or even shoulders touching sitting next to his loved ones because this part of him makes his companions apologize to him for the action of loving him. And he asks himself, 'why can't I even do this right'?

orv bookmark draws, pt. 2! chps 207, 297, 371

Kim Dokja wins first prize for [Character I Simultaneously Want to Strangle but Also Relate to at the Same Time], congratulations sir.

au where for whatever reason Dokja does choose Secretive Plotter as his constellation, only for the entire Star Stream to get an error message and crash for like an hour

I saw a poll where it shows most ORV Fans headcanon Dokja and Sangah as platonic friends only and that's good and all. You do you. But I suggest taking out your platonic posts outside of the Doksang ship name tag if you do not mean to ship them romantically.

Ship names always mean romantic in every fandom for decades including East Asian fandoms. If you talk about a couple being the best of friends under their ship name, you're not respecting fandom etiquette. This also makes it harder for shippers to find each other if the ship is a rare pair so it's just frustrating for all of us.

You don't want anti shippers to talk about your yaoi or yuri ships loving each other platonically under their ship tag, right? Don't do that for other shippers then. Some of us (me) like all Dokja ships as romantic and don't want to see any of those ships being called platonic right under their ship name.

If you want to talk about platonic dynamics, use "Character & Character" tag instead or just names like on ao3 to indicate no romance. (If you know how to use tumblr, you have to kmow how to use ao3)

on the topic of kim dokja canonically being an artist it would be so funny if he was actually quite famous because he's read more stuff than twsa but whenever he would post a yoo joonghyuk piece he always got comments like "oh is this your oc"

you should never kill yourself because there's always new orv meta to read. do you really want to miss that?

Honestly, Doksoo is my OTP in ORV. Like yes I am and always will be a multishipper that believes in polyamory and murders monogamy in its sleep. But I love Doksoo the best because I am both a writer and a reader. I get absolutely mad when other people assume the ship is liked for being "straight". Hell, no.

I love Doksoo because that's the writer/reader relationship of my dreams. I also wish I have a reader who comments on my every chapter for every detail that I write about, someone who supports and loves my stories. I also wish I can talk to authors in a way that makes them motivated to write even more, in a way that they listen to my headcanons and spoil me by writing about my OC. I also wish to become a writer that motivates another person to speak up for themself because I'm also a reader who wants to feel cared for when I'm reading a story even if I isolate myself away from the narrative because I don't do self-insert lmao sorry. 😅

I understand maybe more people like the protagonist more than the reader and the writer because, for one reason amongst others, they probably grew up shipping themselves with a character or just imagining themselves as part of the story. But I, as reader and a writer, just want to share stories with a special person in a way that we study the characters and create worlds out of our imagination. Dokja/Sooyoung are like this to me and if I want them married and in love like Singsong, the married couple who wrote ORV together, it's nothing about sexuality or gender. It's all about sharing stories/souls.

when orv makes enjoying it —> an integral part of the reader’s character

i really do love how trans the themes of orv are. orv really said you will have to face a loss of autonomy and control that is completely horrifying and people will try and push stories and roles that don't fit onto you in order to better catergorize you and you will grow up with this gigantic wall between the rest of you and humanity. and the only way to escape any of it is to partake in the art of creation and scribble over what was already written to begin writing your own story (your own self). which is only for you. and this is what being trans is like as well!

do you all see my vision here