☆⋆ﾟAnonﾟ⋆☆

Teens orufrey 🥰

And Olly's goatee origin story:

there's something deeply fascinating to me about the implications of ORV being both the 'real' text that exists in our physical world and the diegetic text that han sooyung writes inside the text to save kim dokja.

like: obviously sing-song wants us to like her main character, kim dokja, and so writes him accordingly. he's the world's wettest and coolest little meow-meow. but han sooyung needs us to love kim dokja; she writes her diegetic version of ORV intentionally so it would be kim dokja's finest hour, so he's as lovable and as tragic and as relatable as possible. it's a text that practically turns itself inside out to embrace kim dokja; and despite the fact that it puts him through the wringer, it's absolutely full (outside of kim dokja's clinically-unable-to-accept-or-recognize-affection point of view) of tenderness and care for him. people, when they're not trying to kill him, love him, adore him, take care of him. he can't recognize it, but he has the full-on protagonist aura. he's the the universe's most special boy.

and meanwhile yoo joonghyuk, on whom kim dokja projects this idea of protagonist privilege, is also a part of the diegetic text, and, well. the text doesn't seem to love him. han sooyung loves him only inasmuch as he's kim dokja's honeypot when she's writing him. inside the third round, the only people to value him with at least a degree of that overwhelming tenderness that's usually wraps around kim dokja are lee jihye, yoo mia and namgung minyoung; the rounds add lee seolhwa, to the extent. he has loyalty of his companions, their respect but it doesn't seem that he gets their tenderness. 41st is a bitch; 999 quite literally pays with most of pieces of himself; 1864's is the world's most hated. 1865 is, even after the end, overwhelmingly lonely. his story teaches kim dokja survival and determination; it teaches kim dokja self-sacrifice; but it's asbsolutely unable to teach kim dokja anything about being loved, because yoo joonghyuk is the universe's unloved child. the only person that had ever loved him with the same absolute abandon is kim dokja.

and so in a sense their ending trajectory is moving in same but paradoxically opposite directions: kim dokja needs to accept himself as a character, the universe's most helpless and most powerful and most loved child. yoo joonghyuk needs to break out of being a character, of being somebody created for a purpose by a ruthlessly practical author. and han sooyung, i guess, needs to rest and write a story that has nothing to do with either of them. and yet they're all still so hopelessly entangled in each other, the orouboros of writer-reader-character; and there's nothing solved by the end, nothing but a semicolon in the middle of the sentence.

this is not to say that there's no potential for human connection for yoo joonghyuk in 3/1865, but as of the ending, it's more of a potential than a realized thing.

han sooyung and yoo joonghyuk do have their interesting separate relationship, except that it's built on being united in the face of really bitter mourning. or a really bad divorce. take kim dokja out of the equation, and where are they.

the absolute magnetic pull of needing to shower kim dokja in love and make him accept it as expressed in the majority of post-epilogue fics (including mine!) is a super interesting thing in-text, especially when taking in account that they're, technically, all part of the big canon simply by the virtue of existing.

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written