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I can finally put all 8 animations I made together 💐

Tianlang-jun and Zhuzhi-lang enter battle ⚔️

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CW: suicidal ideation

age is a weird thing in this story because everyone ends up in their teens to 30s plus/minus four or five to a couple million years but nevertheless. there's a certain emphasis given to the ages of KDJ and YJH specifically that got me thinking about why that was.

Ways of Survival just so happens to end the year that Kim Dokja is 28, the same age that Yoo Joonghyuk is when he begins the scenarios. (To be clear, YJH has not lived 28 years at the start of WoS, but significantly more, since the story starts at his 3rd regression following 3 existing run-throughs, of which during at least 1 or 2 he trained for a 100 years in the time fault. Nevertheless the regressions always start by looping him back to a point in time where he is biologically 28.) Even if this wasn’t intentionally planned, it's a neat parallel that both of them are drawn into the scenarios at the same point in their lives.

KDJ's birthday is a few months before YJH's, and by virtue of that, one of the first things he tells YJH is to use polite speech on him because he's actually older than YJH. Makes sense, fair enough. It's notable that YJH is SHOOK by this statement because (a) why does this person know how old he is (b) the balls on him to tell him to use polite speech and (c) it's probably the first time in a long time that he's been confronted with the concept of his age at all, and being told that he's younger than some guy who probably hasn't repeated life 3 times or trained for a 100 years in the dark dimension has to feel jarring. Anyway. Later someone asks KDJ who exactly YJH is to him and he replies that he's like a frustrating yet endearing little brother (paraphrasing) who screws up a lot of things and causes trouble but you can't help caring about.

The thing is... as you read on you realise KDJ didn't always see YJH this way. In his teen years, he viewed YJH almost as a father figure (admittedly YJH is too young to be a father to a 15 year old, but if you consider the years of experience he has behind him, it's also more than possible?) Even as he grew older, it's evident that for much of his time spent reading WoS, KDJ looked up to YJH and saw him as a paternal/older brother figure - a protector, guide, guardian, someone to emulate and admire.

At some point, you can only imagine that this started to change. As KDJ grew older, he naturally matured and found himself able to look at YJH on the same level - even if YJH was gathering hundreds of years of experience in the meantime, he was still stuck in his tightly bounded recursive loop in a small fictional world, unable to grow past whatever his writing allowed him. And soon to KDJ, YJH was no longer the towering figure in the black coat to hide behind and unwaveringly respect; but something more like a friend - someone to cheer on, criticise, disagree with, empathise with and still become attached to. At some point, probably in the very last few months of serialisation or so, as KDJ approaches YJH's canon age and subconsciously realises he's not so different from this all-powerful protagonist as he thought he was: YJH becomes the naiive little brother who makes more mistakes and stupid decisions than he does good ones, who elicits more sympathy than admiration, and who goes from being the protector to one that needs to be protected.

It is also somewhere along this journey that KDJ's perception of YJH's sponsor and stigma changes. I might write a separate essay on this some day but I have a lot of thoughts about why "regression" was so important as the key ability of his favourite protagonist to 15 year old, suicidal Kim Dokja. I know it's a common trope in system webnovels but its framing in WoS is that of a character who, like his reader, fucks up and experiences tragedy and despairs and gives up, over and over again, except that his giving up turns out to be a drastic step forward, if not backward in time, and a hardened resolve to go through all of it all over again to achieve what he wants. it's a powerful inspiration to a kid that wanted to end his life and needed a reason to keep hanging on for another day. (When we find out about the Oldest Dream, it makes perfect sense why YJH's stigma is the way it is.)

Yet despite his younger self's overcoming of his own troubles through the regression of this character, the 28-year-old Kim Dokja thinks regression is cruel and hates YJH's sponsor (before he knows who it is) for putting him through the horrors over and over again instead of letting him rest. I'm still not quite sure what to make of it - whether the older Dokja is coming from a place of having made peace with his own life and wanting the same for YJH, or a place of growing tired of the endless monotony and the unending struggles he is still faced with, and wanting an excuse to give up on it himself as well. He approaches the epilogue, where we find out what would happen to a YJH that no longer needed to regress, with mixed emotions; he had no plan for what to do with himself after the story ended, either, and we learn from his conversation with Sangah that he might have even just decided to kill himself. Perfect timing for the real epilogue of both his and YJH's lives to start - the 1864th round - that gave both of them fresh motivation to finally see a happy ending at the end of it.

In conclusion, I like to think that the two of them aged together in some ways, even if one aged 13 years and the other several thousands. WoS begin with Kim Dokja, 15, in the shadow of his protector Yoo Joonghyuk, 28, both desperately fighting to live a little longer, full of motivation to save themselves and what they love; and ends with Kim Dokja, 28, fiercely protective of his naiive little brother, Yoo Joonghyuk, also 28, both worn down by the heaviness of life and looking for salvation or death; either way, an end to it all. Then ORV, the endnote to WoS, gives them an end that promises a happier end. And then they spend untold millennia chasing after that all over again.

And the act of constellations/outer gods giving their plausibility support willingly so that a certain character can create the story he wants is like they saying: Oh I WISH to see this version of his so much more than I care about how this story WAS USED TO BE TOLD.

So, the plausibility is a scale that tilts under the combined influence of storytelling convention, popular tropes at a certain point of time, and the power of readers’ WISH.

Come to think of it, this is how stories change and evolve in our world, too. How the authors took this rule of storytelling and made it into the foundation rule of the new world that was Star Stream just like gravity in our physical world was the first few things that made me fall in love with ORV.

During scenarios KDJ only dies to achieve something. To save someone, to fulfill a condition, or to outmaneuver the story. His death is the final move in a plan, it's the button he presses after exhausting every other option. It solves something because he made it solve something. People like to downplay those moments because they're reading it from the outside, but if you were actually in those situations, you'd probably make the same call (if you were clever enough to figure out how to get back, which is another thing people like to downplay about his character). KDJ also spends time preparing his companions for his absence when he knows it'll be the outcome of his plan. He makes sure they'll be okay without him.

YJH's deaths are different though. He doesn't die to fix a specific problem. He dies to escape, to try again because he couldn't make this round work, but he never learns because the trauma just keeps stacking. His deaths are an admission of failure, a way to abandon the timeline and all the people in it and start over. It doesn't solve anything. It just leaves everyone else to deal with the aftermath of him being gone, which is textbook suicidal behavior.

Super ironic that the guy the fandom made into the "he likes to die cuz why not lol" actually uses death as a controlled and meaningful tool, and the guy who genuinely treats his own life as disposable and has killed himself more times than anyone can count barely gets talked about in this aspect (because it's not as funny I guess?? or just because this fandom obviously doesn't like him as much??). Meanwhile the "sunfish" nickname is right there in the text, constantly and directly pointing back to YJH's self-destructive tendencies.

The fact that people miss that while making KDJ the dramatic suicidal one is impressively unimpressive.