Orv Spoilers - Blog Posts

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

if all 3 of them were in that train for eternity..

i think post-epilogue when kim dokja now has to for the first time in years exist without the fourth wall and for the first time in well over a decade has to move through life without the metaphorical fourth wall of twsa he has a lot of trouble regulating his emotions. han sooyoung makes a stupid joke and he starts laughing until he can't breathe. the kids buy him worlds best dad mugs and he bursts into tears and can't stop. he reads a book with a stupid ending and has to go for a walk around the neighbourhood so he doesn't punch a wall. stuff like that as kim dokja relearns how to experience the world firsthand

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