Seeing long footnotes by the Webtoon’s fan translator and reading Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint metas using Jungian theories just make me feel appreciative how nerdy Sing-Shong are as well as somewhat disappointed about how underrated ORV is as a giant story about stories, y’know. Do you have a list of literary, historical or mythological references and themes in Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint that you like or want to talk about?
My dear anon, you are just one step away from the realization… that all media is capable of inviting Jungian analysis! Yes! Even someone’s guilty pleasure harem anime may, in fact, embody the ancient literary concept of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, should one care to look for it… or so our beloved Han Sooyoung might say, at least. She said it best when she said that meaning is found by those who care to look for it.
But to be more serious. Yes, anon, in the process of writing ORV, Sing Shong have taken a lot of time and effort to embed a lot of interesting information! Whether it be puzzling over who certain unattributed modifiers belong to, or wondering if maybe, just maybe, Aileen Makerfield’s shop Etika is actually a stealth reference to Spinoza, or so on. Remember early on in the novel, where it said `”Now Yoo Joonghyuk’s face was as difficult as a philosophy book with no commentary written.” Someone among Sing or Shong just bombed their epistemology midterm, I fear. It’s very lovely to see how these two combed through books and essays and, it has to be said, online wiki articles, to flesh out their novel’s world and internal philosophy. For a book like ORV, the authors must be ones who find beauty in the nature of a story, in many different ways. Just as charming as their literary and mythological deep cuts to me is Kim Dokja critically surveying common webnovel tropes and tags during the Journey to the West scenario. This is his truest scholarship, after all….
A list… a list… it would be quite long… the surface level notes are often my favorites. Of course, I think everyone should give Mourning Diary by Barthes a read, just as Han Sooyoung suggests. Extrapolating from there, one could find a great deal of meaning in Derrida’s “The Death of Roland Barthes”, responding both to Barthes’ seminal work “The Death of the Author” (which, as of side story, has *also* been namedropped) and Barthes’ own, untimely death (heh).
I enjoy that Sing Shong had Han Sooyoung reference the people’s poet Kim Sooyoung with her parody of ‘Grass’, and how cutely they placed it during KimCom’s workers’ strike. I wonder over why they chose Ah Q and Solzhenitsyn to name Fei Hu’s and Iris’ factions (no, really, why did Iris name her squad after Solzhenitsyn? I thought she liked communism?? Girl, your politics). Did you know that Lee Sookyung’s own group wasn’t called New Wave, but rather Nouvelle Vague? The French art and film movement specifically? Can you imagine? Lee Sookyung? French??? I’m in love with her.
One could draw a line between the entity of a constellation in ORV to Walter Benjamin’s theoretical ‘constellation’, in that, as constellations are ways to organize or to imbue meaning on an existing physical object (the stars in the skies) so are ideas (thought, philosophy, etc) constructed through people drawing relationships between objects…. And it would be appropriate, since Benjamin also believed that real enrichment came through reading the most exalted and elevated products of a culture alongside its most common and commercial… coming back to my original point that what I find really lovely about ORV is its commitment to holding these two seemingly polemically different forms of media and going “they live hand in hand with each other”.
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