Feb 16, 2024
Okay. Here's the thing. I absolutely adore Omniscient Reader. The webnovel is easily beside my favourite novels/series like Les Miserables and Lord of the Rings. Seriously. The novel is just that good, and I honestly, wholeheartedly recommend reading the novel if you're someone who loves stories and great characters. There are a lot of impactful and heartbreaking moments in the book, and it moved me to tears both while reading it and thinking about it. So yeah. I love this novel. But then why did I only rate the webtoon a 7?
The thing is that Omniscient Reader is a story told from an unreliable point
...
of view---throughout the story, Kim Dokja is constantly misleading the reader, hiding things from you, and thus you rely on the other characters who are more concise and clear with intent (Yoo Joonghyuk, Han Sooyoung) to fill you in on what he may have left out of the narration. Kim Dokja does not like conveying his emotions, he wants to *appear* like a calm and level headed leader who totally knows the best course of action, but the narration of other characters, the fourth wall, and even his own views on himself betray this. It shows you just how lonely he is and how lowly he views himself, and why he has no value for his own life, and why he is willing to throw away his life for his companions (because they are his everything). The point of view changes in this novel can let you into how the others view the world, and how Kim Dokja actually felt during a certain moment. On top of this, it lets you know what other characters might have been during between periods of time (ex. When YJH threw KDJ into the Han River during the itho-im not spelling that-saur scenario, he actually came back to the bridge and waited for him for 3 days). The webtoon chooses to focus almost entirely on Kim Dokja, and the effect of an unreliable narrator loses all of it's meaning when you can see the action rather than having to trust Kim Dokja to accurately describe what is happening. I think that the loss of the unreliable aspect of the novel, combined with the fact that you don't really read all of his thoughts, I can get why people don't think his motivations make sense, because his motivations lie within his constant commentary, and the rumblings of the fourth wall or the viewpoint of another character help further your knowledge of his character. As a result, I think his webtoon counterpart lacks depth that his original webnovel self had. Removing the context of Kim Dokja's thought process and ramblings, it makes webtoon Kim Dokja come off as flat sometimes (not all of the time, but definitely certain moments where he had plenty of internal dialogue reduced to a few sentences).
I also feel like the reader loving the story metaphor is lost in other forms of media, and that is why I fear the release of the movie to be honest...with the webtoon, those elements are completely removed since you can't hear all of Kim Dokja's thoughts and the thoughts of other characters, and I feel as if it focuses entirely on the action instead. Also, the addition of new characters (like that one dude from the peace land arc, whom I cannot recall the name of. in the novel it was just Asuka Ren, which ties in to the theme of authors and readers loving the stories that they make, and the peaceland arc was way longer now that I think of it) is something that I believe to be unnecessary.
The art is amazing, beautiful colours and clean lineart, and some panels are so beautiful I'd frame them if I could tbh...
But other than that, as a reader of the novel and the first person to sing it's praises to the highest point in the Alps, I think that the original meaning and overall emotional impact of the novel is lost in the webtoon because of the lack of external narration and because Kim Dokja is no longer an unreliable narrator. Thanks for sticking around!
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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