Omniscient reader’s viewpoint is a book about being in a book. It has five hundred and fifty-one chapters currently translated into English. Omniscient reader’s viewpoint is written by a Korean duo under the pen name Sing Shong. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic world where creatures known as Dokkaebi stream the suffering of the people for gods or important historical figures, who are called constellations, for entertainment. Everything in this world is controlled by the will of the star stream.

 An office worker who likes to read is on a subway reading the epilogue of his favorite novel, three ways to survive in a ruined world, when a Dokkaebi appears and announces a ‘scenario’ where you have to kill a lifeform to survive. The office worker ‘Kim Dokja’ realises that they are in the novel that he was just reading. Dokja is the only person who knows the end of the world because he was the only reader who read to the end. Being the only reader who has seen its end Dokja wants to change the ending because of what it was like. To my knowledge we as the readers don’t know what the original ending was but we can assume that it wasn’t without sacrifice because Dokja wants to see a world where all of his companions live to see the end without any sacrifice. Dokja monologues about this throughout the novel, saying that a world without sacrifice doesn’t exist amongst other statements. Dokja acquires a pdf version of the novel during the first scenario as well as the skill ‘omniscient reader’s viewpoint’ which comes free with the fourth wall who protects him.

The story does well to explore its main themes, one of them being, everything is your own perspective/ viewpoint. The story has more themes but this one stuck out to me the most because it’s not the first you would think of. Omniscient reader’s viewpoint is told from the viewpoint of Kim Dokja. We only see Dokja’s perspective on people but as he learns more and gets a broader perspective we can see more of the characters. For example, he saw the protagonist in a one dimensional ‘I know him the best’ way but then learns that Yoo Joonghyuk, the novel’s protagonist, has his own story, one that he doesn’t know. Dokja constantly thinks that he knows the characters he’s grown up with the best, but he fails to understand some of the basic things about them. The more Dokja learns about each character he learns that there is more to them than just what they show through their actions/words. With characters he can’t understand he starts to understand them more through their stories, one of the other main themes of this novel. Dokja’s skill ‘omniscient readers viewpoint stage 3’ lets him see the characters’ perspective which gives him insight and some of the time confuses him. There are times when we see characters contradict what Dokja has described them as because of something he changed or doesn’t understand about them. I think this is cool because it shows that the characters’ experiences make up their personality and everyone has different perspectives.

Most of the main characters have their own character arc that are relevant to the plot. Dokja goes from being a weak kid who had to rely on books to survive to a person who becomes the story for the rest of the world to survive. All characters have their moments, and they wouldn’t have reached the end of scenarios with any of them missing. The beginning focuses on the characters’ dynamic and introduces most of the main cast and their abilities. The Characters start off basic but gradually become something more as you read, Dokja start to understand them more and think of them as more than characters. By the end of the story, they become ‘real people’ and they aren’t described as characters.

Orv has a slow start then speeds up after the 130th chapter. You can see the main difference when Dokja becomes a constellation, as they start breezing through most of the scenarios. The change in pacing is hard to get used to after the 10th scenario as they skip over the non relevant main scenarios. The pacing had to get faster in order for the story to stay interesting, otherwise it would take way over 500 chapters. But most of the mid-late chapters felt rushed as the fights went by quickly.

The story itself is kind of repetitive as Dokja has one way to solve any of his issues, self sacrifice. Dokja and the main cast have to clear scenarios but the way they end up clearing them is repetitive as the main focus isn’t the scenarios themselves but the outer beings and the star steam. They usually fight and defeat the enemies before another stronger enemy shows up, which they have no chance of defeating. They beat the stronger enemies through one of two ways; one being Dokja kills himself to stop the greater force, or second, they team up together and defeat them with Yoo Joonghyuk’s power. An example of this is when an Outer god in the Murim land shows up and they could hardly beat it even with help of multiple constellations, but when the same Outer god showed up in the 73rd demon realm, with more power, Dokja was able to beat it with the help of another worldline’s Yoo Joonghyuk. The authors make up for the repetitive nature of some story arcs by making them slowly add up to the larger story. The Outer god in the 73rd demon realm wasn’t much of a fight because Dokja used the Outer god to make a deal and progress the story.

The story is very complex and explores its themes pretty well and has realistic characters. One thing I didn’t review was the world building, but it was also well done and highly immersive. I would recommend this novel to anybody who likes complex stories, time loops, the action-fantasy genre, history, mythology, and anybody who likes reading to escape reality.