Reductio ad Absurdum—Omniscient Reader

Lee Min-ho (center) as Yoo Joonghyuk in Omniscient Reader: The Prophet. (All accompanying photos are stills from the movie's trailer.)

No film adaptation can replicate a story entirely, and some tradeoffs have to be made. Adaptation screenwriters need to seek out what they believe to be the core themes and plotline of the story and find a way to mesh them with cinematic grammar, maybe sprinkling in some Easter eggs if they can. But what if that story is really freaking long and has multiple core themes? What if it’s currently being serialized into another medium so successfully that the latter is considered equally as canonical as the original?

Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy (Jeonjijeong dokja sijeom / 2025, aka Omniscient Reader: The Prophet) is based on the best-selling Korean serialized webnovel of all time, Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint (2018–2020), by the married duo singNsong. The main story has 551 chapters (you read that right), with a handful of one-shot side stories and an ongoing sequel which, as of this writing, has added another 358 chapters. The main story was later revised and released on paper in 20 volumes. Charles Dickens could never. ORV is also currently being adapted into what’s called a webtoon, basically a manga that imitates the scroll of a website rather than the turning of pages.

Before I get to the summary in a second, I’d like you to sit with the sheer impossibility, even enormity, of the idea that the main story could be adapted into just five conventional-length feature films. Heck, even The Hobbit took three.

Then there’s the complication that the story is a semi-metafictional science fantasy, with all the worldbuilding complexity that entails. Kim Dokja (idol Ahn Hyo-seop), whose name means “only child” and is a homophone for “reader,” is a mediocre wage slave with a traumatic childhood. His only consolation is his favorite serialized webnovel, Three Ways to Survive the Apocalypse (or TWSA), which he started reading in middle school, about a Korean professional gamer named Yoo Joonghyuk (idol Lee Min-ho) whose world turns into a science fantasy role-playing game in which dokkaebis (Korean goblins, which actually look more like gremlins, create “scenarios” and force people to take part. (I’ll be using the romanizations and terms from the widespread fan translation of the webnovel, which may be different from the officially translated webtoon and published English novel, both of which are still being released.) Think Squid Game (2021–2025), but cooler. Due to its complex worldbuilding, excruciating detail, convoluted plot, and extreme length, the number of readers quickly dwindled, until after chapter 100 only Kim Dokja (I’ll call him KDJ for short was left to finish all 3,149.

On this day, he finishes the final chapter on the subway home, when he receives a message from the author thanking him for his support, and notifying him that the upcoming epilogue will be paywalled. Suddenly, the subway grinds to a halt, and a familiar figure appears hovering midair to announce that, henceforth, humans will have to earn their keep to stay alive. A screen appears announcing the first main scenario. KDJ is stricken by déjà vu: this is exactly how TWSA begins, subway and everything.

Ahn Hyo-seop as Kim Dokja.

As KDJ comes to grips with the situation and plans his next moves, he realizes a few things. His personal skill in this “game” is that he can see the attributes (or in-game details) of people who were characters in TWSA, but not those of others, including his own, even though he has them. His physical strength and other stats no longer matter, as he can raise them using coins earned from completing scenarios. And the world might now be game-based, but the deaths are very real.

He also discovers that TWSA’s author has sent him a copy of the novel and scrubbed the original from the internet. He’s an omniscient reader – as long as the story follows the original plot, that is. Thus, the existence and actions of KDJ himself limit his foreknowledge.

One might think that the best way to survive is to stick close to TWSA’s protagonist, but the reason TWSA is so long is that YJH’s “stigma” (or special skill) is “regression”: when he dies, he can just start over while retaining his memories. Not true for KDJ. To make matters worse, at the start of TWSA, YJH is on his third regression, which means that he’s already tried three different strategies and failed all of them. Now, he has no fucks left to give and will eliminate even the slightest hint of any potential obstacle with extreme prejudice. He also periodically suffers from “regression depression,” the melancholy of realizing that he has to redo everything all over again, again.

The dokkaebis aren’t doing this (just) for fun; they livestream the scenarios for the entertainment of “constellations,” higher-level beings such as historical figures, mythological deities, and players (or “incarnations”) whose actions have created five narrative arcs (or “stories”), usually by accomplishing great achievements. Constellations can contract with an incarnation to sponsor and support them by spending coins (think The Hunger Games now, except without the messiness of having to airdrop things), as well as granting them a stigma, and the dokkaebis take a middleman’s cut. Constellations can also possess their incarnation directly (hence the term “incarnation”), but only in times of great need, for as in any good game, fairness must be preserved: incarnations who do too well using such extraneous means are deemed to be cheating by “using up” too much probability and are physically punished by something akin to electrocution. The whole universe, not just Earth, is one big Star Stream.

A brief digression on the ending. Technically it has very little to do with the film under review, even though one significant character should have already appeared by the point the film ends. However, for reasons I’ll get to below we don’t even know if the film series will continue, so I’m going to talk about this while I still can. Besides, it’s the coolest part of the story.

It turns out that KDJ isn’t the only reader of TWSA to appear; those who have read the early chapters start causing havoc, trying to wield their limited knowledge to their advantage. They call themselves prophets and are led by Han Sooyoung (HSY), the young lady who stopped reading at chapter 99 and plagiarized the parts she did read, to great commercial success. (This is particularly funny for habitual readers of Korean webnovels, as apparently the main elements of regression and the world becoming a roleplaying videogame are genre clichés, or at least became so after ORV started serialization; only serialization can respond to developments in real time like this.) By the last chapter, it’s discovered that TWSA was written for the middle-school KDJ to protect him from his traumatic circumstances and prevent him from another suicide attempt. But who’s the author? To find out, in the epilogue (a version of) HSY works with the Dokkaebi King to do what amounts to parallel-world time traveling, going back to visit KDJ just before TWSA’s serialization. When she witnesses his suicide attempt and the webnovel still doesn’t appear, she realizes that she herself has to write it, kind of like the climax of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. But as this “worldline” already has a young HSY, she can only control her younger body in the dead of night, becoming a passenger during the day. While she writes TWSA at night, her younger self reads and plagiarizes the manuscript during the day. In other words, the plagiarist and the “author” of a bootstrap object are technically the same person without knowing it. Talk about multiple personalities! (HSY’s stigma is cloning herself by giving each clone part of her memories.) The cost of bringing HSY to the First Worldline is that, as soon as she finishes the story, the Dokkaebi King brings it to life, taking us full circle back to the beginning of ORV.

Anyway, the bulk of ORV follows how KDJ uses his reader’s knowledge to find new and entertaining ways to complete scenarios without letting anyone important to him die; when someone does have to die, KDJ (ironically for someone who was a suicide) sacrifices himself, but not before first acquiring an extra life or eight. As befits such a lengthy serialized narrative, there’s a lot of internal monologue filler, and the plot itself is rather picaresque, traversing various locations (such as the Greek underworld and the world of 1939’s The Wizard of Oz) that conveniently allow KDJ et al. to skip whole swathes of the 99 main scenarios. At one point, KDJ’s party take part in a Journey to the West remake competition, with points granted for authenticity but also originality, so that some teams come up with creative adaptations, such as changing the protagonist to Zhu Bajie, or even to Tang Sanzang’s horse. KDJ’s party, unsurprisingly, makes Sun Wukong a regressor who coasts by on his knowledge of past regressions, but in the event, the role of the regressor Monkey King is played by KDJ himself, unbeknownst to his party (it’s a long story, literally). We thus get an adaptation of ORV, which is itself an adaptation of TWSA. (By the way, the webnovel’s sequel is about how a character who plays an “author” role similar to HSY’s finds himself in the world of ORV, adding yet another layer of adaptation complexity; it’s additionally about authorial control and how a story and its characters can seem to have a life of their own, as the new character and HSY both experience “their” respective novels as being “written” by their unconscious.)

There’s also an important bit involving fragments of a wall, but it’s way too complicated to summarize here.

Digression within a digression: there’s a meme, commonly applied to House (2004–2012), in which someone will post a clip or series of images from a show with no context and add a comment to the effect of “Bruh, what is this show even about?!” It works best with long-running shows because each later episode has so much context built into it that doesn’t need to be rehashed. So of course it applies especially well to a story like ORV, as you can see from this six-minute recap that is 100% accurate (even the parts you may think are jokes, granting some humorously creative interpretations) yet makes no sense whatsoever until you actually read up to each part.

Phew!

Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, even from this bare-bones summary, we can see multiple important themes: capitalism reducing the working stiff to his labor value, the lasting effects of childhood trauma, the power of literature to soothe and empower, gaming culture, the curse of immortality (regression depression), streaming culture and the content mill, and time travel. (The story comes up with a novel resolution to paradoxes called the Disconnected Film Theory, according to which different timelines can be joined together like film in an editing bay with no problem, but if the person or thing so joined together is killed or destroyed, it’s like burning the film, and the whole thing disappears, Also plagiarism and authenticity, the unconscious (HSY’s self-possession), self-fulfilling prophecies, the costs of self-sacrifice on those who care about you (KDJ’s party is traumatized every time), and the pleasures and perils of (creative) adaptations.

How in the world does one turn this into a feature film series?

The only way is to cut and condense. Fortunately for screenwriters Kim Byung-woo (who also directed) and Lee Jeong-min, there’s already a webtoon, which they seem to have used as their main visual reference: some scenes have a similar color palette, and one shot is reproduced wholesale. The film also takes inspiration from the webtoon for what I’ll call in-shot transitions: just as the webtoon’s vertical scrolling format makes it possible to do fun things with time, such as creating an image that moves forward in time as one scrolls down (see below for an example from webtoon episode 142, which is, again, beyond the scope of the film under review), some shot compositions in the film contain different narrative times in the same image, so that the background is a memory while the foreground is in the present, or the time shifts from past to present as the camera cranes up. (Jeon Hye-jin is the cinematographer.) This is most often used when linking KDJ’s present thoughts and emotions to his past trauma, and it gets the point across beautifully.

The webtoon is also less dense textually, which must have felt like a seal of approval for the more extensive cutting that the screenwriters had to do. To be clear, the relation between webnovel and webtoon isn’t so simple. The webnovel came first, but many readers only switch to the webnovel once they finish the latest webtoon episode. This dual canonicity can lead to indeterminacy, such as how the film’s Lee Gilyoung is played by the elementary school student Kwon Eun-seong in accordance with the webnovel, whereas his webtoon appearance is more like that of a young teenager.

These differences are trivial, however, compared to the liberties the film takes. (I’ll use the term “the original” for elements that the webnovel and webtoon have in common.) Some changes are so drastic that the fans are generally up in arms, going so far as to refuse to recognize the film as an adaptation of ORV at all and to try to prevent the sequels from being made. Given the complexity of the worldbuilding, the screenwriters had to zero in on just one or two themes to make the film cohere, and the main theme they settled on was the necessity of solidarity under an oppressive system. The belligerent YJH is simplified to represent the stereotypical lone wolf (wolves in real life always run in packs), and his initial distrust of KDJ, entirely justified given the latter’s unique existence, gets spun into making KDJ represent the necessity of teamwork, which he learns from being bullied as a student into fighting another victim; this trauma replaces the more layered one in the original related to not just bullying but also domestic violence and commodification of victimhood (in the form of a memoir – a narrative). As “solidarity against oppression” is essentially a Manichean Marxist critique, it leads to flat characterizations: they either understand the need for teamwork or have to be shown by KDJ that their inclination to go it alone is false consciousness. Other traumas are modified or simplified as well: the soldier Lee Hyunsung (idol Shin Seung-ho; are you seeing a pattern?), who in the original has an abstract trauma related to needing a life with clear guidelines, here has the more concrete trauma of accidentally killing a comrade during training, which we see in what is in fact a deeply tragic flashback. The traumatic flashbacks here are all quite tragic, an idea that is underscored by all those strings in Mowg’s excellent score.

Shin Seung-ho as Lee Hyunsung.

These changes work in the context of the film, but what the fans are in an uproar about is how the new versions will play out as the story moves forward. To an extent, they have a point. What happens when more characters appear who were YJH’s party members in past regressions, KDJ’s mother becomes a major character, and we reach the narrative arc about LHS having to figure his life out? After simplifying the worldbuilding by keeping the constellations mysteriously in the background, how will the film handle future moments when they become significant characters not just through their incarnations but in their own right? Then there’s the uncertain English title. The Korean title is just Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint; the English follows the webtoon in calling it Omniscient Reader, but then adds a nonsensical title, in some marketing materials The Prophecy (but there is none), in others The Prophet (but KDJ isn’t one, not really). What will they subtitle the sequel in which we get to the Moirai, the Fates of Greek mythology, who announce the ineluctable prophecy of KDJ’s death? What to call the very next film, when HSY and her reader-prophets appear, or a later sequel that reveals Anna Croft, the only actual prophet? The film also removes KDJ’s ability to read others’ stats, and gives to YJH a version of KDJ’s ability to observe others while he’s unconscious. This adaptation cuts so much that the reader isn’t even omniscient. The fear is that the future films will have increasingly little to do with ORV as the fans know and love it.

But here’s the thing: as someone who has finished the webnovel, one-shot side stories, and all current webtoon episodes and translated sequel chapters, I loved this film. So many minor changes make the proceedings visually more appealing, or sometimes just more coherent. While fight scenes in the webtoon emphasize sword energy often to the point of incomprehension (as above), the ones in the film are easy to follow thanks to the camera’s focus on the spatial relations between the characters, and its frequent use of video-game angles like the side-scroll or the behind-the-head Snorricam shot. (In a Snorricam shot, the actor stays till while the world moves around them.) There’s even a bravura moment that echoes the shot from Contact (1997) where the camera seamlessly enters a mirror, albeit executed digitally. Movement, which can only be hinted at in the webtoon, is presented intuitively, such as YJH’s weapon selection system: a rotating selection system that appears beside him and materializes whatever weapon he puts his hand on. And the one thing the film absolutely gets right is that whenever KDJ once again starts talking himself out of a pickle, his signature scheming smirk unfurls across his face.

Yet as you can see, my appreciation is built atop familiarity with the original. That puts me in the tiny sliver of the population that is neither (1) too attached to the original to handle major changes, nor (2) unfamiliar enough with ORV that the film’s worldbuilding is too confusing. Despite my enjoyment, I must concede that making the dozens of viewers in my position the target audience can hardly be called a sound adaptation strategy.

– CJ Sheu has a PhD in contemporary American fiction from National Taiwan Normal University, in Taipei. He also writes about films and film reviews on the side, and has been published in Bright Wall/Dark Room and Funscreen (Taiwan). Check out his blog reviewfilmreview.wordpress.com/about, or hit him up on X/Twitter @cj_sheu.