Toon-Up: Omniscient Reader Viewpoint

“Never use omniscient reader viewpoint. Never. Don’t do it.”

That’s one of the first commandments a budding fiction writer gets handed. And unlike most other ‘YOU MUST NEVER DO THIS’ rules of writing, this one’s actually worth listening to.

Third-person limited is easy. First-person isn’t that hard either, just more personal. Second-person? That’s the one where the writer is addressing the reader directly, and saying ‘you’ all the time. It’s weird—tricky to write and even trickier to pull off.  It was a favorite gimmick of old radio dramas from the 1930s and '40s, and it had a minor revival in the early ’80s text games: “You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.”

But omniscient viewpoint? The god’s-eye POV? That style quietly went out with Tolstoy. It’s archaic—an artifact from the 18th and 19th centuries. You can get away with it in a prologue, where you’re holding the reader’s hand and dragging them through the misty front gates of your world, but even then, it's a gamble.

It shows up a little more often in comic books, where the narrator is helping set the scene for each panel. Webtoons too, especially the ones leaning into meta-commentary or fourth-wall flirting.

And if you’re writing a meta-webtoon with omniscient reader viewpoint?

Then you’re probably Sing Shong. And you’ve got a monster hit on your hands.

It was originally published as a web novel on the Korean website Munpia.  It’s currently in production as a webtoon.  While the novel is completed the webtoon may be in production until 2030.  Omniscient Reader Viewpoint (ORV) is huge at a half billion views worldwide. It’s probably earning Sing Shong an estimated $15 million a year. This is after Webtoon’s nearly criminal 70/30 split.

The pitch meeting went like this: 

Writer: Think Groundhog’s Day that starts on the morning of the Apocalypse!

Producer: Wow. Wow. Wow… W-O-W.

Writer: I know right? You see this guy named Yoo Joonghyuk on a commuter train, and he knows the end of the world is about to kick off because he’s been through it before…

Producer: So, I’m in the story too? AMAZING!!!!!! 

Writer: What?

Producer: You said I see him! That’s fire! That’s so FIRE! What do I do next? I’ve never been so wrapped up in a pitch meeting!  This thing is already greenlit!!! Tell me, what do I do?  It’s a Groundhog’s Day device, so I already know what Yoo Joonghyuk is going to do next, right?  What’s my next move!?

Writer (pauses to collect his thoughts): You know, we may actually have something here.

The protagonist of ORV (Kim Dokja) has been reading a web novel for years called Three Ways to Survive the Apocalypse, it follows the adventures of Yoo Joonghyuk as he is repeatedly regressed to the start of the end of the world. Then to his horror, Dokja finds himself thrust into Yoo Joonghyuk's story.  Dokja knows everything that’s about to happen because he’s read the story and so does Yoo Joonghyuk because for him it’s Groundhog's Day. But Dokja is a new and frightening thing for Joonghyuk because nothing is ever new for him. And if it’s frightening, he should probably kill it. 

The rest of the cast is extremely Korean.  They are everyday office workers, a soldier, a bullying boss, a love interest that doesn’t go anywhere among others.

The story kicks off in the middle of a morning commute. The world comes crashing to an end when god-like aliens who care about as much for humanity as Cthulu, decide to make Earth their MMORPG.  So yes, this is indeed another RPG-lit/Progression Fantasy story, albeit one where two of the characters know the cheat codes.

Dokja’s name follows the Korean Webtoon tradition of having a double meaning that doesn’t work at all in English. ‘Dokja’ means both ‘reader’ and ‘alone,’ which he is. At least at first.  

The first quest from the Constellations is simple. Kill. Or be killed. Dokja manages to salvage a few people’s lives in train car, he got them through it without making them murderers. They become his party and after a while, his found family. 

Again, I’m having talk about stuff as being ‘meta-contextual’ but it’s completely unavoidable here. Everyone in this book is either a reader a character and frequently, both. This is about deeply reading a story. Dokja survives not just because he comprehends the meaning of words, but because he truly understands what the story is.  However, he must break it if he and his new family are to survive.

The original protagonist, Joonghyuk, has been called a weapon forged in pain and suffering.  His regressions give him the vast power of knowledge but it comes at a terrible price. He has had to watch the agony of others over and over.  Worse, he has had to kill the same people over and over. The closest thing to a moral code Joonghyuk has at this point is; survive.

Joonghyuk is damned to a wheel of fate that crushes him with every turn.  And Dokja is gradually freeing him from it. He’s Joonhyuk’s path to salvation.

ORV is so ambitious it really shouldn’t work.  Just the title alone is a huge up-raised middle finger to modern literary customs and culture. I’m here for it. The big key to this, is landing those big emotional notes. Dokja eventually has some moments that come down hard.  However, Joonhyuk’s path back to humanity is the really clever part because he’s still “technically” the protagonist of the story, at least so far as Dokja is concerned. 

The further you get into it the more you start to suspect that your Omniscient Viewpoint makes you the unreliable narrator. You have to read it before you understand that. I can’t help but admire the conceit, while you get to listen to Dokja’s insights, you are also getting a writer’s literary analysis of his own work. This writer has the nerve to not only break the fourth wall but tell you to your face why breaking it works for this story. You’d think the guy was a little full of himself for trying to get away with that… Except he went and did it.

Omniscient Reader Viewpoint has become absurdly huge.  The anime has been announced but it looks like the live-action version is going to beat it to the theaters. 

The real surprise is how long it takes you to notice that Omniscient Reader Viewpoint isn’t a deconstruction. That’s what the smarty smart smartass kids having been doing for years; break the toys, then tell the audience they aren’t bright enough to appreciate your brilliance. ORV doesn’t do that. It dissects but with reverence. It’s a love letter to both storytelling and story-reading. It’s earnest about its themes—about narrative itself as something worth sacrificing for, something capable of saving people. Dokja is a reader-turned-hero not because he’s "special," but because he cares enough to understand the story and love the characters in it. That’s the job of the reader, in the end. And if you save the world, that’s nice too.

Also, this thing is unapologetically Korean. And I don’t mean that in the surface-level “K-pop aesthetic” sense. The values, pacing, humor, and even the spiritual cosmology are deeply Korean in ways that make no attempt to translate cleanly into Western tastes. 

Good. 

The raw power of the storytelling carries it. ORV doesn’t try to meet the global audience halfway. It simply invites you to come along and catch up, and if you can keep up, you’re going to find something amazing waiting at the end of the train ride anyway.

So no—don’t use omniscient viewpoint in your novel. That rule is there for a reason. But if I can’t talk you out of breaking it, you sure as hell better be ready to break everything else, too. Structure, perspective, plot armor, and even the idea of who gets to tell the story.

ORV is stunning in its audacity. It would have been so easy to get it wrong and yet the author didn’t.

The Dark Herald Recommends with Enthusiasm (4.5 / 5)