COURSE: English 245: Writing Feeling
MEDIUM: Website, Graphic Essay
DESCRIPTION:
“Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint” is a Korean webnovel by SingShong that places the responsibility of imagining a happy ending on the readers. Fans have flocked to the anonymous community website The Fourth Wall to interact with each other, leave messages, and talk about how that ending has made them feel. This essay examines how the themes of the novel, the open ending, and the mode of the Fourth Wall allow a unique rhetorical ecology of hope to flourish. By being left on the Fourth Wall, the essay takes advantage of the anonymous text form and perpetuates the circulation of emotion.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT:
The popular consensus among fans is that finishing “Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint” is life changing, and sometimes life saving. With this project, I wanted to investigate why the ending is so impactful by looking at how fans write about their reaction, and how that ending influences the way they interact with each other.
When I first stumbled upon the Fourth Wall website, I was overwhelmed by the passion, vulnerability, comradery, and sheer quantity of the messages. Users could leave anything for someone else to read, and there is a fair amount of jokes and ASCII art, but many messages are confessions of depression, declarations of love to whoever might see it, and telling each other to keep holding on. In the novel, the Fourth Wall is a character and an obstacle to be overcome. The website named for it is a community and a labor of love.
I wrote this essay to understand the feelings of others as much as my own. I left it on the Fourth Wall so others can read it and hopefully understand their feelings as well.