What’s possibly bad in seeking the vicarious satisfaction in fictions? But for how <The Gamer> develops, it does not look all good.

One day, Jihan Han obtains a power of ‘the Gamer’ and starts to enjoy the world with the power. End of the summary. The storyline is consisted of: the interjectory remarks of “isn’t that a cheat?” made by Jihan Han or other people, getting the pleasure of vicarious satisfaction from the money Jihan Han makes, and crushing villains’ odd philosophy with Jihan’s force and logic. And the process is made of stale description and directing.

That stale description and directing means wasting a lot of space explaining something of no interest. For example, in part 1, Jihan gets a skill and it shows the process of Jihan training the skill, outrageously repeatedly. Every skill is made sure to be followed by the interjection “it’s a cheat!”. Rinse and repeat the whole process every week. A webtoon should have a goal anyway, but it’s like constantly postponing the end of its life for a week with the training scenes.

I won’t say such an approach is bad because it aims at the vicarious satisfaction. It is also a good approach to concentrate on the story development for the reader’s amusement, not sticking to certain philosophy or a message to deliver. However, the approach <The Gamer> takes is inclined more to the author’s vicarious satisfaction. There should be something remaining the reader can emphasize, but in here there’s no such thing.

Especially the developing process is like that. To explain the skill the protagonist obtained verbosely all the time or to explain the setting arranged in the work at great length hamper the empathy of the readers to the extreme. It only contributed to the separation of the protagonist and the readers. In a work of vicarious satisfaction, the reader should be able to identify with the protagonist, but no one wants to identify themselves with such a talkative protagonist. Rather, it looks like the author is bragging to the readers about the author’s child. “My kid is such a cheater!” If it’s the case, the only answer from the readers should be “it’s a cheat!”

Too much explanation in the work thoroughly separated the reader from the work. It places the reader in the position of an extra, who only gives reaction to the protagonist. As works of vicarious satisfaction have a shallow footing, they are likely to be the target of sharp criticisms. Before doing anything else, it had to thoroughly inject the fact only that this work is amusing, to prevent unwanted attention toward its weaknesses, but thanks to the excessive self-bragging, it missed the chance. Now it passed through part 3. Maybe there’s still a chance. I hope it to be a better one.