Webtoon Spotlight

Spotlight#90: John from Unordinary: Victim or Villain?

Across my nearly four years of webtoon, I've experienced many different protagonists. And if you've already seen my favorite webtoon protagonists, then you'd probably expect me to talk about this guy eventually. But, unfortunately, John Doe from Unordinary has been a character with a very divisive fanbase.

From troubled tyrant to kind-hearted cripple to reckless relapsed renegade to introspective individual, John has gone through more character derailment and development in these past five years than most protagonists do in double that time. And with his character being in an exciting crossroads now but his sins still very much fresh, I've seen both a lot of shit and a lot of praise on John's character.

So I've decided that I'm going to shine a light on every nook and cranny of John's shattered open personas. From his spiral of abuse, I'm going to personally decide if John truly deserves the moniker of victim or villain for all he's done.

Note

So before I begin, it's pretty apparent this will contain a hell of a lot of spoilers, so I highly recommend being caught up to at least issue number 241. Also, this will pretty much be a massive recap on his various stages of character development, mostly lifted from the Unordinary Wiki since I think they did a great job of separating these stages.

Finally, this spotlight isn't to change your mind. If you think that John is a victim, villain, both, or neither is a choice you're going to have to make. I'm just tired of having people ignore so much context and set up to only consider John, some simple psycho that has no leg altogether to stand on. This is mainly an add-on to the conversation rather than an ultimatum. But before we get it all, that might as well show off another vital aspect of John's character.

Design

First up, let's get the most giant elephant in the room out first. Out of all the characters in Unordinary, John's family is the only one with a full last name: John Doe. Which fits pretty well since a John Doe is an unidentified body or a name that intentionally gets hidden in real life could mean two things.

This could highlight how John himself is a bit of an enigma to most people in the first half of the story and made subtly to excite his mystery. This could also mean that John Doe gets made to represent a normal person in the crowd, which the world of Unordinary would consider a cripple. But, course, this is just my take.

Upon further notice, I feel like not enough people give credit to Uru chan's amazing character design for John. Throughout the series, most of the characters in Unordinary have displayed the common trait of different colored hair and word bubbles to represent the glowing aura that usually comes with their ability.

Uru Chan deliberately uses these rules to flip the script when it comes to John intentionally. At the start of the series, John is featured with a rather gelled-up hairstyle combined with white word bubbles. These get made again to highlight John's faux persona and adamant hatred of his ability. He tries to "reflect" any chance of him using his ability, much like how white reflects all the light spectrum colors.

However, we know now that those white bubbles are just an act as we see his more ruffled up regular hair and black word bubbles as his true self and the color of his ability. This makes sense,  given that John can copy any other ability he sees with his signature ebony hue. This makes sense because if white is the color that reflects everything, black directly absorbs the color spectrum.