By O F Cieri

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Y/N, a clinically written, formally correct debut novel by Esther Yi, is about an unnamed K-Pop fan whose obsession gradually spirals out of control.

Like Yi, who is a graduate student herself, Y/N’s protagonist is a foreign exchange student in a German graduate program who is bored by the pretensions of her peers. The graduate school setting doesn’t significantly affect the plot, but it briefly connects the protagonist to a group of cultural studies students who almost misappropriate her love for her pop star.

A graduate program might have provided an interesting context to further interrogate the similarity between fandom and scholarship, but this avenue reaches a dead-end during a scene set at a party with the protagonist’s hot/cold boyfriend Masterson and his friends, where Yi mocks their studies for sounding wordy and valueless.

For a novel rooted in fan culture, there’s little sense that Yi’s protagonist has much experience of modern music fans or their cultural context. For example, the title refers to a genre of English language Fan Fiction written in the second person without naming the narrative character. This conceit allows the reader to imagine that they are the central character in the stories they read (Y/N = Your/Name).

Y/N (or ‘reader insert’) fiction proliferates online, on sites such as Wattpad and Fanfiction.net – and some sources attest to it having originated as a genre on sites like Quizilla, as long ago as the early noughties. However, in Yi’s novel (and in other reviews of the book), it is made to seem like a new concept.

Fans discuss their pet pop group with all the heightened seriousness of religious doctrine. In one digression, a male character rhapsodizes on the importance of finding meaning in a world without God, imagining their little group of fans evolving into a new nation using the K-Pop boy band as the basis of their collective identity.

Y/N’s plot relies on weaponizing its protagonists’ disdain to push her towards an ultimately destructive conclusion. Some may think that such a finale would be impossible without such an emphatic schism between the narrator and their surroundings – but Idol Burning by Rin Usami shows a different approach to a similar plot. 

Published in 2022 (but only translated into English by Asa Yoneda this year), Idol Burning’s  main character, Akari, is a superfan of the lyricist and pop idol Masaki Ueno. As a Masaki ‘stan’ with a public blog and a network of online friends, Akari has to deal with both the social and emotional fallout which results from her idol punching another fan.

Akari decides to stand behind her oshi (her favorite), because she holds no delusions that she will ever be friends with him. In fact, part of Masaki’s hold over Akari is his public honesty about the reality of being a pop star with a one-way emotional connection with millions of people. This is a radical antithesis to Yi’s depiction of fandom as foundationally delusional.

In a radio interview, Masaki explains that he has been a show business asset since he was three months old. His first job was at the age of five, when he burst into tears after being separated from his mother. His adult co-star, in a giant bear suit, struck an Ultraman pose to make Masaki laugh. When the bear-suited man made the same gesture over and over again, five year-old Masaki realized that people react to his facial expressions and not his true emotions.

“I mean, I get letters, these kids saying, I’ve been your fan for however-many years, since I was this age, or telling me all about themselves, what’s going on in their life. And I appreciate it, I really do, it’s just– there’s a gap, you know?”

Idol Burning doesn’t explore the difference between obsession and inspiration to any great depth, but it does show how Akari’s devotion to Masaki serves as an emotional anchor. Through Masaki, she connects to like-minded people who worry about her absences and support her creative work – unlike her family who do nothing but criticize her. Akari is a poor student, but her one good school grade comes from studying Russian history to prepare to see a play Masaki performed in.

Akari is not a passive viewer of her oshi, but a participant in his career. She must make her own statement on his assault charge to her fellow fans in order to justify her continued social media presence. In the novel’s afterword, the author, Rin Usami, discusses how she was inspired by the way that cycles of hostility in internet discourse can affect even the most innocent, lukewarm opinion.

Through Akari, Usami shows how a fan can feel accountable for their idol’s actions. Social pressure is enhanced by the industry’s complicated incentive/reward system (the band’s record sales come with voting tokens to keep each idol in the public eye), designed to extract as much money from fans as possible by encouraging them to feel personally responsible for Masaki’s success.

After the assault, Masaki’s fans mobilize to buy as many CDs as possible to keep him in an elevated position. Akari has to juggle her failing high school career along with a part time job at a restaurant in order to pay for all the merchandise.

Akari describes how fans discuss fan merch among themselves in a blog post about the Voiceful ☆ Heartbeat Alarm Clock, which allows users to set an idol’s voice as their morning alarm:

“Ever since we saw the promo, people have been saying they’d have preferred something more understated – maybe a pen with a logo, or a pouch? Others have called it an idol merch triple threat – useless, embarrassing and expensive – but quite funnily enough, it seems like quite a few of us have gotten one anyway.”

Meanwhile, in Y/N, the protagonist’s idol speaks to his cell phone live stream as if he really is madly in love with his fans:

The pack of boys called their fans “livers” because we weren’t just “expensive handbags” they carried around. We kept them alive, like critical organs. I suspected they used the English word “liver” because it sounded like “lover”. They could be coy like that.

Y/N is based on the premise that each fan is a true believer of a pop act’s marketing department. Y’N’s protagonistworries about watching the livestream with her mouth open or shut, then admonishes herself for falling for the illusion of closeness the idol offers. In Idol Burning, Akari relishes her distance. She watches Masaki from a room strewn with trash, carefully studying each sip of soda he takes and mirroring him exactly. She projects herself through him.

While Y/N tries to apply a modernist analysis of celebrity culture as a new form of identity, Idol Burning takes a more contemporary approach by describing fan communities as communities, agreeing on, or arguing over their internal norms. Y/N seems uncomfortable with this dynamic, imagining K-Pop cosplay as a ritual, in which participants come together to act out their fantasies by using each other as proxies. These fantasy elements make a perverse kind of sense for Y/N as a surrealist novel which only maintains a three-act structure for its own internal momentum.

Girls Against God, a similarly deconstructed 2020 novel by Norwegian singer, songwriter and writer Jenny Hval, is a semi-fictional rumination on inspiration and creative expression that describes a creative source that is intensely familiar but which has never before been put in print.Hval’s story is an exploration of the origins of creativity stemming from her childhood – but unlike Yi and Usami’s wistful accounts about not fitting in, Girls Against God is a story of hatred.

Born in 1980, Hval was a young girl when Norwegian Black Metal was at its height, and the novel takes us through her first encounters with the genre as a scratchy recording on a faded video tape. Her childish enthusiasm for the boundless potential she sees dies early on, when she sees how both the men operating within the genre, and the wider media interpret black metal.

The epic drama, the hierarchy, the gender segregation, the authoritarianism, the xenophobia, the silence, became its defining elements – all the things that already define society. In college in 1997 black metallers don’t look different from neo-Nazis, and neo-Nazis don’t look different from black metallers, and no one knows exactly who to beat up. The only people who keep their heads on straight are the brightly coloured Jesus kids, who spend all their time praying for everyone, since upside-down crosses and Nazi violence are the same in their dramatic staging of the fight between God and Hell. The battle unifies them, Nazism and black metal and Jesus Revolution, so that everyone is a player in the eternal battle between good and evil, in which individuals dominate thanks to their faith or their race, or their misanthropy, and look down on the sheeple who accept so-called secular social democracy.

Girls Against God deviates from Idol Burning and Y/N in that it offers no distinction between audience and artist – as Hval wants to erase the hierarchy between consumer and producer. While Yi’s book critiques the limits of the people she shares a source of inspiration with, her complaints focus on the quality of their work, Hval is not concerned with quality.

In fact, a major theme of the novel is Hval’s struggle with the way that perceptions of ‘quality, as mandated by institutions, inhibit creative potential. She rails against teachers who call her writing ‘primitive’, demanding to know what is wrong with the primal. She does not aim to sculpt perfect prose but to excavate a deep, cruel kernel of her own soul. Yi could use some of this unrestricted honesty. Her work describes a deep fear of being misinterpreted, such as in scenes when the characters talk about their motivation:

“Before I started painting, I’d spent all of my time doing one of three things; distracting myself– preventing matters from getting any worse – or obliging a person who meant nothing to me. What was I safeguarding myself for? I long to put my life at the feet of a tremendous conviction. But not for some obvious hugeness, like a religion or a political movement. I refuse to be drafted into any cause. I wanted a passion so totally mine that no one else could possibly have it.”

Graduate students are pretentious, strangers on the street project desires onto her. Moon, the object of her affection, doesn’t know that she exists, but talks to a population the size of a nation when he livestreams. You/(Y/N/)/the reader, do not want to be like those people but, from your privileged position as the reader, you can clearly recognize our protagonist as one of them – which only creates a further separation between the reader and narrator.

Contrast this with the way Hval gets under the reader’s skin with her own feeling of disgust for her peers. Her fellow southern Norwegians with their accents, their religion, and their morals exist as objects for her loathing. She despises them and, like the protagonist of Y/N, wants to be different from them.

Also like Y/N, she is forced to confront that she isn’t any different than they are – but this happens earlier in the narrative. In the first third of the book, Hval’s protagonist grows up, goes to college, and travels abroad, where she discovers that no one understands her cultural baggage. Outside of her small, rural Norwegian village, very few people know anything about the language or food or religion that she rebelled against as a child.

Separated from her past, she matures and grows – but the most interesting part of the novel is that it doesn’t end there. In fact, it’s only on page 22 of a 229-page book that Hval describes the feeling of being freed from the source of her anger. The Norwegian South is far behind her and she floats through the vast world as an amorphous, undefined blob. She becomes softer, calmer, more easy-going, and therefore more traditional. She makes art that is easier to digest. As Hval continues her self-discovery she realizes that she is not cured, or fixed, or defused, but still angry:

“The only thing I don’t like seeing written about me is that I’m from the South. It feels like a factual error, after five, then ten and, even later, fifteen years of emigration. Calling me a Southern Norwegian reintroduces this set of shadows, a collective and dirty presence that I’ve rinsed from myself. Did I not scrub it from my CV? Is it still there? A few years after earning my masters I go back to the U.S., and at one point in New York, I get a new laptop with an American keyboard, to get rid of æ, ø, and å. When I turn it on for the first time, at a cafe in Chinatown, I can feel my body tingling, as if I’ve woken up from a plastic surgery that has removed my old features (æ, ø, å) and made my face unrecognizable and impenetrable.”

The rest of the novel discusses Hval’s guerilla campaign against complacency, sometimes with accomplices but other times alone. The loathing in Girls Against God is palpable, and like love, it’s obsessive. Hval’s hatred is self-sustaining and self-reflective, a compulsive litany that includes all things.

This hatred breaks through the fourth wall of the novel and bleeds into the other mediums that Hval deploys to inform her war against order. Hval is drawn to anti-art, especially when it is loud and performative. The solitary girl depicted in Edvard Munch’s Puberty escapes the frame and then, later on, all paintings eventually escape the museum. Hval sends all of Norway into a post-apocalyptic reforesting and allows nature to reclaim the institutes.

An interesting question is whether Hval is (consciously or otherwise) part of a fandom. Heavy and underground music genres exist in a second sphere outside of the usual categories of pop music discourse, where they are either incomparable or dismissively similar depending on the critic. – but Hval is familiar with all the major players of black metal. She discusses moving to Oslo with her bandmates and watching American black metal tourists crawling through the residential streets looking for the apartment complex where Euronymous was stabbed to death. That said, the most notable difference between Hval, Y/N and Akari is that hero worship is utterly antithetical to Hval’s relationship with black metal.

Some believe that heavy music (especially black metal) is intentionally starved of major media attention because it doesn’t generate the money-in-hand audience of less thematically challenging genres. Songs about death don’t translate into car commercials or sneaker promotions. However, an obsessive, creative, musical spark was still struck when Hval watched that first video recording – even if it connected her to the potential of the music being performed, rather than the artists that were its generative source.

The distinction between fan and student is a complicated area of discussion, and usually leads to conversations about privilege of access. How can anyone guarantee that a produced piece will engender mature analysis and not immature, recursive compulsion? Public concerns about the potential of certain media forms to lead to degenerative obsession are as old as the hills – and so are the muddy fields of ethical debate over how best to reduce its potential to cause harm.  

Whether that harm is most damaging if it affects the consumer, the producer, or an unrelated third party is another matter. In Y/N, though the protagonist is well educated in both modern advertising techniques and the ancient canon of the humanities, she is still engulfed by the contagious ecstasy of K-Pop music. Helpless to protect herself against the boys, she tries instead to pull back from her fellow fans, who consume mindlessly and reiterate their worship liturgically.

In Idol Burning, Akari’s delusion is mostly self-inflicted, and all her rationalizations for her actions are only thin justifications to disguise how her worship is hurting her mind, body, and connections to reality. While in Girls Against God, Jenny Hval asks: “Who fucking cares who gets hurt or what the consequences are? Let the damage be done. Reach the end of your obsession and spit your well-chewed heart back in the face of your creator.” Reject worship and embrace destruction. Listen to more music.

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