Fanfiction is having a moment. Anne Hathaway is set to star in a film derived from a Harry Styles fanfic. Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis initially shipped characters from Star Wars. And, of course, the wildly popular Fifty Shades of Grey series came into the world as Twilight fanfic. Yet despite its indisputable success and influence, fanfic invariably prompts ambivalence. Either it is exalted, obsessed over, and furiously devoured––or it is ridiculed. In her debut novel, Y/N, author Esther Yi walks this fine line, balancing a surreal, tongue-in-cheek tone with a pretentious first-person narrator who is at odds with her fanfic obsession until it consumes her completely. 

As the novel opens, Yi’s narrator, an unnamed Korean American woman living in Berlin, is introduced to a popular K-pop group, the pack of boys, by her flatmate, Vavra, who happens to have an extra ticket to an upcoming concert. In just two years, the boy band has gone from releasing their first album to selling out stadium shows; along the way, they have amassed a painfully devoted global fanbase of young people, all of whom are connected to their idols by frequent and intimate social media livestreams, which function altogether as a petri dish for parasocial fan relationships. 

Y/N’s narrator is an unlikely fan, usually confident in and reliant upon her deliberate, cultivated taste. Her voice aligns with her self-perception, which is chilly, detached, and laden with metaphor. In the opening chapters, especially, the narrator’s voice feels deliberately exclusionary and unrelentingly cynical. Describing her repulsion toward Vavra’s attempts to initiate her into the boy band’s fandom, she says: “What I feared most wasn’t death or global cataclysm but the everyday capitulations that chipped away at the monument of seriousness that was a soul; my spiritual sphincter stayed clenched to keep out the cheap and stupid.” 

And then she attends the concert. The event is transcendent. Despite her initial resistance, she can’t help but appreciate the high-brow inspiration behind the boy band’s album: a Korean translation of Sophocles, specifically Oedipus’ decision to blind himself. She is drawn particularly to Moon, a dancer who is one of the band’s four members: “His shirt was the pink of a newborn’s tongue. He was tasting the air with his body. It would always be the first day of his life.” The narrator, listening to their music for the first time, reflects on Oedipus’ “woeful ignorance of the truth.” Why shouldn’t he have gouged out two new holes in his face––double the sight! she thinks, an ironic foreshadowing of the self-blinding she will enact when her fan obsession grows so all-encompassing that she becomes closed off to the rest of her life.

Soon, the narrator’s fixation with Moon irreparably disrupts her status quo. Her boyfriend, a philosopher named Masterson, comes across the picture of Moon that the narrator has harvested from the packaging of a face mask kit and now uses as a bookmark. He says: 

We once turned to philosophy for an interpretation of God… But philosophy has relinquished its authority to data. Now we know too much… Religion, shorn of philosophy, is now a vending machine for manifestation and fulfillment. That’s why there are so many lowercase gods in this secular, cynical era. A boy band like this… is one such god. 

To this, the narrator replies that she knows Moon better than her boyfriend; Masterson’s concreteness is nothing compared to the true “spiritual companionship” Moon seems to offer her. 

Her obsession deepens. She begins writing scenes in which Moon is a philosopher whose behavior and circumstances resemble her boyfriend’s. She sends them to Masterson at first but quickly discovers a better outlet: a fanfiction site. In this story-within-a-story, Y/N (a fanfiction term, meaning “your name,” which encourages readers to insert themselves into the role of protagonist) meets philosopher Moon, and the two form a relationship and move to Seoul, where he searches for his birth mother and becomes a dancer. In real life, Moon seems to drop off the face of the Earth, having retired from the band, logged off social media, and gone quiet. Naturally, the narrator flies to South Korea to find him. 

The adventure that follows brings readers into the “colorful disorder” of Seoul, where time seems to fall away, and where the narrator meets a cast of bizarre and memorable characters on her quest to find Moon: O is a devoted artist working at a shoe factory; the Music Professor once mentored the boy band in the ominous Polygon Plaza, an office building with an indefinite location, size, or shape; the Caregiver, finally, guides the narrator through the doors of a luxurious and secretive outpost, the Sanctuary, which is “neither nursing home nor medical clinic.” Each development brings her physically closer to Moon, yet farther from her conception of him.

Yi has written a highly literary novel about fanfiction––which is actually part fanfiction itself––through the perspective of an unwitting and unexpected participant in fan culture. In doing so, she is able to invite to the table a literary audience perhaps less willing to submit to or seriously discuss what they may deem “low art.” Y/N dissolves the differences between low and high art in pursuit of larger social questions about fulfillment, desire, and devotion. 

What happens, Yi asks, when an individual has no way to express her capacity for devotion? When she is neither religious nor a brilliant artist; when she feels distanced from the country in which she lives, from her relationships, and from her own identity? Rather than a form of escapism relegated to tween girls, Yi’s Y/N recognizes fandom and fanfiction as indicative of modern society’s deficiencies––and invites discussion about the ways in which obsession, devotion, art, pleasure, and dependency manifest in modern life. 

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Esther Yi was born in Los Angeles in 1989 and currently lives in Leipzig, Germany.

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Regan Mies lives in New York, where she is an editorial assistant and recent graduate of Columbia University. Her translations, short fiction, and book reviews have appeared in No Man’s Land, the Asymptote blog, Necessary Fiction, On the Seawall, Litro Mag, and elsewhere.