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challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
This book is definitely challenging to get through. While on its face, it uses parasocial relationships and fan culture as the primary perspective, it's really digging into loneliness and obsessive love and people latching onto each other for these reasons.
I feel really mixed about how successful this book is at doing this, though, and the use of language throughout. It's dense with strange turns of phrase and pseudo-philosophical tangents that often did not work for me and came across as pretentious - reading between the lines that the characters are trying to express and navigate their loneliness and willingness to attach to each other in strange ways through strange connections, I still don't know if it works.
This is mostly a miss for me. I feel like the actual reality of the kpop industry has plenty to critique around the manufacturing of image for the sake of capitalism and consumption, the intentional commercialization of identify and parasocialism of fans, and this only scratches the surface on those topics. It also does a disservice to fan culture and what fans get out of fan culture, or what fanfiction is even trying to do most of the time - cherry-picking Y/N fic and ignoring the broader reasons people engage with writing fanfiction is very surface-level, but I also think that isn't what the author was trying to do, here. It's a little odd this book is billed as tangling with these things when it's really doing something very different - using surrealism to peer into themes of obsession and loneliness, just cushioned by the scene-setting of being a fan of a celebrity.
I think I get what this book was trying to do but it wasn't for me, and the few glimmers of interesting moments do not make up for the overall fever dream this felt like to read. At least it was on the short side.
I feel really mixed about how successful this book is at doing this, though, and the use of language throughout. It's dense with strange turns of phrase and pseudo-philosophical tangents that often did not work for me and came across as pretentious - reading between the lines that the characters are trying to express and navigate their loneliness and willingness to attach to each other in strange ways through strange connections, I still don't know if it works.
This is mostly a miss for me. I feel like the actual reality of the kpop industry has plenty to critique around the manufacturing of image for the sake of capitalism and consumption, the intentional commercialization of identify and parasocialism of fans, and this only scratches the surface on those topics. It also does a disservice to fan culture and what fans get out of fan culture, or what fanfiction is even trying to do most of the time - cherry-picking Y/N fic and ignoring the broader reasons people engage with writing fanfiction is very surface-level, but I also think that isn't what the author was trying to do, here. It's a little odd this book is billed as tangling with these things when it's really doing something very different - using surrealism to peer into themes of obsession and loneliness, just cushioned by the scene-setting of being a fan of a celebrity.
I think I get what this book was trying to do but it wasn't for me, and the few glimmers of interesting moments do not make up for the overall fever dream this felt like to read. At least it was on the short side.
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
What the fuck. Cool premise, poor execution. As someone who enjoys kpop and has since 2016 I thought the idea behind it was interesting, but it left only more questions than answers. Most unreliable narrator to ever exist. Someone please get the narrator some help.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Toxic relationship, Stalking
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Toxic relationship, Stalking, Sexual harassment
hopeful
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
STRANGE!! But I enjoyed it a lot for the unsettling fever dream religious fangirl fervor atmosphere. It's unsettling, but also nonjudgmental. It's the lowest rated book I've read (which compels me to rate it even higher) but I feel like it's misunderstood, just found the wrong audience.
Yi approaches fandom as worship, pretentiously, but also willing to go to strange, disgusting places for reasons that will never be explained. There's loneliness at the heart of it all.
Also I love this quote by the author:
"I respect that fan fiction is so much the product of a compulsion, of a yearning, that it almost forgoes all of these pretensions of polish, of quality, of sophistication. And in that sense, for me, there is something that's revealed at the heart of fan fiction that I think is essential to all great literature, which is this desire to put yourself in the same space as the transcendental, you know, to almost touch the hem of it without really quite grasping it."
One of the more bizarre books that I've finished, and one that I cannot in good faith recommend to any of my friends. it's definitely not for everyone but I really respect it
Yi approaches fandom as worship, pretentiously, but also willing to go to strange, disgusting places for reasons that will never be explained. There's loneliness at the heart of it all.
Also I love this quote by the author:
"I respect that fan fiction is so much the product of a compulsion, of a yearning, that it almost forgoes all of these pretensions of polish, of quality, of sophistication. And in that sense, for me, there is something that's revealed at the heart of fan fiction that I think is essential to all great literature, which is this desire to put yourself in the same space as the transcendental, you know, to almost touch the hem of it without really quite grasping it."
One of the more bizarre books that I've finished, and one that I cannot in good faith recommend to any of my friends. it's definitely not for everyone but I really respect it
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Way too fast pacing in the beginning, y/n becomes obsessed far too fast, the prose was so purple it melded together. Every character was so insane it read like fanfic itself. The ending was not as embarrassing as it should be and there wasn’t an emotional resolution for the narrator. Great idea, horrible execution.
[edit] changing my 2 star rating to 2.25. I keep thinking about it months later. the strange characters feed her delusion. she’s never challenged, like the culture feeding into the delusion of celebrity worship, until the end by Moon himself. but she should’ve been challenged by him more. he should’ve been disgusted by her. he should’ve been real, rather than any other of the insane characters.
[edit] changing my 2 star rating to 2.25. I keep thinking about it months later. the strange characters feed her delusion. she’s never challenged, like the culture feeding into the delusion of celebrity worship, until the end by Moon himself. but she should’ve been challenged by him more. he should’ve been disgusted by her. he should’ve been real, rather than any other of the insane characters.
This is a hard book to write, and I appreciate that... It is also written in that plotless, distanced from the point of view sort of a way that is Brutal for my personal engagement. But it is short! And I did finish it.