The word fan, as in a fan of sports team or rock group, derives from the word fanatic, a word that more often than not refers to extreme religious passion, and itself comes from a Latin term for someone driven mad by a divine spirit. In recent decades, it has begotten the words fandom (a subculture of fans) and fan fiction, which Veronica Clarke describes as “stories about fictional characters or real-life celebrities, written by the fans, for the fans.” This genre is the subject of Esther Yi’s Y/N: A Novel:

Yi’s nameless protagonist, a lonely and bored twenty-nine-year-old Korean-American woman living in Berlin, becomes obsessed with a Korean boy-band star, or “idol,” called Moon. After she sees him perform live, her “world suddenly proliferate[s] with secret avenues of devotion.” In him, she finds her raison d’être.

Yi’s narrator lives in Berlin, a foreign city; she isn’t fluent in German. She is divorced from her past; she isn’t fluent in Korean. She met her roommate online. They share something that can only “almost be called a friendship.” Her boyfriend, whom she also met online, is merely “considering being in love with” her. No family is mentioned, except for an estranged uncle in Seoul. . . . “I don’t want real life,” she declares. “I don’t even want romance. . . . I need something else. Piercing recognition. Metaphysics. Byzantine iconography.” But those hints at a religious awakening go nowhere. Instead, she begins to write fan fiction.

“K-pop is a symbol that, in my opinion, traffics in displaced spirituality,” Yi told Publishers Weekly in an interview. . . . “To me, it’s a natural consequence of the sort of conditions under which she’s living.”

So, Clarke surmises, is fan fiction itself. The words here give away much: not just fan, but also idol, and a fictional location in the book called the Sanctuary. Yet, writes Clarke, “this kind of failed transcendence, which privileges emotional intensity—the more intense, the better—over truth and reality, easily takes a dark turn.”

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.