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.”
More about: Decline of religion, Fiction