The Fanfic Temptation

Y/N:
A Novel
by esther yi
astra, 224 pages, $26

A few months ago, an old school friend confessed that she’d been reading a lot of “AO3”—Archive of Our Own, the world’s most popular fan fiction website. I assured her that she wasn’t alone. Fan fiction—stories about fictional characters or real-life celebrities, written by the fans, for the fans—long assumed to be the hobby of awkward fangirls, has escaped from its niche. AO3 receives up to two billion visits per month (the number of visits increased during the pandemic), more than Netflix, and hosts more than 12.8 million works and 64,000 “fandoms,” the top three being Marvel, Harry Potter, and the DC Universe.

Though fan fiction—or “fanfic”—has been around for a while, the sweeping pervasiveness of the internet is making it more accessible than ever: 97 percent of AO3 readers access the site from their smartphones. It was only a matter of time before fanfic influenced mainstream culture, which is becoming increasingly subservient to the internet. In 2019, AO3 (taken as a whole) won “Best Related Work” at the Hugo Awards, the science fiction Oscars. It is a decade since the novelist Lev Grossman, in his introduction to Anne Jamison’s 2013 Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, observed: “Fanfiction is the madwoman in mainstream culture’s attic, but the attic won’t contain it forever.” That prediction has been vindicated. Jamison, an English professor at the University of Utah, was invited to teach a course on fan fiction at Princeton University in the spring of 2015. By that time, E. L. James’s steamy Fifty Shades trilogy, originally posted online as Twilight fan fiction, was gaining extraordinary popularity. The novels were published by Vintage Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

A few weeks after my friend’s confession, another friend admitted that, as a teenager, she had been captivated by Anna Todd’s After series, a wildly popular fanfic about the boy band star Harry Styles. She read it on Wattpad, a website that hosts both original fiction and fan fiction, which has been endorsed by Margaret Atwood in The Guardian. Gallery Books, a Simon & Schuster division, published the series after buying the rights for a six-figure sum. Jennifer Bergstrom, vice president and publisher of Gallery Books, has said that “fan fiction has absolutely become part of the fiber of what we publish. This is changing at a time when traditional publishing needs it most.”

The list goes on. Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments, a young adult book series that has been adapted for film and television, started out as Harry Potter fan fiction. Anne Hathaway is set to star as the forty-year-old divorcée love interest in a film adaptation of Robinne Lee’s The Idea of You—a novel seemingly inspired by Harry Styles. On a trip to Coachella with her daughter, Hathaway’s character “meets 24-year-old Hayes Campbell, the lead singer of the hottest boy band on the planet.”

Once derided and ridiculed, fan fiction is now sought after because it is profitable. It is profitable because, in a lonely digital age, there is a fortune to be made from the human longing for intense relationships and emotions. As Jamison noted in an interview, “fanfic unapologetically places a premium on feeling.” A typical fan fiction reader wants to be emotionally manipulated; she delights in seeing her favorite characters forced into situations that compel intimacy and vulnerability, such as injury or illness. On AO3, fans can look for the stories they’d like to read by inserting certain “tags” into the search function: “hurt/comfort,” “angst,” and “fluff” are among the most popular. Readers can customize their searches further by selecting the rating (from “General Audiences” to “Explicit”), the characters and relationships featured, including the types of relationships (“M/M,” “F/F,” “F/M,” or “other”), and more.

A work of fiction about fanfic may sound self-indulgent. But Esther Yi’s surreal and dreamlike debut novel Y/N is perceptive about the strange forms of longing that characterize contemporary youth culture. 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. The obvious inspiration for Moon and the other celestially named members of the band is the globally adored K-pop band BTS, subject of more than 200,000 stories on AO3 and the eighth most popular fandom on the website.

“K-pop is a symbol that, in my opinion, traffics in displaced spirituality,” Yi told Publishers Weekly in an interview.

There are very few things in an average person’s life that one would call their idol. My narrator has no outlet for her enormous capacity for devotion. . . . She turns to K-pop. That’s how I view her obsession. . . . To me, it’s a natural consequence of the sort of conditions under which she’s living.

What are these conditions? 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. She works from home as a copywriter for an “Australian expat’s business in canned artichoke hearts”—uncreative work that doesn’t address her intellectual longings. “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.

Specifically, she composes Y/N (“Your Name”) fan fiction—a subgenre in which the reader can insert her name into the story—after she is struck, as her boyfriend breaks up with her, “by the impossibility of conveying what I felt, which was crushing disappointment.” She is “tired of making arguments and revelations, of words falling out of my mouth and exploding in another person’s face”—in other words, the inevitable land mines and difficulties of connecting and communicating with others.

The narrator is lonely, but not because she lacks human interaction. She yearns for bone-deep connection, to be known and understood, and to be loved unconditionally. But every conversation with a stranger reminds her of the abyss that stands between people who have no shared understanding: “She and I would never see eye to eye. So it was with most people.”

In fan fiction, there are no such difficulties. The narrator can be the author of her life and build it from the ground up. The protagonist of her tale, Y/N, meets Moon at a bus stop. She “senses they were rudely cut off in a previous life. It is possible, she realizes for the first time ever, to open her mouth and say exactly what she’s thinking.” Unlike real life, this encounter bears the mark of destiny; Y/N is chosen, special. Their relationship is not random, but meaningful.

When Moon disappears from the world stage in real life, the narrator impulsively buys a one-way ticket to Seoul and sets out to find him. Unexpectedly, she does find him, at a place called the Sanctuary, where she makes him read her fan fiction. When she is forced to confront the reality that the Moon in her mind and the Moon in front of her are not the same, she laments: “I wish we’d met through mutual friends. I wish our families had gone to the same church. Don’t you see how hopeless my situation is?” Without a common culture, the spaces between us are even more unbridgeable. Fan fiction bridges those gaps only by reinterpreting the world, Narcissus-like, in the author’s image. The narrator tells her boyfriend accusingly that Moon “feeds my imagination more than you do.” “Of course he does,” the boyfriend replies. “Because he exists in your imagination.” Fan fiction, the novel hints, can become an exercise in self-cannibalism.

In 2014 the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki offered a celebrated critique of the $26 billion global anime industry. “Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves,” Miyazaki said. “Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know. It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans. And that’s why the industry is full of otaku!” (An otaku is a person obsessed with pop-culture phenomena such as anime or manga.) There is something similarly misanthropic about fan fiction. When you can gratify your emotional needs by reading words off your phone screen, you will have no need for the pains of cultivating good character and the nitty-gritty of social interaction—of patience, forgiveness, selflessness.

No wonder that so much of the genre consists of “slash” fiction: love stories between two men, predominantly written by young women. This trend, at first baffling, is best explained as answering a desire for connection without complication. In the real world, relationships between the sexes involve tension, miscommunication, a hint of threat. But the female consumer of “slash” fiction can enjoy her attraction to the masculinity of a male character in a context where he is “in tune” with his lover. In Y/N, the narrator imagines Moon having sex with her boyfriend, who acts as her “ambassador, sent to a foreign land with which my own land was in delicate relations.”

Yi, it should be said, has a fundamentally optimistic view of fan fiction. In an NPR interview last year, she praised the genre as “a really interesting and really rich mode of expression,” because it conveys “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.”

But this kind of failed transcendence, which privileges emotional intensity—the more intense, the better—over truth and reality, easily takes a dark turn. Fan fiction (as evidenced by Fifty Shades, among other examples) is often sexually explicit, and can delve into disturbing adult topics, with popular search tags including “smut,” “death,” “violence,” “BDSM,” “blood,” “abuse,” “trauma,” “rape/non-con,” and “suicide.” And it often calls human nature itself into doubt. Gender and sexuality are fluid; in “slash,” men can become pregnant. Y/N’s narrator writes about a “feat of dance that defies description” in her fan fiction, one that she tries to replicate in the real world: “Limbs had to go where they couldn’t. Muscles were asked to tense and relax at the same time. My head behaved like its own person.”

Perhaps I should conclude with my own confession. I was a late bloomer when it came to reading, and my first steps consisted of late nights with fan fiction and questionable young adult fantasy novels, which slowly gave way to days of reading Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, East of Eden, Crime and Punishment. For an unpracticed reader, the classic works were more laborious and offered less instant gratification, but they were beautiful, vibrant, full of soul and wind and dirt, words that carried real meaning and real weight, words as solid as the book I was holding in my hands. Reading them felt rewarding, not shameful. Most importantly, I found that while reading these books I was finally able to stop thinking about myself, to turn my gaze outward. These were not stories designed around my own desires. In contrast to an internet trend that has prevailed for some years now, I was not the “main character.” I was training myself to take an interest in the world I was in, body and blood and bones and all, instead of wishing to escape from it. It was a relief to be free from my incessant overthinking. The only price was accepting the truth of my insignificance—or rather, the significance of everything around me, which I had once preferred to ignore.

Veronica Clarke is associate editor at First Things.

Image by Dispatch, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.