Y/N: The Coroner's Report On My 2010s Fanfiction Phase
Thoughts on Y/N by Esther Yi, and the unexpected connections to my experiences with abuse.
This is a book that you simply bear witness to as it happens in front of you. On its face, Y/N is about a Korean-American woman who becomes obsessed with a K-pop idol named Moon, leading her to write y/n fanfiction and even fly to Seoul in pursuit of meeting him. The prose is philosophical from beginning to end as Yi presents a dissertation-like depiction of modern fan culture and its consequences. In an NPR interview, Esther Yi describes how she imagines Moon as “a knife … exposing some kind of wound or void in [the] characters’ lives.” This novel cut its way into my life too, autopsying my long-dead obsession with fandom during years of persistent abuse.
“Y/n,” which stands for “your name,” gives its name to a genre that “allows readers to insert their name into that slot” —y/n fic can also be called “self-insert” fic— “and thereby play out the events of the story, which, of course, usually involves a romantic encounter … with [a] celebrity or … fictional character.”1 In short, they are fictions of convenience, where the protagonist is often featureless so that every reader can supplant her own persona into a fictional position of privilege.
At the height of my obsession with fanfiction in early high school, I did not see my experiences with abuse and obsessive love of fanfic as connected. Now I see that emotional desperation is what drove me to the altar of celebrity worship.
Yearning without suffering
In his novel Anxious People, Fredrik Backman writes, “Addicts are addicted to their drugs, and their families are addicted to hope.”2 Even though my dad wasn’t a drug addict, I was addicted to yearning in a similar way—I longed for him to change, for him to wake up one day and stop being the way that he was.3 Don’t conflate yearning and hope, though. They are distinct. Hope is the expectation of something that could happen, while yearning is the desire for something that may never happen. When I think of yearning I think of Marianne Dashwood in Sense & Sensibility, pining after Willoughby even once she knows how disloyal and selfish he is. In that way, with the surety of a bad ending, I longed for my dad to be someone he could never be.
Longing for what you can never have doesn’t translate perfectly to celebrity worship; suffering takes on different roles in relationship to an abuser and a celebrity. A therapist in Y/N accuses Yi’s protagonist of having an
“addiction to pursuing love where there is none … [and having] settled a comfortable distance from [Moon] so that [she] can yearn without suffering.”4
Yearn without suffering. I can’t encapsulate fandom any better than that one phrase. Because I was already used to wanting what I could never have (a real dad) fandom was a distinct improvement. A distant object meant that it really was all yearning and no suffering, while abuse felt like all yearning, all suffering.
When perpetual longing was already a given in my life, it was easy to translate that feeling to a distant object of affection. The object was usually someone good, too. Someone who was “a beautiful cinnamon roll too good for this world, too pure” (or, “looks like they could kill you but is actually a cinnamon roll,” my other type).5 What’s clear now is that the nature of my companionate affection was the same for both my abuser and a given celebrity, but the objects—and their respective effects on me—were sharply at odds.
Celebrity obsession offers participants a fantasy preserved in amber. As Moon’s Music Professor puts it:
“You don’t know Moon, so you think you could know him. Because you’ve never met him before, he’s always waiting for you in a state of existential integrity.”6
The Music Professor is “exasperated” when she tells the protagonist this. She goes on to say that she’d “‘kill to know what [she’s] feeling” because “‘it’s just so much better in our heads’” (140). The Music Professor knows what it’s like to crack open the amber and find only a fossil inside.
She’s trying to communicate to the protagonist that suffering lies ahead if she continues on her journey to find Moon. When I engaged in fandom, I was displacing my suffering, not escaping it altogether—I suffered when I came back to reality and realized the fiction was a fiction. That realization has no place within the fantasy (it exists distinctly outside of it) therefore there is no suffering within the fantasy. I didn’t suffer because the fantasy wasn’t real, but because my life was.
Empty-full
We often associate the feeling of emptiness with abuse. But fullness characterized my time still living under my abuser; I felt full of another person’s opinions, expectations, and emotional trauma, like a gutter clogged with leaves.
Contrary to the known gambit of y/n fic (to be filled and fulfilled by interactions with our distant objects of affection), Yi asserts that the true appeal is to be emptied of oneself.
“You say you’re Y/N, but you’re really no one at all. You’re the placeholder itself. A vacancy waiting to be filled.”
“Exactly,” Lise said with a dreamy smile.
In a life defined by the fullness of abuse, the vacancy of y/n provided unmatched comfort, with its rhythm of namelessness and notoriety. You become nameless to yourself, nameless to the world, but noteworthy to the person who matters most to you.
It’s escapism in its purest form. It’s not quite like Harry Potter (another fiction I used to escape abuse when I was very little) but you are transporting your very self into the fantasy directly as the person of y/n, with an important caveat: you can simultaneously leave all of yourself behind.
The protagonist’s authorship of y/n fiction begins as a letter to her ex-boyfriend, but as soon as she rereads the content, she realizes that she was really talking to and about Moon. So, it turns into a story, where the protagonist’s “y/n” meets a philosophy author iteration of Moon at a bus stop (what fanfic authors would probably call Philosopher!Moon).7 Y/n reads his latest book in one sitting, and is brought to tears:
[Y/n] understands everything without knowing what it is she is understanding. … The lucid strangeness of the philosopher’s work occasionally brings her to tears.
“Thank you for not trying to relate to me,” she says, shaking the book like a box of cereal.8
That last line hit me like a punch to the gut when I first read it. It’s what I was subconsciously thinking every time I turned to fanfiction. Thank you for not trying to relate to me. Thank you for allowing me to not be myself, for once. Thank you for loving me for who I wish I were.
The protagonist longs for this feeling because the effort of a real relationship was too much for what little payout she received. Moon however requires no effort and yields excellent returns. He makes her feel loved, seen, and appreciated: “‘He works a hundred times harder at our relationship than you do,’” she spits at her ex.9
Are you there, Moon? It’s me, Y/N.
As the novel comes to a close, Yi tackles physicality as an intrusion into the digital world the narrator has created for herself. The narrator and her new friend in Seoul, who goes by the nickname “O,” seek to understand one another, with great difficulty. The narrator laments,
“I wish I were made of glass … Then you could see right into me. I wouldn’t have to say a word to make you understand what I’m feeling.”
“It’s more likely I would see right through you,” O said. “Which means I wouldn’t see you at all … Flesh constitutes a tradeoff: it lets you know that a person is standing before you, but you have no idea what this person means.”10
The narrator’s confrontation with O makes explicit what I knew from the start — she was seeing through Moon, viewed at a distance, through a screen. At the time it seemed worthwhile for the narrator to trade an opaque boyfriend for an ephemeral idol. Moon’s lack of physical presence in her life allowed her to project onto him whatever she wished, whereas her boyfriend’s presence (and now O’s) brought with it the imperfections of humanity. As Y/n, the narrator was a void longing for a void.
I do not (or try not) to feel guilt over having taken comfort in sugarcoated depersonalization like the narrator. Rotten food is still food to a starving person. I needed at the time what I still need today, and that is community. The coroner’s report is this: I did not need an indiscriminate self-purgation that left me empty of everything, good and bad, I needed the cleansing balm of people who see me for who I am, and do not ask me to be who they want me to be.
Reading experience: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐
Literary style/“value”: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Overall rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
Trigger/content warnings: mild nudity/sexual content, brief references to domestic abuse
Thank you for reading this very personal edition of The Female Spectator. Things are not always this dark and gloomy! Next up I have a weird piece on the strange sport of hobby-horsing, the history of the hobby-horse, and how it relates to our modern word “hobby.” If that sounds like more fun to you (I know it does to me), please consider subscribing!
Thanks for sharing this piece friend, I can really feel your heart and voice so deeply coming through. It was a joy to read!