Y/N

So I sat on this book for a long, LONG time, because I've had a hard time navigating through and around my feelings and my own understanding of what I just read. This might not be a very long book, but BOY DOES IT PACK A PUNCH.

It's also interesting to read this book as someone who is a fan and has had almost similar desperate crushes on people who didn't know I existed. I'm not into the Kpop scene so I can't really speak to what the culture's like in that fandom, but reading how the narrator falls for Kpop boyband member Moon and then begins to structure their entire life around him is vaguely familiar, but also strange. It's kind of like a train crash: I've never been in one, and I hope to never BE in one, but I can easily imagine what it'd be like to be in one and I don't want that experience at ALL thank you very much.

Speaking of train crashes: reading the protagonist go through this crush is also kind of like a train crash in that you know it's bad, but you can't look away. I found myself wanting to know what she'd do with her life now that Moon was in it, how her relationships with other people would change - which they did, because that's kind of what happens when you get into a fandom.

But as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the protagonist's fannish engagement with Moon as a fan isn't quite– I hesitate to call it “normal”, but I also don't want to call it “abnormal”, either, because she exhibits behaviors that a lot of fans exhibit, and usually it isn't very harmful, just maybe weird to people outside of fandom. But then she goes overboard, as some fans do, and things take a turn for the very strange.

See, what the protagonist does is she builds up this idea of Moon in her head, making him her own - and I mean that quite literally, since after a certain point in the novel she's convinced that the Moon in her head is hers, and moreover that he's the REAL Moon, as if the Moon the other fans adored was some kind of fake. She has, in essence, a headcanon version of him that she is convinced is who Moon really is, and that he's hers, somehow. This belief spills over into the fanfic she writes about him: a “Your-Name” or “Y/N” fanfic, which is where the book gets its title. It's basically a variation on the self-insert fic, where the reader inserts their name at specific points in the fic signified by the placeholder “Y/N”. The more the protagonist writes the fic, the more she becomes convinced that the fic she's writing IS real, in a kind of parallel-dimension, alternate-reality way, and that it's sort of a signifier of her connection to Moon, which just deepens her belief that her headcanon of Moon IS the real Moon.

But what about Moon the Person? Are they less real than the protagonist's headcanon of them? Yes, but also no, because at this point the protagonist's Headcanon!Moon is a distinctly different entity from Person!Moon - but does the protagonist's feelings for Headcanon!Moon make him more “real” to her than Person!Moon? Are those feelings less valid because they're for an imaginary entity? Please note that these ideas don't occur to the protagonist (not right away at least), but they DID occur to me as the reader.

And from there, I began to extend the question: can emotions for a fictional character be considered “real”, given that their target is fictional? Would such emotions be more “real” if they were aimed at a real person? What if that person doesn't know who I am? Are those feelings less valid if they won't be reciprocated? Is it truly terrible if I KNOW the feelings won't or can't be reciprocated, but I continue to have and cherish them anyway? These are all very interesting questions, and I think they're questions fans grapple with regularly - and if they don't maybe they should, if for no other reason than that they're interesting and can potentially reveal a lot about oneself and one's emotions.

Another thing that's interesting about this protagonist is how she tries to intellectualize her crush on Moon. She considers herself a high-thinking member of the culturati: the style in which the novel is written reflects this, as does the protagonist's initial disdain towards pop culture. She even claims that she keeps herself deliberately “pure” of all pop culture influence because of how it might affect her interior world and her thinking.

And yet, when she finally encounters Moon, she has to reconcile all her previously-held beliefs with the fact that she has an intense infatuation with a pop star. So: she tries to “elevate” her feelings, tries to frame her infatuation in such a way as to make it seem like it's more important somehow, more valuable, and not something so “low” as a crush on a celebrity - which is something everyone else around her tells her it is.

This aspect of the novel is something I find interesting, because it points out to a flaw in separating “high” versus “low” culture. Proponents of the former are still fans: they have arguments, form cliques, and exhibit support and enthusiasm in the same way as fans of “low” culture do. The only difference is that fans of the former like to think they're better than fans of the latter, that their fandoms are more “valid” or “important” than pop culture fandoms. This novel reveals that stance to be a lie via the protagonist herself, who elevates her “low” culture fandom into “high” culture by virtue of how she talks about it.

There's a lot more going on in this novel than I mentioned above: how consumption has replaced religion; the weird and discomfiting nature of parasocial relationships; and the strangely veiled nature of the K-pop industry, to name a few. I won't say that this is best read by someone who is involved in fandom or has experience with fandom, but I think fans will find themselves both intrigued and discomfited by this book.