Superfan is an intimate portrait of parasocial love

Superfan
By Jenny Tinghui Zhang 
Fiction/Penguin Michael Joseph/Paperback/336 pages/$33.86 

In the age of BTS and Taylor Swift, of Stan wars and Tumblr and parasocial everything, a novel about what it means to be a fan – nay, a superfan – is long overdue. So Chinese-American writer Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s sophomore work feels like an apt story for these times. 

And it really does try to capture just how insane the current times are. Superfan contains all the elements you would expect from a story like this: a lonely college student, a brooding heart-throb with a dark secret, a real-life boyfriend who fails to match up, a warm yet toxic online community, and faceless industry moguls who heartlessly prod and push this universe’s all-male version of girl group Katseye. 

Despite its relatively predictable starting point, Superfan is an empathetic, optimistic look at this particular phenomenon. In alternating chapters, the parallel stories of Minnie and Halo unfold. One is a socially inept freshman, the other a rising star beloved by thousands, but both ache with emptiness. 

Minnie, a Chinese girl who immigrated to the US as a child, finds solace in HOURglass, a K-pop inspired boy band that is three-quarters Asian. It is love at first sight. She comes across a video of the band performing at a music festival and the indignities of real life fade away. “There is only them and all the things she wants, which is to be with them, to love them and for them to love her.”  

The more isolated she gets, the deeper she falls into their orbit. Their songs make her feel “warm and held, and somehow, pink”, they convince her that “loneliness can be good – it can even be great”.  

A self-professed BTS obsessive, Zhang’s book is an insider’s take on fandom, in all its intoxicating glory. She has a knack for capturing with skin-crawling accuracy the tender, cloying feeling of being a fan. Her writing thrums with the genuine devotion Minnie feels for these boys, for this is how she refers to them – never “the band” but “the boys”.  

After that first video, “a new hunger blooms, the desire to know every single thing about these boys until she brims with them”. Yet, for all of her increasingly radical actions – it starts with her joining a message board dedicated to shipping Halo with a fellow bandmate, and ends with her tracking down their hotel and flight – this reader never quite gets the sense that she is capable of real madness. 

Also nursing a buried wound is Halo, who is framed as the bad boy of the group. His mysterious past looms over most of his narrative, but when finally revealed, it is a bit of a letdown. Tragic, yes, but not nearly as incriminating as made out to be. 

Instead of exploding in a fury of sound and colour, tension peters out like the end of a concert you enjoyed but will not necessarily remember. So while this story far from “flops” – to borrow from Stan culture parlance – it does not feel quite as fresh as its hot new boy band.

Granted, it can be difficult to say anything novel about a community that routinely cannibalises itself through unrelenting discourse. Stans, after all, are the masters of this sort of granular dissection – of their idols, their entourages, other fans, even themselves – and anyone who has spent enough time lurking in these online communities will be familiar with the usual tropes.

By now, it is no secret that few things soothe a fractured soul like perfect, parasocial love; that the life of an idol is often punishing and unglamorous; that stoking passion this intense and one-sided is like playing with fire.

Then again, there must have been a reason why Cambridge Dictionary named “parasocial” its word of the year in 2025. Given the current cultural climate, perhaps these are points that bear repeating. Perhaps, as BTS launches their long-awaited comeback, what the world needs at this time is something fun and familiar and just thought-provoking enough – the lovesick crooning of a boy band, or a compulsively readable story about a girl who falls in love with one. 

Rating: ★★★★☆

If you liked this, read: Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created The Internet As We Know It by Kaitlyn Tiffany (2022, Macmillan, $25.49). Tiffany, a staff writer at The Atlantic and One Direction superfan, delves into the world of fans, Stans and boy bands in this sharp and witty non-fiction book.