Hot on the heels of reviewing “Kpop Confidential“, Kpopalypse is back to review the sequel! Let’s take a look at “K-pop Revolution” by Stephan Lee!
While I didn’t endorse actually seeking it out, I did warn you all in my review of Stephan Lee’s first fictional book “K-pop Confidential” that a sequel called “K-pop Revolution” also existed. The same kind caonima who sent me the first book then quickly obliged and sent me the sequel, and now I have it in my hands, ready to review for you, the lovely Kpopalypse readers. Let’s take a look at it – does it meet required standards?
K-POP REVOLUTION
Author: Stephan Lee
IreadYA, 362 pages, softcover, 198mm x 128mm
ISBN – 978-1-338-75113-0
Amazon link so the author doesn’t hate me for this snarky review and can still make a buck
“K-pop Revolution” fills the same niche as Jessica Jung’s “Bright“, and my own “Love Light” – it’s the second-in-line “let’s pick things up after we’ve told the group’s pre-debut training story and look at what happens when they actually start doing stuff in the public eye” book. Like “K-pop Confidential”, the new book also has a video trailer for some strange reason, although I’m unsure whether this is really an official trailer or not. It doesn’t seem like it, because it’s a lot more amateurish than the trailer for the first book, but I can’t fathom why else this even exists – I’ll put it here anyway just because.
Once again, the entire story is told first-person from the point of view of the main character Candace Park, and boy is she the “main character” in more ways than one, but we’ll get to that shortly. Here’s the back cover of the book which will give you a pretty good outline of what to expect and it will save me from having to write a boring-ass plot synopsis before I get stuck into the actual “reviewing” part of this review:
This back cover image is from my own personal copy of the book that I was sent, and you may have noticed two things about the image. The first one is that I’ve censored a problematic word on the back cover, and no I don’t mean “cunt” but the other problematic c-word. Tsk tsk, Stephan Lee, you’d do well to leave that sort of talk to the experts like Kpopalypse. The second thing you may notice is that even though I’ve only had it for a couple of weeks at the time of writing, this rear book cover is pretty scuffed up. How did that happen? Well, the book came to me in very good condition but the quality of the paper isn’t much stronger than tissue paper and quicky degraded with normal use just from being transported in my gym bag over about a dozen bus trips – the first book definitely didn’t have this type of durability issue. Perhaps it’s the change in publishers for this new book that is to blame, but whatever the reason is, at least my wish to have people send toilet paper to my post office box has finally been realised. And that’s before we even get into the content.
So there’s going to be big-time spoilers of both books here in this review, because… well, it really can’t be avoided. I have to spoil the first book to even discuss the sequel at all, and I may as well spoil this one too because, I mean, let’s face it, you know what you’re getting. This isn’t suspense fiction. However if you are a very spoiler-averse person and just want to know if you should read this trash then the answer is “fuck no” and you can stop reading here. For the rest of you, let’s read on, and once again I’m going to try and start with something nice to say about this book, so let’s see how I go with that.
So once again, Stephan’s biggest strength in this book is that he did actually go to quite the length to research his topic, he’s clearly a big k-pop fan and also a mature one (i.e not 12 years old) so he’s been following the k-pops for a while and is not someone who is in denial about how the industry can be. In fact industry shittiness is a very big theme in this book as our hero Candace battles evil corporate forces of evil, so in that way this is a very similar book to my books only in the sense that it has a theme of advocating for compassion towards the struggles of k-pop performing artists. The part I was the most impressed by of all just in terms of the “exposing the industry” aspect was when the group take a trip to New Zealand to shoot a music video and everything is rushed and nothing is OH&S compliant and things start careening off-course because people are cutting corners and aren’t doing safety checks. This stuff is no joke and it’s true accross the world in the performing arts (which is why Van Halen had the “Brown M&Ms” clause) but it’s especially true in k-pop where competitions are tight and profit margins are often even tighter. The deliberate, planned shittiness and worthlessness of k-pop interviews is also another point that Stephan touches on correctly. You can tell that he’s tried to get decent interviews out of some stars and not been able to due to company intervention, I can relate. And although he gives Candace a completely unrealistic two-year idol contract (only the best Terms and Conditions will do for this Mary-Sue-on-steroids main character), he does at least mention that the seven-year idol contracts also exist and are not a good thing. Ideologically, myself and Stephan are actually very much on the same page with a whole bunch of this stuff, he’s just got a very different way of expressing himself. Hell, he might even be a reader of this site, so hi Stephan if you’re reading, I hope you’re doing well and you’re not getting bashed anymore (apparently he was the victim of some violent incident a few years back), and I hope you do find some use in this review even though it’s largely negative. Great, now that being nice to the author is out of the way, let’s talk shittiness.
Those of you who read my “K-pop Confidential” review, or even more daringly, read the actual book yourselves (yikes), will know that the first book ends with Candace going completely against everything her character believed and worked hard for all throughout the book by giving a big fuck-you speech and screwing her entire career on purpose. But of course, we need a sequel, so how is the author going to engineer this after Candace has effectively taken her bat and ball and gone home? Those who have read my own books know that a similar screw-the-pooch moment happens in my book series at one point, and… it actually really does screw the pooch, the group is totally fucked after that, as you might realistically expect. Not so with “The Girls”! Yes, you guessed it; “The Girls” is the realistically shithouse name for Candace’s five/six member girl group, but it’s the only realistic thing about them – as it happens Candace telling everyone to fuck off on stage instantly makes her the biggest most super big biggity-big international k-pop megastar ever, she goes massively viral around the world, is called “a feminist icon” by international v-tubers, her revelations make international news (because apparently there aren’t already a dozen “dark side of k-pop” documentaries out there), the old label come crawling back with their tails between their legs and promise to be nicer to her pinky swear, she gets let back into her group again, cameras and fans follow her everywhere… all this even though she’s a fifteen year old girl (we’ll come back to that) who doesn’t even have a song out yet. Like anyone not deep down the k-pop rabbit hole would give a single fuck what a trainee says. Even the very biggest of the big of the huge of the massive k-pop stars that were ever huge and massive and big and celebrilicious and fametastic like your faves IU and G-Dragon and Jennie and Karina and those BTS boys whatever their names are at least had a fucking song or two under their belts before the entire world started sucking their dicks. So that’s the incredibly contrived-for-plot-convenience opening, and it’s one of the worst things about the book, Candace is so Mary Sue that even her poops are relevant (it’s true, her mother asks about them). I found it very difficult not to throw the goddamn thing out of the bus window (and myself straight afterward with it) through the first twenty pages or so. It really is that fucking shit.
Having said that, things do get a little bit better as the book progresses, and now I’m going to say the only other nice thing about the book that I can think of. In my review of the first book I complained about how none of the tension in the book lasts for more than a few pages before everything is quickly resolved, which makes everything just feel kind of unexciting and stupid like a bunch of k-pop pals “yass-queening” each other about their faves. Well it seems that Stephan Lee watched a few “10 Ways To Make Your Next Fiction Book Suck Less” YouTube videos between writing the first book and the sequel, because here he actually exhibits a bit more writing craft, building some tension and letting it hang around for a bit longer, rather than resolving the setup from ultra short chapter 37 by the end of ultra-short chapter 38… but then this isn’t a positive really, because the way he keeps that tension going kind of sucks, resorting to typical soap-opera-tier cliches. Other characters try to share information witho Candace to correct some key important misunderstanding that is making her hate them for no reason, but Candace is just so angry that gosh darnit she’s just not going to let them finish their sentences and storms off to do some other important shit leaving the situation unresolved for a few more chapters… this seems to be the only resolution-delaying tool in Stephan’s author trick-bag. I think he’s spent too many afternoons on the couch watching shitty k-dramas and The Bold And The Beautiful… or maybe not enough afternoons, because I actually think The Bold And The Beautiful did a somewhat better job of handling this particular cliche.
Stephan Lee also still has the nasty habit of not actually bothering to use his own imagination in his own fiction writing, constantly referencing real-world events, brands and people like a star-struck fanfic author instead of actually bothering to write fiction like a fiction book writer. (People use “Wattpad-core” to describe literally any book at all that they don’t like these days, but I assume that this is what the term actually means.) The author lays it on thick – it’s one thing to have a reference in your book to Taylor Swift, Netflix or Flamin’ Hot Cheetos… but all three, in the same fucking sentence? I know you all think I’m just making this up to be mean or something, but I have receipts:
Another hideous example early on in the book is when one of Candace’s boy-crushes gets interviewed on The Stephen Colbert Show and he breaks from the flow of the interview and uses the platform to give her a special message in Korean. Like, beyond the cringe of this even happening at all, why that show, why not use the opportunity to make a show up, was it that difficult? Like, can I have some fiction writing in my fiction writing, pretty please? Then there’s Candace being blown away by being allocated a blue check mark on Twitter, which somehow she “never thought possible” (this book was written back when they were considered by some to be a celebrity status symbol, before Elon took over that hellhole and just let you rent the check marks by the month), because that adds to the story somehow, apparently. Blackpink gets a few mentions too because of course they do, so does Eric Nam for some reason which feels kind of random… but no BTS, again, interestingly (because Candace going out with a fictional k-pop boy when there is also BTS in the same universe to drool over wouldn’t feel quite so special-snowflakey now, would it). Also, I don’t know how many times RuPaul’s Drag Race is mentioned in this book, but it’s a non-binary number (as if it’s somehow a relevant enough media entity to even refer to repeatedly in a k-pop book). Okay Stephan, we get it, you’re gay, I’m happy for you and all that, but we probably actually just want to read a k-pop fiction book here, cheers.
Speaking of which, “K-pop Revolution” is a lot more concerned about being on the right side of the average western k-pop fan demographic’s “social concern” matrix than it should be, to the point where it makes the writing feel very fraudulent and takes you the reader right out of the story completely. This was an element of the first book too, but it wasn’t as on-the-nose as it is here, where it actually really gets in the way of credibly telling the story in places. So the story goes, Candace’s group The Girls have some competition from another group called NEVERIDOL and they’re on a small independent label and their gimmick is they’re not afraid to reveal their oh-so-human flaws, to the point where they wear words describing their “flaws” on their own stage uniforms, like “fat”, “unpretty” etc (because small labels don’t like perfection or money or attracting sponsors and their profit margins aren’t even tighter oh gosh no). One of the girls in NEVERIDOL happens to be a black girl, and guess what her T-shirt says? Yes, you guessed it. “I’m Black, in case you didn’t notice”, she actually says at one point in the book. Oh and that’s verbatim, “black” is always capitalised in this book, even when it’s used as an adjective rather than a noun, maybe Stephan Lee was scared about being called racist if he didn’t capitalise it. Oh, and Candace mentions that she’s an ally of black folk while beating herself up for being Wasian-privileged every so often and exhibiting a bit of “saviour” complex every now and then as well. “There isn’t a single Black k-pop idol at a major k-pop company right now, which is not even close to okay – it’s something I always hoped to speak about once I had more fame…” – Candace is so painfully Mary Sue that I suppose she’ll fix centuries of colonialism with a quick swish of her hair in the third book if one ever gets written. Oh and Candace has a plush toy that she insists is gay for no obvious reason. Oh and the entire cast of characters are all progressive and not bigoted at all, not even the nasty corporate execs or the young men in the Korean incel demographic. I mean I’m not against “k-pop fan values” necessarily, but everything I’ve mentioned so far all rubs hugely up against the book’s one elephant in the room, which is… well, we all know how one of the latest bees in k-pop fan’s bonnets is the fact that several girls in girl groups are debuting while underage, right? Right? (I mean we know that k-pop fans largely don’t actually give a fucking shit about this issue because NewJeans were huge and people caped for them hard even when Min Hee Jin was trying to get the entire world to look at their cookies, but k-pop fans at least act like they care when it suits them.) Well, Candace is not only debuting while underage and in a love triangle through the whole goddamn book (which is the same tiresome love triangle stupidly ressurected from the first book where it was all seemingly resolved, I guess the author felt like he had to have one and didn’t know what else to do), but her forbidden relationship with boy trainee YoungBae is now greenlit by the agency and they are now considered a “K-pop Power Couple” – at fifteen and sixteen years old! I’m not sure how the author messed that up when he successfully pandered to western progressive k-pop fan social concerns in every other aspect, but there you go, I guess even the most socially-conscious folks have their “Julie’s Birthday Party” blind spot moments.
There’s a lot more that I can say about this book and how it’s shit, and I will, right now. Candace is fucking unlikeable as fuck. Now that’s not really a problem in itself – unlikeable characters are great and I write them often, plus I arguably am one, but I don’t care if you think I’m a cunt (you’re probably right, anyway). On the other hand I think the author here wants us to fall in love with Candace, or at least be on her side in her struggles, and… that’s actually a really hard sell given how stupid she acts. Every time Candace says or does something bone-headed and impulsive and way too honest for her environment you’ll groan to yourself and think “surely this dumb bitch knows by now from her last 35 negative experiences to just fucking shut up and behave so things don’t bite her on the ass later” and then things bite her on the ass later and then she says or does even more dumb impulsive shit in response and then the cycle continues. In quite a few arguments between Candace and the evil executives extolling corporate values, I was siding with the executives all the way. When Candace’s groupmates were getting sick of her shit, they weren’t the only ones. She really is painfully obnoxious and at multiple points you’ll be rooting for the villains and hoping that Candace gets what’s coming to her before she Mary Sues her way out. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the author’s intention.
Another shitty thing – this book way, way, waaaaaay overestimates the importance of winning k-pop idol music shows, in the way that only a deluded k-pop fan could, and since music shows drive important parts of the story, this gets cringe quite quickly and becopmes a real stumbling block of the book as a whole. Yes, music show wins can matter in isolated cases, like for a little-known group on a small agency, because a nugu beating the big groups can cause some positive media attention, so when NEVERIDOL get a first win and it’s a big deal for them that makes sense, but Candace’s group “The Girls” are signed to S.A.Y. who are in the story the biggest k-pop agency that was ever biggity big, so we assume that they’re on SM-tier, which means they don’t need to even give much of a fuck if they win or lose. Someone needs to tap Stephan on the shoulder and let him know that big agencies don’t actually care about award show wins because the big agencies simply don’t need the exposure of music shows all that badly, for example it’s quite well known by k-pop fans that YG artists don’t even bother going on most of the shows. In fact I can’t believe he doesn’t know this, or maybe he just forgot? But the plot threads where music show wins are such a big deal for The Girls and losses are so devastating and the entire fucking label has an emergency red-light crisis meeting every time The Girls lose a show… come on, now. This is the author bringing in a sport mentality to music because he just assumes that’s what all competitions of all types are like and probably just has no idea how it really works.
Stephan Lee also seems to really struggle to write endings, as “K-pop Confidential” had a real stinker of an ending and so does “K-pop Revolution”. It’s all foreshadowed fairly obviously, where in the last fifty pages or so the book has a weird and somewhat amusing tonal shift where it basically becomes a spy novel. Of course it’s obvious who the bad people are (it’s those slimy execs at Candace’s agency who made the place over to be more respectful of trainees to win Candace back so they could then get sneaky revenge later because Candace is just that fucking important that she justifies all this weird dick-around scheming to humiliate her to the max and ruin her life instead of just being fucking ignored) but Candace gets back at them by (spoiling the ending here but fuck it) surprise-turning up at a show and doing a surprise stage where her and her group and that other group all express their individuality and true feelings and shit on the bad people at the company in public and hold hands and cry a lot and… and… well, that’s it really. The End. Not sure what that was supposed to achieve. Oh and there’s an epilogue where Candace writes her Harvard University application even though she’s shown no academic interest of any kind whatsoever over the entire two books, but of course she has to go to Harvard because anything less wouldn’t be Mary Sue enough for Candace, the Queen of the Mary Sues… and she even admits in the application to cheating in school and basically being lazy and not even caring if she gets in or not, but gosh she learned lessons and “made k-pop a more inclusive place” and that’s important or something. At least it’s somewhat of a proper conclusion even if it sucks dicks, it mercifully wraps everything up and doesn’t leave an opening for a third novel.
So in summary, yes this book both feels and reads like asspaper. However, if you’re a typical 2025 k-pop fan, chances are you’re as dumb as Candace and maybe you’ll love this book. Perhaps that’s the whole strategy – pitch the book to the lowest common demoninator of knuckle-scraping TikTok doomscrolling hype-believing loser, so you get only the most uncritical fans reading it, and then they’re easier to sell more stuff to. Maybe it worked, who knows. Stephan Lee lives in both New York and L.A according to his website so I guess he’s paying that rent somehow. But for actually smart readers like YOU (because you’re reading kpopalypse.com right now and not some shitrag k-pop site that spreads revenge porn) this book just isn’t going to cut it. If nothing else the writing style does have some minimal improvements over the first book, but the problem is that it’s somewhat of a moot point because you have to read the dogshit first book in order to make this sequel even worth reading at all. I’m giving “K-pop Revolution” one Netflix documentary about Candace out of five (yes that’s a thing that exists in this book), but add another two Netflix documentaries about Candace out of five if you’d actually watch a Netflix documentary about Candace.
Are you a brave writer of k-pop books who would like to see me review your work? If so, get in touch!
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