The idol industry is no joke. Considering a lot of comics, it’s easy to forget how vicious it is, comicsand the anime tries to give us a romanticized portrait, at first, it looks like Imitation Probably doing the same thing. The show tells the story of Maha Lee, a bubbly young woman in the three-person girl group Tea Party, a small group and a small company. Part of Maha’s success is that she looks like Limala, a veteran entertainer, something she’s been emphasizing ever since the news came up about it. But when Maha meets Lima at the Idol Games show, everything starts to go wrong. Not only did she piss off Lima, she also offended popular male idol Shax member Ryoc Kwon. Suddenly, Maha’s rise seemed destined to come to a halt.
main plot Imitation Ostensibly, it’s about how Maha and Rick come to work out their differences and fall in love. It starts almost from the beginning of the first volume: after Maha’s initial bad encounter with him, she has another one that ends with her playing “Woman A” in a TV series he’s filming… In this In the play, he is a dangerous serial killer who murdered woman A. In the case of Ryoc and Maha, things took a slightly drastic turn. He decided to improvise by playing on her fear of him, resulting in real bruises on Maha’s neck and a deeper fear of Ryoc Kwon. The love story begins in earnest when Riok realizes he’s screwed up big time, but that won’t sit well with all readers.
On the plus side, Ryoc has been battling depression since bullying a former Shax member out of the band, and as the series goes on, he becomes more and more self-aware, which includes realizing how he When it comes to going too far, and learning to be more yourself. While he was very public about his feelings for Maha (and how awkward they often sounded), he also had a lot of respect for her as their relationship grew. If Maha said stop, he would stop, no questions asked. If she asked him to slow down, he would. Riok matures through his relationship with Maha (somewhat ironically, this leads to people like Limala viewing him in a jaundiced light, as he is somehow less calm and aloof) , and by volume four, he feels like a completely different character than the one we met in the books.
Ryoc’s growing self-awareness also helps highlight some of the problems in the idol industry. As a male idol, he was expected to maintain a certain physique, but he was largely unaware that the standards for female idols might be different. In the first volume, he finds Maha without shoes and is surprised to see that her feet are covered in cuts and bruises. He soon realized that this was because she was forced to practice dancing for hours in high heels, which in no way imitated the shape of a real human foot. In all four volumes, he gently points out that Maha is getting thinner, building on the background of how she and her teammates Lea and Hyun-ji are constantly dieting. Things come to a head in volume four, when he finally sees and touches her naked torso, and he realizes How many Maha was forced to lose weight.
The mentions of dieting, and the scene where Hyun Ji makes herself vomit in Volume 3, have been done so casually so far that I initially thought I was overreacting by focusing on them. The young women mentioned being hungry throughout, and at one point their music producer demanded that Ria should eat more than the other two because she had the best voice and needed to maintain it. But until we see Maha’s emaciated body in Volume 4 – and compare it to the publicity stunt in Volume 1 where she allowed her bare back to appear on TV – we won’t know exactly how serious that is. horrible. Creator KyungRan Park does a good job of downplaying this as “industry standard”, focusing instead on Maha’s relationship with Ryoc, or the fact that Hyunji has a crush on Yujin (a member of boy band Sparkling), who has long been with Obsessed with Maha. But it turns out that all of these off-the-cuff comments were meant to avoid a very real issue that can have real consequences for a girl’s health. By volume four, we have the bargaining scene with Ma-ha, where she and Hyun-ji only eat “three slices of meat and a lot of vegetables” while their manager gives them each a piece of candy for a meal because “they have to eat “Breakfast the next day”. The whole thing is eerily reminiscent of the horrific “Pro-Ana” movement and the harmful slogan “Nothing tastes better than being skinny feels.”
This isn’t the only dark element in the series, either. It’s mentioned early on that Maha had a bad relationship with her family, largely due to her now deceased grandfather, but it’s not until volume four that we fully understand the extent of the abuse she suffered. Even scarier is the fact that we spend most of these books assuming that Maha now lives alone in the apartment, since we never see her interacting with her parents or younger brother, and sometimes just her older sister. Arguably that’s not the case, which further illustrates the harsh reality of how her family abused and neglected her. It’s no wonder that her chosen industry has given her few eating disorders – in Maha’s mind, it’s proof that someone is paying attention, and any Attention is better than no attention.
While the art isn’t great – it’s hard to distinguish some of the characters, and there are some perspective issues – Imitation is a story worth reading. If you’ve been struggling with an eating disorder, this series might not be for you, but its melding of the light and dark aspects of the Korean idol industry is fascinating, and the fourth volume reveals that Park knows what she’s doing.
