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apexpreyshareable version on substack.
For those who don’t know me, I am an MFA candidate in Creative Writing working on an essay collection about motorsport, fandom, and alienation called Apex Prey. This piece was the first I wrote under the banner of this project.
What you must know about me upfront is that I’ve always been voted off the island first. Several times in my formative friend group, I was the one who was left out, cast aside, made to feel insecure of my ambitions and desires. Sometimes, it was me who drove the wedge. Less close friends also liked to act on my behalf, regardless of whether they had a stake in the matter besides me. In the end, I would apologize and try to make amends, but I knew I’d become an adult when I realized my leaving the island all the time meant that wasn’t the place I needed to be.
What may be helpful to know next is that the people I turned to after, when I was most alone and wanting, even if we are no longer in each other’s orbits, are the ones for whom I live my life.
Starting from a young age, I’ve been fascinated by celebrity and its mechanics.
People love to interpret celebrities—which for our purposes will be a blanket term for individuals who are widely known, constantly reported on by media outlets, and whose public personas operate as profitable brands—at their contradictory extremes. They are at once caricatures and obfuscations, nuance and reduction. The same is true of popular people at school and in the workplace: these people may be physically beautiful and spiritually ugly, rich or kind or stupid or well-connected or all at once, or none of these things, or some of these things and not others, in service and defiance of stereotypes. They are given something the common person doesn’t have and covets, or detests, or doesn’t care for. Existing, ultimately, separate from a public but always situated within it. A celebrity without its audience is not.
Borrowing K-pop parlance, the most compelling famous people to me, my biases, are Centers—typically, but not always, the Face of the group. Within the context of a K-pop group, a Center is the member who their company places in the literal middle of the lineup because they possess desirable traits that demand attention: they are the most conventionally attractive (overlapping with the position of the Visual), the best singer or dancer, and/or the most popular among fans and the general public. Center is not a fixed position; certain choreography may better suit one member over another, or a company may want to capitalize on someone’s unexpected viral social media moment by shining an additional spotlight on them, for example. And some groups prefer to be equitable with center distribution, allowing all members to have their moment in the sun, though their fans and the media may bestow that role upon someone anyway for marketing reasons.
Centers may also overlap with the Face of the group, also a mutable position, whose job it is to represent the band in public and draw in new fans. In K-pop especially, the group’s leader may be its Face, by virtue of respecting established hierarchy. Other times, it again is the best-looking or most popular member, someone whose presence on a variety show or red carpet will sell the group to potential fans.
Each group has their own relationship with the idea of a Center and how they do or do not connect to the public because of it, and each central member reacts to their own positioning in myriad ways. What complicates matters further is the ongoing debate in and around the K-pop industry of whether the Center (and Visual) position has become obsolete. I’ve been a fan of K-pop for nearly six years, and I’ve been aware of it for much longer. I see this cultural evolution play out in the way each of my four favorite groups differs from each other in terms of how, or if, their Centers willingly operate, even when two of them share the same central member. These Centers stand out to me because they are not only popular and aware of how the public perceives them, but also because their response to the perpetual media cycle of being exaggerated, then flattened, is to turn inward. Spending time off-camera, or behind the camera, grappling with fear, nursing their own wounds, and figuring out how to put their most complete foot forward.
I gravitate toward Centers because I was not popular in high school.
I gravitate toward Centers because I want people to see me in a stellar lineup and choose me.
I gravitate toward Centers because I want to be many people’s favorite person.
I gravitate toward Centers because I want to be one person’s favorite person?
I gravitate toward Centers because I don’t know who I want to be to anyone, and maybe turning toward the brightest spotlight like a lab-grown sunflower stops me from ending up alone with myself in the end.
I read K’s Oscar Piastri post on Dreamwidth the day after she published it. K is someone whose blog I scour to learn things about coding, fandom statistics, and incredible music taste, and even though our sports and K-pop interests don’t always overlap, I’ll leave each post having thought about something in a new way, overall net positive.
K and I are neither friends nor mutuals online. We’ve spoken once before—I liked the way she embedded a YouTube video in one of her monthly media reflection posts but couldn’t figure out how to reverse engineer the HTML, so I messaged her asking how she did it, which prompted a new public post for everyone but kind of just for me—but there was no reason to remain so loyal to her output on the obscure offshoot of LiveJournal. That’s why I didn’t read the post the first time I saw it.
Dreamwidth is not only unsung but also slow-moving, and I don’t follow many blogs, meaning my reading page is often stagnant. The second day that week, I checked the reading page and saw nothing newer, so I read K’s post, which was a concise but thorough chronicling of Australian racing driver Oscar Piastri’s career prior to his 2023 debut in Formula 1 for the McLaren Formula 1 Team.
She posted it on January 14, 2024, a month and a half before the 2024 F1 season kicked off in Bahrain. There was plenty of time for me to pore over this wonderfully wrought post, then scroll through two of K’s Tumblr tags, one for Oscar and a joint one for him and his teammate, which would ready me to tune in at the start of the season. But as evidenced by my usage of Dreamwidth, I’m quite reticent to embrace swift newness. F1 was globally popular; at the time, its Netflix reality show Drive to Survive had six seasons. Millions of people were already familiar with this sport that’s existed since 1950, some of whom had followed it for much of their lives. I thought getting into it would be embarrassing. Not because it was popular, but because I was late.
My first F1 race was race 3 of the 2024 season, in Melbourne.
Around 10pm on March 23, I was scrolling Twitter on a break from dismantling major edits on my first art review. I noticed the sidebar of trends included the surnames Verstappen and Hamilton: Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, F1 drivers with a combined 10 World Drivers Championship wins between them at the time. I can’t say for sure, and I do think it matters, but I think it was Lewis’ name I clicked; he’d been my one loose tether to the sport because news broke on February 1 of his shock move from the Mercedes team to Ferrari. According to Twitter, both Lewis and Max had retired from the Australian Grand Prix, meaning something happened to their cars that ended their races early. Lewis’ exit surprised me because I’d learned tangentially of his success in the wake of the Ferrari news, but Max’s DNF was more immediately pressing to fans and casual viewers because he’d been fresh off the heels of a wholly dominant 2023 season, winning 19 of 22 races and having podiumed in 21, and was poised to do the same in 2024, after handily winning the first two races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. This was Max’s first retirement since 2022, also in Melbourne. Neither of the active world champions I’d known of at the time were in contention, which meant the win was wide open.
There was about half an hour left to go in the race.
One of the, um, alternative streamers I rely on to watch some soccer matches had an active channel for the grand prix. My heavily stricken review draft was deeply upsetting to me, so to get out of my head for a bit, I tuned into the race feed.
On the last lap, Mercedes driver George Russell crashed.
Having driven so close behind the Aston Martin of two-time world champion Fernando Alonso, dirty air washed over George’s car. The turbulence stripped his car of its downforce, causing oversteer—his rear axle lost grip and sent him sliding into the gravel at turn 6. The Mercedes hit the barrier in such a way that it skidded back onto the track, ultimately landing on its left side, surrounded by a confetti explosion of debris. George was okay, able to get out of the car with the help of two trackside marshals, but the severity and timing of the crash triggered a virtual safety car, ending the race then and there.
The winner of the 2024 Australian Grand Prix was Carlos Sainz, who’d missed the previous race recovering from appendicitis surgery. He raced until the end of the 2024 season for Ferrari; his was the seat Lewis moved to in 2025. Ferrari teammate Charles Leclerc ended the race in second place, a 1-2 for the Scuderia.
Oscar Piastri, the driver whose history I’d come to learn and for whom this was a home race, was fourth. Completing the podium in Melbourne was his teammate, the person who soon after this became my favorite driver and a principal axis around which the season revolved, Lando Norris.
The next race was at the Suzuka Circuit in Japan, in two weeks. I planned to watch the lights go out.
For those who don’t know me, I am an MFA candidate in Creative Writing working on an essay collection about motorsport, fandom, and alienation called Apex Prey. This piece was the first I wrote under the banner of this project.
What you must know about me upfront is that I’ve always been voted off the island first. Several times in my formative friend group, I was the one who was left out, cast aside, made to feel insecure of my ambitions and desires. Sometimes, it was me who drove the wedge. Less close friends also liked to act on my behalf, regardless of whether they had a stake in the matter besides me. In the end, I would apologize and try to make amends, but I knew I’d become an adult when I realized my leaving the island all the time meant that wasn’t the place I needed to be.
What may be helpful to know next is that the people I turned to after, when I was most alone and wanting, even if we are no longer in each other’s orbits, are the ones for whom I live my life.
Starting from a young age, I’ve been fascinated by celebrity and its mechanics.
People love to interpret celebrities—which for our purposes will be a blanket term for individuals who are widely known, constantly reported on by media outlets, and whose public personas operate as profitable brands—at their contradictory extremes. They are at once caricatures and obfuscations, nuance and reduction. The same is true of popular people at school and in the workplace: these people may be physically beautiful and spiritually ugly, rich or kind or stupid or well-connected or all at once, or none of these things, or some of these things and not others, in service and defiance of stereotypes. They are given something the common person doesn’t have and covets, or detests, or doesn’t care for. Existing, ultimately, separate from a public but always situated within it. A celebrity without its audience is not.
Borrowing K-pop parlance, the most compelling famous people to me, my biases, are Centers—typically, but not always, the Face of the group. Within the context of a K-pop group, a Center is the member who their company places in the literal middle of the lineup because they possess desirable traits that demand attention: they are the most conventionally attractive (overlapping with the position of the Visual), the best singer or dancer, and/or the most popular among fans and the general public. Center is not a fixed position; certain choreography may better suit one member over another, or a company may want to capitalize on someone’s unexpected viral social media moment by shining an additional spotlight on them, for example. And some groups prefer to be equitable with center distribution, allowing all members to have their moment in the sun, though their fans and the media may bestow that role upon someone anyway for marketing reasons.
Centers may also overlap with the Face of the group, also a mutable position, whose job it is to represent the band in public and draw in new fans. In K-pop especially, the group’s leader may be its Face, by virtue of respecting established hierarchy. Other times, it again is the best-looking or most popular member, someone whose presence on a variety show or red carpet will sell the group to potential fans.
Each group has their own relationship with the idea of a Center and how they do or do not connect to the public because of it, and each central member reacts to their own positioning in myriad ways. What complicates matters further is the ongoing debate in and around the K-pop industry of whether the Center (and Visual) position has become obsolete. I’ve been a fan of K-pop for nearly six years, and I’ve been aware of it for much longer. I see this cultural evolution play out in the way each of my four favorite groups differs from each other in terms of how, or if, their Centers willingly operate, even when two of them share the same central member. These Centers stand out to me because they are not only popular and aware of how the public perceives them, but also because their response to the perpetual media cycle of being exaggerated, then flattened, is to turn inward. Spending time off-camera, or behind the camera, grappling with fear, nursing their own wounds, and figuring out how to put their most complete foot forward.
I gravitate toward Centers because I want people to see me in a stellar lineup and choose me.
I gravitate toward Centers because I want to be many people’s favorite person.
I gravitate toward Centers because I want to be one person’s favorite person?
I gravitate toward Centers because I don’t know who I want to be to anyone, and maybe turning toward the brightest spotlight like a lab-grown sunflower stops me from ending up alone with myself in the end.
I read K’s Oscar Piastri post on Dreamwidth the day after she published it. K is someone whose blog I scour to learn things about coding, fandom statistics, and incredible music taste, and even though our sports and K-pop interests don’t always overlap, I’ll leave each post having thought about something in a new way, overall net positive.
K and I are neither friends nor mutuals online. We’ve spoken once before—I liked the way she embedded a YouTube video in one of her monthly media reflection posts but couldn’t figure out how to reverse engineer the HTML, so I messaged her asking how she did it, which prompted a new public post for everyone but kind of just for me—but there was no reason to remain so loyal to her output on the obscure offshoot of LiveJournal. That’s why I didn’t read the post the first time I saw it.
Dreamwidth is not only unsung but also slow-moving, and I don’t follow many blogs, meaning my reading page is often stagnant. The second day that week, I checked the reading page and saw nothing newer, so I read K’s post, which was a concise but thorough chronicling of Australian racing driver Oscar Piastri’s career prior to his 2023 debut in Formula 1 for the McLaren Formula 1 Team.
She posted it on January 14, 2024, a month and a half before the 2024 F1 season kicked off in Bahrain. There was plenty of time for me to pore over this wonderfully wrought post, then scroll through two of K’s Tumblr tags, one for Oscar and a joint one for him and his teammate, which would ready me to tune in at the start of the season. But as evidenced by my usage of Dreamwidth, I’m quite reticent to embrace swift newness. F1 was globally popular; at the time, its Netflix reality show Drive to Survive had six seasons. Millions of people were already familiar with this sport that’s existed since 1950, some of whom had followed it for much of their lives. I thought getting into it would be embarrassing. Not because it was popular, but because I was late.
My first F1 race was race 3 of the 2024 season, in Melbourne.
Around 10pm on March 23, I was scrolling Twitter on a break from dismantling major edits on my first art review. I noticed the sidebar of trends included the surnames Verstappen and Hamilton: Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, F1 drivers with a combined 10 World Drivers Championship wins between them at the time. I can’t say for sure, and I do think it matters, but I think it was Lewis’ name I clicked; he’d been my one loose tether to the sport because news broke on February 1 of his shock move from the Mercedes team to Ferrari. According to Twitter, both Lewis and Max had retired from the Australian Grand Prix, meaning something happened to their cars that ended their races early. Lewis’ exit surprised me because I’d learned tangentially of his success in the wake of the Ferrari news, but Max’s DNF was more immediately pressing to fans and casual viewers because he’d been fresh off the heels of a wholly dominant 2023 season, winning 19 of 22 races and having podiumed in 21, and was poised to do the same in 2024, after handily winning the first two races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. This was Max’s first retirement since 2022, also in Melbourne. Neither of the active world champions I’d known of at the time were in contention, which meant the win was wide open.
There was about half an hour left to go in the race.
One of the, um, alternative streamers I rely on to watch some soccer matches had an active channel for the grand prix. My heavily stricken review draft was deeply upsetting to me, so to get out of my head for a bit, I tuned into the race feed.
On the last lap, Mercedes driver George Russell crashed.
Having driven so close behind the Aston Martin of two-time world champion Fernando Alonso, dirty air washed over George’s car. The turbulence stripped his car of its downforce, causing oversteer—his rear axle lost grip and sent him sliding into the gravel at turn 6. The Mercedes hit the barrier in such a way that it skidded back onto the track, ultimately landing on its left side, surrounded by a confetti explosion of debris. George was okay, able to get out of the car with the help of two trackside marshals, but the severity and timing of the crash triggered a virtual safety car, ending the race then and there.
The winner of the 2024 Australian Grand Prix was Carlos Sainz, who’d missed the previous race recovering from appendicitis surgery. He raced until the end of the 2024 season for Ferrari; his was the seat Lewis moved to in 2025. Ferrari teammate Charles Leclerc ended the race in second place, a 1-2 for the Scuderia.
Oscar Piastri, the driver whose history I’d come to learn and for whom this was a home race, was fourth. Completing the podium in Melbourne was his teammate, the person who soon after this became my favorite driver and a principal axis around which the season revolved, Lando Norris.
The next race was at the Suzuka Circuit in Japan, in two weeks. I planned to watch the lights go out.
