The idol industry is no joke. It would be easy to forget how vicious it can be, given that a lot of manga, manhwa, and anime try to give us a romanticized portrait, and at first, it looks like Imitation may be doing the same thing. It follows Maha Lee, a perky young woman in the three-woman girl group Tea Party, a tiny unit with a tiny company. Maha got her break partly because she looks like Lima La, a veteran entertainer, and she's been playing that up ever since the news commented on it. But everything starts to go wrong when Maha meets Lima on an idol sports day show set. Not only does she manage to annoy Lima, but she also gets on the bad side of hot male idol Ryoc Kwon, a member of the top boy band Shax. Suddenly, Maha's rise seems destined to stop.

The main plot of Imitation is, ostensibly, about how Maha and Ryoc begin to work out their differences and fall in love. This starts almost from the beginning of volume one: after Maha's initial bad encounter with him, she follows it up with another one, culminating in her being cast as “Woman A” in a drama he's filming…one where he's a dangerous serial killer and he murders Woman A. This turns out to be the K-comic equivalent of the old romance novel standby of the female lead detesting the male lead, causing him to realize that he's falling in love with her. In the case of Ryoc and Maha, things take a slightly more violent turn; he decides to use her fear of him to adlib the scene, resulting in Maha getting a real bruise on her neck and an even deeper fear of Ryoc Kwon. When Ryoc realizes that he's screwed up big time, the love story begins in earnest, which is not going to sit well with all readers.

On the plus side, Ryoc, who has been fighting depression ever since he bullied a former Shax member out of the group, becomes increasingly self-aware as the series goes on, and that includes realizing when he goes too far and learning to be more respectful to other people in general. While he's very open about his feelings for Maha (and how cringey they often sound), he's also remarkably respectful of her as their relationship progresses. If Maha says to stop, he stops, no questions asked. If she asks him to take it slower, he does. Ryoc matures through his relationship with Maha (which, somewhat ironically, causes people like Lima La to look at him with a jaundiced eye because he's somehow less cool and aloof), and by volume four he feels like a completely different character than we met in volume one – and we can easily trace his evolution.

It's also Ryoc's increasing self-awareness that helps to highlight some of the issues with the idol industry. He is expected to maintain a certain physique as a male idol but is largely unaware of how the standards may differ for female idols. In volume one, he finds Maha without her shoes on and is aghast to realize that her feet are covered in cuts and bruises. He quickly makes the connection that this is because she's been made to practice dancing for hours in high heels, which in no way mimics the shape of an actual human foot. Throughout all four volumes, he notes mildly that Maha is getting thinner, which builds on the background mentions of how she and her groupmates Ria and Hyunji are on constant diets. Things come to a head in volume four, when he finally sees and touches her bare torso, and realizes just how much weight Maha has been made to lose.

The mentions of dieting and one scene in volume three of Hyunji making herself vomit off-set are all so casually done up until this point that I at first thought that I was overreacting by zeroing in on them. The young women all mention being hungry throughout, and at one point their music producer dictates that Ria should get to eat more than the other two because she has the best voice and needs to maintain it. But until we see Maha's emaciated body in volume four – and compare it to a publicity stunt in volume one where she allows her bare back to be shown on television – it isn't clear just how horrible the situation is. Creator KyungRan Park does a good job of downplaying this as “industry standard” by keeping the focus on Maha's relationship with Ryoc or the fact that Hyunji has a crush on Yujin (a member of boy band Sparkling), who has a longstanding crush on Maha. But as it turns out, all of those off-hand comments were meant to handwave away a very real problem that's likely having a real effect on the girls' health. By volume four we have scenes of Maha bargaining that she and Hyunji will just eat “three slices of meat and lots of vegetables” and their manager giving them each a single piece of candy for a meal because “they'll have to eat a full breakfast” the next day. The whole thing is eerily reminiscent of the horrific “Pro-Ana” movement and the harmful slogan “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”

This is not the only dark element of the series, either. It's mentioned early on that Maha doesn't have a great relationship with her family, largely due to her now-deceased grandfather, but it isn't until volume four that we fully understand the scope of the abuse she's undergone. Even more horrifying, we spend most of these books assuming that Maha now lives alone in an apartment because we never see her interacting with her parents or younger brother, just her older sister on occasion. Suffice it to say that that is not the case, further driving home the grim fact of how her family abuses and neglects her. No wonder the eating disorder her chosen industry is giving her barely registers – in Maha's mind, it proves that someone is paying attention to her, and any attention is better than none.

Although the art isn't great – it can be hard to tell some of the characters apart, and there are some perspective issues - Imitation is a story worth reading. If you've struggled with disordered eating, it may not be the series for you, but its blend of the light and dark of the South Korean idol industry is fascinating, and volume four reveals that Park knows exactly what she's doing.