Camille Chong’s Singapore superheroes debut

The defining influence came much earlier in the form of the six-season superhero cartoon Miraculous: Tales Of Ladybug & Cat Noir, first released in 2015.

“It had a really big impact on me,” Chong confesses. “I was writing fanfic about it. I really liked the idea of secret identities because then you have a love square. I really wanted to replicate that tension.”

The first draft, which she hammered out in four months after completing the A levels, was much more romance forward. Yet with each revision, especially with the process happening in her second and third year at University College London, the story steered towards the political, finally involving a conspiracy over a new energy resource called moonstones.

This is a Singapore where superheroes have become guns for hire, including by the government. Harper and Tia are asked to question authority and the pitfalls of unthinking allegiance.

Chong says: “Law actually teaches you to trust the institution, because all these processes are put in place for specific reasons. But it also taught me what to critique.

“As I grew up, and also because I was in the UK, I started to ask more questions. It’s a good message to put out there: that people should not immediately trust the institution, or at least they should know what they are trusting.”

Her book is a long-term dream that has finally been fulfilled and a kind of expurgation of hang-ups perpetuated by Western media. When she was younger, she wrote about protagonists who were white men in the United States, which she at that point knew next to nothing about.

“I wanted a Singapore superhero in a Singapore setting. That was the first premise,” she says. Though like many younger authors, having grown up with the breakout appeal of K-pop as a matter of course, she is also aiming for a larger audience now.

“A lot of Singapore stories are about Singapore, which is obviously great, but I also wanted something that felt mainstream while still being in Singapore.”

Her sequel, which she has submitted, will be “less rooftop heavy” and more “mall heavy”, Chong teases, barring editorial vetoes. Harper and Tia who, it is no spoiler to say, become a couple by this first book’s end, will have to contend with being in a relationship while working together.

“It was more fun to write because I could explore different dynamics. Honestly, if I had known there would be a second book, I might have prolonged the will-they-won’t they,” Chong says. “But we have very few established couples in fantasy right now after they get together.”

Enemies to lovers is emphatically not something that happens in real life, but Chong explains that the obsession is with the tipping point when someone is suddenly seen in a radically different light.

It is a tension she revels in, and the confident debutante ends the interview by saying with a wide smile: “Their face is on your wall, whether you give them kisses or throw darts at them. It’s fixation that drives both love and hate.”