Finally Happy: Parasocial Relationships And Liking A Celebrity
Or: a longwinded, personal piece
Last year on a day as hot as this one, I scrolled through Twitter while trying to do the daily job. At some point, The Boyz’ Sunwoo started a livestream - then sometime later, bandmate and close friend Q joined. But what an entry: his hair is disheveled and sweaty, he looks visibly upset, almost like he’s been crying before. The translations don’t make matters better. The one I caught on the day of was: “Changmin [Q’s real name] was dancing alone and he is angry at himself because he didn't dance well..........” The visuals don’t make matters much better.
In the ten minutes he’s in the livestream (around 1:41 hours in) he mentions a lack of a proper meal, not being able to find his wallet in his bag in the convenience store only to find it later “in a bag inside my bag”, and how he lost against himself. Sunwoo brings up their rising popularity and this leads Q to talk about this being the last life of everybody present, so they should live their life happily. “Because,” he says, and the camera shakes as he hits the desk. “It’s a life we only live once. Don’t you feel mad? If things that make you mad happened?” Sunwoo confirms that yes, in his twenty-one* years of living, he’s lived days and hours being mad. “For the last time in our youth,” Q continues, “Let’s live happily, more healthily, with TheB [fans of The Boyz’].”
I didn’t know any of this. If you saw it without subtitles, all you’d get is the palpable sense of anger. And then, of course, with the very basic information provided that he is mad at himself, my brain did the rest. It was the recognition of a feeling that pushes me to have a hard demeanor, to others and to myself. The mentality that leads me to have a much steeper learning curve than others probably do, the blinds that leave you unable to praise yourself even if you are, by an objective metric, good. I know it well. It’s self-loathing, and the determination in the face of it to keep going.
It’s been a year since Q is my favorite of The Boyz. In Kpop lingo, this is called having “a bias”, or being a “stan”. Yes, he’s attractive, yes, he’s talented, and yes, he’s strange in an entertaining way: if somebody asks me, I will tell them he’s my favorite for these reasons - not that anyone does, because it’s irrelevant. Here’s the truth though: he’s my favorite because of that moment above. Because in that moment, I hurt for him, and I recognized his hurt, and that sympathy is real and binding.
Parasocial relationship. Any moment a celebrity (whether that be a traditional one, or a more modern variant, like streamers and influencer) has a sizable fandom, the conversation turns to parasocial relationships. Professional Smash player and streamer ESAM to say earlier this year he doesn’t want to be called by his real name, but by his tag. “I feel like people saying my real name is a way they think they’re close to me,” he reasons. Though I can’t find it right now, I was surprised to read that kpopalypse, a blog I’ve been following for almost as long as I’ve been into Kpop, was kind of worried that people knew so much about him. But unsurprisingly, this is a bigger talking point in Kpop, with so much content for and to fans being produced. Livestreams like the one I described of Sunwoo’s are the norm, not the exception. There’s apps with paid subscriptions where idols talk to fans in PMs; you enter your name and the idol’s message is filled in with yours. Girlgroup aespa was created with the idea that their AI variants were always available for the fan, fittingly called My. AESPA: Avatar Experience.
We talk of a world where marriages have to be apologised for, where idols are expected to be totally okay with literal stalkers harassing them, not to call the police on their own fans. This is light years away from what ESAM is complaining about. Calling someone by their real name? That kind of thing is normal in Kpop. Literal baseline. I literally call Q “Changmin” or, even shorter, “jcm” like Ji Changmin, his birth name, on a daily basis. All this is to say that of course — and with companies aware of these extreme situations happening, encouraging fans to take the next step, break the next boundary — Korean pop music has a vested interest in parasocial relationships. In Kpop, music is not the business, but the business card: the more an idol can bind fans to them, the more they have a certain brand reputation, meaning that with every brand endorsement of the idol there’s customers ready to buy the advertised product.
How do you get somebody to care for you? You provide them comfort when they need it most. You become the thing that makes them happy on a bad day, perhaps the only thing that makes someone happen when every day is a bad day. This isn’t something idols really have much of a control over, but it’s not a surprise to me - nor, I believe, to anyone - that younger people, people that struggle with mental health, cling onto idols. A Twitter user mentions reading a post that suggests that “maybe the reason why some people are slowly losing interest in kpop is because they've finally healed, which they no longer need those groups to make them feel happy and loved”. It inevitably leads to the following question: can you like Korean Pop music without somebody to bind it to you? And here’s the other implication: does happiness come from a single source from which you move when it wanes, a moth drawn to a lamp? But more importantly, it leads me to ask myself: what does normal look like? Will I ever attain it?
The boyband phase. I think this is a rite of passage for a lot of girls, or at least Hollywood will have me believe that; I did notice that people followed celebrities and bands, but nobody liked Kpop back when I liked Kpop in school. There were weebs but not Kpop, which got me to hear that I was watching “porno”, or “weird Koreans”. When you learn really young that you like something that’s not shameful, you learn how to shrug it off easily. I was sixteen when I was into my first boyband. The first boyband I really liked was Infinite, and of Infinite, my favorite member - my bias - was Sungyeol. Sungyeol was the tallest, best-looking member; he was known as the jokester of the group, a kind of hyperactive presence in a frat-like group dynamic. In songs, he would get one single line, and when other members got acting and modeling opportunities, he got nothing, even though the whole reason why he became an idol in the first place was to become an actor. One, two, three roles passed onto other members, and you could see that it weighed on him; in most of the 2012 variety show Ranking King, he looks moody and sullen, even lashing out to MCs for not winning at something he really wanted. For promotional interviews of 2013’s EDM nonsense Destiny, he’s sprawled on the couch, saying: “It was my destiny to wear this skirt”. Anyhow, it really weighed on me back then, as if that hurt was mine. I told myself I wouldn’t like a system that so obviously exploited the people within, so obviously hurt people. I smile at the face of this naivete and sincerity now, but in a move that practically screams dramatic irony, the thing I “moved on to” was anime, an industry notorious for exploiting its people. Not that the move was permanent; I couldn’t keep up with seasonal anime anymore, so in 2015 I was back in Kpop because of Infinite’s Bad. The reason why I liked Sungyeol best was because in 2011’s Sesame Player, a show that almost doubles as a documentary that happens to play around the release of the first album, Over The Top, he declares: “I’m practicing only for myself. It’s not because somebody told me to do it, I’m doing it. Because it’s the road I chose, even if I’m tired.” The subtitle reads: “It’s the road I chose. Even if I’m tired, I definitely cannot give up!”
I know, I know. Feeling something for a celebrity is cringy in 2021. I think that numerous celebrities singing along to Imagine like three days into lockdown last year set the tone for a year in which celebrities were seemingly incapable of saying the right thing or shutting up or donating money where it was relevant. Yet, more than once, and this year too, people turned to celebrities to show a sort of moral compass: if they said what they knew was right, then it was even more right, then it was validated. If celebrities said the wrong thing, then it was time to join a gleeful backlash, a welcome reprieve from heavy topics that no single Twitter user could control. But I’ve seen more people want, genuinely desire, their celebrities and idols to say the right thing. Perhaps in more extreme cases, this has to do with celebrities becoming an extension of the fan’s identity. Perhaps in more benign cases, this has to do with celebrities being virtual friends of a fan, and as the old adage goes… But it’s a parasocial relationship in either case, and in 2020 and 2021 we saw the full brunt of how it pervades social media. Smarter people have said smarter things about it, but perhaps this was inevitable. People were locked down and couldn’t meet with friends. People were isolated. It’s no wonder that they form emotional bonds with celebrities that don’t know them, cling onto them, and that they become an extension of someone’s identity. 2020 was a year where people’s mental health deteriorated in a lot of cases, so to me, it may well be an outlier of a phenomenon that is quickly becoming normal in real time - that we now have three dimensions of relationships: the family we have, the friends we keep, and the celebrities we stan.
Don’t think of this discourse as something that lives and dies on the Internet. At work, a coworker once said to the group that he’s stopped watching a show because an actor said something idiotic in real life. Just yesterday I heard my coworker say he can’t socialize with us on a department trip because he has to watch a Twitch show of two people talking in the evening. Yes, I’ve heard people tell me celebrities are all nuts, and though I disagreed with him back then… now I would almost agree. But this is one of the very few topics going around online that you could take up in real life and have a good discussion of: both liking celebrities and fandom culture. Though from my experience, the baseline assumption and conclusion is to be… well, normal about it. Normal, as in, that it doesn’t threaten your mental health. Does it threaten my mental health, is it hinged on it? No. My interest in Q is nowhere near the level of intensity that I had towards Sungyeol back then. He’s got something I value in people. He’s hot; why lie? Seeing him do his usual antics makes me happy, and various looks rouse attraction in me, and there’s nothing wrong with squeeing and feeling happy. But his well-being isn’t mine. At worst, like with Kingdom, I feel the kind of connection that I do with the Turkish national teams: happy when they win, pissed when they do not. But competition shows are an outlier. None of these things are threatening my mental health, nor does it have my happiness on a stranglehold. Even if they did: I change the tab, I close the app, and it’s over. And then it’s back to my job or to writing - the one thing that my happiness actually depends on.
* Though Sunwoo is born April 16, 2000, and thus considered 20 years old, Koreans consider your first year of being born as age 1.