Why I Worship Pop Stars — And Why I Am Not Delusional

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As the return of BTS took the world by storm, I was sucked into the fandom like a feather into a Dyson. I have been inside this vacuum for weeks now, and it appears that no one empties this dirtbag out.

I even told people online that I was “stuck in the ARMY-vacuum”, but people only welcomed me with lots of purple hearts.

They talked of “a refuge”, reassured me that there was no getting out of here, but also added that “you don’t leave ARMY, but it makes you a better person.”

At first, I laughed.

Then two weeks passed.

And I realized: Shit, there is really no way out. But am I better now?

Just delusional children?
As this sank in, I discovered something startling: I think I really don’t want to go out.

At first, I was scared I had finally ended up as the delulu that my Gen Z heritage assigns me to. I feared I had finally fallen victim to “escapeism”. But if I look at the past two weeks, it is striking how happy I became, and not in a delusional sense.

I laughed, even alone in my room. I was sick, but didn’t feel creeping loneliness hovering in the corner of my expat-life adapted single-room. I made friends, online maybe, but ones that I met in real life after. They laugh at my jokes, follow me around, and make me feel heard and understood in a way that eldest daughters rarely do.

And call me crazy, but I actually think I DID become a better person.

I became a better person for myself. I give myself grace more easily, but I am also more easily motivated to work on things. I have achieved and done stuff in the past two weeks that I never dreamed possible, and I can’t help but wonder if I would have done the same things if I had never become ARMY.

And before you rage-comment, telling me that I have simply become an escapist, Gen Z delulu, let me dive into the nature of parasocial relationships and the pitfalls of them. In my opinion, Western cultures overuse the concept of “childish behavior”, especially among men, and parasocial relations fall in this category.

I took the time last summer to “Swiftify” myself, which was far from the first time I engaged in a parasocial relationship. Maybe because I grew up in the digital era, prasocial relations and strong immersion were always part of my world. But I realized that parasocial relations aren’t all bad.

The defining criterion is whether one is able to use them to one’s advantage.

Using parasocial relations RIGHT

Like I already pointed out in my article on the psychology of Taylor Swift, the famous object of a parasocial relationship is basically a strongly engaged role model that drives you forward. The difficulty here is to differentiate what you get from the star: If a famous person becomes the source of your happiness, not drive, you might actually lose your shit when they stop delivering that entertainment.

That is toxic, a clear sign of dependency rather than role-modelling.

I have seen that in many of my K-pop-loving roommates in my time in Korea last year. They would invest their entire salary in merchandise, return from concerts either in happy tears or roaring anger if “the group didn’t deliver,” and would find themselves utterly destroyed for days when a famous member went to the military.

That is not the only possible para-social relationship, and also not even the most common, but rather the one that is represented under the term “parasocial relationship” the most. Like most things in life, parasocial relations exist on a spectrum.

While my roommates were clearly showing signs of escapism and obsession, many ARMY that I find online use BTS more as a source of drive, a crutch to lean on when things get harsh.

You’d be surprised by the number of fans who write stories of “the time that BTS helped me in my life”, which sounds obsessive, but is actually usually just a genuine story of a human wanting to say “thank you”. It doesn’t mean you give up your personal agency over your life, but rather you needed them at some point, and now this experience fosters your connection and personal drive in life.

Such things in psychology are referred to as “transitional objects”.

Traditionally, a transitional object could be a teddy bear, which a child carries to get over the sadness when it is separated from its parents; but there are also “adult transitional objects”. The more mature the human, the more immaterial the object, and thus religion, creativity, or other intangibles can aid grown humans as “transitional objects” to overcome hardships.

They serve as a psychological crutch, a means to maintain a regular schedule through difficulty, or an automatic mechanism to feel less alone with one’s issues.

My generation grew up in a globalised society that questions and challenges religion, but rediscovers the human need for spirituality among digital media influences. Thus, personified transitional objects are often the pop-stars that market themselves readily to us.

Positive effects of parasocial relationships

Religion or parasocial relationships are transitional spaces that help humans naturally regulate their emotions, explore their identity, and add a meta-level of symbolic meaning-making that goes beyond one’s existence.

Since moving to Asia, where religions like Taoism are also philosophies and where Confucius founded a philosophy of education that structures society alongside temples, it has become clear to me how religions are effectively a code of ethics that society adheres to.

And this learning cemented itself when I recently made friends with a Jehovah’s Witness.

Initially, I have no interest in these sorts of religious conversations, because I seek my ethical code elsewhere. But I couldn’t suppress the thought that life for this new friend of mine seemed fundamentally easier.

She had met her boyfriend and husband at church. They had become friends and then a couple, and as she, another Gen Z, mentioned: It was freeing not to need to clear topics such as open relationships, the boundaries of their physical interactions, and others into the smallest detail as it is often necessary nowadays.

She said that since these things were written in the bible, many conversations about basic topics were not necessary, and I will admit that a part of me envied her for that simplicity.

She had also arrived in Taiwan, a completely foreign country, with no job, no Mandarin skills, and not even a university to study at, and yet, because of her community at church, she immediately had her own, personally fitted network that shared her values. As someone who continues to build such a community painfully, I was really surprised to hear this.

Religion, just like para-social relations and other transitional objects, can be practiced safely in the form of a necessary, non-toxic sort of escapism. This doesn’t mean to detach from reality, but it means to foster an alternative space that is filled with things that are “bigger than us”. This can reach from religion to philosophy or creativity to art.

Which transitional space is available to you depends on your cultural system. While some cultures still foster religion among younger generations, in others, there is now a vacuum where spirituality once was.

This gives engagement with the arts and also alternative spirituality a chance to thrive, as we saw in the early 2020s with the rise of tarot cards.

Of course, it becomes dangerous when idols become gods, but a normally mentally capable young adult of the 21st century can typically differentiate a god-figure from a human idol, even if the extreme cases are those that appear in the media. Fundamentally, our society is more interested in the crazy outliers than the norm.

For most fans, an idol fulfills several roles:

They serve as a role model whose path to success is reverse-engineerable, and their dedication is admirable or imitable
They become emotional anchors in a society that increasingly suffers from loneliness and a multitude of lifepaths that leave many struggling for consistency
Besides this, they can serve as identity check-points, where one can see themselves reflected in another person or watch themselves become a better version of themselves
And ideally, assuming that the idol has a well-established moral campus themselves, they can become a moral north star
All of these points foster emotional and psychological growth that is self-motivated and genuine and more often than not steers away from the idol sooner or later.

The misunderstanding in fandoms
If you are not part of a fandom yourself, all of these descriptions might still sound fishy to you. Mainly, because as mentioned earlier, only the extreme cases are showcased in the media. On top of that, the blurred boundaries between famous people and their followers can look threatening from the outside.

The intensity looks irrational, and it is often only until you enter a fandom that you realize that these communities feed on the most basic of resources: Human connection.

As with a religion, where people go to a service to meet each other, fandoms, at their root, are areas of connection. This is why when you become part of ARMY, you will find yourself in the same physical and digital spaces as like-minded people and eventually share deep things with them, based on a previously agreed-upon, often invisible, code of ethics within the fandom.

This invisible code of ethics is constructed by the idols themselves, sometimes more and sometimes less on purpose. For instance, the BTS ARMY has a strong focus on mental health and emotional growth. The Swifty community celebrates all stages of womanhood and love, and Sabrina Carpenter’s fans value radical femininity.

Ironically, the brand that such idols create to market themselves becomes the basis for the values that their fandom upholds, and yet this process seems secondary and silent in comparison to marketing. This is sad in my opinion, because these people do hold a lot of power and therefore should treat their fans not just as a marketable audience, but also as individuals who find a certain need to be fulfilled by their star.

This is why stories of idols abusing their fans haunt the keyword “parasocial-relationships”. Because, unfortunately, though fans unintentionally but yet actively create spaces that foster their values, it often takes the actual stars a while to catch onto what these values they “accidentally promoted” actually are.

We still invest time in “finding a niche” and “creating a marketable brand”, but what underlies this idea is the craving of a certain part of society that lacks a set of values that this person, more or less accidentally, provides through their branding.

So the real question is not: Are parasocial relationships good or bad? The tricky part is: How does one use the parasocial relations advantageously and safely, ESPECIALLY on the idols’ side?

These relations can serve as tools for growth, transitional space, healthy and necessary escapes into a today much needed spirituality, or they can help form identity and human connections through a joint moral compass.

The truth is that most members of a fandom don’t enter parasocial relationships because they want to look more fashionable through a certain brand or buy lots of LPs. They have an unsatisfied and mostly unnoticed need for a moral compass, an ethical code that is so often lacking in the 21st century, where our society is continuously becoming more and more diverse.

We live in a time where spirituality often lies in ruins, and it has, fortunately, become the choice of each individual whether to engage with spirituality individually or seek a sense of “moreness” in creativity and the arts. Be it music, acting, or visual artists, parasocial relationships are far more than obsessions.

They are modern spaces that define morals and values in a world that is yet to be built, like a code of conduct for the modern Gen Z knight in shining armor.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.