Parasocial relationship

Parasocial relationship describes the one-sided intimacy that develops when fans feel personally connected to a public figure who cannot know each participant equally in return. In the idol industry, that intimacy is unusually elaborate: Jungkook and BTS appear not only as singers but as continuing characters whose personalities, relationships, struggles, and victories unfold across music, livestreams, variety programs, fan events, and social platforms. The relationship can generate care, solidarity, and collective action, yet it can also be organized for profit and turn into surveillance or intrusion.

Formation Through Continuous Access

The relationship begins with sustained exposure rather than a single performance. Idols provide a volume of material far greater than that typically produced by Western pop artists, creating an almost inexhaustible stream into which fans can disappear for hours. Their cheerful performances offer temporary escape, while the narrative of their lives gives that escape structure: fans watch the group endure difficulties, hope for its recovery, and experience each achievement as a development in an ongoing series. Jungkook is cast within that structure as the apparently gifted all-rounder, a figure who seems naturally capable at everything, while the group’s quarrels, affection, and mutual care are presented as the episodes of a found family.

This narrative encourages fans to treat an idol as more than a distant entertainer. Entering a fandom and finding a favored member is described as ipdeok, a term built around entering and obsession. Fans do not merely observe the journey; they buy albums, stream songs, and work to help an artist break records. Their actions appear to affect the outcome, making success feel jointly produced. Leaving the fandom is correspondingly called taldeok, or escaping the obsession, a vocabulary that reveals how strongly fandom is understood as an emotional condition rather than a casual preference.

Reciprocal Feeling and Commercial Design

Jungkook’s connection with ARMY is presented as affectionate and sincere. The fandom, named in July 2013 as an acronym for Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth, helped carry BTS from obscurity into international prominence and later supported the members’ solo careers. Jungkook’s gratitude is not merely a marketing gesture: at his final solo showcase for Golden, he became emotional while thanking the fans and attributed his growth into a better person to having met them. The bond therefore has a reciprocal story—fans help create the star, and the star publicly recognizes the fans as part of his becoming.

At the same time, the relationship is economically structured. A casual listener who adds several BTS songs to a playlist and buys one album is outmatched by the deeply invested fan who purchases more than twenty albums to collect photocards and improve the chance of meeting the idol at a fan event. Companies benefit from this escalation because emotional attachment encourages repeated purchases and sustained attention. Joon Choi, the president of Weverse and an executive at HYBE, described the company’s investigation as an inquiry into the psychological mechanism of falling in love. That formulation makes the commercial logic explicit: intimacy is not only experienced by fans but studied, designed, and converted into an industry resource.

Fans’ emotional labor also extends the relationship beyond what companies initially provide. Before Big Hit Entertainment began official English subtitling of BTS videos in 2019, fan translators supplied much of the infrastructure that made the group legible to international audiences. Bangtansubs, the subtitling arm of the nonprofit BTS-Trans, translated social-media posts, blog material, lyrics, and other BTS-related content. Founded in 2013, the organization eventually grew to about thirty members across countries including Germany, the Philippines, India, and the United States, with translators, timers, video coders, coordinators, and administrators. By the end of 2024, its YouTube channel had 1.46 million subscribers and more than a thousand subtitled videos. Such work turns affection into unpaid distribution, archiving, translation, and promotion.

Collective Attachment and Social Action

The relationship is not confined to an individual fan’s imagined closeness with Jungkook. ARMY is highly international and digitally organized across Twitter, Discord, Reddit, Tumblr, YouTube, and TikTok. Its members helped promote BTS across linguistic and national boundaries, then used the same networks for collective political action. In 2020, international fans joined other K-pop fandoms to oppose white supremacy and anti-Black racism, flooding the hashtag #WhiteLivesMatter with K-pop fancams and reaction GIFs. BTS’s donation of $1 million to the Black Lives Matter movement was followed by ARMY matching the amount within twenty-five hours, demonstrating how identification with the artists could become coordinated philanthropy.

The fandom’s reputation for collective force has itself become part of the parasocial mythology. A 2023 episode of The Simpsons contrasted supposedly ruthless fan armies with the ARMY of BTS, described as fair and pure-hearted. The joke worked because the fandom had become recognizable as an organized public in its own right. Its activity helped open a path for later K-pop artists, showing that fans were not simply consumers waiting for official communication; they were translators, promoters, network-builders, and cultural intermediaries who made global participation possible.

BTS’s public role further enlarges this imagined community. After the group’s Love Myself campaign with UNICEF, BTS was invited to the United Nations in 2018 to support education, global development, and efforts to end violence against children. During the pandemic, Moon Jae-in brought the members to the United Nations General Assembly, gave them red diplomatic passports, and appointed them special presidential envoys for future generations and culture. They performed Permission to Dance in the Assembly Hall and encouraged vaccination and hope among young people facing the crisis. Jungkook spoke calmly in black, with silver earrings visible, insisting that if their voices could give people strength, they would continue using them. The fan relationship thus overlaps with a national and global “we,” linking personal devotion to collective identity and public representation.

Boundaries, Intimacy, and Intrusion

The same system that produces closeness can violate the boundary between public access and private life. Sasaeng fans are stalkers who invade an idol’s sasaenghwal, or private life. They may wait outside an idol’s home, enter residences or hotel rooms, steal belongings, obtain telephone numbers, send repeated messages, track flights and seat numbers, or purchase personal information from online sellers allegedly supplied by entertainment-company staff and contractors. Jungkook remarked with mild irritation during a Weverse livestream before enlistment that sasaengs were still outside his house, presenting an intrusion serious enough to mention but familiar enough to have become routine. In September 2023, HYBE organized a task force to combat the sale of such information.

Fan signs demonstrate the authorized version of the same intimacy. Fans who purchase enough albums receive lottery tickets for exclusive events where idols sign albums, perform requested fan service, make eye contact, hold hands, and respond to personalized prompts. Regular attendees may be recognized and remembered. During the pandemic, in-person meetings shifted to video calls, giving international fans access to a degree of intimacy once largely reserved for people in South Korea. Album sales rose as fans bought dozens of copies for a chance at a call; in one Golden call, a fan showed Jungkook baby photographs and asked him to imitate the expressions, which he did happily. Another fan proposed a virtual toast made from cider, soju, and beer, and Jungkook replied that he would have a drink during a livestream. These encounters feel reciprocal precisely because the idol responds in real time, even though the scale and conditions of the relationship remain fundamentally unequal.

Scale, Power, and Contradiction

The parasocial bond is strengthened by Jungkook’s extraordinary visibility. His Calvin Klein campaign made his body and style available as global images; the fall 2023 Calvin Klein Jeans campaign generated $13.4 million in media impact value within forty-eight hours, making him the brand’s best-performing ambassador. Seven then debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and Global 200, accumulated nearly 16 million Spotify streams, and became the fastest song in Spotify history to reach one billion streams. Such achievements give fans more than private pleasure: they offer measurable proof that their streaming, purchasing, translation, and advocacy have moved an artist through competitive systems dominated by capital and status.

BTS’s broader economic effect magnifies that feeling of shared accomplishment. The group was estimated to have contributed $32.6 billion to South Korea’s economy in a decade, attracted about 800,000 foreign tourists annually, and generated an estimated five trillion won in tourist spending. Contracts with Samsung, Louis Vuitton, and the NBA, along with commemorative stamps issued by the Korean postal service in 2023, turned fandom into a national economic and symbolic asset. Yet this expansion also places fans within a hierarchy of value: the most devoted members are more profitable, more visible, and more capable of influencing outcomes than ordinary listeners.

The relationship consequently contains a persistent contradiction. Fans may experience genuine care, and Jungkook may answer them with real warmth, but companies encourage attachment because attachment sustains the idol economy. ARMY can mobilize translations, charity, and anti-racist action, while a smaller number of obsessive fans can transform access into stalking. Jungkook’s path from a small-company trainee to a global solo star makes the bond appear like a shared triumph over industrial elites, but the same triumph demonstrates how emotional participation can be converted into records, tourism, brand value, and national prestige. Parasocial relationship is therefore neither simply false intimacy nor uncomplicated devotion: it is the emotional mechanism through which an idol and a dispersed audience become collaborators, customers, witnesses, and—within carefully guarded limits—an imagined community.