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averywaycreative · 7 years ago

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BTS Analysis: The Meaning of Fake Love

(The video version of this can be found here or on Youtube.)

Fake Love is obviously about, as a pop star, doubting the sincerity of your fans’ love for you. （￣□￣；）

(status: speculating about the thoughts and feelings of famous people)

And by “obviously,” I mean that this is one possible motivation behind the creation of this song that may also be reflected throughout the entire Love Yourself arc. Here are some English-translation excerpts of the lyrics that I got from Genius:

(Of course, if the translations are wrong then that could undo my whole point. :D)

For you, I could pretend like I was happy when I was sad For you, I could pretend like I was strong when I was hurt I wish love was perfect as love itself I wish all my weaknesses could be hidden

“Fake Love” by BTS

Mold a pretty lie for you [...]

Erase myself and make me your doll

“Fake Love” by BTS

The third track of the album, The Truth Untold, also seems to be heavy on the same kind of emotional content: that is, hiding your “true” self in order to maintain another’s love for you.

The mask imagery we’ve gotten in the music videos and the explicit references to masks that we get in the lyrics of different songs on the album also provide a nice, concrete metaphor for this emotional state.

I’ve also heard rumors that this has something to do with a legend about an Italian nobleman who is especially ugly in some way but hides his face with a mask and ends up falling in love with someone but he feels he can never reveal his actual face to them…

Now,

I don’t know anything about stories.

I’ve never consumed a piece of fiction in my life.

To me, this is kind of a pop-music cliché: the overwhelmingly successful and popular star who feels like their audience doesn’t love the real them. But maybe there’s “truth-in-television” (warning: link to TV Tropes) here and this is how the mega-famous may actually feel. Really, I would be shocked if there were no celebrities who experienced this feeling, because it’s a normal human feeling to have.

The most familiar way to put it would be the statement: “You only love me because I’m beautiful.”

Something interesting about this is that we consider traits like physical beauty as being less reflective of the “real” us than other traits, but actually any trait that can be affected—that is, that you can pretend to have or emulate with time, money, and/or effort—is susceptible to this.

To illustrate this, imagine some Person A saying “You only love me for my sense of humor and intelligence!” to their fonfon ru Person B. This hypothetical concern that Person A is expressing seems unnecessary and odd with no context, but then imagine that you learn that almost everything Person A has said or written to Person B was actually fed to Person A by one Person C. (“C” is short for “Cyrano de Bergerac”. [Warning: link to TV Tropes])

BTS are pop stars, which means there is a limit on how much of themselves they can show their audience. (Innuendo?)

They have to walk a perilous tightrope (*dramatic music*) between being open enough to be sincere in their performances and songwriting—open enough to at least partially satisfy the undying curiosity of their fans—but closed off enough that they maintain some aspects of their personal lives as, you know, private. Because everyone needs a level of privacy and freedom from public scrutiny in order to maintain feelings of legitimacy, self-agency, and safety.

BTS genuinely loves their fans, and I’m confident enough in that statement to not even put “I think” or “as far as I can tell” in front of it. BTS genuinely loves their fans. (｡･ω･｡)ﾉ♡ But as a fan of BTS, I can tell you that we’re not perfect people, just like humans in general are incapable of being perfect—except obvs Mr. Rogers and my 11th grade English teacher—and any flaws that large groups of us within ARMY share will then be notable enough to be clear to the subjects of our adoration—that is, BTS.

Flaws? What flaws? Well...

Fans of things like pop music tend to skew on the young side, and they don’t always have an abundance of self control or well-rounded opinions. (Note: these flaws are not exclusive to the young.) They can have a tendency to overstep boundaries and to pry too hard into performers’ private lives or to tread on uncomfortable topics—everything from being too rowdy at public appearances to having very strong feelings on who the stars are or are not allowed to date or what kinds of clothes and hairstyles the stars are allowed to display upon their persons.

(leave Tae’s mullet alone gosh)

What’s lacking in some of these kinds of reactions to performers’ lives and choices is a little thing called respect. And if you have don’t have respect for the people you love, would you call that real love or…?

But this isn’t some big crisis. If the members of BTS do ever struggle with these kinds of doubts or feelings, then some combination of them and BigHit recognized that this is a struggle that’s kind of just part of the package of human interaction, and they’ve turned it into art for us to consume and with which to better ourselves and our lives. (which by the way I think is the best kind of art)

Most of us have experienced or will eventually experience insecurity about the love that others have for us. “Does my spouse still love me even though I’m getting old? Will my friends still love me if I don’t like the same music as them?”

The unfortunate truth is sometimes the answer to these kinds of questions is “no.” Was their love fake because it ended? I’m not sure. If loving feelings fade, that doesn’t mean they were never real. But one lesson from this is that you can’t rely on the love of other people as an eternal, unchanging source of self-worth and validation.

And that

is why

you gotta

love yourself.

(✿ ♥‿♥)

#bts #bangtan #bts theories #bts analysis #fake love #fake love analysis #bts reactions #i love you army #life #psychology #essay #short essay

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