A star is born

Who is your bias?

May 19, 2025

Dear friends,

One night before bed, I spent half an hour swiping the entire Instagram homepage of an anonymous girl decorating photo cards.

She slipped each card into a transparent plastic case then flipped through blocks of vinyl sticker sheets, removed them with a pair of tweezers, mixed and matched different shapes and sizes – tiny hologram hearts and texts in Blackletter. To finish, she punched a hole in the case, attached it with a bunch of charms and keychains, then hung it on her purse.

On those cards, there were the faces of Kim Jong Un and Putin.

Photo cards are an essential part of the fandom culture, especially in J-pop and K-pop. It’s not only the adrenaline rush of opening a deck of cards without knowing whether you can get your idol portraits, it’s also the community sense of collecting, trading and showcasing that brings fans together.

Photocards lay at the core of consumerism, in other words, become the embodiment of consumerism itself.

On the creation of K-pop idol group, Joanna Elfving-Hwang stressed upon its mission to “finding the ‘magic formula’ that results in a consumable product that resonates with as broad an audience as possible”.

One time, I escorted my best friend to buy three newly-released albums of NCT127 with the hope to at least earn a photocard of her bias. She prayed solemnly in front of the SMTown pop-up truck at Union Square before unboxing the packages just to find her least favored member cards. The fate of those albums remained unknown.

That Instagram’s combination of fandom keepsake, consumable sense, DIY elements, girly-pop aesthetics and ASMR sensation thrusted a satirical outlook upon the two radical politicians.

What can be more absurd? Vietnamese netizens’ takes on creating fan accounts for PM Phạm Minh Chính and Foreign Affairs Deputy Minister Đỗ Hùng Việt.

It’s absurd, not because of cringe worthy captions and dazzling Cap Cut edits, but because these accounts’ tones of voice are rather of adoring and worshipping, not satirical compared to the photocard Instagram.

Is the pivoting to designated people who are chosen by a system with full sets of credits the indicator of the idolism recession?

What makes a Vietnamese youth icon? Beautiful, smart, being admitted to an Ivy, overachieving but more importantly, doing it all on their own. It’s the element of self-making that has sent the Viet youngsters to disappointment and resentment as the privileged backgrounds that afford influencers to be who they present on the Internet are exposed.

Again, Elfving-Hwang’s take on the relationship between K-pop idols and fans transcends into these cases.

“The images of the idols mediated through the media gaze construct a post-feminist space in popular culture in which both young men’s and young women’s bodies are presented as examples of success through hard work and not simply an outcome of innate talent out of reach of most fans.”

When the perfect image crumbles and reveals illusion, here come traditionalists.

We can never know whether PM Chính and Deputy Minister Việt are aware of their fan accounts. They must be extremely busy by now – with the global geopolitical complexion and domestic policy launching of “the whole people’s competition to get rich” also known as Resolution no. 68.

However, if they ever know about it, I hope they will not take it as a silly joke of chronically online kids but really take a look at what this generation craves for – something to believe in.

In 2012, the National University Entrance Examination – a defining event for most Vietnamese students – asked its takers to discuss an argument: "Admiring idols is a beautiful cultural trait, but being blindly obsessed with them is a disaster."

Till next time,