Abstract
Many contemporary media audiences/fans develop understandings of and personas for celebrities based on the fictional characters they perform, necessitating research on fans’ negotiation between fiction and reality. This innovative media consumption demonstrates an opposite practice to the traditional scholarly understandings of how fans borrow actors’ real-world behaviors or chemistries to form their perceptions and imaginings of fictional characters. Based on unobtrusive observation and semi-structured interviews, this research particularly investigates fans of two Chinese actors Zhehan Zhang and Jun Gong, who became famous playing the leads in the popular 2021 homoromantic television series Word of Honor. Findings illustrate that fans first contextualize the two characters’ stories and then suggest their personality traits ultimately represent certain aspects of the real-world actors. Most fans focus exclusively on characters’ “great” qualities as extensions of the actors while blaming screenwriters and directors for creating and forcing the actors to “unwillingly” perform those “undesirable” plots. On this basis, fans keep analyzing the two actors’ interviews, gestures, social media posts, etc. to confirm their perceived character-actor similarities and build up the actors’ personas. Exploring this new type of media and celebrity consumption, this presentation will offer media scholars insight into how contemporary audiences/fans balance and act on their affections or interests toward fictional creations and real-world celebrities. Further discussions on how the media industry may have increasingly realized, responded to, and manipulated fans’ this type of desire in media productions and promotions is also provided.
Presenters
Qiuyan GuoStudent, PhD Candidate, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Fictional Characters, TV Series, Real-world Celebrity, Media Audiences, Fan Understandings
