버추얼 아이돌에 대한 팬심 분석: 유튜브 댓글을 활용한 토픽 모델링을 중심으로

초록

Introduction and Objectives: Virtual idols with high-fidelity 3D modeling have recently emerged as a powerful force in the K-pop industry. Among them, PLAVE has achieved remarkable commercial and symbolic success, including first-place wins on major music shows and over one million first-week album sales. A key driver of this trajectory is the group’s frequent and intimate engagement with fans through YouTube Live, which functions not only as a content channel but also as an ongoing site of relationship-building, emotional exchange, and participatory negotiation over identity. While prior research on K-pop and virtual idols has emphasized real-time interaction, most studies rely on cross-sectional snapshots or small-scale qualitative data. As a result, the dynamic evolution of fan perception over time remains largely unexplored. This study addresses this gap by conducting a large-scale, time-series analysis of fan comments on PLAVE’s YouTube Live streams. Conceptually, the research framework links two strands of social cognition: mind perception—comprising experience (capacity to feel) and agency (capacity to intend and act)—and social trait inferences of warmth (benevolent intention, sociability) and competence (ability, professionalism). In virtual contexts where non-human entities are anthropomorphized and treated as “someone” rather than “something,” perceiving a mind not only enables affective bonding (anchored in experience) but also grounds normative expectations and responsibility (anchored in agency). Based on this premise, the study conceptualizes fan perception not as a single, static judgment but as a cumulative process in which repeated live exposure reorganizes how fans attribute experience, agency, warmth, and competence to a virtual idol group. Methodology: Empirically, the study analyzes 104,861 comments posted to 227 YouTube Live episodes on PLAVE’s official channel between September 15, 2022, and March 9, 2025. Comments were collected via the YouTube Data API, preserving original timestamps to examine both broadcast timing and the latency between broadcast and comment posting. After filtering duplicated entries, non-textual content, and technical noise, 67,237 valid comments remained. Given that fan comments are short, informal, and rich in emotional nuance and fandom-specific slang, the study adopts BERTopic with a Korean sentence-embedding model (jhgan/ko-sroberta-multitask) rather than traditional LDA. This approach combines Transformer-based sentence embeddings, UMAP for dimensionality reduction, HDBSCAN for density-based clustering, and class-based TF–IDF (c-TF-IDF) for topic keyword extraction, allowing subtle contextual distinctions in unstructured social media text to be captured more effectively. Results: The results reveal a multi-phase trajectory rather than a simple linear shift. In the early phase, fans concurrently explored members’ experiential qualities (intimacy, charm) and emerging competence. Comments frequently combined affection with diagnostic evaluation, admiring vocal color or stage presence while noting potential for growth. As PLAVE accumulated visible achievements—such as music-show wins and a solo concert—these evaluations consolidated into judgments of “proven competence.” Fans increasingly framed PLAVE as a group that had “earned” its position through skill and consistency, reinforcing the competence dimension while maintaining the affective bond rooted in experience. Over time, repeated live streams and serialized narratives deepened warmth and experiential intimacy. Fans referenced shared memories, inside jokes, and past emotional episodes, positioning themselves as co-travelers in the group’s growth. At the same time, agency-related expectations intensified and expanded beyond the members to the development and operation team, affectionately labeled “Dduks.” Fans evaluated avatar modeling quality, streaming stability, and the creative use of glitches as narrative devices. In doing so, they treated technical staff as quasi-members and key agents responsible for sustaining both competence and relational warmth. This pattern distinguishes virtual idol fandoms from traditional cases, as technical production becomes directly integrated into the fans’ affective field. Discussion and Conclusion: The temporal analysis also uncovers an “emotional lag.” Retrospective comments, posted long after a broadcast, often reinterpret past interactions through the lens of accumulated narratives, indicating that fan perception is continuously updated. In later phases, debates over the alignment between PLAVE’s diegetic world and live-stream personae became central and fed into normative claims about how the group “should” be managed. Such discourse illustrates how fans come to treat virtual idols as full social persons, endowed with both rights and responsibilities. In conclusion, the study demonstrates that fan perception of a virtual idol is organized through an intertwined deepening of experience and agency. Rather than moving from one dimension to another, the fandom simultaneously expands and stabilizes both. Practically, the results suggest that virtual idol management should design live formats and technical execution with an eye toward nurturing both experiential intimacy and perceived agency—across idols and production staff alike—so that growing expectations for competence, warmth, and governance can be harnessed as a resource for co-creation rather than a source of conflict.

키워드