K-Pop Idol Trainer Reveals His Worries About The New Concept Of Combining Idol With Characters

K-Pop idol trainer In Ji Woong touches on the subject about idols and avatar member concepts and the problems it may have.

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This is a fairly new concept in the K-Pop world of creating a character based off an idol member. In short, this means they are using a person for a character IP. Now, what is the problem with this concept? It is the fact that it cannot avoid the numerous amount of secondary creations that will be stemmed from these characters.

He used K/DA as an example where if you type in their group name on various sites, you will get more sexually explicit photos than their normal ones. In terms of K-Pop idols, there haven’t been any idol virtual characters so the secondary content has just been fan fiction, etc. But creating characters based off of idol members? This is just asking for it, says In Jiwoong.

In terms of K/DA, because the characters are just made up and not based off of someone, there is no damage done to anyone through secondary content. But in terms of aespa, they are using actual human beings who have feelings and thoughts.

Even idols with the toughest skin can be brought down if they receive enough hate.

In states, “Imagine a character that was inspired by me was being used all over the internet for secondary creations.”

“Do you think that members of aespa, who have an average age of not even 20 years old, will be able to endure this?”

He also questions if SM Entertainment really thought about all of this before launching this character IP concept.

He argues, that almost everyone knows that a concept like this will cause many problems. But the fact that SM went through with this concept…

…just proves that they are just doing this for the money.

He reveals that this shows that they are not seeing idols as people.

He predicts that after aespa officially debuts, there’s going to be tons of secondary content created based off of their virtual characters and by then it will be too late.