MANILA, PHILIPPINES – #LizQuen, #KathNiel, #MayWard – the fact that we constantly baptize any new pairing with a new name to refer to them as a single entity only goes to show how crazy Filipinos are about love teams.
While other nations, in Korean dramas, for example, on-screen pairings change quite frequently, Filipinos expect our love teams to work together for a long time and sometimes act in love even off-screen, as if they do date each other in real life. It’s a tall order.
But that’s one of the reasons why we love our Pinoy love teams. They’re able to sustain the fantasy of the Filipino fandom from their movies and TV shows to their social media content.
Why else do we love them? A report by AdSpark Intelligence called the “The New Romantics” looked precisely into that. What do we see in love teams that we can’t help but fall in love with them? In their first-ever ThoughtSparker event, AdSpark shared their findings to members of the press. Using data and analytics, they were able to find out why we love love. Why did they do that? Well, because they can, the topic is fun, and because it’s a reflection of Filipino culture we could all learn from. Here’s what they found out:
We are just like them
Thanks to social media channels like Twitter and Instagram, we are now able to follow the lives of our idols more closely than ever before. We can see what they’re doing in real-time through Instagram stories or get to know them more through their much lengthier Youtube vlogs.
Through these pieces of intimate content, we feel like we know them and we see that we’re just like them. Maymay Entrata, for example, frequently posts photos together with the other half of the #MayWard love team, Edward Barbers. These are photos of them traveling together or sometimes a peek into what goes behind-the-scenes during tapings or most sought after events like the ABS-CBN Ball.
We find that behind the dolled-up idols we see on TV and magazines are real human beings who like eating street food and follow their own skincare routine, too.
The report showed that the more frequent these love teams post about off-screen activities, the more engaged their fans are. In this case, #MayWard really takes the cake.
They make us believe in love
Filipinos are hopeless romantics. And love teams, especially those who go from reel to real, make us feel like #MayForever and make us want to say #SanaAll.
On-screen partners who became real-life lovers like Liza Soberano and Enrique Gil, and Kathryn Bernardo and Daniel Padilla make us believe that maybe we, too, can end up in a real relationship with that one person we’re getting close to.
Based on the report, love teams who eventually dated in real life are being constantly talked about and followed by their fans even if they don’t work together as often anymore. This is because they also stay active on social media. In this case, it’s #KathNiel.
They didn’t work on a single project in 2019 but because they’re still very visible as a couple on social media, they’re still the love team to beat when speaking of “love” and “kilig”.
Love teams are timeless
Being a hopeless romantic encompasses generations. If there’s one thing we share among us Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials, and now the Zoomers, it’s the fact that there’s always a love team that will forever mark our growing years.
Sharon-Gabby, Dawn-Richard, Jolina-Marvin, Bea-John Lloyd, JaDine, DonKiss – no matter your age, you would recognize a pair from this list.
And even if these classic love teams didn’t end up together off-screen or are no longer doing projects together, too, our hearts flutter (and we immediately post about it on social media) whenever they reunite. We’ve seen this happen with the Angelica Panganiban and Carlo Aquino “CarGel” reunion last year though the kilig was unfortunately short-lived.
But it was the only thing people could talk about – according to the report, even overshadowing conversations about Gen Z love teams of today – while it lasted.
PH, a nation of fandoms
Since Filipinos are so invested in the love teams they stan, showing support could sometimes get a bit messy. This happens when fandoms started pitting love teams against each other.
Filipino fans also tend to get easily upset when their favorite love teams start to work on solo projects or decide to part ways. #AlDub was one love team who had to suffer from so much online hate as we can see in the large percentage of negative mentions they received.
But slowly, Filipino fans are learning how to support their favorite love teams in whatever they choose to do – even if that means supporting them separately. In 2019, people were more open to uplifting their idols individually than in 2018.
Filipinos will always be a sucker for love teams but thanks to our exposure to foreign entertainment like K-dramas, we now know that starring alongside different partners is okay, supporting individual careers is also okay. And that we enjoy fresh on-screen pairings from time to time as seen in the films “Hello, Love, Goodbye” starring Kathryn Bernardo and Alden Richards, “Isa Pa, With Feelings” starring Maine Mendoza and Carlo Aquino, and “Indak” starring Nadine Lustre and Sam Concepcion.
As long as we’re being served the love and kilig that we live and breathe for, we should be fine and remain the hopeless romantic nation that we are.
