From Love to LOL: The Meme-ification of Pinoy Celebrity Breakups

(SPOT.ph) The long-rumored breakup of Jericho Rosales and Kim Jones has been confirmed, and of course the Internet is now flooded with Jericho-Kim content. Showbiz news produced by local media are expected. But in recent years, they’ve been overshadowed by random netizens always on the lookout for celebrity breakups so they can be the first to post about it.

In my head, they fall into two categories, this type of content. The first one we can call "hugot." The second—and in my opinion, the worse—is your usual meme. For better or worse, they’re for sure changing the way we view the end of a celebrity couple’s relationship, a particularly sad event in people’s lives last time I checked.

The “Hugotization” of Celebrity Breakups

Let’s start with hugot. It often takes this form: a random netizen steals pictures of the couple from Google, captions it with an overly sentimental essay that ends with a moral about relationships. The lesson sounds almost always the same and quite obvious: “Sometimes love just isn’t enough.” “God will give you someone you’ll be with for a while but not forever, but what matters is the time you spent together.” These and various other versions that will make your eyes roll.

Also read: Jericho Rosales and Kim Jones' Paris photos will fuel your wanderlust

To be clear I’m not saying these sentiments aren’t valid. They may be helpful for anyone going through a similar situation. But my issue with these messages is their underlying logic: Why do we always associate breakups with the idea of gaining? And why do we constantly feel the urge to reduce a breakup to a takeaway, as in “Things I realized from…” when we could simply allow ourselves and others to experience and process our/their emotions?

What’s worse is that these sentiments are sometimes exploited for personal gain. I swear I once saw a post like this that went viral, and in the comment section the person who posted it included links to their online business. Why is it necessary to gain from an unfortunate event? Can’t it just be a case of giving and losing? As if you can’t move forward in life empty-handed. As if the heart can’t endure a loss. It’s often better to start fresh with nothing. The thing about a fresh wound is that it opens you up.

And this is only the case when the concerned celebrities stay quiet about their breakup, like in this Jericho-Kim one. Sometimes the celebrities themselves make content about it. The worst offender I think is Nas Daily: in May 2023, he posted a 12-minute video about his breakup with his partner of six years.

I have no access to their personal lives—and maybe that’s how they cope—but turning your breakup into a scripted explainer video took this business of sharing your pain to the world slash content-creation business to a whole new level. Guess how many views from Filipino Nas Daily fans that one raked in?

Jericho-Kim and More: The “Memefication” of Celebrity Breakups

Our digital spaces are saturated with humorous content that targets even the most personal aspects of people’s lives. And when celebrities break up, the memes get even more intense if there are allegations of cheating involved.

Just recently, Kathryn Bernardo and Daniel Padilla confirmed their long-rumored split. As expected, memes related to it circulated widely. We’ve all seen how Padilla’s breakup poem was memed to its absurd extremes, or how Andrea Brillantes, allegedly the cause of the breakup, became the subject not only of memes but also of public shaming, often tinged with sexism.

At first glance they might seem harmless and just for fun, but I argue they’re symptomatic of what Susan Sontag describes in her book Regarding the Pain of Others: desensitization resulting from constant exposure to mediated suffering.

Although Sontag primarily addresses photographs of war, her insights can be applied to memes, which are more easily and rapidly disseminated today. Sontag argues that excessive exposure to images of suffering, rather than enhancing our capacity for empathy and understanding, actually makes us “indifferent” because we feel there is nothing we can do. This “passivity,” Sontag suggests, “dulls feeling.” Since none of us can fix Bernardo and Padilla’s relationship, we might as well just make memes out of their highly publicized breakup.

But that’s the problem with memefying breakups, memefying suffering, memefying things that should be taken seriously: we end up not caring at all. Dark humor? Maybe. But either way it decontextualizes pain and makes it less real.

This occurs in other situations as well. For instance, in 2018, a meme of a bald man saying, “Paano mo nasabi?” became widely popular. But what netizens didn’t know or didn’t bother to find out was that the guy, whose real name was Robert Nocos, uttered those words during an interview with local media while facing charges related to the murder of a waitress and the attempted murder of a cashier at a KTV bar in Tondo, Manila. His words were his response to being asked if he’d been under the influence of drugs when he allegedly committed these crimes.

Nevertheless, since Nocos had become some sort of cultural icon through the meme, whatever he's being accused of doing has already been forgiven, so to speak. The connection between his words and his alleged crimes no longer mattered. What mattered was that you could now use "Paano mo nasabi?" as a handy and humorous reply to any question, detached from its root context.

What do these memes say about Filipinos?

This piece began with breakups, I know, but maybe our common reactions to Filipino celebrity breakups represent our collective attitude toward things that are beyond our control. Like, if you’ve witnessed the bickering—or breakup, if you will—between the two most influential political families in the country lately, and your initial reaction was to find it funny, or you didn’t care at all? That’s precisely what I’m saying.