While reading the section, I kept relating the text to my experience. Are the idols that I admire really who they are when presented on media, or else they are my inner fascinations? It is hardly able to find out. They are packaged perfectly by companies and polished by the media. Perhaps they are the simulacra.
I realized that as I grew older and older, I gradually started to learn that the world is not either black or white. It’s not either fake or real and it is even hard to define those terms. Baudrillard defined four phases of an image: a reflection, a perverted reality, absence of reality being masked, an unreality. The transition from phase two to phase three is the largest since it went from what there is to what there is not. In some cases, outsiders are hard to tell in which phase a sign is. So, there are iconolaters who totally believe the sign is a reflection and iconoclasts who think it lacks reality, and also some people who feign to be iconolaters. Maybe some fans are like those iconolaters. They know they are merely projections, but they choose to dissimulate it for ones’ enjoyment.
zx.lyu 
I love the idea of idols as one’s inner fascination. And it seems like idols have some features that you want in yourself, which you might imitate or improve yourself to have those features and I believe that could be seen as simulation
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This is so interesting. The way I l think about idol is not really admit their real personality(or perhaps we can’t admit since we can’t even know what is real), but to stop everything in my imagination for my own enjoyment as you mention in the end of your reflection. The way I like them is similar as the way I like anime characters, which are truly being understood as simulacra at the first place. The reason why I stop there is because I think as long as I find the truth for myself to believe, I will feel happy to live within my own imagination and illusion of idol. If I believe their personality is true, it is true! And that is all I need to make myself happy! (maybe not for other case tho.
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