Love Yourself

The Love Yourself era is the period in which BTS achieved worldwide fame, but also the one in which their concept became its most deliberate. Across three albums, Her, Tear, and Answer, with the introductory Wonder, the group told a complete story of love in four steps, drawing on the classic East Asian narrative structure that builds a story not through conflict but through introduction, development, turn, and conclusion.

The narrative unfolds gradually. First comes the rush of infatuation and the joy of a first meeting, held within the album Her. Then comes the turn, the realization that this happiness was an illusion and that the individual had changed himself so much in order to be loved that he lost his own face, the core of the album Tear and the song Fake Love. Finally comes the answer, found in the album Answer, the message that true love must begin with loving oneself, since only one who loves himself can truly love another. This conclusion is captured in the song Answer: Love Myself.

The era was woven through with symbols that fans eagerly interpreted. An invented flower, the Smeraldo, was created, complete with a fake florist's blog, and its meaning, a truth I could not manage to say, was tied to the song The Truth Untold. The vocalists each opened an album with a solo intro, Euphoria, Serendipity, Singularity, and Epiphany, which, like chapters, followed the main character's journey. The story continued too through the so-called Notes, fictional diary entries that linked this era to the one before it.

A special place belongs to the song Magic Shop, named after a real psychological technique in which a person imagines a shop where fear can be exchanged for hope. It is, in truth, a message of comfort addressed to fans and a promise of mutual support. Carried by the message of self-love, RM gave a notable speech at the United Nations headquarters during this era, calling on young people to speak up and accept themselves. Alongside the songs DNA, Fake Love, and Idol, Love Yourself remains, for many, the pinnacle of their creative work, the moment they fused immense success with a message of real depth.