Déjà Vu in Iridescent Bloom: Bottom-Up Place Branding in the Complex Adaptive Reception of a RESCENE Member’s Personal YouTube Channel

How does a place–brand association form when no institution is running a campaign? We analyze the complete first season of the personal YouTube channel of the leader of RESCENE, a five-member South Korean girl group that debuted in 2024—93 videos and 357,242 Korean-language comments from 127,939 commenters—as a complex adaptive system. Humor and memes dominate the discourse (34.4% of comments), yet a locality register built around one member’s home town was elaborated in that banter into a portable, repeatable form and was already rising well before the city concerned appointed the group its publicity ambassador. Daily place discourse rose beforehand and decelerated afterwards with no detectable level jump, an ordering in which an audience-elaborated trend was institutionally ratified rather than initiated. Place-oriented talk is positively associated with warmer video-level reception in the primary measure, with transformer evidence in the same direction but weaker, and is amplified by the audience’s own attention, and its later decline is mostly audience turnover rather than abandonment by the commenters who built it. The case shows a place–brand association forming in public, on a timetable, with the institution arriving late. We use place–brand association for what the record can carry: a place register that is measurably present, rising, person-carried, and amplified by the audience, and we reserve stronger senses of place brand for constructs these traces cannot certify.