Social Structural Pressures and East Asian Adolescents' Consumption Behaviors Toward Virtual Anime-Style Characters: The Mediating Role of Parasocial Attachment

East Asian adolescents face multiple structural stressors, including academic pressure, peer competition, parental expectations, and uncertainty about the future. When these pressures frustrate their basic psychological needs, some turn to virtual anime-style games for emotional compensation, forming parasocial attachments to virtual characters. Integrating compensatory consumption theory and parasocial relationship theory, this paper synthesizes existing literature to construct an analytical pathway from structural social stress through psychological need deficits and parasocial attachment to consumption behavior. The analysis suggests that when academic competition and family expectations leave adolescents' needs for belongingness and competence unfulfilled, their emotional involvement with virtual characters accelerates from casual contact toward attachment; once attachment is formed, consumption becomes a natural extension of maintaining and expressing the relationship, manifested both in the general logic of paying for parasocial proximity and in possessiveness-driven consumption that transforms intangible bonds into tangible possessions. Moreover, the developmental asynchrony between the socioemotional system and the cognitive control system during adolescence further heightens adolescents' susceptibility to immediate rewards in gaming contexts. By integrating compensatory consumption theory and parasocial relationship theory within the novel context of anime-style virtual games, this study extends the application boundaries of both frameworks, and suggests that parents and schools should attend to the real-world satisfaction of adolescents' needs for autonomy, competence, and belonging rather than merely restricting gaming time and spending.