I initially didn’t intend to watch the Netflix blockbuster “KPop Demon Hunters,” an animated film about a K-pop girl band that must save its fans from a group of demons who have taken the corporeal form of a K-pop boy band, as any clever demon would. I had no reason to believe it would be to my liking, let alone culturally relevant to anyone anywhere near my age.
Just because I sometimes write about K-pop doesn’t mean I want to hear it. The film contains so many things I normally hate, including juxtapositions seemingly for juxtaposition’s sake, e.g., hey, wouldn’t it be hilarious if cute, leggy cartoon Asian girl idols slaughtered monsters? I did not particularly care to find out what manner of cultural self-extinction, whitewashing and watering-down the largely North American production had to tolerate in order to appeal to the masses.
And yet, when I did watch it, I found that this worldwide blockbuster isn’t the sloppy, West-kowtowing sellout I had assumed it would be. Rather, it might be proof that we are living in a post-multicultural world — or at least that pop culture has normalized imagining such a world as within reach.
It started streaming back on June 20 and has since become Netflix’s second-most-successful original film of all time. Its tinnitus-inducing single “Golden” (lyrics: “We’re goin’ up, up, up, it’s our moment / You know together we’re glowing”) is No. 1 on the Billboard Top 100. Its Rotten Tomatoes score — 97 percent — is similar to that of “The Godfather” and “Schindler’s List.” Plus, unlike those latter two slouches, this cartoon has singalong screenings in the United States, Britain and Australia. And yet here we are.
This is a film about a three-member K-pop girl band called Huntrix that represents the current iteration of an endless line of female singers/demon hunters. Their life’s purpose is to protect the so-called Honmoon — the thin membrane between our world and the demon-filled netherworld, which resembles the bleak Upside Down from the Netflix series “Stranger Things.” Each generation of demon hunters taps its successors. Got it?
Why do these demon hunters have to be a girl group and not a law firm or something? Because their supernatural powers come entirely from their fan base. The bigger the screams, the higher the album sales, and the more social media engagement, the more equipped Huntrix is to defend the universe. So when Gwi-ma, the head demon (voiced by the “Squid Game” actor Lee Byung-hun), wants to sneak past the Honmoon barrier, his strategy is obvious: create an even hotter, competing boy band called Saja Boys, who are so hot that they make girls’ eyes temporarily turn into popcorn (really). Steal the fans, steal the world.
This conceit is a somewhat clever metaphor for the K-pop “fandustry” — a portmanteau for “fan” and “industry” — which is the real secret sauce behind K-pop’s enduring success. Fandustry takes the expression “We are nothing without our fans” to a literal level. Case in point: U.S.-based K-pop fans in 2023 spent 2.4 times as much money on band merch as did pop fans generally, according to a 2024 study by entertainment analytics firm Luminate.
And therein lies a big key to the success of “KPop Demon Hunters”: The film suggests that the future of the world isn’t A.I. or the demonic oligarchy or any one group. It’s the fans. It’s you and me. How is that not intoxicating?
In other words, the film mirrors where the cultural identities of young people around the world are evolving and converging into a mash-up of styles that doesn’t privilege one over the other, or assume there is a center anywhere. Which is in no way to say that all humans of every race or ethnicity are getting along great. What it does mean, though, is that the whites have finally been decentered? And not by the invasion of Koreans or indeed of any other group, but by fandom.
Everything about “KPop Demon Hunters" is neither fish nor fowl: The movie’s leads, just like K-pop singers in real life, look neither Korean nor white nor indeed any other race; they look extraterrestrial. Some of the characters are neither human nor demon but a mix of both. The songs are in a strange hybrid of English and Korean that doesn’t even alternate languages cleanly by verse or sentence. Instead, there’s a staccato inclusion of certain Korean words at arbitrary junctures.
For example, one line from the song “Soda Pop,” performed by Saja Boys, goes like this: “Han-mok-um-eh, you hit the spot.” That first bit is Korean for “in just one gulp.” How odd that the songwriters felt the need to say that one phrase in Korean; han-mok-um-eh has the same number of syllables (four) and the same meaning as in just one gulp, so nothing is lost in scansion or translation. The mixture is so confusing that even if you speak both Korean and English, it’s hard to follow. And yet K-pop fans, and Gen Z-ers in general, have accepted all of the above as a perfectly natural state of being. It’s not A.D.H.D.; it’s viewing the modern world dead-on as the chaos it actually is. Without irony.
As an Asian who sings disturbingly white songs like Neil Diamond’s “Cherry, Cherry” at Asian karaoke; who speaks French with a German accent, German with a French accent, and Korean with an American accent, I feel seen.
Sure, multiculturalism and globalization have been around for a long time. But it was typically depicted in relationship to a “normal” that it deviated from. One way the culture responded to a world whose references were not only American or European was by being ironic, by pointing out the incongruities and laughing at them. That enjoyment was wholly dependent on othering: Some people, the right people, were the arbiters of culture, and others — the outsiders — were funny because they were not. It played on the audience’s firm prejudices that certain things were simply ridiculous. It meant that some people were in on the joke, and others are not. That gave us Apu on “The Simpsons.” To give one recent example, one of the running gags in the aughts-2010s hit “Community” was that an Asian American guy (played by Ken Jeong) was teaching Spanish. Get it? An Asian teaching Spanish! And he’s called Señor Chang! Sorry, where is the joke?
It was a fun time for meta-ness and meanness, but even though we didn’t know it at the time, its appeal had an expiry date.
“KPop Demon Hunters” made me sigh with relief: Hybrids, mash-ups, whatever you want to call it, are no longer a freak show that can only be enjoyed ironically. “KPop Demon Hunters” is a sign of the times: We’re at a post-multicultural, post-irony and post-meta end of history. Bless this mess.
Euny Hong is the author of “The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture.”
Source images mikroman6/Getty Images and Netflix
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