Yet Another KPDH Thought Piece: Socially Conscious and Popular?
David C. Oh / Syracuse University

Figure 1: K-Pop Demon Hunters official trailer

I set my Netflix account to include K-Pop Demon Hunters [hereafter, KPDH] to my watchlist weeks before it was first available, but it was primarily out of academic interest, fully expecting that it would be another “cringey” example of U.S. media creating meta-media about Korean popular culture. The most notable example of this was in the Family Guy episode titled “Candy, Quahog, Marshmallow,” which included a song with the same name. As I argued elsewhere, the episode largely used pastiche and mocking parody to discipline counter-flows that even, at the time, that only mildly challenge the global hegemony of the U.S. and other Western, Anglophone media and celebrities [¹].

Figure 2: Candy Quahog Marshmallow video featured on the Quahog Place YouTube channel

To my pleasant surprise, KPDH seemed different. K-pop “idols” were starting to participate in KPDH dance challenges, and the early feedback was effusive, including from K-pop fans, who read the film as a movie created by a fan. Many K-pop fans based in the West are sensitized to the stigma they endure because of their K-pop fan interests [²], so its wide approval was a hopeful sign. When I watched KPDH, I was relieved to see its depiction of K-pop and Korea because it avoided flattening tendencies that either exotically romanticize or mockingly other Korea. While the credits rolled, I watched attentively to confirm my assumption that the show must have been written by someone with Korean ties. 

Figure 3: Credits from K-Pop Demon Hunters

Over the next few days, I clicked on the KPDH reactions that had popped up on my YouTube algorithm (at that time, it was still too early for the song covers). I was curious to know what it was that resonated with other viewers because I viewed KPDH as a very specific text. I braced for the possibility of a rising backlash because of its unabashed centering of Korea and K-pop and because of the feminist messaging. Instead, in the comments of videos that had compared Disney/Pixar and Elio disparagingly in relation to KPDH, a few comments argued that KPDH was popular because it was not “woke” like Elio.

Figure 4. Comment under YouTube video titled “How KPop Demon Hunters ENDED Pixar…”

These responses are, on their face, inexplicable. Although I have not yet seen Elio to know if there is a reason that KPDH feels un-woke in comparison, the claims about the film’s lack of progressive meanings is untethered from the film’s overt meanings. Most obviously, KPDH passes the internet-popular Bechdel Test. Not only does the movie have more than two women in it, the movie features three women in the group, Huntr/x, including Rumi, Mira, and Zoey. Other than the male lead, Jinu (진우), the three women are at the center of the film’s narrative. The women not only talk to one another, but other than the woman lead, Rumi, they do not center men in their conversations. Rumi even hides her conflicted feelings for the demon leader of the Saja Boys, Jinu, from her friends in part because of her own half-demon heritage. In the end, the movie concludes with the three women confirming not only their individual self-acceptance but the acceptance of one another. Although a feminist critique of KPDH is easily available, including the heteronormative coupling at the heart of the story and the impossibly thin visual representations of the three women leads, it is, at least, an ambivalent text with some clear feminist meanings. 

The film is also “woke” because it centers the stories of Korean people and culture and because it is told from a diasporic Korean standpoint. It does not reproduce whiteness as the constitutive center of its narrative [³]. Indeed, there is nary a White character in the film, and even the primary voice talent consists of ethnic Korean performers from Korea and the North American diaspora. The film also famously features iconic, everyday Korean foods such as kimbap and instant ramyeon; Korean lyrics and language sprinkled into the dialogue and music; Korean iconography, including Derpy and Sussie, the mystical tiger and magpie that accompany Jinu; and hangeul in the background on storefronts and signs. In the Saja Boys’ final performance, they also wear the costumes of jeoseung saja, the supernatural beings that guide human souls from the mortal world to the afterlife. For Korean-speaking viewers, they might also notice that the Saja Boys’ lion logo is a play on words with saja acting as a homonym for lions and the guide for human souls. The film’s tight association with Korean culture coupled with its explosive popularity as the most streamed film in Netflix’s history to date has also led to increased interest in South Korean foods, art history, and tourism. The popularity of the film’s soundtrack, which has included several simultaneous hits in the Blackboard Top 200 and the #1 song for several weeks, has contributed to a multicultural popular awareness. It has intervened as the soundtrack for many children’s lives during developmentally important times and during a historical moment in which multiculturalism is being politically attacked.

Figure 5: Abby Admiring his Abs and Romance Flirting with Mira at a Fan Meeting

Further, it encourages sympathetic identification with three Korean women with different struggles, personalities, and backgrounds. The film does not objectify them as passive or submissive, a common racial stereotype of Asian American women [⁴], but it subjectifies them by showing the women as having agency and their own motivations. It also shows Korean men, albeit demons, who are the object of interest and attraction whether it is as a romantic lead or simply as eye candy. This includes a character named Abby, which appears to be a name given to him for his most famous body part, his abs. This subverts controlling images of East Asian American men, which have emasculated them as romantic and sexual partners [⁵]. In U.S. media, a desirable, sympathetic Asian male lead in a loving relationship with an Asian female lead is still rare in corporate media. An Asian bad boy-turned-good whose loss lingers in the romantic imaginations of viewers challenges the construction of East Asian men in much of the West’s popular imagination.

Figure 6: Audience reaction during Jinu’s sacrifice

Yet, despite KPDH’s obviously counterhegemonic tendencies, there was no major backlash to the film that I had noticed, and, indeed, like the comment above, even reactionary viewers had read the film otherwise, not seeing its feminist and multicultural intentions and even arguing that it is the opposite. To explain this with any depth would require another essay, so I will briefly conclude with my interpretation of what is happening instead. Of course, it is likely the case that if this were an inferior film, people would look for reasons to dislike it rather than for reasons they enjoyed it. In addition, because it is animated, the characters’ semiotic connections to our real world are more slippery. KPDH does not traffic in mukokuseki (cultural odorlessness), Iwabuchi’s term to describe some anime’s attempts at global appeal by cloaking Japanese specificity [⁶], but I would argue that all animation produces some distance from the “real” by making signs less attached to what it signifies – iconic rather than indexical [⁷]. This animated distance allows audiences to see themselves more fully in the characters, songs, and stories of people. Among the main cast, this distance is furthered because it is only Zoey and Jinu that immediately would visually signal East Asian racial identities. The other Korean characters are known to be Korean in context of the narrative and their relationships. 

The visibility of Korean signifiers is also the kind of multicultural sampling that is preferred by liberal viewers, who believe their own tastes to be cosmopolitan. Although I would not argue that KPDH includes “superficial multiculturalism,” it is a multiculturalism that does not require much from the viewer. The characters’ motivations have no direct relationship to the cultural location of the movie, so it does not have to be understood. Instead, Korean culture acts like “Easter eggs” that people can “discover.” KPDH presents a world to explore and get to know but makes no demands on the audience to know it. This is likely shaped by what I also read as a diasporic storytelling standpoint. The creative force behind the movie, Maggie Kang, is Korean Canadian, and the primary songwriter, Ejae, is Korean American. Although the story is set in Korea with mostly Korean characters (the exception is the Korean American character, Zoey), I would argue that the movie is driven by a diasporic storytelling ethos that is rooted in the struggles of diasporic Koreans to accept who they are in a world that racializes them as inferior. This is, of course, the central theme of much Asian American indie cinema that features struggles over identity and self-acceptance [⁸]. This self-acceptance is multiply layered as it is not only about the characters themselves but about the film, too – a culturally hybridized movie that says that self-acceptance and multicultural difference can be rendered popular if the storytelling and production are exceptional and if its multicultural “authenticity” does not demand too much from audiences. 

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Image Credits:

1. Trailer for K-Pop Demon Hunters 
2. Candy Quahog Marshmallow parody music video 
3. Credits of K-Pop Demon Hunters on Netflix (author’s screengrab)
4. YouTube comment under the video “How K-pop Demon Hunters ENDED Pixar…” posted by Marina McBain (author’s screengrab)
5. YouTube video titled “kpop demon hunters but it’s only when abby is on screen” posted by li (author’s screengrab)
6. YouTube Short video titled “Jinu Death Theater Reaction”

References: 

1. David C. Oh, “Disciplining Transnational Popular Culture’s Counter-Flows on Family Guy,” in The Routledge Handbook of Digital Media and Globalization, ed. Dal Yong Jin (Routledge, 2021) [↩]
2. Irina Lyan, “Shock and Surprise: Theorizing the Korean Wave through Mediatized Emotions.” International Journal of Communication 17 (2023): 32; David C. Oh, “The Patriarchal Western Gaze and the Disciplining of Fandom: ‘Koreaboo’ as Stigma. International Journal of Cultural Studies 27 (2024): 624. [↩]
3. Richard Dyer, White (Routledge, 1997). [↩]
4. Yen Le Espiritu. “Ideological racism and cultural resistance: Constructing our own images,” in Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, ed. Margaret L. Anderson and Patricia Hill Collins (Wadsworth, 2004). [↩]
5. Darrell Hamamoto, Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of Representation (University of Minnesota Press, 1994). [↩]
6. Koichi Iwabuchi, “How Japanese is Pokemon?,” in Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon, ed. Joseph Tobin (Duke University Press, 2004). [↩]
7. Daniel Chandler. Semiotics: The Basics (Routledge, 2002). [↩]
8. Peter X. Feng. Identities in Motion: Asian Americans in Film and Video (Duke University Press, 2002). [↩]