“This is what it sounds like…” Readers of a certain generation will perhaps automatically complete this phrase by saying “when doves cry.” But it isn’t doves we’re talking about. It’s magpies. Prince’s funky epic of tortured love (“Why do we scream at each other?”) forms part of the extensive pop-culture back catalog ransacked by the market-savvy makers of the animated Netflix movie KPop Demon Hunters. At the movie’s climax Rumi, one of the eponymous demon hunters, sings a not un-Prince-like song called “What It Sounds Like.” No agonized eroticism, à la Prince. Rather, ingenuous self-acceptance: “My voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like.”
For certain parents, this might be what it sounds like when children cry. Last September Dr. Colleen Ryan of the Shriners Children’s Hospital in Boston issued a warning about the dangers of speedily consuming boiling-hot ramen noodles in homage to a KPop Demon Hunters scene. Children had, it seemed, been microwaving tall, slender cups of instant ramen and spilling the contents on themselves with alarming regularity. In her statement Dr. Ryan testified that “we see injuries like this two to three times a week.”
Videos have certainly proliferated on TikTok with tags like “#KPopnoodlechallenge” or “#demonhuntersramen.” A number of these videos recreate the moment in the film when Rumi, Zoey, and Mira—young female singers in the K-Pop band HUNTR/X who are also grimly competent supernatural warriors—scarf down spicy instant noodles just before they jump confidently from a “trashed” plane while singing a catchy, obnoxious song (“How It’s Done”). Of course we have only Dr. Ryan’s word for any such link between KPop Demon Hunters and an uptick in the numbers of ramen-scalded children visiting American emergency rooms.
Hashtags? Health panics? Clearly, we’re talking about the epiphenomena of a phenomenon. As of this writing KPop Demon Hunters is Netflix’s most-watched film ever. Three months after its release on June 20, 2025, the movie had been streamed over 300 million times. By the end of the year it had been watched over 500 million times. Four or five million of these viewings occurred in my house over the last month. Our kids (boy, age five, and girl, age seven) are obsessive rewatchers of KPop Demon Hunters. In the last six weeks I have, through no real choice of my own, paid closer attention to KPop Demon Hunters than I have to any other artwork ever, including my own novels.
I have therefore had ample time to brood on the movie’s magpie approach to source material. KPop Demon Hunters has been praised for its use of Korean myth and for the sophistication of its highly compressed, and at times winningly surreal visual style, and these elements are to be celebrated. But the film is also full of baffling non sequiturs and jagged, decontextualized allusions. “How It’s Done” includes the line “Fit check for my napalm era,” which is fun to say, but very weird. Things get even weirder when, later in the movie, Rumi channels Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War: “This is a battle for hearts and minds.” Are we meant to be thinking about Vietnam? No. The lines are just cultural detritus, vacuumed up and redeployed to serve a newer, emptier purpose.
*
A battle for hearts and minds—“a battle for the fans,” as Rumi elaborates. And this is indeed what the movie is about. But which fans? “It’s just a really funny and good movie and the songs are good,” our daughter says, accounting for her taste. “There’s no kissing. But there’s lots of love. Kissing is worse than love. But love is still bad.”
The nonkissing lovers are Rumi the demon hunter (voiced by Arden Cho) and Jinu, a handsome, conflicted demon (voiced by Ahn Hyo-seop). There are two problems. One is that Rumi is herself part demon (her father, it is revealed but not further explained, was a demon), and as the movie unfolds her skin is increasingly marked by the purple zig-zag patterns that signify demonhood. The other is that Jinu has conjured up a “demon boy band,” the Saja Boys, to rival HUNTR/X. The goal of the Saja Boys is to steal the souls of HUNTR/X fans, thereby weakening a magic shield, the Honmoon, that keeps the main demon, Gwi-Ma (a purple glowing cloud voiced by Lee Byung-hun), at bay.
The Honmoon is sustained by the passionate connection felt by the fans with HUNTR/X’s music. The bigger the fandom, the stronger the anti-demon shield. Rumi’s goal is to turn the Honmoon “golden,” which will finally drive away her purple zig-zag patterns and let her “live like the girl they all see,” though how or why any of this works is never explained. Jinu wants to destroy the Honmoon and convince Gwi-Ma to delete his shameful memories of betraying his mother and sister when he was a child—until, that is, he falls in love with Rumi. In romantic fiction circles, I believe this plot is known as “rivals-to-lovers.” In millennial TV-viewer circles, it is known as “very, very similar to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except with K-Pop.”
And indeed, it is very, very similar to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Except the whole point of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was that Buffy Summers, the show’s heroine, combines being a fated supernatural warrior with being an ordinary California high-schooler who has an ordinary family (well, mostly) and ordinary friends (well, ditto). Rumi and her bandmates, Mira and Zoey, by contrast, must juggle two exceptional identities: demon-hunting and global pop-stardom. There are no ordinary people in KPop Demon Hunters. There are only pop idols, demons, and those who serve them. The rest of humanity is reduced to a fungible mass entity: the fans. The competition between HUNTR/X and the Saja Boys over this finite resource generates the action of the film.
Fan or god: these are the choices. But only the gods have agency. Everyone else just picks a side. Much of our popular culture is now dominated by this logic. Kendrick or Drake? Brooklyn Beckham or his parents? Taylor or Charli? At crucial moments in KPop Demon Hunters, large groups of fans move in literal lockstep (as at an impromptu “joint signing” by both bands) or under the sway of mass hypnosis (as during the prelude to the climactic battle). When smaller groups of fans appear, they are defined entirely by their maniacal allegiance to one band or the other. The film’s darkest moment comes when Zoey and Mira give up on HUNTR/X altogether and join the zombified fans trooping into the stadium to see their rivals, the Saja Boys, perform a song called “Your Idol,” which warns of the dangers of obsessive fandom (“I’m thе only one who’ll love your sins/Feel the way my voice gets underneath your skin”). From this weirdly ironic Götzen-Dämmerung, Zoey and Mira will of course emerge triumphant, undefeated idols once again—because the fans reject the Saja Boys and prefer “What It Sounds Like,” HUNTR/X’s new song.
*
In Buffy, the supernatural was a source of metaphor. The guy who turns weird after you sleep with him? Well, he’s a vampire contending with a centuries-old curse. Finding school tough? That’s because it’s built on the literal Hellmouth. In KPop Demon Hunters, there are no metaphors of this kind. (Rumi’s visible “patterns” obviously symbolize destructive patterns of behavior; Buffy at its best would have chewed that one up in a throwaway gag.) Instead the film operates in a mode of semiconscious allegory. It allegorizes not a journey to self-acceptance or even (in Jinu’s case) to self-sacrifice, but rather the conditions of its own production and reception.
The Korean-Canadian filmmaker Maggie Kang, who codirected KPop Demon Hunters with Chris Appelhans, first pitched the idea to Sony in 2018. “I used K-Pop as the selling point,” she told The New York Times. “I’m an artist, but I also came up from DreamWorks. I’m trained to have a marketing mind.” The Times’s oral history of KPop Demon Hunters recounts a lengthy, “iterative” process of development, in which, for example, the song “Golden” was reworked eight times before it met Kang’s and Appelhans’s standards: “It was important for us that the songs served the story but then, as stand-alone pop songs, could be on the Billboard charts,” Kang said. “Golden” (“We’re going up, up, up, it’s our moment”) duly became one of the longest-lasting hits in the history of the Billboard 200.
To watch KPop Demon Hunters is to recognize that the corporate entertainment industries and the fandoms that they solicit and serve have now entered into a sort of closed loop. In a sense, the true subject of mass entertainment products is now the creation of mass entertainment products and the drama of their possible fates in the marketplace. That this is the literal subject of KPop Demon Hunters only makes visible a general truth: mass entertainment products now seek to create the illusion of an unmediated connection between fans and idols, a frictionless vision of the perfected market. The movie features no state actors: no cops, no government officials. What remains is the screen and the literal presence of famous bodies performing for your money and your love. It’s a dream of perfect neoliberal order.
Circulating freely in this marketplace are the usual collective fantasies: fame, wealth, power. KPop Demon Hunters belongs to the decadent phase of the superhero genre, when everything unfolds according to the logic of a rigid dreamwork. Now that ordinary people appear only in the mass—as phone-using witnesses, as victims, or as tokens to be won or lost in the hyperkinetic battles of the gods—the presence of superpowers is barely explained, or is taken entirely for granted. The important scenes are ritualistically enacted: the quippy opening battle, the final confrontation with the physically enlarged villain… They mean very little by themselves. The point is not the battle but the hustle. Like the Avengers, damned to save Earth from recurring supervillainy, the anointed girls of HUNTR/X are never permitted to rest. They must work to keep the attention of the fans. Even the gods can never stop. “Let’s go promo!” shouts their manager, Bobby (voiced by Ken Jeong). In the age of the algorithm, it’s always promo time.
Superhero films now depend for these rigid structural beats on the simplistic emotions that underlie the dreamwork: the feeling of being stronger than everyone around you, the feeling of being alienated from your team, the feeling of being weaker than everyone around you, the feeling of returned strength, and finally the feeling of acceptance by your team. These movies are not about self-acceptance but acceptance by others.
And it seems uncoincidental that this is the pattern of emotions that also underlies the art and public symbology of fascism. Watching KPop Demon Hunters four or five million times won’t make your kid a fascist. The worst it might do is send them to the ER with ramen burns. In other words, the worst it might do—and it’s worth asking seriously whether, at this moment in history, this counts as a good thing or a bad thing—is make them a fan.
English (US) · 