KPop Demon Hunters is the escape – and the hope – that I needed

You’re all I can think of, every drop I drink up
You’re my soda pop, my little soda pop

While the city around me is subject to an immigration enforcement blitz and threatened with military occupation, I can’t help but smile as five little girls in tights and leotards  — my daughter among them — belt out these lyrics as they dance around freely, in front of a wall-to-wall mirror but somehow less self-conscious as they find commonality in the music. 

It’s “Soda Pop,” one of several chart-topping hits from Netflix’s most-watched movie of all time, the animated Korean-style musical, KPop Demon Hunters. While the song is seemingly innocent and admittedly catchy, the characters singing it represent demons enslaved by the towering, fiery, ghost demon Gwi-ma, and the movie opens a much deeper window into the power play between good and evil in the temporal world. 

I always appreciate a well-told villain story — one which delves into a traumatic past, humanizing a character who was previously labeled nothing more than a “bad guy.” In this regard, KPop Demon Hunters does not disappoint. In fact, central to the story line is the encounter of a demon (villain) and a demon hunter (superhero), and how their relationship transforms from hostility, to curiosity, to the revelation that they are not so different after all. 

Their journeys reveal how our encounters with one another can be sources of healing for the parts of ourselves that we hide, that we put walls around. 

In one scene of the movie, a young fan approaches the antagonist — a demon disguised as a singer in a boy band — and gives him a drawing. “You have a beautiful soul,” it says, and it stops him in his tracks. 

For so long, he had only heard the condescending, demeaning voice of Gwi-Ma: You are worthless, you only think of yourself, you aren’t capable of change — words not unlike the soundtrack that so many of us have playing in our minds, all the time. 

This fixation on Gwi-Ma’s voice is so haunting, perhaps, because it is so disturbingly resonant with voices in today’s world that seek to tear down human dignity. Activists fighting for Palestinian rights are labeled as terrorists. People who have come from other countries to the U.S. are never seen as anything more than “criminal illegal aliens,” a soundtrack on repeat so that we might forget they are our neighbors, sisters, mothers, fathers and brothers. Black and brown youth caught in a trap of survival are cast as menaces to society needing to be controlled, repressed, removed. 

Like Gwi-Ma, too many voices in power today reduce people to a what, and we lose sight of the who.

This act of evil is directly contradictory to the Christian anthropological view  that we are created in God’s image. It is the view that every human person possesses, rooted in words of St. John Paul II and Pope Francis, “infinite dignity, inalienably grounded in his or her very being, which prevails in and beyond every circumstance, state, or situation the person may ever encounter.”

Certainly, the movie’s heroines fall short of pointing us in the direction of a loving, merciful God as an antidote to this venomous attack on human dignity, but their solution is not without truth.

The superhero, demon-hunting pop trio Huntr/x are able to dispel demons with their songs, but it is not their voices alone that fuels this power. Rather, it is the collective sense of hope awoken by the music, represented visually by a glowing light within their fans’ hearts. 

As the plot progresses, the women of Huntr/x struggle to write a song so effective that it will activate an unbreakable protective shield against the demons. Their first attempt is aggressive and violent: ‘Cause I see your real face, and it’s ugly as sin / Time to put you in your place ’cause you’re rotten within … A demon with no feelings don’t deserve to live.

The lead singer and protagonist questions these lyrics as she begins to feel empathy for the demons trapped in Gwi-Ma’s grasp — and as she comes to terms with her own imperfections, represented by the patterns spreading across her skin, that are supposedly the mark of a demon. From, 

When the patterns start to show it makes the hatred want to grow out of my veins,

she moves towards:

When the patterns start to show I see the pain that lies below… 

The message is that hatred cannot defeat evil; only love, only radical acceptance, only admitting our faults while refusing to let them define us, can accomplish that. In our world, we get this message from Jesus teaching us to love our enemies, to St. Paul writing to the Romans, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good,” to the very message of the cross, in which Jesus must submerge fully into the darkness of sin in order to bring it into the light.

The salient words of M. Shawn Copeland, challenging Christians not to turn away from injustice and suffering in the world, but rather to enter into it deeply and find God there, serve as a Christian reframing of the ultimately triumphant anthem: “Theology must learn to see in the dark. Theology emerges from God’s gracious act of mercy at our wrestling for meaning in our human condition.”

KPop Demon Hunters has proved for me to be more than a mental escape from the crushing war of dehumanization and cruelty being waged inside and out of U.S. borders. It is a reminder that by accepting ourselves and each other as we are, by being and speaking love to one another, we can resist and break through the lie that any one of us is anything less than human. 

And it is a reminder that is urgent as ever. Gwi-Ma’s dehumanizing voice is a means to an end. By controlling the narrative, stripping people of hope, and leading them to despair, Gwi-Ma becomes stronger and more powerful.

We can reclaim the narrative of shared humanity and be the healing balm of hope that doesn’t let that happen.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emily Cortina is a mother raising three bilingual, bicultural children alongside her Mexican husband. She advocates for transformative and restorative justice through her work in prison ministry and parish outreach at Kolbe House Jail Ministry in Chicago, Illinois.