“You’ve Met Me at a Very Korean Time of My Life”: Reflecting on “KPop Demon Hunters”

When “KPop Demon Hunters” won Best Animated Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards just over a month ago, co-director Maggie Kang declared: “And for those of you who look like me, I am so sorry that it took us so long to see us in a movie like this. But it is here. And that means that the next generations don’t have to go longing. This is for Korea and for Koreans everywhere.”

I remember watching this speech the morning after and frowning. Don’t get me wrong, the success of this film signals something that co-directors Kang and Chris Appelhans should be incredibly proud of. But I also remember thinking, “really?” As a Korean American, I felt no connection to the film, but was also expected to have longed for it. And this film specifically? What do you mean I’m supposed to look at Rumi, Mira, and Zoey and think, “yes, these are my people”?

To be fair, Kang’s rhetoric isn’t that far from how K-pop as a soft-power cultural machine works. Note how, although the success of a film like “KPop Demon Hunters” depends on a global audience, Kang constrains the subjects of her speech to “us,” “generations,” and “for Korea and for Koreans everywhere.” The truth of the matter, according to Kang, is that the “K” in “K-pop” belongs to ethnic Koreans. This also means that the victory at the Academy Awards is, ostensibly, just “for Korea and for Koreans everywhere,” even if there’s a gap between the K-prefix — an imagined Koreanness as a result of cultural exports — and the experience of living as someone with Korean ancestry.

I’m reminded here just a little bit of Cheryl Harris’s “Whiteness as Property,” her groundbreaking 1993 law review article that also serves as a foundational text for Critical Race Theory (CRT). According to Harris, whiteness in the United States goes beyond just “blood” (and there is no such thing as “white blood” anyway). In an incredibly brief over-simplification, the cultural construction of whiteness assumes the status of property because white people benefit socially and financially from their racial status and also have the ability to exclude others from their whiteness. Legal frameworks such as slavery and segregation codified this cultural practice; whiteness is not just an identity, but an asset that confers social, political, and economic privileges.

The point of this analogy is that Kang seems to be implying “KPop Demon Hunters,” or really just the “K” in “K-pop,” is also a form of property owned by Korea and Koreans everywhere. The invocation of “generations” suggest that this “K” property will remain in Korean hands in perpetuity. Kang presents it as though it is a birthright, even though there’s a difference between being ethnically Korean and “Koreanness” as a globalized cultural export. By virtue of your having inherited Korean blood, you and future generations of all unborn Koreans automatically gain the ability to receive and benefit from this “K” property. Think about it this way: The “K” cultural export has increased the visibility of ethnic Koreans as well as the South Korean government’s soft power since, say, even 20 years ago. Look no further than the fact that BTS visited the White House in 2022 as representatives of South Korea during Joe Biden’s presidency, or that certain gestures like aegyo are now a way of communicating “Koreanness,” whether or not you’re actually Korean.

I imagine all you legal scholars out there are tearing your hair over this comparison between something as mass-produced as K-pop and one of the foundational texts for CRT, and it doesn’t take much thinking to make the whole comparison fall apart: Whereas whiteness, as defined in Harris’s paper, is rooted in (but not limited to) an American cultural tradition and has devastated millions of people through exclusion, the “K” property functions in a transnational space that ironically wants to be as accessible as possible. And perhaps “property” in this context is best interpreted metaphorically rather than structurally, but I hope it at least partially illustrates the strange relationship and fascination I have with “K.”

As professor Joanna Elfving-Hwang of Curtin University explains in her 2024 article on Koreanness, the logic of K-pop is about creating “spaces of belonging between the fans who can never be part of this ‘Koreanness,’ but [who can] form communities around what the idea of Koreanness of an idol or cultural represents to them as group.” Here’s a translation: You don’t get this money-making machine of K-pop culture without making it highly accessible on purpose, even if Kang says on live TV that “a movie like this” is “for Koreans everywhere.”

All this talk of what exactly the “K” in K-pop means brings me to the “problem” of “KPop Demon Hunters” itself. K-pop historians will know that the music genre has its roots in Black culture, which is to say that trying to pin down or define a concrete form of “Koreanness” in the “K” property can lead to a lot of dead ends. Is there such a thing for what is essentially a Frankenstein of cultural extractions, despite what others have argued? Just take a look at BTS’s recent comeback album, “ARIRANG” (a folk song sung in both North and South Korea), which raised a lot of controversy for having an overwhelming proportion of English lyrics (among other things). Is “ARIRANG” suddenly less Korean because of its English usage? Can we calculate a proper scale for “Koreanness”?

Perhaps that’s the wrong phrasing; it’s not like there’s a sliding scale of “Koreanness” everyone uses to judge cultural exports associated with South Korea — especially when it comes to “KPop Demon Hunters.” But I’ve also met several people who weren’t aware that the film is actually an American-Canadian production animated by Sony and distributed by Netflix. The “K” is doing a lot of work for the film’s strange cultural identity and marketing: Its music, lyrics, and dialogue were originally written in English, and some have argued that the characters don’t even “look” Korean, if we want to borrow from Kang’s language. To quote Euny Hong in the New York Times: “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.”

I’m not saying that “KPop Demon Hunters” isn’t Korean or is somehow “less” Korean, but rather that Kang’s deterministic language and framework don’t really capture the implications of her film’s cultural complexity. She’s trying to connect “Koreanness” as both an ethnic identity and cultural export together using too few words, with a film that is ironically successful because of its inability to neatly fit into one cultural aesthetic. I don’t blame her; I imagine the Oscars were a nerve-wracking place to make such declarations. But there’s also a part of me that really is confused about how Kang thought her cultural mishmash of a movie was the one that people of Korean descent everywhere had apparently been longing for. If I had been longing for a film to represent “my people,” was “KPop Demon Hunters” really the one? Over other popular Korean and Korean diasporic films like “The Handmaiden” (2016)? “Parasite” (2019)? “Past Lives” (2023)?

Maybe one way of looking at it, as a friend suggested to me, is that “KPop Demon Hunters” was always meant to be Sony’s cheesy, genre-recycling, money-printing, hour-and-a-half long extended music video. Can art forms exemplifying a so-called “low culture” also count as representation? Is there gratification in knowing that your once under-appreciated subculture of music now has its own genre of shallow, nearly-whitewashed films, which is now being used (and maybe was always intended as such) to sell concert tickets and McDonald’s limited time meals?

Sorry Huntrix fans, that was a little mean. On that note, though, a different explanation might imagine Huntrix — the demon-slaying badass girl group (not my words, but how I imagine a fan might describe it) — as an optimistic reimagining of “Korean” representation that appears to escape the post-colonial deadhand control of han. My relatives have explained han as a sense of injustice that stays with you almost permanently. This could be personal (e.g. between boss and worker), but I’ve seen the term thrown around when describing Koreans’ untranslatable sorrow born from the surplus of Korean suffering during the last century or so. There’s an exhaustive list out there somewhere, but just to name a few items: Japanese colonization; the Korean War; and the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, where the International Monetary Fund (IMF) initiated a $58 billion bailout at the cost of opening up South Korea’s economy to foreign ownership (colloquially referred to as the IMF or “I M Fired” Crisis). Think about how a lot of globally successful Korean films have tended to focus either on the country’s historical woes or current social strains — “Joint Security Area” (2000) and the North-South split; “Train to Busan” (2016) and corporate callousness; and, of course, our internationally beloved “Parasite” and financial woes in a post-IMF economy.

Whatever the reason, it’s clear that this film has touched many people’s hearts. As Hong writes at the end of her article, “‘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.”

But it hasn’t touched mine (at least in the way it has for others), and I’m sure it has to do with more than just my pretentious film taste. Maybe it’s that I felt flattened at the thought of being grouped into the “we” of Kang’s pan-Korean construction. Absorbed, even, into the Leviathan that represents the body politic of “Koreans everywhere,” the sovereign (within the limits of this fraught analogy) being whatever the catch-all term “Korea” has come to mean today. 

Let’s be specific here: It’s not necessarily “Korea” itself that bothers me. I have a deep fascination with both “K” culture and the history I’ve inherited from my parents — I’ve gone through the painstaking effort (i.e. getting my advisor to sign something) of taking a Korean language class at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and I’ve observed that even my fiction writing is tending toward Korean identity. And don’t get me started on my thesis on “Koreanness” in Korean adaptations of Shakespeare.

Instead, the real confusion is that despite the fact that I describe myself as Korean American (or an American of Korean descent) and feel that both “sides” are integral to my identity, I don’t feel any connection to “Korean America” or the Korean diaspora as a whole — Kang’s “we” — and not especially the ones on the cast of “KPop Demon Hunters.”

I can’t firmly say, “don’t lump me in with the rest of you guys,” because I know Kang meant well with her speech, and I imagine her pan-Korean construction was meant to highlight how Korean Americans have achieved such visibility in a racial caste system that has historically refused to see them at all. But at the same time I can’t deny that I often feel like an outsider in spaces and groups that are supposedly meant for Korean Americans. I can’t deny that it feels strange when a group of people whom I’m supposed to feel connected to (but don’t) appear to have bequeathed something I’m not sure if I want to inherit.

Yet I also can’t deny that there’s some part of me that feels connected to “KPop Demon Hunters” simply because of how much of a cultural mishmash it is — that’s how I would at least partially define my experience growing up in the U.S. with the face and body I’ve inherited from my parents. That probably also explains why I’ve been harping on and on about this film to anyone who’ll listen. Despite all my distaste for what feels like a jarring mix of corporate soullessness, monster movies, and a love for Korean culture, there’s a lot more this film and I have in common than I’d care to admit.