Quite a few of my best friends still refuse to watch this movie.
Sometimes this makes me feel like I turned to the wrong choose-your-own-story page. Surrounding myself with people who are like me demographically, but not emotionally, or intellectually, or – most importantly – equally suffused with trendiness.
Because I am one trendy creature, let me tell you. Not every trend, I’m rather selective, but I really do enjoy a good bandwagon. Bandwagons are fun. You can make friends, find decent conversations, score that rare fan trinket you’ve been trying to find. They are a nice existential distraction from the pointless cruelty of existence, and I cherish them.
I was one of the early converts to the KDH cult. Which happened because I’m into K-Pop.
Which came about because my music computer died two months into the pandemic. I have a stonehenge of former hard drives that I’ve used since the ‘90s and all of them are recoverable except this one in particular. It contained all my CDs, which currently live in a storage box just in case I have to re-upload them a third time.
Faced with a choice between re-uploading and just throwing up my hands and embracing a new style of music for a while, I chose the latter. The last good concert I saw before the pandemic had been SuperM, a KPop supergroup. I had just started getting paychecks again after a long gap, and I splurged on a good seat, because I was writing a science fiction book with a boy band in it, and I wanted to check out the latest trends in boy bands.
At that show I fell in love with a performer named Taemin, and his group SHINee, and his bandmates’ groups EXO and NCT, as well as other groups from the same country such as BTS and MonstaX, but it all started with Taemin. He’s just that good, and you should go watch one of his videos right now, because he’s the best dancer in the world. I came out of that show with the immediate desire to own all his albums, so I ordered them – on CD – and the last one arrived the day before lockdown began. When my music computer died, they were on top of the stack.
I briefly tried to replace my music computer with Spotify and then I discovered another harsh truth: I was now accustomed to high definition sound. This was a side effect of a prior addiction to World of Warcraft. I started listening to everything in HD surround and after a while regular stereo (i.e. most of my existing music collection) sounded way too skinny.
But not K-Pop! These folks were doing awesome things with their endless array of tracks and multilayered sounds. I later learned that the guy who had a major hand in developing the SuperM bands, Lee Soo Min, was holed up in Southern California during the eighties, avoiding a military coup in Korea, and all he did was study computer science and watch MTV.
As someone who also spent a lot of the ‘80s watching MTV, I recognized a kindred soul. If you took all the best ‘80s MTV videos and shot a package of them into space, you might receive back something resembling K-Pop. And that was sort of the linchpin of the science fiction story I was writing at the time, a delirious adventure featuring a boy band trapped on a dinosaur planet, and a brave girl trying to rescue them. (Rhonda Wray: Raptor Wrangler – the buy link’s right here on this blog.)
So I developed a massive addiction to K-Pop while patiently re-installing my old classic rock and jazz and blues and industrial and Hawaiian guitar and all the other stuff I like to listen to. I’m still quite happily addicted. I’ve seen BTS live three times this year and I’m tempted to go see them again because they’re playing in LA right after Worldcon and it’s an amazing show. I actually followed Taemin’s tour last year, saw him in New York, LA, Oakland and Honolulu. Speaking of amazing shows.
And because of this addiction I am in a bunch of fan groups, and we were talking about KDH on day one. Someone mentioned the boy dancers were based on SHINee, as well as BigBang, MonstaX, and BTS, and that’s all it took – I found it on Netflix and clicked play.
I spent most of the last year repeating that action.
Bad Bunny did a skit on Saturday Night Live where all he wants to talk about is KDH despite his dinner companions bringing up interesting conversations, and finally the Huntrix girls burst right out of his imagination and sing Golden.
Which is still on the iTunes charts today. It’s number two under K-Pop. Soda Pop, Takedown, and How It’s Done are beneath it. The album is also number two, right above Arirang by BTS.
When I was early in my Kpop addiction I briefly tried to style myself as a KPop blogger – mostly as part of the research for my character, but also because I felt like I wanted to join this mission to help Asian music break into the American market.
As I’ve written about elsewhere, I grew up in Hawai’i, listening to excellent Asian musicians, and then moving to the mainland and wondering why they had so much antipathy toward Asian/Pacific Islander music given that American popular music was largely kickstarted by Hawaiians following the overthrow and occupation of their kingdom. You can still see the “blackface” version in some movies, like Baby’s sister’s performance in Dirty Dancing, and here’s a documentary if you want to dive deeper.
My career as a K-Pop blogger folded after the initial burst of energy and I moved on to my next trend, but I’ve kept up on my stated goal with that: to help Asian music be more visible. Promote it to people like my classic rock friends whose knowledge of Asian music begins and ends with Yoko Ono jokes.
So I do things like share videos on Facebook, and show up at concerts, and fan meetups. I wear my coat that’s covered with rock patches as well as K-Pop patches, and be a big old example of someone who can move between both worlds. I participate in fan groups, and since I write mostly under handles these days, I spread lots of positive reviews. My courtroom-novel-in-progress has a character who is a K-Pop star trying to launch a solo career, he’s based on both Taemin and Mark Lee.
When I saw the jaw-dropping magnificence that is KDH I immediately wanted to share it with the world. I wrote a long breathless review for File 770 pitching it hard. Solid storytelling! Amazing songwriting! Girl characters who fight, pig out, burp, have moral conflicts, spew popcorn out of their eyeballs, and do all manner of amazing things one hardly ever sees girls do in cartoon movies!
I watched it over and over. I found Rumi absolutely compelling, and I was fully absorbed in the love story between a mostly-good girl and a mostly-bad boy, as well as the story of a half-demon who hunts full-demons using music. I loved the Saja Boys too, with their astute parody of boy band archetypes and their weaponized seductiveness.
Dear Reader, my enthusiasm for watching movies had been dormant so long I feared it was dead. I continued to dutifully watch the Oscar nominees every year for a long time but after Anora I stoped bothering. Clearly the American media industry was aiming their product in a direction that wasn’t mine.
Meanwhile, I’ve enjoyed a few Korean shows, like Extraordinary Attorney Woo and Squid Games. My impression of South Korea is that it is a country where intelligence is valued. I’m not sure I could live there because I have a few antisocial American habits that wouldn’t blend well, but their media makes me feel seen and accepted where American media … hasn’t for a while. Despite its best efforts at focusing on inclusion.
I think an Americanized version of Rumi would fall flat. She’d be more of a people-pleasing role model. Probably she’d describe herself as “punk” and claim to be on the rockist side of the rockism versus poptimism debate, and in fact Huntrix would probably get retconned as a feminist punk band, since that might be a lot more plausible here than the idea of (gasp) men being fans of a girlpop group. Although American men probably wouldn’t line up to see a feminist punk band either, so maybe they’d get changed to plaster casters or something.
In fact, that was one of the reasons K-Pop Demon Hunters got rejected from larger platforms: it was thought boys would hate it. In some countries, it’s normal and acceptable for boys to listen to groups made of cute girls, and even crush on them, but here that’s totally unmanly and potentially gay. American men are supposed to listen to groups made of young men screaming about aggression instead.
Which brings us right to the elephant in the room: KDH is a female gaze movie. Sure, men can watch it. Women can watch spaghetti westerns and Marvel Universe films if they want, and lots do. It’s from a woman’s perspective though, and a straight one. Huntrix is never sexually objectified the way the Saja Boys are. Women are allowed to be gross, gluttonous, lazy, lustful, foolish – a whole range of things they don’t typically do in male gaze entertainment where they’re basically decoration.
I think KDH belongs in lots of sections at Blockbuster, so probably it’s a good thing Blockbuster isn’t around anymore. It’s a musical, and it’s animated, and it has nothing inappropriate for children, so those are three potential shelves for it, but it’s also a women’s movie. A tragic love story. An opera. A fairy tale. A comedy. A spiritual allegory. Whatever you need it to be at any given moment. It’s there for you.
Above all, it’s deep. There’s a reason people are still compulsively watching it.
And avoiding it too. For whatever reasons. Maybe they are devout rockists who could never sully their pure authenticity with pop, or maybe they think it’s going to be sexist, or childish, or they have a deep and secret vein of anti-Asian racism they usually keep to themselves. There’s a lot of weird resistance to this utterly charming film, even among people I know well and like. I’ve moved beyond my evangelical phase where I was going to peoples’ houses and logging into my personal Netflix account to try and get them to engage with Huntrix and Derpy the tiger. This movie fits into some peoples “uggggh not for me” category just the same way I approach mysteries, Star Trek, superheroes, genderswapped reboots and similar.
The Grammys are trying to introduce a “best Asian” category for the new BTS album, to keep it out of the regular Best Album competition. Similar to what a country western award did when they invented a “traditional” category in response to Beyonce invading their genre. BTS fans have thrown down the gauntlet over this and are embarking on a campaign to give BTS Best Album, for Arirang, which it damn well deserves in my opinion.
Similar things have been happening to KDH, which has been studiously ignored by lots of people that consider themselves too serious for its colorful charms. Still, it made it up there to Best Long Form in the Hugos. I am specifically avoiding the award ceremony because I don’t want to see it lose, which I predict will happen, because of those mysterious avoiders, who are voting for Sinners or something about superheroes or anything but KDH. Too young, too girly, too foreign. My internal translator tends to render it all as “clashes with their sensibilities” (and makes me wonder sometimes if I need to recalibrate mine).
Then I think about the fan merch. There was zero fan merch available when KDH became a huge hit, and people were actually making it themselves. Shirts, dolls, 3D printed figures, plushies, stickers. Anything you might find at the Disney store, but handmade, by people whose desire for a Derpy Tiger hoodie or a Saja Boys t-shirt was so unstoppable they took matters into their own hands.
Usually it flows the other way. Target has a huge pile of figures for the new Moana movie, which are available pre-release. I predict they’ll be on clearance at some point. Maybe I’ll get the boat, but I have zero need for a The Rock As Maui doll when I have an animated Maui doll that resembles Israel Kamakawiwo’ole and is the only Maui doll this Maui girl needs.
You can buy KDH stuff now, like the shirt I’m wearing to the show, as well as some really nice dolls and other merch. And there’s going to be a sequel happening, for all of us happy devotees who have been attending singalong showings in theaters and other fan activities.
It’s really nice when the corporations go “wow, you want more of that one?” Instead of “our team has decided we can maximize profits by feeding you this one, so here, buy this weird-looking Moana doll instead of the homemade Rumi doll from Etsy that you are craving.”
I’m going to close this with a video of real live K-Pop band Oneus, who impulsively threw a cover of My Idol into their live show when I saw them at the Masonic in San Francisco. They got a lot of screaming applause, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
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