Sneaking Out of Me in KPop Demon Hunters Sing-Along by Julian Castronovo

I remember my young man last month had forgotten who he was. Even though he was too busy with his thoughts and feelings as well as his high self-awareness of his existence, the young man, at some point during KPop Demon Hunter sing-along event, slipping away from himself. It’s an easy thing to do. However, the theater was dark. Then there was light and sound. It’s hard to know where it comes from. Words and songs in English and Korean emerged from the screen, and came from everyone around the young man, and came from the young man himself. In blissful confusion, the young man lost track of his identity. He is a movie character, and he is also a die-hard fan who loses his individuality simply because of the strength of his love for the movie character himself. When the lights came back on, the young man knew it was time to take back his identity, so he looked at his ID clothes. Geez. I wear my blue NewJeans shirt in a deliberately non-ironic way, which, to me, seems to be an expression of my unique personal taste and highly sophisticated yet completely understated aesthetic intuition. And when I was younger, I remember thinking that I should be myself. I’m happy about that, but also sad. It turns out that a person can be two things at once.

KPop Demon Hunter beg to differ. If you’re not yourself, I study at 8:30 PM sing along in suburban Southern California, everyone will die. This message has resonated with a large portion of the global population, and in just three months, the film has been streamed for more than 540 million hours, according to Netflix’s self-reported data. Of course its popularity today KPop Demon Hunter is, in the most basic sense of the word, a phenomenon: something you can see. And surely you’ve seen it. Real-life performances, dance trends, song covers, cosplay, theatrical performances around the world over two days with karaoke-style subtitles, which, at least in my theater, are completely useless—we already know every line and lyric by heart.

The situation is like this. Satan is trying to take over the world. For centuries now, humans have been protected by a trio of Korean girls, who, with the power of stan culture, maintain a magical barrier called the Honmoon, which separates the demon and human worlds. Currently, K-pop girl group HUNTR/X is just one away from making this barrier permanently impenetrable and thereby defeating evil for good. Unfortunately, the devils came up with a genius idea to form a sexy devil boy band and steal HUNTR/X fans. Unfortunately, Rumi, the main vocalist of HUNTR/X, has not been completely honest with himself. Like half-Australian NewJeans member Danielle, Rumi is not fully Korean. He is actually half-demon, and hiding this secret makes it impossible to express himself authentically through song and dance. “Now I shine,” she sings, “like I was born to—” On the final note, our quietly biracial heroine’s voice faltered and cracked.

Ultimately, Rumi learned that to create great works of art and/or alleviate the unrelenting pain caused by the intrinsic structural contradictions of human consciousness, you simply need to be authentic. Being authentic means there is no difference between who you are and how you appear. So, this film tells us, you have to be yourself. This is like BTS advice, meaning you’ve probably heard it before. If you were the Shakespearean character Laertes, for example, your father, Polonius, might have told you, “Be true to yourself.” Likewise, if you are, like me, an ethnically ambiguous filmmaker in California, someone interviewing you for some stupid funding or whatever has probably said to you, “I’d love to hear more about your personal connection to this story.”

But that evening, at the Regal Alhambra’s Renaissance theater—a multiplex chain location that has nothing to do with grandeur, thirteenth-century Islamic architecture, or the Renaissance—we weren’t so sure of its authenticity value. After all, we were wearing costumes. Almost every object and article of clothing appears in it KPop Demon Hunter can be purchased on the Netflix Store, and we in the audience brandished our merch: Mira’s polar bear sweater, Zoey’s bucket hat, Rumi’s choo-choo pajama bottoms. And we—perhaps because of the cinematic “apparatus” and the specific sociocultural context underlying it that night—experienced a bit of spatial, ideological, and metaphysical confusion. When demons appear on screen to perform their deceptive and inauthentic pop songs for us, we scream and sing along.

Still, maybe KPop Demon Hunter is on track to become the most popular film ever made because its director, Maggie Kang, was careful to ensure the authenticity of her work. Kang informed New York Times that, at Sony Pictures Imageworks, “we have an entire Korean committee overseeing authenticity.” Ironically, the idea of ​​a multinational conglomerate creating a special team to oversee the aesthetic and cultural details of one of its products is very authentic to K-pop. More broadly, however, it makes little sense to apply the logic of authenticity to K-pop animated films. While it is quite clear that K-pop is a new form with its own unique rituals and language, it is also clear that the fundamental function of K-pop is imitation. In my favorite song by Meovv (a real girl group that is also in the diegesis KPop Demon Hunter) there are lines like “Listen to dat bass drum, / wons and yens and dollars / comma, comma, comma.” Clearly, the lyrics are contrived and mimetic, and not an accurate reflection of the way teenage girls in South Korea actually speak—except, of course, when they sing and dance to Meovv’s songs. I think this inverted, self-evident vision of authenticity is what makes K-pop so great: it stylizes, distorts, and imitates reality in a way that forces reality to imitate it in turn.

French theorists, like K-pop idols, know that we construct our identities through a kind of chaotic process in which we think we are something we are not, like images and other people. Identification is “the transformation that occurs in the subject when he takes in an image,” says Lacan. “Now you can speak French, / talk about ‘us’,” sings Meovv. This understanding of identity as the result of imagined otherness is more or less inconsistent with the idea that a work of art, person, or demon hunter in anime must be authentic. Luckily, KPop Demon Hunter is, like identity itself, a contradiction. Its directive to embrace your true self is at odds with the social and participatory experience of watching it, which reminds us that all identities are choreographed, lip-synced, and made up.

My identity position, for example, was made up like five years ago by teenagers on TikTok. As I left the event singing while sipping the last of my boyfriend’s Dubai chocolate drink, “It’s Boba Time,” I declared that, like me, Rumi was “Wasian.” I’m drawn to this stupid Zoomer term because it can describe someone who is white and Asian as well as white people who are overly obsessed with Asian culture, and I like the idea that identity can mean enjoying your idea of ​​other people’s fantasies about you, rather than your own boring life experiences. Being this kind of person is exhilarating, scary, and full of slippage, like singing songs you only know at karaoke.

In the huge concrete parking lot outside the theater, the song I sang was “Golden” by HUNTR/X. “I’m done hiding, / now I shine…” As my voice echoes away and back toward me, I realize Rumi’s climactic sentence is quietly ungrammatical, for he says that he is, in the end, “as I was born.” Usually, we talk about being born in the past tense—”I is born to be,” not “I am Morning born to be”—but when you’re cosplaying a character or cosplaying yourself, it might be more authentic to say that moment you are who you were, and always will be, right now.

Julian Castronovo is a filmmaker and writer. The film Debut, or, Debris Field Objects As Currently Cataloged will be released by MEMORY in October 2025.