What does the largest “yes” do when it comes late in life, when one has been saying “not quite”?
To the creators of Netflix’s “KPop Demon Hunters,” the solution presented itself in a manner uncharacteristic of the streaming era stories: awards, going viral and an overnight ubiquity in the culture making their secret struggle feel more like a statement. Rei Ami, whose voice gives Zoey her singing voice, referred to the scene as “vindicating”, that there was finally validation. It had been too long, when “We worked our asses off. We’ve had the door shut in our faces. We were told we were too little, too much.”
The hook of the film is popcorn-clear: a K-pop girl group that doubles as demon hunters, yet has persisted with something more human, namely the appearance of fearless characters who are doing business deals with perfectionism and insecurity and armor to survive. It is that emotional plumbing that the cast and vocalists continue to revisit, particularly after the breakout song of the film, the song titled “Golden”, became a reflection of their own journeys into reality. The movie was the largest to be streamed on Netflix and the soundtrack did what was previously done on superstar tours; it conquered everyday life. The singing voice of Rumi, one of the authors of the song, EJAE, had to explain the weirdly intimate nature of it all: “Hearing it at H Mart on the radio. It’s weird,” It’s weird, she said.
Much of “Golden” wins due to its resemblance to a victory lap and a confession simultaneously. Its chorus says that it is time to stop hiding, time to shine like I was born to be, but the tale it is based on is more complex a typical I want song that also reveals what the characters are continuing to conceal. The songwriting itself was incorporated in the myth, as well: it peaks on high A (A5), a bend that even Ami attempted to bargain with around in auditions.
The roads that the cast takes to the project themselves look like a collection of close calls. Ji-young Yoo went through auditions due to several roles once every many months, and later, she ended up reading 25-30 pages in a face-to-face meeting. Arden Cho began by auditioning as a separate character, and she had recorded with an iPhone, but later was asked to do Rumi. In mid-2022, May Hong signed an NDA and was working at home by tape, and later purchased a microphone since the callbacks had been so realistic as to warrant an upgrade. Mira sings with Audrey Nuna, and Nuna found her point of entry in an SXSW stage performance that was not so good and a hallway meeting with a Sony animation executive who could see beyond the moment and into the necessity of the project.
It was that rejection-and-return chain of rejection that now dictates their perception of the film as the symbol of the “demons.” Nuna has characterized the internal struggles of the three as unique: Rumi is perfectionistic, Zoey fears that she is not enough, and Mira is tough because she has to live in a world that is unwilling to give her space. Cho has linked that to a particularly Korean and Korean American need to exist as a polished self, pointing out that the movie silently shatters the trauma along the generational lines with no proclamation that it is therapy on screen.
The cultural particularism directed by Director Maggie Kang was insistence, but not as ornament, but as structure. EJAE has added that she was attracted because she had never watched an animated movie of Korea production by U.S. producers, and the story could weave together the modern pop spectacle and the older ones, such as Korean shamanism. That devotion is transferred into the bilingual texture of the music, in which the Korean lines will be structured in such a way that they do not intrude into the English as something new.
Once the phenomenon had spread out into fandom, and even to a shared language, the women concerned started discussing the very term, how K can act as a fence when it is intended to act as a flag. Cho presented it as an episode: this movie is now, and it seems to me that it is the start of demonstrating the world that K-pop, K-fashion, K-beauty are not something one-dimensional. The “K” is … It is no more, Ami, Amin said. Drop the K.
Ultimately, “KPop Demon Hunters” has danced like a chorus of its own: a narrative on visibility that has become visible everywhere and catapulted by a band of performers who have carved a career in the long line that the spotlight has spotted.
