'KPop Demon Hunters' is my kind of globalism

World views

- By EUNY HONG

I initially didn't intend to watch the Netflix blockbuster "KPop Demon Hunters," an animated film about a K-pop girl band that must save its fans from a group of demons who have taken the corporeal form of a K-pop boy band, as any clever demon would. I had no reason to believe it would be to my liking, let alone culturally relevant to anyone anywhere near my age.

And yet, when I did watch it, I found that this worldwide blockbuster isn't the sloppy, West-kowtowing sellout I had assumed it would be. Rather, it might be proof that we are living in a post-multicultural world—or at least that pop culture has normalized imagining such a world as within reach.

It started streaming back on June 20 and has since become Netflix's second-most-successful original film of all time. Its tinnitus-inducing single "Golden" (lyrics: "We're goin' up, up, up, it's our moment / You know together we're glowing") is No. 1 on the Billboard Top 100.

This is a film about a three-member K-pop girl band called Huntrix that represents the current iteration of an endless line of female singers/demon hunters. Their life's purpose is to protect the so-called Honmoon—the thin membrane between our world and the demon-filled netherworld, which resembles the bleak Upside Down from the Netflix series "Stranger Things." Each generation of demon hunters taps its successors. Got it?