K-Pop’s Demons, Real and Fictional
KPop Demon Hunters has seen massive mainstream success in the U.S. What does that mean for real K-pop artists and their fans?
by Aja Romano
A trio of fans meet the HUNTR/X trio—Mira, Rumi, and Zoey—in Kpop Demon Hunters. Image courtesy Netflix.
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In 2012, Rolling Stone published predictions for the top 10 K-pop artists most likely to break through into mainstream U.S. fame in the near future. The list was focused on bands that had already been dominant for years—Girls’ Generation, 2NE1, Big Bang.
Missing from the list were recent rising stars EXO and the newly formed BTS, now generally considered to be the bands that ushered in the “third generation” of K-pop, with fresh new sounds and a general leveling-up of talent. Completely off the radar was the artist behind the major phenomenon that dropped exactly two months after the list: Psy, whose “Gangnam Style” became the first music video in YouTube history to reach one billion views.
It’s a sign of how little has changed in the years since that no one, not even Netflix, had KPop Demon Hunters on their radar as the global phenomenon it became. In a year where smaller-scale, non-franchise movies have triumphed, the film about a demon-fighting girl group benefited from its broad appeal, the ease of repeat viewings, and one of the most successful soundtracks ever composed. The KPDH fandom sprang up fully formed overnight, eager for more content and in-theatre singalongs—all signs of just how badly the producer, Sony, missed the mark when it essentially gave away KPDH to Netflix despite the film’s flashy $100 million budget.
While the film owes a great deal to its genre-spinning combination of anime tropes, Korean folklore, and a dash of Disneyfication, the media has granted most of the credit for the film’s wild popularity to its K-pop soundtrack. In fact, the film’s success seems to have erased months of handwringing throughout the first half of 2025 about whether K-pop is “in crisis.” The narrative of an underrated Cinderella film, buoying the global rise of K-pop with its smash-hit soundtrack, is a hard one to resist.
But if no one expected KPDH to take over the latter half of 2025, does that mean it’s a game-changer for K-pop as a whole, or a fluke that has nothing to do with the broader K-pop fandom? There’s no question that the film is a cultural watershed. But Korean culture has been down this road before, with breakout series Squid Game and Oscar-winner Parasite, only for follow-ups to fizzle while little has changed at the industry level.
Meanwhile, for K-pop and K-pop fandom, the timing of all this couldn’t be odder—or the stakes fuzzier.
One big reason Kpop Demon Hunters took everyone by surprise is that it wasn’t conceptualized as a vehicle for K-pop; rather, K-pop was creator Maggie Kang’s vehicle for a rich animated narrative based on Korean mythology. The characters aren’t K-pop artists because they’re trying to break into the grueling studio system and achieve global fame; they’re K-pop artists because they use music to fight demons, and sometimes you need a power anthem to recharge your celestial shield. That’s just how these things work!
The songs, however, are inarguably the key to KPDH’s success: The film is packed with bangers, with big stadium performances often leading into, and even standing in for, the big action sequences you might expect from a typical animated film.
Much like Pixar’s 2022 Turning Red—another surprise animated hit in which fandom played a major role—KPDH treats its subject and fandom as well understood parts of its universe. No one takes pains to explain what the “visual” or the “maknae” of the group is. Parts of songs where characters sing in Korean are left untranslated. If you don’t understand what all the light sticks are for, or what the references to fandom shipping are about, the film trusts you’ll figure it out.
This is a huge change-up from the extremely labored approach K-pop typically has to take on its journey to global mainstreaming. Here in the U.S., the more traditional pathways K-pop has been forced down have often been explicitly xenophobic and fandom-averse. While BTS finally hitting #1 with 2020’s “Dynamite” was seen as a breakthrough moment at the time, the breakthrough never actually arrived, mainly because of DJs refusing to give K-pop bands radio play. Although BTS continued to land #1s, both as a group and as individual soloists, three of their combined eight chart-toppers were collaborations with non-Korean artists like Coldplay. Blackpink star Rosé’s “Apt,” currently the highest-charting song from a Korean female artist, is also a collab with Bruno Mars.
When critically acclaimed Korean bands like hip-hop veterans Epik High and Blackpink have played Coachella, U.S. media have often treated them like novelties rather than serious artists. As for the songs that break through, I’ve argued that “Dynamite” is actually a slick troll of what American music producers think foreign music has to be in order to chart: repetitive, condescendingly simplistic and over-produced, with an upbeat party theme and lyrics entirely in English.
By contrast, the KPDH soundtrack—which features the first K-pop song to reach the Hot 100 #1 that’s not by a member of BTS—follows none of those rules and still slaps. Its composers are actual K-pop songwriters, and its songs are closely modeled off other K-pop hits like Blackpink’s “Kill This Love” and BTS’s “Butterfly.” It feels significant that while lots of American fans have been comparing KPDH to Broadway and musical theatre, the songwriters themselves prioritized the K-pop aesthetic—all those earwormy hooks, bass drops, and power vocals—over the Alan Menken-ization of plot with typical showy narrative songs and ensemble numbers. (Although Lea Salonga does make a soundtrack cameo!)
At the same time, those musical theatre beats are there, and they’re just familiar enough to admit a range of entirely new audiences to K-pop who otherwise might have shied away: the average middle-American Netflix user. The film has shown a remarkable ability to hook not only Korean media fans and anime fans, but also the same general audiences that made Encanto such a massive streaming success: kids watching the movie over and over again, and parents enjoying themselves enough to encourage repeat viewings. The film saw so many repeat viewings, in fact, that in the middle of ratcheting up bonkers numbers on the way to becoming the most-viewed film in Netflix history, it reportedly enjoyed a near-zero audience decline for three weeks straight.
All that adds up to an unprecedented level of interest in Korean pop music from a broad range of people who have never before been interested in Korean pop music. It makes the perfect setup for takes about how KPDH has allowed K-pop in the U.S. to finally break through into the mainstream.
If you know anything about the ins and outs of global fandoms and cultural exchange, however, you might be asking whether KPDH is actually having that kind of ripple effect. Granted, South Korea seems to be priming itself for impact: in response to the film’s success, the official Seoul tourism site made a KPDH landing page walking fans through many of the locations depicted; the city has also been offering drone shows and guided tours.
Yet from a certain angle, it’s hard to tell whether KPDH is actually expanding cultural appreciation for K-pop, or just overtaking K-pop itself. Case in point: As of last week, the number of monthly Spotify listeners for the two fictional bands from the film now surpass those for both Blackpink and BTS, arguably the two most well-known K-pop bands worldwide.
On Reddit, K-pop subreddits have received requests for K-pop—but often specifically for songs that sound similar to the album soundtrack. “I was listening to one K-Pop playlist on Spotify and I was starting to think that K-Pop just wasn’t for me because I just really wasn’t into any of the songs on there,” wrote redditor thedeadlyscimitar on a thread requesting sound-alikes. And yes, there’s already a meme for this:
“i’d always been hesitant since kpop seemed so intimidating to get into,” another fan, MayorDeweyMayorDewey, wrote on the reddit page for this meme, “but kpdh made me need MORE.” One Polygon reporter attending a singalong event for the film encountered a litany of fans who were quick to explain that they didn’t normally listen to K-pop, but.
“Even viewers who think ‘Blackpink in your area’ sounds like a medical diagnosis found something to enjoy,” wrote one local pundit before inexplicably going on to credit the film’s success to immigrant culture.
“It’s a little heartbreaking to see how easily my American friends will rally for a cartoon while insisting kpop is ‘cringe’ and not supporting any Asian American artists,” noted redditor Celeano283.
These fandom streams might not be crossing as easily as you might expect.
To understand how all this looks to actual K-pop fans, it’s helpful to understand the way K-pop has evolved over time.
Since the ’90s, the global trajectory of K-pop has been a straight upward line—the much-vaunted Korean wave, or Hallyu, of global cultural ascendance. K-pop’s “first generation” famously began with a single event in 1992, when hip-hop group Sao Taiji and Boys lost a televised talent competition—but lost it so well that they became an instant musical phenomenon, shifting Korean music away from more traditional pop and towards more modern sounds.
The push to develop Korean pop music led to the development of studio trainee systems, based on the J-pop studio industry, throughout the aughts and early 2010s. The bands that emerged from these early trainee programs were known as the second generation: Brown Eyed Girls, Super Junior, DBSK, Girls Generation, Shinee, Big Bang, and 2NE1 became well-known acts around the world. (Shout-out to my second-gen girls, Miss A.)
Then came the third generation, which kicked off in early 2012 with the debut of EXO. This era truly raised the bar for production values, choreo and dance quality, vocal chops, and innovation all around. Third-generation artists like BTS, EXO, Blackpink, Twice, Seventeen, and Mamamoo did more than those of any other era to push K-pop into the global mainstream, with the biggest artists helming significant studio investment and massive global fandoms. (Kpop Demon Hunters’ composer, Ejae, penned a number of third-gen K-pop hits, including Red Velvet’s “Psycho.”)
The fourth generation, which started around 2018, was characterized by global outreach, incessantly catchy hooks, and technological innovations like virtual avatars. Fourth-gen bands like Stray Kids, Ateez, (G)-IDLE, aespa, and IVE, all had strong debuts and have maintained their dominance ever since.
The current era of fifth-generation K-pop has largely shifted away from all of that, with smaller, more naturalistic productions and many bands with more diversity—like multinational groups Katseye and Illit and the recently debuted XLov, which markets itself as “genderless.” They’ve taken center stage while members of earlier gen “megabands” have been stepping back, taking hiatuses, and focusing on solo projects.
Alongside all of this industry evolution, K-pop fandom has risen to global prominence while fostering a hyper-competitive environment where fandoms for various groups are constantly at one another’s throats, and sometimes are willing to eat their own. K-pop fans are largely responsible for the rise of idol “stan culture” as we understand it today. That means K-pop fandom also bears a huge amount of responsibility for making toxicity and harassment routinized parts of the stan experience.
The ascendance of BTS in the U.S., particularly during the pandemic, introduced a wave of more traditional transformative fans to K-pop, as well as fans totally new to fandom. All of them, regardless of fandom experience, were soon subsumed in stan culture, gamifying streaming charts, hyping their bias, learning fan chants, and doing their part to make K-pop more popular stateside. Members of the KPDH team have stated, in fact, that witnessing BTS’s ability to bring fans together during the pandemic was what inspired them to make the movie.
None of this has been particularly smooth sailing. In particular, the quest for “the next BTS” has limited perceptions of recent K-pop achievements, especially among American fans, but also to some degree among the industry itself. A litany of recent racist incidents involving K-pop artists has also led to a resurgence of longstanding accusations that K-pop culture as a whole is racist. Internal fandom debates about whether fifth-gen K-pop is too multinational aren’t helping those optics. The hyper-competitiveness of fandom, combined with the extreme pressures placed on K-pop idols, also means that scandals these days seem to take a bigger emotional toil on everyone involved.
In 2022, rising stars NewJeans turned heads with their debut “Attention,” which brought them significant mainstream buzz here in the U.S. Finally, a band seemed poised to take over BTS’s crown and really truly break into the U.S. mainstream in a major way. But their momentum came to a screeching halt when they tried to leave industry supercorp Hybe, branch out on their own, and rename themselves to NJZ, citing studio bullying and a wish to reunite with their longtime manager, who Hybe had recently ousted. The band wound up receiving an injunction this year that forced them to go on hiatus, and while the court battle wages on, it appears to have already cost them their careers.
The NewJeans controversy came amid a series of headlining scandals that served idols as fodder for the media while antis—massive groups of intense haters who’ve become embedded in K-pop fan culture—celebrated. The most controversial of these involved an incident in which BTS’s Min Yoongi (Suga) was fined for a DUI after driving his electric scooter erratically down a city sidewalk. The star was also reportedly interrogated for hours, which led worried fans to compare the situation to the similar drug scandal and brutal police interrogation that preceded the apparent suicide of Parasite star Lee Sun-kyun.
In the midst of all this scrutiny, artists have been burning out, taking breaks, or leaving their groups with increasing frequency, even as profit margins for studios skyrocket. The biggest fourth-gen bands have arguably had lackluster comebacks in 2024 and 2025, even though their fans continue to drive the industry. Album sales are plummeting both within South Korea and in the U.S., prompting media to ask if the Korean wave is finally ebbing.
Fans are burning out, too. In an essay for Teen Vogue earlier this year, critic Tabby Kibugi wrote that after years of witnessing repeated cultural appropriation, racist behavior, and insensitivity from K-pop bands, she was giving up: “I no longer have the energy to rationalize or hope that ‘next time’ will be different,” she wrote. “The emotional labor of being both a fan and a critic has taken its toll on me. I can’t do it anymore.”
Discussing their own fandom burnout, longtime K-pop fan Feeling_Neo echoed this: “I just feel sad that Kpop makes me feel this way,” they wrote on a K-pop subreddit.
That everytime I get back into fandom spaces all I see is negativity. All I see are fandom wars on twitter for the stupidest reasons, idols being racist (what’s in the air this year seriously) and being cancelled and then idols not doing anything and also being “cancelled”. It’s just… it’s a lot. And it hurts.
Musically, the scene has tapered off as well. Fans complain that production values are mid where they were once steeped in glitz and grandeur, while songs that once built to dramatic, layered climaxes now feature short catchy choruses, meant to go viral on TikTok or to sound trendy instead of serious. Rather than learning the real lessons from Newjeans and their cross-genre musical influence, fans argue that newer bands are just aping the superficial elements of the group (underaged girls in Y2K aesthetics) while leaning into an empty, over-commercialized Americanized sound: “Dynamite” taken to a hyperliteral, hyper-pop extreme.
“Most of the fans who are normal have either become casual fans or have completely quit K-pop, which is what I’ve done in the last two years,” YouTuber hyeautiful observed in a video reflecting on the “bleak” state of fifth-gen music.
Into all of this waning energy, flagging sales, and controversy, Kpop Demon Hunters landed with what might best be thought of as massive 2018 fandom energy—like a time traveler whose dial was slightly askew. It’s not that KPDH feels off aesthetically; a lot of its musical references feel rooted in third-gen styles, but K-pop fandom hasn’t changed enough for that to really matter, especially to a wide audience who’s just showing up to all of this with no idea how a “Kill This Love” (third gen) is different from a “Magnetic” (fifth gen).
A lot of that energy is doing excellent things for K-pop. “Its nice to finally have my favorite genre recognized and appreciated by people who before wouldn't have given a crap about it before,” wrote redditor Laz-R-us224. “Just the coolest thing ever for the modern kpop fan hoping to see their idols and music taste gain more global traction.” When CNN asked kids what they thought about the film, they tapped into a group of singing, choreo-performing fans who were fully on board with the music.
"I think what's different about it is that it's a demon movie and a K-pop movie mixed together," said Henna MacLean, 10. "Usually it's just K-pop or just demons."
While plenty of K-pop fans have mixed and divided reactions to the film, it’s striking that KPDH has already generated a fandom that doesn’t seem tied to K-pop in any usual way—which makes sense, since this isn’t a real K-pop band. These fans aren’t out, say, making video edits or developing fan chants. Instead, KPDH has spawned a thriving transformative fandom apparatus. There are already nearly 10,000 fics on AO3. On Bluesky, a fandom zine tracker has clocked ten KPDH zines with various themes. The main KPDH trio, our beloved girl group Huntr/x, has a thriving subfandom shipping them all together, “polytrix.” Fanart has exploded across all social platforms, fan meta has exploded across Tumblr, and fans are blurring the lines between the real and the fictional, as fans do.
How far all of this is informed by K-pop itself, outside of the obvious influence on the film, is difficult to say. While K-pop RPF remains a huge corner of transformative fandom, its dominance has waned in recent years, and only one K-pop ship squeezed into the top 20 AO3 pairings for the first half of 2025, with older bands like BTS making room for newer.
These fandoms also feel very separate from that of KDPH: A glance at the authors of AO3’s most-kudosed KPDH fics reveals the interesting tidbit that none of them wrote fiction in any Korean fandom prior to KPDH. The majority of them seem far more clearly influenced by anime, Western animation, and video games. And that tracks, too; KPDH is clearly influenced by all of these things as well. Still, when we talk about how KPDH is revitalizing K-pop, it’s good to be aware that so far the KPDH fandom looks and behaves far more like an anime fandom than a K-pop fandom.
It would be a mistake to hang the future success or failure of K-pop on the rise of the KPDH fandom. While actual sales numbers have waned, K-pop groups continue to break ground around the world. Earlier this year, Stray Kids performed two massive sell-out concerts in Brazil to an audience over 120,000 fans—one of the largest K-pop stadium performances in Latin America to date. In June, Blackpink became the first K-pop girl band to move 1 million album sales in the U.S. K-pop artists are making strides in other ways, too; in April, Bain from Just B became the first K-pop band member to come out as gay, to massive support from bandmates and fans.
Meanwhile, with all of the members of BTS having finally returned this year from their two-year mandatory military enlistment service, parts of the industry are banking on them for an economic revival. (Their group comeback drops next spring.) And don’t write off fifth-gen newcomers yet. Bands like Qwer, with their strong J-pop influence and sapphic vibes, are still keeping things interesting.
At the very least, with or without the demons, it’s safe to say K-pop won’t be ready for a takedown any time soon.
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Aja Romano has been in fandom since 1998, when they asked Jeeves about Jane Austen and Jeeves unwisely showed them all the fanfic. When they aren’t ruining canon and writing too many words about Wang Yibo, they’re a culture writer, critic, and expert on internet subcultures.