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At-One-Ment with the Demon: How KPop Demon Hunters Completes the Heroine's Journey
- Jason Batt, PhD
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
The novice emerges from his ordeal endowed with a totally different being from that which he possessed before his initiation; he has become another.
—Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation
I was a ghost, I was alone / Given the throne, I didn't know how to believe / I was the queen that I'm meant to be / I lived two lives . . . / We're goin' up, up, up, it's our moment / You know together we're glowin' / Gonna be, gonna be golden.
—HUNTR/X, "Golden"
Last year's KPop Demon Hunters on Netflix was an industry-shaking surprise: a high-energy animated film that mixed K-pop with Korean mythology and generated a soundtrack that spent two weeks at number one on the Billboard 200. That soundtrack also became the first ever to have four simultaneous songs in the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. The central anthem, "Golden," delivered at the film’s climax, ruled the Billboard Global 200 for over eighteen weeks and took home an Academy Award for Best Original Song and a Grammy for Best Song Written for Visual Media. The film is currently the most-streamed title in Netflix history. More broadly, in 2025 it was the most-streamed movie in the U.S., doubling the viewership of its closest competitor, Disney's Moana.
The film tells the story of three young musicians, called HUNTR/X, whose stage performances serve as a vehicle for their greater purpose: to seal off the realmof the demons using a barrier called the Honmoon (a mythological invention of the film–in Korean, 魂門, meaning “Soul Gate”) and to protect the mortal world. HUNTR/X consists of Rumi, Mira, and Zoey. The trio enter direct competition with a new boy band, the Saja Boys, who in truth are [SPOILER WARNING for two big secrets of the film: you've been warned!] actually the demons the girls are tasked to destroy. Rumi, the lead singer, makes a connection with the lead singer of the Saja Boys, and reveals her own internal struggle: she's part-demon on her father's side. "Golden" is Rumi's moment of identity-integration.
The mirror, not the prize
The Hero's Journey has been rightly criticized for its male-centric perspective—even a male gaze—in its arc toward resolution. Too often Campbell's monomyth reduces the feminine to a trophy: the goddess is something to be earned or acquired. Scholar Maureen Murdock's deconstruction is accurate: Campbell saw through a male lens. This is necessary prologue, because KPop Demon Hunters refuses that frame. The Saja Boys seem like the obvious antagonists, but as with every Campbellian hero journey, the real antagonist is the mirror of the hero. What the film actually delivers, with the heroine in the pole position, is a fuller resolution than Campbell's monomyth has historically allowed: a heroine's journey.
For Campbell, initiation is the structural core of the monomyth. The departure brings the heroine across the threshold, and the return brings the boon back to the world she left. Initiation is the stage where the transformation occurs. Death and rebirth, as well as testing, are bundled here as an iterative process, moving through trials as gates. In Jungian terms, the hero confronts the aspects of themselves relegated to the darkness (the shadow) and discovers more within than they realized.
The cave, reopened
Rumi succeeds where Luke Skywalker fails ("Remember the cave, Luke"). She stares at her own opposite—the demon part of her inherited through her father's line—and embraces it. Rumi discovers the humanity within the demonic, the light within her own darkness. Like Luke, she is confronted by her father—or more specifically, his nature within herself. For Campbell, this is necessary:the heroine must achieve atonement with the father. At-one-ment (with an emphasis on the hyphens) brings the heroine into full recognition and embrace of her complete identity. For Rumi, this is literally the darkness of her father. While we never discover any identifying clues of who he was, Rumi accepts his nature completely, despite living an entire life dedicated to the eradication of her father's kind.
Initiation is structurally a katabasis—a descent in which the heroine goes down before ascending back. Luke climbs down into the cave. While Rumi doesn't descend into the world of the demons, it is visualized throughout the movie as existing below her, so encountering and embracing her own half-demon nature becomes a descent of origins.
Rumi discovers the humanity within the demonic, the light within her own darkness.
The soul speaks Korean
The ascent from the underworld of her soul allows her full nature to erupt through the cracks in her public persona. The song amplifies this by interlacing lyrics in Korean. These eruptions give voice to her unconscious. Key Korean phrases punctuate an otherwise English text: 어두워진 (darkened), 영원히 깨질 수 없는 (unbreakable forever), 끝없이 (endlessly), and 밝게 빛나는 우린 (we who shine brightly). HUNTR/X's mother tongue surfaces precisely where the most emotionally charged material lives. In Jungian terms, the unconscious speaks in the older language. Rumi's persona performs in English; her soul speaks Korean. What is repressed peeks through in syllables that the conscious mind struggles to contain.
"Golden" becomes an anthem, a Disney-esque "I Want" ballad played in retrospect, with Rumi (and her fellow members of HUNTR/X) discovering what they want in the moment they achieve it. John Eisendrath, an executive music producer, defined a form of Disney-created song where the protagonist articulates all they want, often expressing their own call to cross the threshold. He called this form the "I Want." Ariel wants to be part of the human world. Belle wants more "than this provincial life." "Golden" is both an "I Want" song, expressing Rumi's desire to be the queen she's meant to be, and simultaneously the Initiation into that very moment. The film reimagines the classic Disney trope and disrupts the ordering of the Campbellian journey. Stages can occur atop each other and before their supposed cause.
She returns as the treasure
Victor Turner, in The Ritual Process, tells us: "Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial" (95). "Golden" is the classic moment of Apotheosis, that spark of god-consciousness ("I'm the queen I'm meant to be"), the moment the heroine perceives the unity of opposites, the shine of the divine, a supernatural power which melts the ego and through that becomes something greater. The boon Rumi returns with is a new worldview, in which the concept of contentious, always-separated opposites (the human and the demon) has been unveiled and eroded. Despite her life's supposed purpose, embracing her complete self redeems the possibility of redemption for all of demon-kind. The film doesn't explore this further, but the ground has been tilled.
"Golden" also renders this a public Initiation. Rumi's Initiation must be public, as her concealment was also public. She deceived her community and her close circle about who she was meant to be. KPop Demon Hunters expands the Hero's Journey: in one moment, the encounter with the Goddess collapses inward, the Goddess revealed as Rumi herself, the underworld is traversed and ascended from, and then carried into the greater world. The boon Rumi returns with is her embrace of the demonic nature she's warred against–a liminal identity. Redemption and reconciliation become a real possibility for the audience, because what Rumi integrates is nothing less than her world's most rejected force. Rumi invites her HUNTR/X bandmates and the public to join her in the Initiation: "You know together we're glowin'." Rumi anoints the audience itself, both imaginary and real, as Hunters, living out the moment of rebirth inside the community and giving invitation to join her.
Maureen Murdock argues that the Heroine's Journey could not end where Campbell's ended, because the integration the heroine required was not the boon brought home from elsewhere but the wholeness reclaimed from within. KPop Demon Hunters is, in this sense, a Murdockian text in a Campbellian frame. Rumi does not return with a treasure—she returns as the treasure: integrated, reconciled, and visible. The audience is not the recipient of the boon—the audience is the body in which the integration becomes real.
Every persona we manage is a small Honmoon, a wall against the parts of ourselves we haven't integrated. We sing "Golden" along with HUNTR/X because we recognize the wish, and because somewhere underneath the wish, we recognize the cost. Rumi shows us the work: the mask comes off, the demon-half is acknowledged, the audience witnesses, and the integration holds. That is what we are watching when we watch this film a hundred million times—an invitation.
MythBlast authored by:
Jason D. Batt, Ph.D., is a technological philosopher, mythologist, futurist, artist, and writer specializing in mythologies of space exploration. He co-founded Deep Space Predictive Research Group, Project Lodestar, and the International Society of Mythology. He has authored three novels, edited four fiction anthologies, and his short fiction and scholarly work have appeared in numerous publications. Jason currently serves as Senior Editor for the forthcoming Journal of Mythological Studies, Co-Managing Editor of the Beyond Earth Institute Space Policy Review, and Associate Editor of the Journal of Space Philosophy.
This MythBlast was inspired by the Initiation stage of the hero's journey and The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on his Life and Work.
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