Editorial: K-Pop Demon Hunters, Gorillaz, and the mythos of virtual bands

EDITORIAL | PŪRĀKAU / MYTHOLOGY

Written by Liam Hansen (they/them) | @liamhanse.n | Editor-in-Chief

Illustrated by Stella Roper (they/she) | @dodorenzy | Arts Editor

There is no escaping K-Pop Demon Hunters. The Maggie Kang-directed Netflix animated epic has dominated every chart, broken every record, and been rewatched countless times by people who’ve never had any interest in K-Pop before in their life. My partner and I have watched this movie seven times now. We haven’t stopped singing ‘Golden’ badly for months. I’m pretty sure we’ve ended up on a watchlist for harassing Netflix executives into releasing a director's cut that doesn't exist.

The film arrived in the middle of a shitty year for music. After 2024’s neverending barrage of pop banger after pop banger, stunning album after stunning album, 2025 has seen white bread take the centre stage of the charts. The American white supremacist political environment has allowed ‘Ordinary’ to top the Billboard charts, a song written by a guy I thought was best known for eerily stealing the style, voice, and identity of David Dobrik on YouTube before being in that Danny Gonzalez video about the Hype House Netflix show. Alex Warren was only knocked off the charts a few weeks ago, and it was by a fictional band of animated Korean cunt-servers. 

I’m glad such a boring song was beat by a project that took so much love and creative labour - particularly when every major brand and industry is encouraging people to drain their artistic energy into AI prompts. Animation is an industry that’s become increasingly under threat in previous years - after being one of the few entertainment mediums able to continue production through the pandemic, job opportunities have dried up as streamers and distributors like Netflix continue to cancel well-received animated series and abandon interesting projects left and right. To be honest, positive fan reception usually doesn't result in better funding, but hopefully the children of the world drilling the chorus of ‘Soda Pop’ into their parents' heads will be enough to convince Sony executives to let Maggie Kang run wild for the sequel. 

I’m hoping the immense international success of K-Pop Demon Hunters won’t just lead to renewed interest in animation, but also the return of virtual bands to our charts. Assuming we don’t count the Encanto cast topping the charts in 2021 (another recession indicator in of itself), the last and most successful example of fictional characters dominating popular music was Gorillaz at their commercial peak with ‘Feel Good Inc.’ Admittedly, the success of Gorillaz isn’t really best quantified by their streaming and chart numbers - while Damon Albarn throwing shit at the wall with the artists he’s into usually leads to bangers and mash, Gorillaz’ cult following equally stems from the characters, artwork, and stories created by Jamie Hewlett. The names, 2D, Murdoc, Russel, and Noodle are as ubiquitous for nerds as John, Paul, George, and Ringo are for boomers and annoying twinks like me. Maybe soon, Rumi, Mira, and Zoey will be household names as well. 

Despite the media, music, and political landscape sucking over the last few months, I’m hoping the success of K-Pop Demon Hunters (and a new Gorillaz album on the way) indicates a return to relentless creativity throughout the rest of the decade. While we might need to pretend the US doesn't exist as we shoo the coalition out of our government, I’m hoping that the arts, music, and media industries being squeezed to breaking point will lead to a burst of weird and wonderful art from indie wonders to big-budget projects that use each cent of production money to make something fucking cool. 

K-Pop Demon Hunters has put Korean mythology at the forefront of pop culture in a way previously reserved for Norse gods and Greek twinks. The film is rooted in Korean Shamanism, with the girls being depicted as mudang, mediators between humans and spirits, through their duties and appearances. Peppered throughout are various other pieces of Shaman symbolism, like monsters such as dokkaebi and a multitude of environmental designs drawing from traditional paintings and imagery. 

I love seeing people depict their own culture’s folklore through art and film. I’ve seen multitudes of people fall in love with Greek mythology and classics via Rick Riordan books, and will take any opportunity to recommend the Irish animated film Wolfwalkers and its predecessors created by Cartoon Saloon. Considering the fact that our government is trying to remove Te Reo Māori from children's books and incite division at every turn, I’d love to see pūrākau depicted in a similar way by Māori teams of animators, writers, and musicians in the future. 

The folklore passed down through our respective cultures are the founding narratives that make up the fabric of our societies. These tales have been changed throughout the years as history has gone by, shaping up through centuries of storytelling embedding themselves in the collective canon of humanity. Erosion of these tales, via the eradication of social sciences in schools and diminishment of indigenous cultures around the colonised world, has only ever led to the world falling into further disarray and confusion. The stories we tell ourselves are the collective philosophies of respective cultures - without them, culture and society fall apart. Hopefully K-Pop Demon Hunters has delayed that decline for just a little longer.