KPop Demon Hunters (KDH, 2025) is Netflix's most watched original film with over 300,000,000 views. It's got great animation, colorful visuals, music, singing, dancing, and sword fights with demons. Despite the violence, it generally tries to be family-friendly, wholesome and suitable for children. It's rated PG, which approximately means suitable for most 10 year olds to watch alone or for many 6 year olds to watch with their parents.
This post is about the some of DKH's themes and how they relate to real life. What values does it promote? People, especially children, are influenced by films. KDH includes moralizing, as films meant to appeal to children often do. I also connect the issues to rationality.
This post contains only mild spoilers. If you haven't watched the movie yet, I actually think it'd be a good idea to read my post before instead of after watching. That way, you can keep in mind my comments while watching. (This post should also make sense if you never watch the movie.)
KDH says to be nice to people who are different, to misfits, and to people with flaws. Basically, be tolerant. This is a common, popular theme in other media, and KDH got extremely popular using it as a main theme. KDH is fairly light on dialog, and certainly doesn't lecture the audience, so it doesn't have a lot of space to share ideas. This theme is one of the few things they included in a film that was very well optimized to be very popular. I think it must have outcompeted many other potential themes the writers could have used, and it contributed to KDH's popularity. I think people like this theme a lot.
Why do people like it? Because it seems nice, moral, good. Note that although KDH doesn't talk about it, the theme applies to racism, sexism, ageism, anti-queer prejudice and anti-fat prejudice. Those are areas where people differ which our culture says not to be mean about. More broadly, being nice to people who are different is part of how our society is peaceful instead of violent. In a more intolerant, mean society, hate crimes would be more common, whereas tolerance of differences can help people get along better and reduce crime.
The tolerance theme suggests everyone can and should get along. A lot of people (especially young people) have (non-medical) anxiety about fitting in, getting along with others, being accepted. Many people struggle with this in the workplace and even more struggle with it in school.
I find it interesting that people love this theme while not doing it very well. Being mean and dismissive of people for being different remains widespread despite all the messaging saying not to. Somehow, many people don't listen to the message while also liking the message. Maybe they like to pretend to listen to it – to pretend to be nicer than they are. Or maybe they're trying to listen but they're bad at it. Or a mix.
People being different is pretty much the only thing people are dismissed for. What else would you reject someone for? People are intolerant of disagreement, not agreement. People are intolerant of differences, not sameness (with some special exceptions like copying someone's outfit or cultural appropriation).
If people simply lacked skill at tolerance, you might expect some experts to be great at it. People who study rationality or psychology might excel at it. But I don't think they do. In my experience with intellectuals who've studied something relevant, they're not really better or worse than the average KDH viewer at tolerance of different ideas. I haven't found intellectuals particularly more or less open to intellectual discussion and different ideas than non-intellectuals. Maybe intellectuals are better than average at not being racist, but I'm not sure about that either. Some clever people end up kind of racist because they're impressed by clever, logical arguments for racism-adjacent ideas, and they arrogantly think they're just being scientific or something, but actually they're pretty racist in a way that a less intellectual person might avoid. And intellectuals may be more likely than average to be misogynists, since I think men are overrepresented as both intellectuals and misogynists.
KDH's tolerance theme can be viewed as saying to be nice to everyone, be accepting of everyone, stop being dismissive of anyone. But that's unrealistic. People have limited time and attention. They can't spend time being nice to everyone. They'd be too busy. They have to select some friends over others. They are fans of some people but not others. They don't have to be mean to anyone, but not everyone can be super popular like the pop star heroes of KDH. This difficulty may explain some of the shortcomings in people's tolerance. I think it's even connected with violence because being dismissive of people leads to unfamiliarity not respect, which I think does serve to help enable violence.
Popularity is, to some extent, a zero sum game. There is a limited amount of attention that people can pay to others. Some people getting a lot of attention doesn't increase the total amount of attention available. Attention is a scarce resource. When some people get a lot of attention, there can't be an equitable distribution of attention. The world doesn't have to be equitable, but there's a clash of themes here. On the one hand, fandom of pop stars is presented positively, and on the other hand it says to be nice to everyone, and forgive flaws, not be dismissive. But fandom is a system where some people are liked more than others. Some people are liked less, dismissed more, viewed as less impressive, less good, less worthy compared to the stars. Being less receptive to what John has to say than to what a pop star says is a form of dismissiveness, of judging, of being less accepting of some people than others. For many people, many celebrities feel "familiar" and like part of their "in group" or "tribe", which means there's less attention left over for neighbors, classmates and coworkers who therefore feel more unfamiliar and distant and aren't treated as nicely.
So of course people aren't great at actually being nice and accepting in the way KDH says to. Even in KDH itself, there are conflicting themes. KDH normalizes a small number of people being ultra-popular while ignoring that some people in the huge audience can also sing well but will never get similar recognition for their talent. And either that's unfair or else the less popular people have less merit in which case being dismissive of them in some ways is valid.
KDH normalizes being accepting of flaws from ultra-popular people. It illustrates that. It doesn't illustrate any regular fans in the crowd having flaws and being accepted anyway. It doesn't even illustrate people in the crowd with no notable flaws being important, interesting or talented, or getting much attention.
KDH shows a main character, who is extremely talented and popular, having anxiety. I think it's partly meant to normalize such struggles for everyone. Even those people you look up to struggle. But then it turns out she is good enough, is enough, didn't need to have so much anxiety. OK but does that apply to a high school student with no fans, no talents, no skills, no direction in life, no special merit at anything? Does it apply to a young adult with a mundane job? Is everyone already good enough, or just impressive people? The movie only illustrates the theme with impressive people being good enough despite some flaws. It doesn't really show anything about regular people being important, or how to like them at all, let alone like them despite flaws.
The issue of limited attention and dismissiveness has broad importance beyond issues of fitting in to social groups and having friends or a spouse. It also comes up with intellectuals who dismiss a lot of critics instead of debating them. Most of those intellectuals aren't popular and aren't overwhelmed with too many critics who want to debate them. A few very popular intellectuals can't engage with all (or even 1% of) their fans, but most intellectuals aren't popular.
The issue of being nice to people who don't fit in should apply to intellectual misfits. But I don't think most viewers see it that way. They aren't like "Oh, KDH is saying I should be less dismissive of astrology." And the actual right answer here is nuanced. You can't spend time researching every bad idea; there are far too many.
A important consideration is that if everyone dismisses the same stuff, instead of using independent judgment, then some ideas get a lot of attention while others get none. A million intellectuals have time to investigate over a million ideas. My view is that people should pay more attention to which ideas are have already received engagement. In other words, if someone wrote down a refutation of an idea (and is handling followup questions and criticisms about their refutation), then I don't need to investigate it myself since it's already being handled. But if no one is looking at an idea, I should be more open to it. If lots of people had this attitude, then the coverage of ideas that get attention could be better instead of being overly focused on a small number of popular ideas (paralleling how a small number of pop stars get a ton of attention while a lot of other music gets ignored, some of which is actually good).
I think there's something interesting about people who live in a society with tons of meanness and dismissiveness watching yet another movie saying not to do that, and liking it, while knowing that people are going to keep doing it anyway. A lot of the people who like the movie will do the thing the movie says not to do, but instead of being offended they just nod along and agree then don't act accordingly.
If you're interested in intellectual tolerance, see my Debate Policies Introduction.
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