Taylor Swiftian feminism, anime stylization, and cutesy animal sidekicks. The surprise global dominance of “KPop Demon Hunters.” Plus:

Kyle Chayka 
A staff writer who covers technology and Internet culture.

The two K-Pop bands HUNTR/X (“Huntrix”) and Saja Boys currently occupy six of the top fifty spots of the Billboard Hot 100. Each has a song in the top ten, HUNTR/X’s “Golden,” a triumphant ballad about being yourself, at No. 2, and Saja Boys’s “Your Idol,” a vengeful rap chant, at No. 9. These aren’t the work of real Korean bands, however, but fictional headliners from Netflix’s “KPop Demon Hunters,” which débuted in June, and has become, according to the company, the streamer’s most-watched animated English-language film of all time. The narrative might be summarized like this: supernatural Taylor Swift-type kills evil spirits while struggling with her own inner demons. And, early spoiler alert, the film’s pop-star protagonist, Rumi, is part demon herself.

Rumi, along with her pals Mira and Zoey, make up the arena-filling girl-band trio HUNTR/X. Each character is played in song performances by real-life K-Pop veterans, which lends a frisson to the soundtrack, although it won’t convince any haters of saccharine, multi-genre confections. The characters slaughter demons using their voices, along with various glowing blades, weaponry modelled on Korean history: swords, polearms, and throwing knives. There’s a thin mythology to the backstory, which has to do with maintaining the fictional honmoon—“soul gate” in Korean, though it’s not an authentic term—that protects humans from demons intent on sucking out their souls. In every era, the story goes, there’s a girl-band trio that needs to save the world. Gwi-Ma, the demon king, another faux-historical Korean invention, approves a plan to fight HUNTR/X with a demonic supergroup—the boy band Saja Boys, run by a musically talented but psychologically entrapped demon named Jinu. (I’m a Saja Boys stan, and prefer their filmic hit single “Soda Pop.”) You may not be surprised to hear that Jinu and Rumi fall in love over their mutual demon problems.

“Kpop Demon Hunters” lightly satirizes TikTok-era fandom, with ever-present phones and scrolling videos. The band’s manager obsesses over social-media impressions. But the corporate nature of real-life K-Pop musician training and band assembly means that even such iconic groups as BTS and Blackpink are fictions of a sort, designed by labels to appeal to fans. What’s most appealing about the film is the internationalized argot that it employs. The ascendant Swiftian feminism is mixed with a couple of cutesy animal sidekicks, binges of instant ramyeon, anime stylization, and ass-kicking action sequences. Its vocabulary comes from Korean culture; its tunes, with Korean and English lyrics, are globalized earworms; and its distribution is through the relentlessly expanding behemoth of Netflix. The fact that the film feels instantly familiar is a kind of testament to the eclecticism of the post-digital mainstream, a slew of niche ingredients turned into a compelling, albeit homogenized, stew.

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P.S. Choose your fighter: Chat GPT-5 has arrived, along with four options for pre-set “personalities”—cynic, robot, listener, and nerd. “What’s happening is data exchange between user and bot,” Anna Wiener writes, about conversing with this kind of A.I. “But it is also a mutual manipulation, a flywheel, an ouroboros.” 🤖

Hannah Jocelyn contributed to today’s edition.