(Major SPOILERS ahead for the movie KPop Demon Hunters)
It takes a special kind of person to kick demon butt—especially while singing and dancing. But it takes a whole different kind of special to face your own demons.
Along with her two friends and fellow pop stars, Mira and Zoey, Rumi is a demon hunter: one of a trio born every generation to help push back the boundaries of the demon realm with the power of their voices. Together, they sing and dance for the cameras, while off-screen they save their fans from imminent peril.
But Rumi, of course, has a secret. For while she fights to protect her world from demons, she herself bears the markings of a half-demon. And the harder she tries to hide her “patterns,” to deny their existence, the more they start to show. Each new song release, each live concert, each push for her team to work harder and faster, is a desperate step toward finally closing off the demon world for good and ridding herself of the part of her she hates. Everything she has ever been taught tells her to be ashamed of her markings; to hide them. To fight them, just as she fights the demons that manage to break through the barrier. And spending her days listening to Mira and Zoey trash talk demons certainly doesn’t help her grapple with the fact that, to a certain extent, she is one.
The thing about Rumi that makes her a great character worth taking a closer look at is not the fact that she defeats her demons in the end. Rather, it is the fact that she accepts them. And not only that: she does it all on her own.
You would think that, as an audience, we would get that typical pre-climactic moment where the old mentor / best friend / new ally shows her that she is more than her markings and inspires her to return to the fight and defeat the enemy and make herself “whole.” Instead, Rumi’s new ally has betrayed her; her friends no longer trust her; and the old mentor who raised her can barely look her in the eye and tells her, yet again, to hide who she is and try to make it all go away. Rumi literally has no one looking out for her when it matters the most; it truly looks like the battle is lost before the exciting climax can even begin.
But who still shows up in the end to save the day? Rumi, with her patterns glowing for the whole world to see. Rumi, with all her scars, her fears, her shames, out in the open. She doesn’t confront the big baddie Gwi-Ma with some over-dramatic speech about how she is stronger than these things she tried to hide. When Gwi-Ma tells her she can’t even fix herself, let alone the world, she answers simply: “I can’t.” When he tells her everyone sees her for what she is, she says: “They do.” When he tells her the barrier has been broken, she responds: “It is. So we can make a new one.”
There is a reason Rumi’s patterns never disappear, even after the demon realm has been sealed and Gwi-Ma defeated. There is a reason that they instead take on a color of their own, glowing with light and energy vastly different from the patterns that the other demons display. And there is a reason the final song, “What it Sounds Like,” also has strains of their previous song “Golden” running through the bridge: Rumi has stopped fighting who she is, and has found strength and beauty in herself—her whole self—instead. She faced the mirror and decided to love all of herself, a thing which she once wished for others to do and was denied. It is this strength, her strength, that saves the world in the end.
The character of Rumi teaches us that you don’t have to be perfect to be a hero: you just have to be true to who you are. And that, in the end, is what makes her great.
Night Owls, which song or songs from KPop Demon Hunters get stuck in your head the most?
