By: Katherine Cañeba | @kcserinlee

I freakin’ love KPop Demon Hunters (KDH) (my favorite Saja Boy is Baby Saja, not counting Jinu—whom pretty much everybody loves!) and many of you probably do, too! I watched KDH at least 30 times in as many days, watched something else, then came back to watch it another 10 times or so. The soundtrack was on repeat for weeks after the release as well and I know I’m not the only one who’s still that obsessed.

I was a high school exchange student in South Korea and loved my time there, so I couldn’t be more thrilled to see how many people are discovering the joys of K-pop and K-dramas as well as the beauty of traditional Korean culture for the first time as a result of this movie.

When it first released on Netflix, I was vacationing in Japan and it was only vaguely on my radar under all the exhausting fun I was having. However, when I got back to the US and I had three days until Anime Expo (AX) 2025, I knew I had one thing as homework: watch KPop Demon Hunters. It’s a good thing I did, because, not only do I love it, the KDH craze hit AX so hard that some Artist Alley vendors had somehow managed to crank out last-minute merch in the form of a postcard or sticker. There was also a learn-to-dance workshop held on the AX Crossing stage (in front of everyone lining up at the food trucks or sitting around and eating) featuring original choreography to the song “Free,” which is no small feat for a film that had just been released two weeks before AX!

This, it turned out, was only the beginning. Currently, there is still a ton of official merch on the Netflix Shop—as befitting the new recordholder for the most popular title on Netflix ever. We are also blessed with a cornucopia of fanmade art prints, postcards, K-pop-style photocards, acrylic keychains, stickers, pillows, plushies, T-shirts, and more. I think that any anime convention or comic convention will definitely have some KDH representation for at least the next few years. It is in the international cultural zeitgeist—and it is here to stay.

After AX, I attended Anime Impulse in Anaheim, CA, at the end of August. There, I had the opportunity to continue witnessing the meteoric rise of KDH fandom culture as part of the overall rise of K-pop and K-culture’s international fandom (which has significant overlap with Japanese pop culture-focused otaku fandom). There were cosplayers, fan merch, and soundtrack songs blasting from speakers! 

Regrettably, however, I also saw (and can’t unsee) some cultural missteps made by well-meaning vendors in Artist Alley looking to ride the KDH wave. Beyond the issue of some folks misspelling Jinu’s name in Korean (it should be “Jin-u/진우” not “Ji-nu/지누”), there are some more subtle mistakes I’ve been seeing out there that I feel compelled to address in this soft-rant to the Internet. After all, I am a copyeditor whose job it is, generally, to not only catch small mistakes with punctuation but also double-check things.

Firstly, I saw two examples that I would categorize as accidental misspellings in Korean writing. Several artists I spoke to admitted that they could not actually read or write in Korean themselves and were basing their art off the Korean writing sample of a friend or from translation apps. Personally, I don’t always like it when artists embrace foreign writing systems as an aesthetic element of an illustration. It shows that they lack the knowledge of the language to convey it legibly and they just stylize it. In itself, this is not unforgivable but it does seem to happen a lot in international fan spaces and it can be frustrating sometimes.

I feel that, if there is a language barrier issue—like not being able to read or write the words you want to include in your art—you should double-check your final product with at least one person who does know that language (ideally someone detail-oriented) before printing a sizable number of copies and hitting the market. If you don’t have any such resource person in your life, the Internet has many language exchange communities (or even Reddit, if all else fails) that can help. Don’t let your otherwise-amazing artwork stumble over a language faux pas that would have been much easier (and less costly) to fix beforehand. (While we’re on the topic of language faux pas, I wish everyone contemplating getting a tattoo in a language they’re not fluent in would conduct some research, too!)

Secondly, the final push for me to write this blog post is how many artists I saw mixing up East Asian cultures. For example, there was a T-shirt design I saw with several of KDH’s main characters in front of a Japanese pagoda silhouette. For clarity, yes: Korea has pagodas, too. However, Korean pagodas tend to look different from Japanese ones as each country’s building traditions diverged from their original Chinese influences. A couple of tangential notes about pagodas: Japanese pagodas have largely been made with wood to better withstand earthquakes. However, Korea does not have an earthquake problem, so they moved away from wooden pagodas towards stone ones to withstand fires. (Sadly, Japan has historically had problems with earthquakes and fires, so there really was no ideal material that could withstand natural disasters as well as the test of time.)

The pagoda on the T-shirt also had four storeys, which is a culturally unacceptable number of storeys for a pagoda. The number four in several East Asian languages sounds the same as a word for “death”, so East Asian countries avoid constructing buildings with four storeys (and the 4th Floor on a taller building might have an “F” on an elevator button instead of the actual number 4). Additionally, pagodas are supposed to have an odd number of storeys according to Buddhist philosophy regarding odd numbers of things. (For the same reason, a Buddhist altar will have an odd number of an offering: three Asian pears or five apples, for example.) Therefore, a three- or five-storey pagoda would have been okay for the T-shirt design, but it should never have been four!

The cultural specificity of the imagery is important to get right because East Asian cultures have historically been lumped together as a monolith by foreigners, and continuing to do so today is harmful to the peoples from these cultures who want and deserve to have their individual cultural identities respected. It is, quite literally this, which gave me the final push to write this post. 

Yasaka Pagoda, Kyoto, Japan (a similar-looking pagoda to the one on the T-shirt I mentioned)

Seokgatap Pagoda, Gyeongju, South Korea (one of the most famous pagodas in South Korea)

Something died inside me, just a little, when I realized the mistakes made here by some of these artists (and especially the pagoda one!). As someone who genuinely is really appreciative of these cultures, seeing them mixed because of lacking forethought for quick money rather than an intentional design with meaningful purpose feels really inappropriate. I’m not saying this to try to police how artists work or what they include in their art, but it was really clear to me that they were riding a financial wave and not appreciating the work they’re benefiting off of nor the culture they’re trying to reflect. Namsan Tower (an iconic part of the Seoul skyline) in the background would have been far better given how important a landmark the tower ends up being in the climax of the film. Or really anything from a South Korean location, instead of an incoherent mishmash of “cool East Asian things” that ultimately made me walk away from this convention a little disappointed.

While I was otherwise very inclined to buy KDH merch, because I didn’t want misspellings or cultural mixups added to my collections, I ended up passing on these vendors. It honestly hit me a little worse since Anime Impulse so frequently overlaps with K-Play! Fest. It is a regrettable situation that I am sure cost some vendors more than just my business as I’m fairly positive there were more potential customers here than on average for KDH. Perhaps in some cases it could cause damage to their reputation as sellers among those whose culture is being misrepresented.

Now, as of Anime Expo Chibi (this past weekend in November), the vendor of the T-shirt has updated the design to feature the silhouette of a generic high-rise building in place of the pagoda, which is a relief. Personally, I think it was a missed opportunity to have included the silhouette of the Namsan Tower or Huntr/x Tower as a specific nod to the film’s location in Seoul, but at least it’s not a culturally inappropriate design anymore.

Still, though this artist has made a change, I think that this is an example of a larger issue. I understand that an artist may end up being their own cultural consultant a lot of the time, but I don’t believe that they have to be for everything. We live in an increasingly global world and I implore any artists out there reading this to take a moment to consider which cultures you are pulling from to create your art, and whether your work may cause potential harm or offense through misrepresentation. Art has power, as does the written and spoken word. Clearly that’s been the case with this movie—so, why not give it the respect it deserves and take a little extra time making sure you have, at the very least, the right spelling? 

More than ever before, there are online language learning resources, language exchange communities, in-person language schools for all ages including adults, and community college/university classes. Plus, there is unprecedented online access to K-pop MVs, lyric videos, and K-dramas/movies with subtitles in multiple languages. Maybe this newfound appreciation for Korean culture through KPop Demon Hunters might even inspire some of you to take the plunge and learn Korean. I certainly hope so!

Just as we otaku celebrate and appreciate Japanese culture (and maybe even study the Japanese language, too), we can also broaden our horizons to make space for Korean culture and language. There is a lot to East Asia beyond Japan and there is much to appreciate about Korea in its own right!

If you’d like to take up learning Korean, here are some resource links to help you get started online and/or in-person:

YouTube – Talk To Me In Korean (TTMIK) channel page

Teuida – Korean (and Japanese) language learning app

Korean American Center (KAC) – first accredited Korean language center in the US: in-person (Southern California) & online group, semi-private, and private lessons

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Developmental edits by: Peggy Sue Wood | @pswediting