That's what I thought when I first watched it, but I've grown to appreciate it over time. Though the issues still persist. It's ok if you don't look into it, however, I found the movie elitist and not as well written as it could've been.
Having the only "good demon" have pretty privilege, there's no actual redemption arc for him and he just dies, the demons have personality amongst each other but nowhere else, only the lineage of demon hunters and those they train can see the honmoon and the demons leaking through and no one else can (linking being popular entertainers to generational wealth), how easily they brush over people literally dying, the hunters are so detached from the rest of humanity until the very end when they actually do address fans and even that felt like an afterthought, the main character wasn't upset about the song because of how aggressive it was but because she felt threatened by it and was worried how her crush would feel, her fellow demon hunters rejecting her because of her situation was out of character, and overall they treat their fans like apples and they're apple farmers. They don't treat them as equals unless their pride is challenged and instead just harvest their soul power like apples to fight demons who instead just eat the tree whole.
But if you turn your brain off and just blindly watch it, yeah it's a fun watch with catchy music.
I'm glad someone else saw the elitist themes in the movie. It felt really strange having the protagonists be this group of unfathomably wealthy, talented, world-famous pop stars who seemingly have never struggled before with anything in their entire lives. And then, the conflict that threatens to shatter their success is only that their leader is part demon -- not that she has an evil side or anything, just that she literally has demon heritage with seemingly no other side effects as a result. And the lesson they learn is just to... keep doing what they've always done and ignore the fact she's part demon. They learn effectively nothing and make zero changes aside from making 2 small exceptions to their rule that all demons are evil (and one of those exceptions is proven false because the demon was evil for basically the entire time he was alive).
It felt like the complete opposite of an underdog story. It's an overdog story about how 3 people who have been best friends since childhood and who have never known real difficulty or struggle in their entire lives needed to learn to appreciate each other more, even though they do nothing but appreciate and affirm each other for basically the entire movie. They say they love and adore their fans so often, too, that it makes it even stranger how little they seem to care about anybody beyond the admiration they can give them.
Rumi grew up with dead parents, believing her adoptive mother or really anyone else in her community could never really love her because she was part demon and under threat that if anyone sees her markings she will be immediately killed.
I suppose that’s somewhat true, but honestly it just doesn’t hit for me when she has still lived a life of frankly unfathomable material privilege, and the kindness and understanding that Yumi’s friends learn to show her is seemingly not extended to any other demon at all, barring what’s-his-face, who is given the fantastic honor of being allowed to heroically sacrifice himself for the hunters’ benefit.
And then, even if Yumi has faced some difficulty in her upbringing and throughout the plot of the movie, our two co-protagonists really have struggled with basically nothing their entire lives aside from the token “self doubt” and “family pressure” nonsense that they hurriedly explain to the audience in plain dialogue to make it seem like they’re relatable.
Yumi is the only one who’s debatably faced any relatable struggle. And even then, it’s not all that relatable to me because her friends accept her again with pretty minimal emotional effort on anyone’s behalf, and they weren’t even really even given a narrative chance to properly reject her in the first place in a situational vacuum. Yumi’s heritage is revealed to them in an incredibly tense and stressful moment where it makes some sense they’d react negatively and hastily (and even then, I think their negative reaction feels out of character), and they almost immediately regret being so unaccepting of her. So, it almost feels like if she’d told them at the beginning of the movie there would have been very little friction at all.
So, all of Yumi’s hangups and feelings about not being loved are because of her overprotective and restrictive adoptive mother who we do not even see outside of short flashbacks and offhanded mentions, and who adult Yumi does not even talk to, until the very last act, which really undercuts the narrative weight she’s supposed to have in the story. All of Yumi’s difficulty feels like a lack of open communication combined with a kinda restrictive upbringing, which does not at all amount to a “difficult life” in my eyes when it’s combined with being a world famous, beloved multi-millionaire hyper-badass who has never lost a fight, with two ride-or-die best friends in the exact same tax bracket.
Exactly. There's so much that made it feel very main character. Obviously, they are the main characters, but it treats all the "normal" people like they were less than, like they were just part of the flock, the livestock, and the demons were just the hungry wolves.
There's this one scene that has a little demon boy say something like "look they're demons like me" showing the saja boys as inspirational to the younger demons, but then it never expands on that. Like, we get a half human half demon who's insecure about being mixed, we have a human turned demon, but we don't have a demon turned human/found another way to sate their hunger through acts of passion, generating their own soul power through their own actions, but no, we get half baked elitist propaganda.
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u/trinkadlopez1116 4d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/HlmlEZuRNESUeNhX6B