K-pop Demon Hunters was a ride. I’ve been following the K-pop industry on and off for about ten years now, and naturally—like anybody—I was excited, and maybe a bit anxious.
Thinking about this industry for a while, and seeing how real Korean-Americans reflected a cultural zeitgeist like K-pop has become since the mid-2000s is genuinely enlightening. The movie crammed references left and right, and it has been analyzed on YouTube to death for its details.
But in this post, we’re going big picture.
Here, I want to compare an older existential theory, Disney’s failed-but-misunderstood 100th anniversary output, Pantone’s Color of the Year, and Rumi’s confidence—not as isolated artifacts, but as a cultural mishmash that reveals where we are turning as a society.
Before that gets confusing, here’s the central claim of this piece:
Our world is becoming more creative—but only if individuals are willing to seize their individuality and turn it into something productive, rather than ornamental or resigned.
The Existential Elk and the Logic of Refusal
The “Existential Elk” theory—alongside Schopenhauer’s antinatalist views—starts from a bleak but internally consistent premise: existence is suffering, the universe offers no inherent purpose, and meaning is something we project to cope. From this position, refusal becomes ethical. Why create more life, more struggle, more pain in a system that seems rigged against fulfillment?
This logic doesn’t come from weakness. It comes from clarity pushed to its extreme. If the universe doesn’t care, and institutions fail us, then disengagement starts to look like wisdom. Endurance replaces hope. Survival replaces becoming.
This framework has quietly seeped into culture—not always as philosophy, but as mood.
Aestheticizing the Demonic
K-pop Demon Hunters treats the “demonic” aspects of the K-pop industry as trite and earned rather than as a reality-check or something spiritually important. Exploitation, control, and dehumanization are acknowledged, but only as part of the spectacle—stylized, survivable, and ultimately inevitable.
When demons are framed this way, suffering begins to feel like a cost that must be paid rather than a warning that demands response. Harm becomes set dressing. Systems feel natural. No transformation is required.
This is where the logic of the Existential Elk quietly asserts itself. If damage is baked into existence and meaning is nowhere to be found, then resignation looks mature. Detachment looks discerning. Refusal feels honest.
The film doesn’t cause this mindset—it reflects it. Culture sensing the abyss, aestheticizing it, and moving on.
Cloud Dancer and the Exhaustion After Clarity
Pantone’s Color of the Year, Cloud Dancer, confused a lot of people when it was announced. Reactions ranged from disappointment to indifference. It felt bland. Passive. Almost evasive in a moment that supposedly calls for boldness.
But that reaction misunderstands what the color is responding to.
Cloud Dancer doesn’t arrive as inspiration or instruction—it arrives as relief. In a cultural moment defined by atheism, institutional distrust, and fatigue with grand narratives, it offers a kind of secular heaven: soft, understated, and deliberately unambitious. It doesn’t demand growth. It doesn’t demand belief. It doesn’t demand becoming.
In that way, it resembles the Tao—but with a modern twist. This is transcendence without theology. Calm without command.
And yet, a pause is not a solution. Rest is not resolution.
This posture doesn’t stay confined to media; it shows up in how we live. Irony becomes a default tone, not because we don’t care, but because caring feels unsafe. Detachment gets mistaken for intelligence. Commitment is treated as naïveté, and creativity is allowed only when it can be branded, monetized, or insulated from failure.
We learn to keep moral distance from everything—systems, people, even our own desires—because everything feels compromised. This is Existential Elk logic translated into daily behavior: if meaning is suspect and power is corrupt, then refusal looks like integrity. But what it actually produces is paralysis—awareness without movement, critique without consequence.
Cloud Dancer marks the space between resignation and response: an acknowledgment of meaninglessness without surrendering to it. A cultural inhale before something harder.
From Resignation to Becoming
Across these examples, a pattern emerges. We no longer believe in innocence, but we aren’t sure how to move forward without it. We know systems are flawed. We know suffering is real. We know meaning is not guaranteed.
But knowing isn’t enough.
The Existential Elk tells us meaning is a trap. K-pop Demon Hunters teaches us to survive damage. Cloud Dancer gives us somewhere to lie down afterward. None of them answer the question that follows clarity:
If the universe doesn’t care, what are we supposed to do with ourselves?
Rumi, Wish, and Generativity Without Guarantees
This is where Rumi’s confidence matters—not as mysticism, but as posture. While she shares a name with the 13th-century Sufi poet who found divinity in the dance, the Rumi of K-pop Demon Hunters finds hers in the heat of the Honmoon.
The two are not different, but rather complementing forces.
Rumi does not deny meaninglessness; she simply refuses to let it paralyze creation. Her confidence is not rooted in certainty, but in commitment: to love, to expression, to generativity without guarantees.
This is also why Wish succeeds in a way K-pop Demon Hunters does not.
Wish is not a flawless spectacle, but its narrative actively dismantles toxic systems rather than aestheticizing them. The kingdom of Rosas is imperfect, and it remains so—but it is allowed to grow. The story rejects the idea that suffering must be earned, glorified, or endured in silence.
If Rumi were the princess of Rosas, the kingdom wouldn’t become utopian. It would become alive. Flourishing, not because pain disappeared, but because individuality was no longer treated as dangerous, naïve, or disruptive.
Wish understands something K-pop Demon Hunters avoids: confronting harm is not the same as glorifying it, and choosing to become is not the same as believing the world will reward you.
This Is Our Napalm Era
“Napalm Era” sounds, at first, like bravado. A slogan. Something adjacent to “brat summer,” stripped of context and emptied of consequence. But in K-pop Demon Hunters, the phrase isn’t celebratory—it’s apocalyptic. Napalm does not create. It burns indiscriminately. It exposes everything.
In that sense, the Napalm Era is not about excess. It’s about heat. About the moment when illusions can no longer survive.
Passive hope, then, is not optimism in the absence of despair. It is hope chosen because no other belief could survive honest scrutiny. Not a feeling, but a stance. A refusal to collapse into irony, narcissism, or the comfort of powerlessness.
The Honmoon—the collective unconscious—reflects where we are right now. And it is suffering. Too much self-reference. Too much irony. Too much victimhood filtered through power. Too much awareness without courage.
So what does this era ask of us?
To fight.
To be warriors.
Not in the sense of domination, but discernment. To take consciousness seriously—individually. To stop waiting for systems, aesthetics, or institutions to do the work of meaning on our behalf.
The Napalm Era does not ask us to survive the fire.
It asks us to use it.
Images by Getty Images on Unsplash+ and Jr Korpa.
The Self-Styled Scholar 