Oops, my bad. I read “dont do X” as a call to action for me to stop doing X, as if you believed I was mistakenly reading Western notions such as spirituality running on sin ledgers into the film and wanted me to stop. I didn't realize that was intended as just a general statement for the folks at home, sorry about that.
The first season of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” introduced the core tenets of Eastern philosophy in a way that resonated with millions of grade schoolers, and “Percy Jackson and The Lightning Thief” taught so many kids about ancient Greek concepts of inescapable prophecy, polytheism, and paying tribute to the gods.
I think the implication that a more philosophically accurate treatment of mudang shamanism would have fallen flat with children is a painfully simplistic and reductive view of what 7-year-olds can handle.
Giving Jinu a redemption arc while allowing all other demons to be unambiguously evil is philosophically inconsistent and makes Rumi searching for the good in the demons she kills a waste of narrative time that muddies her condemnation of Celine's blind prejudice later in the story.
If Jinu were not redeemed, if Rumi tempted him toward the light only for Gwi-ma to firmly pull him back into the darkness, the morals of the movie would be much more consistent, both toward its internal values and to Korean mysticism.
That would be a very different story however. Would it be a better story? I don't know, that's beyond the scope of my thesis and it's not my job to make K-Pop Demon Hunters a good story.
My point is simply that the haphazard treatment of Korean mysticism blended with either the writers' Western philosophical values of redemption or just sheer lack of creative focus make the moral message of K-Pop Demon Hunters kind of fucking awful.
