Shame in K-Pop Demon Hunters

In K-Pop Demon Hunters (KPDH), patterns are a mark of demons, but what they mark is the shame that the demon feels. Rumi, as the child of a demon, also has marks. Throughout her life, these marks keep growing. When she was a small child, these marks were tiny:

As she grew older, the marks kept growing:

As she got closer and closer to the moment she was going to seal the Golden Honmun and supposedly get rid of her demon marks, the marks kept spreading, until they reached her throat, and she lost her voice:

It was only when she was with Jinu, when she started to feel more at ease about having demon patterns, that her voice returned.

But why were the marks growing in the first place? Rumi had nothing to be ashamed of. She never did anything wrong. She dedicated her life to protecting the world from the demons.

It was Celine. Celine believed that having a demon for a father, that having demon patterns, was something to be ashamed of. Rumi originally didn't feel this way and wanted to share the truth with her friends, but Celine kept drilling into her that she had to hide her patterns and get rid of them. Celine made her feel that she should be ashamed. In effect, Celine felt that Rumi bore the guilt for the sins of her father.

Celine created the problem, then offered a solution: you should feel shame because of what your father was, and the only way to be rid of it is to do a magical ritual to purify yourself. The more Rumi focused on the need to get rid of the patterns, the more she felt ashamed of having them, the more they grew.

This reminds me of what the Bible says: Fathers shall not be put to death for the sins of their sons, nor sons for the sins of their fathers. Rather, every man shall be put to death for his own sin.

Like Christianity, Celine convinced Rumi that she inherited guilt and offered a solution that doesn't work. Only by rejecting this misplaced guilt and choosing the path of repentance rather than supernatural salvation was Rumi able to save herself and her friends and ultimately the world. The same was also true for Jinu. His guilt was earned, but he repented, though because he was late in doing so it ended up costing his life.

When a person repents, he rises to a level that those who've never sins can't reach. Rumi and her friends are in a much healthier place now, and her patterns are no longer marks of shame, but of beauty.

Comments

Learning Japanese, Part 1

Since I started playing those Japanese language learning games I posted about before, I gradually got sucked into going all-in on trying to learn Japanese. To that end I started playing language-learning games, reading books about Japanese, and immersing with podcasts and anime. I've tried learning Japanese in the past, and at one time I even had a streak of over 50 days on DuoLingo, but I never got the results I wanted, and it never lasted. I always felt like I hardly made any progress and lost interest after a short amount of time. The many years that I spent watching anime didn't help much. I developed a bit of an ear for Japanese and picked up a few words and phrases, but that's it. This time I'm determined that it should be different, using an "all of the above" approach to how I'm going to acquire this language. Apps Here's a rundown of apps I've tried and abandoned: Bunpo, LingoDeer, Mondly These apps are similar to DuoLingo, but only a few ...

Game Review: Learn Japanese To Survive! Hiragana Battle

Following the previous game review, I bought several Japanese language-learning games on Steam and tried out a few of them. The one I ended up sticking with the most is Learn Japanese To Survive! Hiragana Battle. It's a cute game with mechanics that remind me of Chrono Trigger. When navigating the world map or inside a specific region, the player has a top-down view of the world and his character. Battles are turn-based with a side view. The story of the game is that an evil Japanese wizard has come to conquer your country by using Japanese-based magic, and the only way to counter this magic is by using Japanese yourself. A Japanese emissary teaches you the language, guides you on your journey, and fights as part of your team of four. The main challenge comes from fighting the Hiragana warriors, enemies that are characters in the Japanese. They are everywhere and you keep bumping into them, and the only way to damage them is by saying which character they are. That is the main dif...

Game Review: So to Speak

Many years ago I was accidentally exposed to Japanese media, and fell in love. It felt new and fresh, with a variety of themes and topics that I didn't encounter much in stories I was used watching or reading, and spoke to me on an emotional level with stories and characters that resonated with how I felt, my life, my situation, and aspirations. In the beginning the Japanese language was completely incomprehensible to me. I couldn't even distinguish which sounds I heard first and which I heard after. It was only after dozens if not hundreds of hours of listening to Japanese being spoken in those shows that I started to develop an ear for it, and ever since then I've wanted to study the language so that I could understand without subtitles, or read ahead in the manga, especially for series where the English translation had been discontinued, a desire that is in no way unique to me. Over the decades I've started studying Japanese many times from books, apps, or other res...

Yman

Search This Blog