Honolulu-based Christine Kim was early on the “KPop Demon Hunters” travel trend. In fairness, her trip to Seoul with her husband and kids was already on the books before the Netflix film came out in June 2025. The plan, initially at least, was to visit grandparents. But then Rumi, Zoey and Mira, the movie’s protagonists, became her 5-year-old daughter’s idols, and the itinerary got rewritten in real time. When they visited a jimjilbang, or Korean spa, and the Namsan Tower, the setting for the rival Saja Boys’s final show in the movie, the Kims’ family trip turned into the ultimate bragging rights.
“My daughter seemed to be totally shocked that the places from the movie were real,” Kim says via text. “She was so excited, she was speechless.”
It wasn’t just her daughter who bought into the cultural moment. “I bought my son a black hanbok and gat (traditional clothing and hat) so he could be a Saja Boy for Halloween,” Kim recalls. “And when we went to the Nike Store at Myeongdong, my daughter made a T-shirt with a magpie bird on it because of the ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ character.”
AloJapan.com