K-Pop Dragonslayer?
How I found a new Comp Title
Did you enjoy K-Pop Demon Hunters? I've been enjoying all of the hype like everyone else. Jamming to the songs. Fangirling with my friends and son and students. You get the picture.
I love it even more for a completely different reason.
We all know that the movie has great mental health rep. You've seen the posts. I've been processing through the same facets and the choices the creators made, but I've also been able to compare it to my books, Dragonslayer and Dragonkeeper.
The overarching storyline throughout the movie is to slay your demons, but Rumi herself is half demon and she has to grapple with that fact. Over the course of the story, she learns to own who she is and bring herself out into the light to heal those parts of herself.
In my books, Dri can see dragons nobody else can, and they feed on her people's emotions and pain. She sets out on a quest to slay them, but she learns that these things must be healed, not slain.
K-Pop Demon Hunters doesn't come out and say it, but I feel that Rumi discovers the same thing. At the beginning of the movie, there are countless demons plaguing the city. No matter how many times they're slain, they crop back up because we can't just silence and push down the bad. If we do, it just festers until it pops back up.
When I was working through the metaphor of my dragons while I was planning and writing Dragonslayer, I came up against the same conundrum.
In my first plans and drafts, when Dri set out to slay the dragons, my plan was to have her succeed. But I kept getting stuck on that part. Our struggles cannot be slain. They have to be seen, accepted, and healed. Halfway through writing Dragonslayer, I realized that and changed the rest of the story.
The end of KPDH makes this clear, both with the visuals of the new blue honmoon clearing out the demons rather than the girls slaying them and through the lyrics of What It Sounds Like.
All of this is to say that, if you enjoyed the mental health rep in K-Pop Demon Hunters and want to see it in a different way, check out Dragonslayer by Heather Shahan (me!).
Featuring:
Emotivorous dragons
An epic quest
Found family
Kingdoms at war
Generational secrets
Mental health rep
Diverse cast
Expansive worldbuilding
Folktales, myths, and legends
First 2 Chapters, Extra Content, and Purchase links at EmberWrites.com !