Collective Grief, Adaptive Shame & Maladaptive Shamelessness
Reflections on KPDH & Sinners: Two Unlikely Musicals That Struck a Chord in 2025
K-Pop Demon Hunters and Sinners. Great art resonates in two directions—outward into the collective, and inward into each of us. It hits that deep chord we might not even know we were waiting for, and suddenly we’re alive with recognition. It’s no coincidence, then, that the two films that impacted me most this year were both musicals. Music works vibrationally; it touches the heart and soul in a way that bypasses the rational mind.
K-Pop Demon Hunters has generated a flood of healthy projection in how audiences interpret it. I’ve heard people say the half-demon aspect mirrors their neurodiversity, their Asian American identity, their queerness. For me, it called up the complicated experience of passing—as cis, as racially ambiguous, as a so-called normie. Secret identity, secret shame—who doesn’t resonate with that? I was struck by how the movie named it outright. Shame, as a concept, is so rarely treated with nuance in Western media. As a therapist, I’m often talking with clients about maladaptive shame, but what’s increasingly missing from our culture is the distinction between adaptive shame and maladaptive shamelessness. The film captured that inner battle—the push and pull between positive and negative forces that shapes so many of our personal journeys.
And then there’s Sinners. The blues numbers thrummed in my chest like an ancestral echo. And the acting of Michael B. Jordan as twins was so seamlessly authentic and energetically distinctive, it almost seemed a direct challenge to the prejudiced white view that Black folks look all the same. Watching Sinners was akin to grieving the end of the progressive era, one that spanned my own life—from waiting eight hours to see the Clintons and Gores on their bus tour during my adolescence, to now. That era at least paid lip service to the uplift of Black communities, recognizing their special role as holders of both collective wisdom and sorrow.
The timing of this film coming out this year carried extra impact. There was a sense of Sinners honoring that history even as it elegized its retreat. I saw the film three times in theaters—a first for me. In my last viewing during the peak musical number, I even had a mystical experience. With some yogic breathing, I slipped into an out-of-body state so powerful I had to call myself back. It was transcendent, alive, nourishing.
It’s interesting that both these films far surpassed industry expectations, not being associated with existing IP giants like the superhero movies as well as focused on so-called minorities and therefore considered too “niche” to have done as well as they did. So their success, yet again, proves that filmgoers can feel a deep connection to characters beyond the identities we have been conditioned to relate to. In over fifty years of witnessing film culture, I’ve seen this cycle repeat: the “new” realization that a minority/women-centered film can do well… and each time, it seems the lesson has been forgotten—perhaps not this time, though? 🤞
Both Sinners and KPDH transported me into a world that registered as hyper-real, magical, exhilarating. A poignant escape from a contemporary reality that too often feels tense, surreal-in-a-bad-way and incredibly uncertain. As solace, these films took my breath away, brought me to tears, touched vulnerable parts within me that seemed both ancient and childlike.
I believe that these works tapped into a yearning I sense everywhere right now: the desire for true equality, communality and transcendence of polarization. Across gender, race and more. We are living in a time when those ideals feel increasingly denied and subverted in the U.S. As a woman, even small touches in KPDH moved me—like showing the girls burping. Not just portrayed as pretty and perfect K-pop stars, but as goofy and highly expressive in a way that didn’t feel overly gender-specific. Yes, they were also glamorous and badass. But not unquestioningly and flawlessly so (I liked how it showed them quickly applying make-up before meeting with their manager). Yes, it’s a cartoon. But multidimensionality has historically been a privilege reserved for male characters, and to see it given freely to female leads felt radical in its own way.
There is so much more that I can say about these two films: how so many of the creators involved embodied triumphant underdog journeys; how music can act as a connective tissue within humanity—conveying hope, resiliency and love like nothing else; how cinema can act as communal catharsis, a balm to our collective wounds and a reminder of the universality of the human experience of joy, pain and redemption. But countless others have already had their say on these matters, so I’ll leave with this.
Together, Sinners and K-Pop Demon Hunters have helped remind me that art can hold our grief and our celebration, our shame and our shamelessness, our nostalgia and our cries for something better. They meet us where we are and pull us toward that which is larger than ourselves, larger than this particular time and place. Something that hums beneath the surface, occasionally breaking into song. Even—or maybe, especially—in this current era of regression, dismissal and outright fracture of the sociopolitical contract, we are drawn to these sung stories of the previously unsung. Perhaps we sense the future, when we will have more than fictional stories to hold onto again. In the meantime, we sing the blues, we sing along—and in doing so, we touch something beyond words, beyond identity, beyond this singular moment.