Two Braids, Two Mothers, Two Traumas - Tangled vs. KPDH
There’s something quietly powerful about scenes where a mother figure braids a girl's hair. It’s intimate. Symbolic. And sometimes deeply unsettling.
Both Tangled and K-Pop Demon Hunter have versions of this moment, but what they reveal about care, control, and trauma couldn’t be more different.
In Tangled, the hair-braiding scene is part of a power move. Mother Gothel showers Rapunzel with “affection,” only to undercut her at every turn. She’s the textbook narcissistic parent: she isolates Rapunzel, feeds her fear of the outside world, makes herself the only safe haven. And she does it all under the illusion of love. But it’s not love. It’s control. It’s ego. Gothel isn’t raising Rapunzel for Rapunzel’s sake—she’s hoarding her like a resource. Her youth. Her power. Her usefulness.
The hair isn’t just a symbol of femininity or connection here. It’s also Gothel’s main tool of exploitation. The braid becomes a twisted tether. Something that looks tender but is rooted in manipulation.
Now look at K-Pop Demon Hunter. Celine braiding Rumi’s hair hits a lot of the same visual notes but the emotional context is very different.
Celine isn’t Rumi’s birth mother. She raised Rumi after the death of her best friend. And while she clearly loves Rumi, it’s not a simple love. It’s tangled up (no pun intended) with grief, loyalty, fear, and internalized beliefs she never fully unpacked. She was raised to believe demons are evil—full stop. But her best friend loved one. And that daughter, Rumi, carries a demon inside her.
Celine didn’t cut ties with Rumi. She stayed. She tried. But her way of surviving the dissonance was to dissociate. To emotionally separate the part of Rumi she couldn’t understand or accept. That’s not healthy, but it’s not malicious either. It’s trauma. It’s fear masked as protection.
Where Gothel manipulates Rapunzel to feed her ego, Celine ends up passing down her own pain to Rumi—not out of cruelty, but because she never learned how not to. It's intergenerational trauma, not narcissism. And that makes the hair-braiding scene so charged.
It’s also striking where the two confrontations take place. Rapunzel faces Gothel in the tower : a space literally built to preserve Gothel’s ego, a prison crafted for control. Rumi, on the other hand, confronts Celine under a tree—which often stand for family, lineage, and memory. If towers isolate, trees connect. It feels fitting. Their pain was passed down, but so was the chance to stop it.
In both stories, the braid symbolizes a maternal bond. A transmission of femininity. But in Tangled, that bond is laced with lies and exploitation—you have to break it to heal. In KPDH, it’s more complicated. The trauma is real, but so is the love. The bond hurts, but it’s also a site of care. Something inherited, tangled, and tender. Something you don’t escape but slowly unravel. You learn to name it, break the pattern, and heal.
You escape from Gothel. You break the cycle with Celine.
