Thinking about KPDH Demons always makes me crazy because like… You’re either born into a hell where your body and soul are owned by a sadistic master who can and will permanently kill you if you don’t please him, or you’re tricked in your most desperate moments into giving up your humanity for a monkey’s paw of a wish that will ultimately make you miserable. And no matter what, you’re trapped. Who’s gonna help you? The god-like being who can yank you around by your patterns and puts voices in your head to make you hate yourself? The Hunters who will slaughter you for existing? The humans who are just as powerless as you? Nobody can. It’s not just the hopelessness talking, nobody can help you. This is your life. Serve your king or perish.
It’s even worse when you used to be human, because then you remember how it used to be. You wish you could go back, because even at your most desperate, you still had autonomy. You once lived your whole life in charge of your own soul and you never knew how good you had it until it stopped being yours. You’re not human anymore and the human realm isn’t your home— the Hunters will kill you, the humans will scream and rat you out to the Hunters, you have no life there anymore. It’s gone. This is all you are now, another soldier for Gwi-Ma’s war.
If you refuse to work for him, what will it do? You’ll die, he’ll get another demon to take your place, and you’ll have died for nothing. Nobody will care. You won’t be a martyr because as far as Hunters are concerned, you should die. You will have deserved to die, as all demons should. They want to cut you off from the world and trap you in literal hell to suffer forever, to be eventually killed and consumed by the king you never wanted, and you’re supposed to what, die quietly? How is that fair?
The answer is that it’s not. It’ll never be fair again. So you can either die in hell, have this be the end of the road and have no idea what happens to your corrupted soul when you’re dead, or you can do whatever it takes to survive, because if nobody is going to help you, you have to help yourself. Damn everyone else, why should you care about them if they don’t care about you? If they don’t see you as a person, just a monster that deserves suffering?
There isn’t a single demon still alive that hasn’t killed before. There are no perfect victims, because the perfect victims are already dead and nobody cared about them. Nobody remembers them when they’re gone.
And I love that. Because so often, when there are victims, people who are suffering, you want to absolve them, say they have never done anything wrong so therefore, their suffering is so tragic and ‘Pure’, but what if it wasn’t? What if it was true that they killed people and caused harm AND they were victims of a horribly inhuman environment? If you put people in a terrible environment where they have to do horrible things to survive, you’re gonna get people who have done horrible things to survive, because no one else survives otherwise. And it makes the morals messier, because things stop being so black and white.
In the movie, you can see the demons be visibly terrified of Gwi-Ma and warily watch as the flight attendant demon shakily walks to her death. Gwi-Ma kills her in front of everyone and they watch her die screaming. They cower (and one of them cries) when he yells at them. They’re desperate to make their king happy— when the first souls come into the demon realm, there’s a demon who sounds excited about it, even though Gwi-Ma seems to take all the souls for himself. They know souls mean Gwi-Ma’s mood will be better, so he’ll be less likely to rage, to kill, to make them all miserable in the process.
Even Jinu, who is able to approach Gwi-Ma with a mocking song in the beginning, still shows a lot of fear and apprehension the second he realizes that Gwi-Ma knows he tried to escape, and immediately gets punished very publicly for it, once again being told this is all he is and he can never escape it.
Which is all a big reason why I love the idea of redemption in KPDH for demons specifically. Because while you have done a lot of wrong in the world, you had little to no autonomy. So what if you did? What choices would you make if you had a choice? If you were given a second chance, if you were suddenly shown kindness and humanity that you had been denied, what would you do then?
Not everyone would make good choices. But some would. Especially for freedom, many would. And maybe your own freedom isn’t the purest of reasons to turn over a new leaf, but the results in this case matter more than the intention. Making allies over enemies, or at least having less enemies than before, is always a net positive.