“Every cruel or fatuous thing I’d ever said came back to me with an amplified clarity, no matter how I talked to myself or jerked my head to shake the thoughts away: old insults and guilts and embarrassments stretching clear back to childhood - the crippled boy I’d made fun of, the Easter chick I’d squeezed to death - paraded before me one by one, in vivid and mordant splendor.” — Donna Tartt, The Secret History, p. 356.
In K-Pop Demon Hunters, a wrathful demon called Gwi-Ma sends a demon boyband to Earth to out-sing demon-hunting K-Pop trio Huntr/x, whose job it is to sing so K-Pop-ly that they seal the Golden Honmoon—a mythic barrier which will keep demons out of the human world forever, thereby stopping them from stealing souls to feed to Gwi-Ma.
The way Gwi-Ma keeps his demons in line and feeding him souls is by excessively guilt-tripping them, needling the demons with shame every time they try to act autonomously.
I find it plausible that evil demon Gwi-Ma is acting wrongly here. Just because handsome K-Pop demon Jinu abandoned his family once and turned into a demon who steals souls with his beautiful singing voice, that doesn’t make it okay for Gwi-Ma to guilt-trip him about it forever.
Guilt-tripping in general is controversial, at least among moral philosophers. To guilt-trip is, roughly, to cause someone to feel guilty on purpose. Suppose you are not yet a paid subscriber to this blog; I meet you for coffee, screw up my face, and sigh: “Yeah… I guess living in a smelly tent stitched from mouldy banana skins with no socks or food isn’t so bad.” I then gruffly insist on paying the bill, tapping a depleted card over and over again on the card machine, wincing with every decline.
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