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When the Hero Needs Their Parent and Not Their Mentor

Been seeing some posts talking about Celine from KPop Demon Hunters and debates on how she should be viewed (villain, bad parent, flawed mentor, understandable, redeemable, etc.), especially regarding that one scene near the end of the movie.

And it got me thinking about the similarities to Jason Todd and Bruce's confrontation at the end of Under the Red Hood (and most of their relationship since).

Both characters are in a dark, vulnerable, and emotional place, but the true hurt comes from the moment when the mentor/parent chooses the mentor role instead, despite the hero crying out for their parent.

Here, Jason is not asking for guidance or for Batman to avenge Robin's death, but for his adoptive father to prove he still loves him. "I'm hurt, I'm scared, and I'm angry. Be here for me." But Bruce turns away and chooses Batman, even though we the readers know what kind of angst Bruce went through after Jason's death. Yet, as Red Hood, there's now a dark side to Jason that Bruce must ignore, cover up, or fight against. And since then, Bruce (and DC) has been trying to convince himself that it was some sort of inevitability. The signs were all there, but not even the World's Greatest Detective could "save" Jason Todd from becoming who he is.

And here we have Rumi at her lowest, but where does she go? She goes home to mom. But all Celine sees is what Rumi has become and the "inevitable" outcome she likely often worried about. She also sees the Honmoon falling apart, and all she can think about is her duty. Which, tbf, is a big deal, but the girl in front of her in this moment is not the lead singer and demon hunter of Huntrix. It's her daughter crying out for help.

In both situations, the mentor/parent is facing their child, who has become the warped version of what they trained them to be. Jason is not afraid to kill, and Rumi is more demon than ever. Jason became a "criminal" from Crime Alley, and Rumi's demon side is beyond covering up. Bruce and Celine's biggest fears have come to be. If not worse, because Jason has Batman's training, and Rumi is undoing the Honmoon.

This is why I think Bruce and Celine look away. Their supposed "failure" is too much for them to bear, but all Jason and Rumi see are their parents rejecting them at their most vulnerable and rawest moment. Though Bruce and Celine could have avoided this moment had they made better decisions in the past. Nonetheless, our heroes are gutted and faced with the harsh truth of... "I'm alone. And no one's coming to help or save me."

Anyway, I think there's a story to be told there for Celine. Not necessarily to redeem her or justify her actions per se, but understand her reasoning and perspective, even if it's flawed.

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The Matriarch Isn’t the Villain. She’s the Mirror

I often hear a discourse where Celine in K-pop Demon Hunters, Alma in Encanto and Ming in Turning Red are seen as vilains. They’re the ones who restricted the younger generation, hurt them, and are ultimately responsible for their pain, trauma and self-doubt. They’re framed as the real villains of the story. But I’d like to differ.

These are stories of intergenerational trauma. They are women who survived, repressed, and tried to protect their families the only way they knew how: through control, perfectionism, and emotional suppression.

And yet, when the next generation begins to reclaim joy, freedom, softness — they become the obstacle. Not because they’re bad people, but because they’re scarred. Their minds cling to survival strategies, unable to recognize that the environment has changed.

Alma is still stuck fleeing the colonizers.

Ming is still afraid of her true self.

Celine believes that fear and mistakes must be hidden.

It’s not about hating these characters. It’s about how unprocessed trauma twists love into control. How survival, unexamined, turns into rigidity. These women were never given space to process their own pain and they project it onto their daughters and granddaughters.

And here’s something we rarely say enough: intergenerational trauma can create toxic patterns but that doesn’t always mean there was abuse or conscious harm. Even when their love becomes suffocating or controlling, these women are not necessarily “abusive parents.” They are daughters of silence, fear, and sacrifice. And they were never taught another way. It’s important to make that distinction, especially in a world that often pushes a binary, punitive reading of family dynamics.

They’re the product of a generation that was told to endure. But endurance without healing becomes its own kind of violence.

What’s powerful in these stories is that they don’t end in vengeance. They end in confrontation and transformation. The confrontation is necessary: the younger generation refuses the silence. Refuses the shame. Refuses to carry a burden that wasn’t theirs to begin with.

The house is destroyed in Encanto.

Mei accepts her full self.

So does Rumi.

And in the best cases, this confrontation allows the elder to soften too. Alma opens up. Ming listens. And I’m hoping in the sequel, Celine will open too.

Maybe that’s also why these stories speak so deeply to POC audiences. These aren’t stories about cutting ties. They’re stories about how hard it is to transform them, to protect ancestral bonds while refusing to perpetuate inherited pain. In many racialized families, collectivity, loyalty, and intergenerational duty are sacred... even when they come at the cost of personal boundaries.

And sometimes, Western individualist frameworks read these tensions as dysfunction or villainy. But for us, they’re just the difficult truth of growing up and trying to do better.

These women aren’t villains. That would be too easy. They embody the fragile, necessary work of bringing change without breaking the thread. These stories are about refusing to inherit their pain without reflection. Because love, without accountability, is not enough.

These stories show us that each generation has something to learn from the next. And the new generation must also break free from the chains they inherited while preserving what is meaningfull.

But it’s not just their story.

One day, we’ll be the older generation.

And we’ll need to be humble enough to learn from the ones after us.

So don’t be a fool.

We may be Mei, Rumi, or Mirabel today.

But tomorrow, we could be Ming, Celine, or Alma.

And when that time comes, we’ll realize how hard it is to unlearn what once kept us safe.

So let’s have compassion for all these characters.

Because these stories show us not just how the cycle of generations works, but how it can make us better, stronger, and more connected... if we’re all willing to go through the change.

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If you’re curious, I’ve written more on K-pop Demon Hunters:

A post on the mental health themes woven through the songs — right here.

A breakdown of Celine-Rumi in comparaison to Gothel–Rapunzel dynamic — here.

An analysis about Rumi, Jinu, and the danger of sinking together — here.

Some book recs for each of the K-pop Demon Hunters characters — here.

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my fragile god

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of course. you are the most precious person in my life.

(ID in alt text)

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I think if rumi ever called celine mom, celine would actually just shut off and dissociate instead of getting angry like I've seen a few other posts suggest

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What about a Celine who isn't trying to make a clone of Miyeong, but a Celine who is desperately trying to do her best by her friend's child but is terribly misguided.

A Celine who never wanted kids, who doesn't feel confident in her ability to take care of kids, but here she is with one thrust in her lap anyway, because her best friend is dead.

A Celine who has lost the two people most important to her, and with them, pretty much her entire support system.

A Celine who grew up watching people—children, even babies, included—killed by demons. A Celine haunted by her mistakes, her inability to save everyone, all the faces she saw disappear as they were eaten.

A Celine trying to bury her own terror that this child might have cannibalistic tendencies, that she might be raising a champion for Gwi-Ma.

A Celine who isn't making a Miyeong clone, but feeling so utterly inadequate, trying to strike the balance between giving Rumi a connection to her mother and not encouraging what she believes will lead Rumi to evil, to self-destruction, to vulnerability from other hunters.

(This is Miyeong' daughter, she tries to show the world, herself, Miyeong if she can at all see—this is Miyeong's daughter. She doesn't want to erase that. She can't bring herself to fully embrace that, but in some ways, small ways, she wants to show it. She wants to share parts of Miyeong with Rumi, but she's scared of not knowing just how many she safely can.)

A Celine who cannot look her daughter—her best friend's daughter—her mistakes—her nightmare—in the face.

A Celine who loves Rumi so, so much, and yet not enough. Not completely. Because she is scared, she is flawed, she is as she has always feared, too bitter, too broken, in too deep over her head with no guide on what path to take.

A traumatized Celine who, despite her best efforts, traumatizes her daughter.

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The execution of Lady Furina de Fontaine

(I got some motivation and made it look more finished <3)

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a glimpse of you

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yuri bioproduct

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coming out to your family and them trying to make things right feels so much like this scene of rumi and celine. even if they swear they love you, you get the feeling— that frustration that they love parts of you, not all of you, and sometimes you don’t know if they ever will… just like how I think rumi must feel after everything.

i love how celine and rumi hiding her scars could represent SO MANY THINGS.

when rumi asked why celine couldn't love all of her, it firstly struck me as being an allegory for coming out. mostly because of the concept of loving someone in their entirety, even if you don't understand some parts.

and celine's dictation that the Hunters need to keep all their problems internalized and how that eventually led to problems was so well-developed in the film. hell, rumi becomes literally suicidal because she is trying to hide parts of herself that she knows her friends and family won't accept, and they literally tackle that concept so well, the gravity is greatly illustrated.

on one hand i dislike that celine tried to mash everything down because she should've had the wisdom to know that she couldn't necessarily control the outcome when everything boiled over. and she in part encouraged the Hunters' turn away from positivity and acceptance to simply hating the other side, which is basically losing the point and doing what they set out to fight. we see mira and zoey say multiple times that demons don't feel anything and i feel like celine planted those ideas in their heads.

but also that's the only thing she's been taught, and she thinks that it's the best and safest way for them to do their job. she loves them, and she did what she thought was right to protect them, but that doesn't erase the fact that what she did didn't help them and in fact made things worse, but just because it didn't help them doesn't mean she's a completely bad person.

"our lives are the sum of our actions." it's important to consider when considering celine

anyway i will die on the hill that this film not only ventures into mature themes, but also explores them in a way that kids can understand which is so hard to do don't even w me. i think this exploration (and also the way it can be an allegory for so many things like sh or being queer or in a marginalized group) is what has drawn many adults towards it.

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my baby

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i desperately need the fact rumi was begging to die by celine's hand to be talked about

especially with Mira and Zoey

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Celine Hot Take

Okay so one thing I'm seeing a lot is the idea/headcanon that Celine hated Rumi because she was half-demon and thus didn't really care for her during her childhood? I can't help but passionately, vehemently disagree. Why?

Because of this.

Celine wasn't raising HUNTR/X and projecting some sort of hatred of Rumi's demonhood onto their training, Celine is consistently in denial and on copium about the idea of Rumi being half-demon. Girl has been on copium for all of her screentime in the movie, so much that I don't doubt that's where her retirement funds go to. She refuses to believe that Rumi is a demon and instead chooses to lean into the idea that Rumi is a hunter, like Ryu, and that she just has demon patterns that will go away when the fabled Golden Honmoon is conjured. She rationalizes Rumi's demon half as, "it's not that she is a demon, she just has demon patterns."

Forgive the analogy, but it's exactly like "it's not that he is homosexual, he just has homosexual urges". Having something is ultimately easier than being something, because having something means that it is possible to no longer have something. Celine sees Rumi not as a half-human half-demon, but a full Hunter who just has demon patterns, because it's ultimately easier to digest something when you know that that something can and will go away.

That's why Celine is able to pass the Hunter's mindset onto HUNTR/X and why they are able to do what they do-- it's not that she's projecting her hatred of Rumi onto them, she just refuses to believe that Rumi is one of the demons she hates. And how could she not hate them, when her tenure as a Hunter has probably given her enough reasons to hate them that they could make a book longer than any historical archive? Those things she taught the girls about demons doesn't apply to Rumi, of course not! She's not a demon guys trust me she's not a de--

This entire rationalization of Rumi's patterns is the reason why Celine insists that Rumi can't tell Mira and Zoey about her patterns. Patterns = demon, but Rumi I guess is an exception because she is full Hunter but has patterns, and they're actively choosing to ignore the implications of having patterns (patterns = demon). This line of thinking is so goddamn fragile that the only way to not poke through this wet tissue paper of a mindset is to simply not acknowledge the big, gaping flaw in it, which Mira would probably be most wont to do.

And which Jinu does.

Fr tho that conversation would be so goddamn awkward like "oh yeah so I have patterns because my dad was a demon but I'm not a demon I swear I just have patterns they'll go away when the Golden Honmoon is formed okay I swear trust me they'll go away they're not who I am they're just something I have that will go away trust m"

But anyway back to my thesis here, Celine doesn't hate Rumi because she sees that Rumi is half-demon. Celine loves Rumi because she refuses to believe that Rumi is half-demon, because making that realization would force her to rethink I'm guessing 30-something years of her time as a Hunter, 30 years of fighting and hating demons, and however-old-Rumi-is years of "I pretend to not see"-ing her patterns.

Her being unable to look at Rumi? That's because she is clinging onto that tissue paper mindset she's made to cope with Rumi's nature. She is holding onto that mindset for dear life, because she hates demons, and she can't bear the thought that Rumi, her best friend's daughter, this kindhearted soul, is of that race of demons that she's hated for so long that she probably can't remember a time where she didn't. She doesn't want to hate her daughter, but her demon origin makes it so goddamn hard. She can't bring herself to hate her daughter, who is a demon.

And this bit here? Yeah Celine kinda has a right to think that, because every time Rumi snaps and her demon form comes out, the Honmoon ripples red. Who knows what that could actually mean, but the Hunters believe red = weak spot in the Honmoon, so that's how everyone in the room believes that, and that's how Celine interprets it.

But she's torn. She's not saying this coldly as a matter of fact. She is scared. She is desperate. She is scrambling to find a solution to this massive problem, but as she said, everything she was taught told her how to handle the problem (kill the demon), but she can't because everything she was taught told her that one cannot simply accept, even though acceptance is the exact solution she's looking for.

Celine probably had the biggest crashout under the tree, because in this moment, she's seeing all the years she spent raising Rumi crumbling apart. She's finally registered that the tissue paper is disintegrated in her hands, and to her that can only mean one thing: that she was wrong to cling so desperately to Ryu's memory, to hold onto the one thing she had left from her. To raise this half-demon to adulthood, when she couldn't even bring herself to put her down.

And then the Honmoon comes back a few minutes later and she goes from having an apocalyptic crashout to having an apocalyptic crashout confusedly haha--

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i do 5 minutes of work and then 20 minute scroll break like a reverse pomodoro method that makes all tasks longer

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major in bullshitting with a minor in talking out of my ass

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i have suffered less than christ but have complained way more abt it

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Shout-out to all the stories that didn't make it out of the shower with us in time to be actually written down.