The Sound of Our Own Voice

The villain in KPop Demon Hunters does not control people through force. He controls them through shame.

It took Dora a while to become interested in the movie. By the time it seemed as though every child knew all the songs, she was still showing very little curiosity. The frenzy swept through the rest of the world first. In our home, it has only just begun.

A few days ago, I sat down to watch it with her. I expected an entertaining children’s movie, with music, adventure, and characters strong enough to hold her attention. I found all of that. But I also found a story rich in symbolism that immediately reminded me of A Segunda Porta and of what I have been trying to understand and write about in this space.

In the film, Gwi-Ma feeds on insecurity, guilt, and shame. He knows what his victims are trying to hide and uses that knowledge to keep them under his control. He does not need to convince them that everything about them is bad. He only needs them to believe that there is something inside them bad enough to cancel out everything else.

That is how he hypnotizes them.

Shame has a way of narrowing our field of vision until one mistake, one weakness, or one rejected part of ourselves begins to feel like the whole story. Everything we do well starts to matter less. Our strengths feel accidental. The things that diminish us, on the other hand, begin to look like the truth.

Perhaps that is why it is so easy to believe the voice that condemns us and so difficult to trust the one that sees our worth.

Outside fiction, there is no single Gwi-Ma running the world. But there are environments, institutions, and relationships that have learned to exercise power by making people doubt their own value. There are families that mistake love for constant correction. Companies that call humiliation high standards. Groups that protect their boundaries not only by keeping outsiders away, but by making those who do get in feel grateful simply for being allowed to stay.

Eventually, no one on the outside needs to keep watch anymore.

We start doing it ourselves.

We replay what we said. We make an idea smaller before someone else can decide that it is too ambitious. We study how other people dress, speak, and behave so that nothing about us gives away the fact that we were not born into that world.

We try not to show too much surprise, too much desire, too much uncertainty, too much of where we came from.

Once shame has been internalised, no one else needs to keep us small. We begin correcting ourselves before the world even has the chance.

This is exactly the conflict Rumi carries. Her body bears the marks of an origin she has learned to see as incompatible with the person she is supposed to be. She hunts demons, but she is also the daughter of one. To be accepted, she believes she must hide half of herself.

This is not simply a matter of keeping a secret. She builds her entire life around the possibility of that secret being exposed.

The marks must remain covered. Her voice must remain flawless. Her performance must compensate for what she has learned to view as a defect in her own origins. The more afraid she becomes of being found out, the more energy she spends maintaining a version of herself she believes others will accept.

I recognised that instinct.

For a long time, I thought belonging meant learning to hide any sign that might reveal where I came from. I was never ashamed of my family or my story. But I had understood, without anyone needing to explain it, that the world asks different questions of those who were not born inside it.

Someone who already belongs can make a mistake and still be seen as interesting, spontaneous, or eccentric. Someone who has only just arrived feels that a single mistake might confirm everything she fears other people already believe about her.

Learning the codes never feels like enough. You also feel you must prove, at all times, that you have mastered them.

For years, I tried to tone down the girl from Osasco whenever I entered certain spaces. The daughter of two bank employees, raised in a narrow house joined to the one next door, never disappeared. She simply learned not to make herself too visible. I thought that restraint was maturity. Often, it was just self-surveillance.

The problem was never that I was broadening my repertoire. Learning how to move through unfamiliar environments mattered, and it still does. The problem was believing that acquiring new codes required me to erase the old ones.

Research helps explain the cost of this effort. Studies on the concealment of stigmatised identities suggest that the distress does not come only from carrying a trait that others might judge. It also comes from the ongoing work of hiding it.

You must read the room, calculate what can safely be revealed, anticipate other people’s reactions, and prevent them from finding the part of you that you are trying to protect. Concealment stops being an occasional act and becomes a quiet, full-time occupation of the mind.

In the film, that strain reaches the very thing that gives Rumi her power: her voice.

That is no coincidence.

Her voice is the instrument of her strength, but it is also where the split within her becomes visible. As she tries to maintain an immaculate image while rejecting part of who she is, singing becomes increasingly difficult. Her voice, which should allow her to express herself, becomes another tool for maintaining the disguise.

Rumi does not regain her strength because she discovers that she has no flaws. Nor does she suddenly decide to love every one of her marks. What happens is more complicated than that, and far more human.

She realises that she cannot keep treating part of herself like an illness that needs to be cured. And when she can no longer carry what she has been hiding on her own, she tells her friends the truth.

That matters.

Rumi’s freedom does not come from an individual decision alone. She does not win by learning to rely only on herself, ignore every judgement, and simply carry on. Her transformation is also possible because the truth meets a relationship strong enough to survive it.

Mira and Zoey are not simply carried forward by Rumi’s strength. They help her recover it. Once she no longer has to spend all her energy guarding the secret, she can use that energy to sing, to fight, and to build something alongside them.

Perhaps that is what belonging really is.

Not finding a place where no one can see our marks, but finding relationships in which those marks do not have to remain hidden for us to be loved, respected, or recognised.

That does not mean turning disclosure into an obligation. No one owes every part of herself to an environment that has not earned her trust. Hiding can be a necessary form of protection when telling the truth carries real risks. In those situations, protecting a part of ourselves is survival, not cowardice.

But there is a difference between choosing what to reveal and building an entire life around the fear of being found out.

Nor is this about romanticising our wounds. Some marks carry injustice, loss, and silences that should never have been necessary. Our origins may give us identity, memory, and affection, but they may also impose limits that we need to cross.

Accepting who we are does not mean staying where we started.

It means refusing to confuse growth with erasure.

I thought about that as I watched the film beside Dora. I want her to encounter, from an early age, places, references, and possibilities that were not part of my own childhood. I want her to walk into bookshops, museums, theatres, cities, and conversations without feeling that she needs permission to be there. I want her to develop a cultural vocabulary before she has to feel its absence.

But I also want her to know where she comes from.

I want her to know the story of her great-grandmother Roza, who never learned to read but made a beef stew whose flavour has remained inside me like an inheritance. I want her to understand the size of the dreams that could fit inside the house where I grew up, and everything it took for me to imagine a life that the people before me did not yet know how to name.

I do not want Dora to carry the same insecurities I carried. But I know I cannot protect her from every mark. No one makes it through life untouched.

What I can hope is that she will not spend years turning those marks into evidence against herself.

That she will learn the difference between responsibility and guilt, between imperfection and unworthiness, between growth and disguise. That she will have the courage to reconsider her choices, acknowledge her mistakes, and expand her world without concluding that she must become someone else to deserve a place in it.

Perhaps courage is not the absence of fear.Perhaps courage is refusing to obey shame.

By the end of the film, Rumi does not sing with a perfect voice because she has finally eliminated every conflict within her. Her voice becomes stronger because it no longer has to hold up a lie. The marks are still there, but they no longer determine what she believes she deserves.

That is what I heard in the song.

The voice of someone who has not resolved every contradiction, but has decided to stop hiding inside them.

Because the second door is not only about entering a room in which no place had been made for us. It is about being able to remain there without leaving outside everything that brought us this far.

And perhaps we only discover the true sound of our voice when it no longer has to serve as a disguise.