The Double-Life Dream of Tween Media✨🕯️👀⚡️🧿💭🔮

Hi Friends!!!!! I’m Zehra Naqvi, founder of Lore, the world’s first subjective search engine and a home for the obsessed. Think of it as the 21st-century Library of Alexandria for fandom: gossip, myth, half-truths, theories, and canon all living side by side. Lore exists because fandom is not trivial. Fandom is the economy. If data is oil, fandom is fire. It spreads faster, burns hotter, and can’t be controlled. That’s how a cartoon soundtrack outpaces Sabrina Carpenter on Billboard, and how an animated girl group can pull 236 million streams and sell out singalong screenings in theaters months after release. It is the clearest signal of what people care about, what they are willing to spend on, and how culture actually spreads.

This essay is part of Fan Behavior, a strand of The Z List devoted to consumer behavior and the culture of consumption. It is not a regular newsletter. I only send it when obsession tips over into analysis when I cannot stop connecting the dots.

I finally watched K-pop Demon Hunters and now I can’t stop thinking about it.

Tween Media, Reincarnated

When K-pop Demon Hunters dropped on Netflix this summer it felt like a cultural detonation. In three months it became Netflix’s most-watched film of all time, with 266 million views.

Its soundtrack also rewrote the rules. “Golden” hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, the first soundtrack song to do so since Waiting to Exhale in 1995. “Soda Pop” with millions of TikTok edits and over 2B streams in 8 weeks. Twice (one of the biggest K-pop groups on the planet) covered one of Huntrix’s songs.

The frenzy spilled offline too. Cinemas in multiple countries held singalong screenings. People discovered the movie through Spotify before even watching it. This isn’t a fluke. A new NRG survey found that 59% of Gen Alpha actually prefer seeing movies in theaters, compared to just 45% of Millennials and 48% of Gen Z. More than half (55%) want to go with friends, turning screenings into social events. It explains why K-pop Demon Hunters didn’t just stream it sold out singalongs months later.

If High School Musical was the DVD that never left the player, K-pop Demon Hunters is the algorithm that never lets you close the app.

Why? Because it cracked a code we thought Disney Channel had buried: the tween double-life fantasy.

The Double-Life Trope Never Dies

• Hannah Montana: Miley as popstar vs. schoolgirl

• High School Musical: Troy as basketball star vs. theater kid

• Grease: Danny as tough guy vs. soft romantic

• K-pop Demon Hunters: Idols on stage by day, demon fighters by night

This was Disney’s house style, and it printed billions. For over a decade, the double-life trope dominated tween musicals:

• Camp Rock: Mitchie hiding her background to fit in, ordinary girl vs. wannabe star

• Descendants: Kids of villains torn between embracing past legacies vs. forging new identities

• Teen Beach Movie: Modern teens zapped into a 1960s musical world, caught between surfer vs. biker roles

• Lemonade Mouth: High school misfits balancing invisibility vs. their secret power as a band

Kids wanted to see themselves in characters living contradictions. Disney built an empire on this, and K-pop Demon Hunters has now picked up the baton with new tools: K-pop spectacle, algorithmic virality, and fandom distribution.

Why K-pop Demon Hunters Works Now

Streaming killed the Friday night Disney Channel premiere. High School Musical 2 had 17 million live viewers in a single night. That will never happen again.

What replaced it is more powerful.

K-pop Demon Hunters was built for infinite loops. Kids are not watching once. They are watching ten times in a weekend. Gen Alpha is growing up in an on-demand world, where streaming is the default. Ironically, that makes theatrical experiences feel more special. They aren’t jaded like older cohorts they treat theaters as a novelty, which is why they’re showing up in higher numbers than Millennials and Gen Z.

The film’s magic barrier, the Honmoon, is literally powered by fan love. That is not metaphor it is obsession written into the plot.

The Economist breaks its success down to three things:

1. Music: Not Broadway-lite fluff for kids. Real K-pop, produced by the hitmakers behind BTS and Blackpink.

2. Story: Female friendship and self-acceptance. Rumi, revealed as half-demon, is accepted by her bandmates: a metaphor for living with your contradictions.

3. Fandom: It harnesses the mechanics of real K-pop stardom. TikTok edits, Spotify virality, singalong screenings. Fans aren’t an afterthought. They are the infrastructure.

This is not Disney Channel. This is industrialized obsession.

What Fans Are Actually Saying

I didn’t just watch the movie. I did what I always do: spiraled. I read through hundreds of Reddit threads, trying to map the consumer sentiment the way Lore will once it launches (Lore will make this automatic quantifying obsession the way Bloomberg quantifies markets). Here’s what stood out:

• Overhype backlash: Some fans think it’s overrated “great animation, but the story? not so much”. Others argue the hype is exactly the point: if everyone is talking about it online, you can’t escape it.

• Global accessibility: Multiple commenters pointed out they hadn’t seen a single ad for the film they discovered it because friends were raving on Instagram, or because Netflix shoved it to the front of their homepage. Obsession spreads faster when it is frictionless.

• Comparisons to Disney/Pixar: Fans contrasted it with Pixar’s Elio, calling K-pop Demon Hunters “more human than any mainstream animated feature in years”. Disney’s original IP feels “safe” and derivative; Sony took risks and won.

• Mythology and theories: Fans are already writing sequels in the comments. Some are convinced the “Four Guardians” myth means a fourth Huntrix member is coming. Others are deep-diving into Korean folklore and noticing details casual viewers missed (like the symbolism of the White Tiger and Magpie).

What does this prove? That IP value isn’t just about “catchy songs.” It’s about giving fans a story they can pull apart, argue over, theorize about, and project themselves into. The value of IP is good storytelling.

The Death of Tween Media

Disney Channel as a pipeline to mainstream success no longer exists.

I remember High School Musical being the first media I consciously obsessed over. I learned all the dances, watched the DVD on loop until my grandfather begged me to stop. Hannah Montana was the other touchstone. I loved the contradiction of being “normal” and a superstar at once.

That contradiction is gone from Disney. Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Jenna Ortega feel like the last Disney Channel “it girls.” A viral TikTok asked: Who are the current Disney stars? The answer is none. Disney Channel tween media has ceased to exist.

Disney Channel peaked at 99 million US households in 2014; now it is closer to 70 million and shrinking. Nickelodeon has retreated to preschool. Roblox, meanwhile, generated $3.5 billion in bookings in 2023. Tween dollars no longer flow into backpacks and dolls. They flow into skins, emotes, and Netflix drops.

Filling the Vacuum

This is why K-pop Demon Hunters matters. It is not just another animated hit. It is the first new canon for Gen Alpha.

It fuses spectacle with authenticity: ramen dinners, folklore, lightsticks, fangirls and fanboys of all ages. It is global from the start. It is infinitely memeable.

TikTok edits are the new Radio Disney. Spotify virality is the new CD chart. Repeat streams are the new DVD marathons.

Think about how wild this is: Sony is now making more compelling musical animation IP than Disney. Moana 2’s songs flopped on TikTok (Moana 2’s lead single didn’t crack the Billboard Top 20). Encanto was their last true breakout, and even that was powered by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s one-man songwriting machine. Disney cannot keep relying on the same formula. Meanwhile, Sony just dropped K-pop Demon Hunters and made “Golden” the biggest soundtrack hit since the ’90s. The center of gravity for myth-making has shifted. Disney is no longer the world’s storyteller. That’s not just a movie win. That’s an IP shift. And here’s the kicker: IP is only as strong as its storytelling. Good stories create rewatch loops, spin theories, and pull fans into theaters. Disney’s Moana 2 couldn’t get a song into the Top 20. Encanto had a Lin-Manuel Miranda miracle. But Sony, not Disney, is now building the stories that kids obsess over.

An incumbent abandoned obsession. Netflix industrialized it.

The Economics of Tween Media Then vs. Now

• In the mid-2000s, Disney tween franchises like Hannah Montana and High School Musical generated an estimated $2.7 billion in retail sales. CDs, movies, merch, concerts, tours every line fired at once.

• Today, Netflix monetizes through subscriptions, with nearly 280 million global subscribers. In Q2 2025 alone it pulled $9.3 billion in subscription revenue.

• Music now outpaces cinema by 38 percent, with the industry generating $45.5 billion in 2023.

Disney built multi-division empires.

Netflix bets on retention, replays, and charts.

Different math, same obsession.

Fan Behavior lives inside The Z List but also stands on its own. It is my spiral turned outward, where I treat consumer culture as its own fandom.

Why did tweens once buy Hannah Montana backpacks in bulk? Why are Roblox skins replacing Disney merch? Why does K-pop Demon Hunters make perfect sense as the new High School Musical?

This is not media analysis in neutral tones. It is obsession as methodology. If The Z List maps the venture ecosystem, Fan Behavior is the notebook in the margins, full of arrows and annotations. It is serious about unserious things, and unserious about serious things. It is where I test theories of how culture moves in real time.

💌 ZN