The extraordinary success of K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025) as the most-watched original title in the history of Netflix (with over 325 million views) invites the reconsideration of a surprisingly vast and multivalent “mega-trope” that has proliferated throughout popular culture in numerous variations for centuries.  Its deep roots in folklore and mythology remain to be further explored, mapped, and connected with its various historical expressions throughout indigenous worldviews, Classical cultures and civilizations into Late Antiquity and ultimately through the global Middle Ages and straight through into the interactions of Western, East/Asian, and diverse global civilizations of the contemporary period.  While this mega-trope is here identified