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 with the “Hunter”, and has been easily found in the parade of esoteric, occult, magical, preternatural, supernatural, paranormal, and psychic “Hunters” across recent media (including not only demon hunters, but devil-hunters, witch-hunters, monster hunters, ghost hunters, vampire hunters, zombie hunters, mindhunters, shadowhunters, soul-hunters, treasure-hunters, and so forth), numerous related roles and concepts overlap with it, filling functions that in some contexts are equivalent, in others contrasting, and in still others, require disambiguation: detectives, investigators, inquisitors, slayers, assassins, avengers, exterminators, scavengers, and collectors.

This special panel in the Area for Esotericism, Occultism, and Magic at the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association consequently invites presentation proposals that relate in any way to this mega-trope of the “hunter” (and the “hunted”) and their related tropes and subtropes across all disciplines and media of historical and contemporary popular culture.  This can include fiction, nonfiction, and metafiction, as well as their various intersections, being intended to apply to all such figures in representation and reality.  Focused examinations of specific media and particular figures are welcome, as is the full range of comparison, analysis, and theoretical investigation, such as explorations of the significance of the mega-trope itself, along with its genesis, development, transmission, and influence across time, place, and circumstance.  Why does it have such depth, span, distribution, and enduring popularity?  Further, why and how are the features of this megatrope sometimes influenced by, but sometimes independent of, prevailing attitudes toward esoteric, occult, magical, supernatural, preternatural, and paranormal content?  How might this relate to the demonization, diabolization, and reappropriation of deviant, dangerous figures, and what does this reveal about the representation, reception, and deployment of violence, othering, and categorization processes themselves? 

The archaic, perhaps even primordial, prominence of hunting and slaying has been tied to popular conceptions of the preternatural throughout myth and legend since before the monster-slaying exploits of the most ancient deities, demigods, and heroes. Its transformations have been applied to an astonishing range of categories from the explicitly innocent, to the definedly defective, categorically impure, conceptually superior, numinously terrifying, divinely revered, alluringly valuable, intellectually fascinating, and even the instrumentally useful.  All variations of the megatrope even seem to be applicable to itself, ranging from the ubiquitous monstrous-other-hunting-other-monstrous-others trope all the way to the conceptually abstracted injunction of Philip K. Dick’s Mercerism that “you shall kill only the killers”, appearing in the novel later adapted into Blade Runner, producing iconic hunters of synthetic replicants which themselves inspired lethal constructs from Terminators to Murderbots – which, as the behavior of the trope implies, might well be synthetic themselves.  The boundary-paranoias and category-panics that this implies have been both feature and bug since the sorcerous detection and removal of curses was easily seen as an indication of the capability to levy them, and the base pattern of the deviant-versus-deviants persists, regardless of its moral or nomic valence, in parallel and in dialogue with the corresponding purity-against-deviance motif. The “exterminator” and chaos magician William “Hassan Sabbah” Burroughs observed that “all agents defect and all resisters sell out”, yet somehow they all coexist within a conceptual space in which variations on violence and death offer commonality between figures as seemingly disparate as the virtuous knight, the holy inquisitor, the eugenic purist, the ideological assassin, the amoral bounty hunter, the serial murderer, and the psychic (or psychopathic) detective who pursues them – all of whom are so recognizable as to have been thoroughly satirized and parodied, and nobody expects anyone not to expect it. 

Expanded to include abstracted and conceptual expressions of the trope such as treasure-hunting, knowledge-hunting, resource-hunting, and “experience hunting,” the intellectual impositions of classification and categorization, and the acquisitive adventurism of the “quest”, the boundaries of this symbolic battle royale would seem to remain at a spacious distance, leaving as much room for the simulation and gamification of the “raid” in all of its forms as for the search for the undiscovered where “there be dragons” to be hunted (and slain, and trained), as well as the unclaimed, unexplored, and unknown where there be dungeons, vaults, laboratories, libraries, and diverse containment facilities in which to collect them (and from which to plunder, extract, or liberate them).

As such, any scholar wishing to propose a 15-20 minute conference presentation further investigating the territories implied by these boundaries (and their denizens), however porous and monstrously conceived, should email a 200-500 word abstract to the Area Chair for Esotericism, Occultism, and Magic at georgejsieg@gmail.com and/or request further information regarding the proposed special panel, the Area in general, or the full Area CFP. 

All suitable proposals will be considered for acceptance, and if too many suitable proposals pertaining to this topic are received, they will be organized together into a series of inter-related panels. No viable submission will be wasted or rejected due to this single panel being filled.  Inquiries can also be directed to (505) 440-2105 for live or text response that does not depend on email, so please feel free to use whichever method of contact you prefer.