My Nine-Year-Old Is Playing Fortnite Because of KPop Demon Hunters

You know, Rumi was always destined to look cute while holding a shotgun.

“I think I’m obsessed with Fornite now.” “I like loot.” “I like to get my violence out in it.”

These were comments out of my nine-year-old’s mouth after an hour playing Fortnite, a game that’s been around 2017 but only came onto my daughter’s radar in the past week because she scrolled past a video about its new KPop Demon Hunters collaboration.

Our house, like basically every other house with children, has been KPop-obsessed since the movie appeared. We watched it on a whim the opening weekend it dropped on Netflix while bored in a hotel, and it only took the first song for me to put down my phone and go “hold on a minute.” (Our family are big pop fans, and more specifically, big female pop fans. This soundtrack hit. Somehow, the songs don’t annoy me yet.)

The soundtrack has been on loop since late August. At times, my children try to speak Korean. My five-year-old is going as Rumi for Halloween, dressing up with friends and forming a trick-or-treat trio. Both have rehearsed choreography for “Soda Pop” and requested I post their version on TikTok. (My parenting solution to this is “filming” the video via TikTok, then sharing the video with them. Ultimately, they do not want/understand social fame, they wanna feel like they shot a video for TikTok.)

The reason Fortnite hasn’t entered the equation before isn’t for any specific reason.

I don’t have a real problem if either of my kids plays a game with cartoonish guns. But crucially, none of their friends play Fortnite. They play Roblox because their friends play it. It’s also worth noting that Fornite is much more explicitly a video game ass video game, where grasp of the mechanics means a lot. You can fail. What my kids spend most of their time in Roblox has lower stakes and typically involves role play.

KPop Demon Hunters, however, transcends all. I figured my oldest would forget about Fortnite, but within minutes of waking up on Saturday, she asked if we could play Fortnite. And I should be really clear here: she doesn’t even really understand what Fortnite is. I mean, she gets it’s a game. But she knows it has KPop Demon Hunters.

I had, at one point, set her up with an Epic Games account when LEGO Fortnite Odyssey launched, figuring it might be our way in. But we never got around to it.

We should side bar for a second here.

I’ve talked about this before, but my children have a pretty ambivalent relationship with video games. They like them but they do not love them. They do not wake up and think “gee, how I’d like to spend my free time today is with a video game” like their father does. Yes, they play a lot of game-like experiences in Roblox, but if Roblox were to disappear off the planet tomorrow, I’m not sure their attention would turn to video games, you know? All of this is funny, of course, because I started Crossplay to document my experience parenting children in an era of mass video games and because of my job, they can conceivably play any video game they could ever want.

But they don’t! Astro Bot is the game that stuck the most in the past year. Split Fiction stuck for a few days. Everything else is slop. It goes in their brain and leaves quickly, which I think says less about video games and more about how children today have readymade access to so many different kinds of media. The commitment is different.

This is what drove the logic behind buying the KPop Demon Hunters bundle in Fortnite—$32!!! if you want everything—on my account, rather than my kid’s. Why waste the money? If past was prologue, she’d just move on in an hour or less. Might as well have the characters for myself. Can you guess what happened next, and did it include spending that money all over again to unlock the characters in my own kid’s account?

Yes. I paid the money twice. No, you cannot share costumes across family accounts. No, I didn’t make my daughter pay for any of it because it was honestly my mistake.

Naturally, I did this just before Epic Games introduces something I both can and cannot believe already in Fortnite to begin with: the option to pay an exact amount. Instead, you buy way more V-Bucks than you need because there’s no other option!

[rubs temples]

Financial headaches aside, the game clicked instantly for my daughter. She was humming around to the music cues. She yelped when she could recruit a fellow demon hunter. It’s also getting her to, at long last, understand a controller. She has, like many kids, largely played games with touch controls on a tablet or phone. She can pick up a controller and goof around with it, but it’s always clear it feels uncomfortable and can’t hold it naturally. Now, she has preferences on if she uses the Joy-cons (“It’s too weird”) or the Pro controller (“I can reach the buttons easier.”)

We’re not playing Battle Royale (yet), we’re spending time in the “Demon Rush” mode where you team up with other people and try to survive waves of enemies. The mode itself is very much just okay, but it’s an excellent way for my kid to wrap their head around the fast pace of Fortnite, because there’s no worry of being sniped from across the map. Instead, she can wave her energy sword around a bunch and work on remembering what different items do and how to access them from the controller.

(FYI, we’re both playing on Switch. I’m on a Switch 2 and she’s on a Switch 1.)

I also want to share some very cute moments from her playing for the first time:

• “Wait, do we get to play with people? Yeah. Other people around the world? [gasp]”

• “Wait, I can shoot?”

• “I’m so good at this.”

• “I’m like…slay, I need to eat my ramen. Everyone is like ‘How is she doing this?’”

• “Why is it closing in? That’s how the game works. Oh, that’s the Honmoon!”

• “How do I die so quickly?”

Tremendous.

It’s also worth complimenting how Epic Games handles parental controls—with one caveat. I wish I could manage them from my account, instead of having to log into hers. Still, I was delighted to get an email that included a summary of my changes:

Neat! Helpful. Straightforward. More of that in my games and technology, please.

We’ll see if Fortnite sticks.

It’s already stuck longer than…well, anything else. She joked over the weekend that she “needed to get the violence out” while she was waiting for a friend to show up and was, for a brief moment, bored. We played a round before bedtime on Sunday. I have not set any time restraints yet because we tend to play together, but we might be trending in that direction. She’s already annoyed we don’t have a Switch 1 dock connected to the TV, because she prefers to “play Fornite on the bigger screen.”

Uh oh, folks. Is my kid becoming a gamer?

Be careful what you wish for.

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Also:

• Anyone else going through the same thing this weekend? Curious what other experiences have been like with KPop Demon Hunters coming for video games.

• My life for a mediciore KPop Demon Hunters video game. I suspect we’ll get something in-between now and the sequel, but imagine a mediocre beat ‘em up!

• I took my five-year-old to the sing along and it was legit amazing. I suspect moments like that are going to shape my kid’s relationship with movie theaters.