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If you’ve been anywhere near a television or social media screen recently, you’ve probably heard of the smash-hit movie . I know I have: My kids demand the soundtrack on repeat every time we’re in the car. In addition to demons, demon hunters, demon hunting, and a whole lot of singing, the movie features a bird character that definitely caught my eye: Sussie the Magpie. I had to know more.

To understand Sussie the Magpie, it helps to have a very cursory understanding of the movie plot. To make a very long story short, three young women form “Huntrix,” a KPop singing group also responsible for keeping demons at bay and away from the human world. A particularly evil demon wants to destroy demon hunters and eat the souls of all the humans he can find, so he sends his own boy band called "Saja Boys" to the human world to work against Huntrix. Sussie the Magpie, along with a strange-looking tiger, carry messages back and forth between Rumi (the leader of Huntrix) and Jinu (the leader of the Saja Boys). I won’t tell you the end—it’s worth watching the movie (and getting earwormed pretty much immediately) for yourself.

But what about that bird? The six-eyed magpie in KPop Demon Hunters is an Oriental Magpie (Pica serica), though in real life they have two eyes like a regular bird. In Korea, the magpie is thought to represent good fortune and luck. It’s a symbol of Korean identity, and is even the national bird of South Korea. The tiger repels evil spirits, and has appeared alongside the magpie in Korean art for centuries. The bird and tiger characters in KPop Demon Hunters are introduced as the plot descends to a particularly bleak part of the movie, adding a bit of comic relief (the bird wears a hat). They also suggest that Jinu, though he himself is a demon, may not be evil.

Magpies across the world are known for their curious natures and association with people, but the magpie-tiger pairing is particularly important in Korean art. According to curators at the  in San Francisco, California, “[t]he tiger and magpie pairing appears so frequently in Korean art that it comprises its own genre: jakhodo, paintings depicting tigers and magpies.” When painted or portrayed together in Korean folk art, the tiger becomes not stern and scary but, well, kind of dopey. The magpie is intelligent, even cunning. In some folk versions, they protect people from the tiger, in others they warn people of a tiger’s presence. The Asian Art Museum curators also note, “[i]n time, a political dimension also emerged: caricatured as a foolish oaf, the tiger became a symbol for the aristocratic yangban, while the dignified magpie represented the common people; the display of such imagery allowed villagers to quietly rebel against the ruling class.”

In KPop Demon Hunters, the tiger and magpie pair lighten the mood, nod to traditional Korean culture, and foreshadow the conclusion of the movie. They are also a critical part of director and writer Maggie Kang's commitment to representation in the film. , she explains: "We went to folk villages, we looked at what the bricks look like and how the streets are designed in Myeongdong. We took pictures because capturing the feeling is so important...We tried to make the movie feel as Korean as possible. And one way to do that was to, in every scene and every design aspect, add in Korean elements."

Are you interested in magpies but don't live in Asia? North America hosts two species of magpie: the Black-billed Magpie (Pica hudsonia) across much of the western United States and Canada as well as into Alaska; and the Yellow-billed Magpie (Pica nuttalli), one of the few bird species endemic to California. As far as I know, none of them wear hats, but they're still pretty cool.