You Haven’t Been Able To Escape the Squid Game Memes and Neither Have I

An unstructured deep dive into this kdrama

You’ve seen the memes, even if you don’t spend a lot of time on the internet. Everyone at work is talking about it. You keep seeing triangles, circles and squares. People keep talking about sugar cookies. Squid Game has been in the zeitgeist and we all know it.

In a way, it reminded me of the Game of Thrones fad. It’s been a long time since my entire squad agreed to watch the same thing. By long, I mean that it’s been at least 5–6 years. Even Game of Thrones didn’t have this pull, because some of my friends flat out refused to watch it because of the fad.

Squid Game surpassed that. Despite the hesitancy that a lot of my friends have had about Korean dramas being cliché and too focused on romance, the trailer for Squid Game proved “dystopian enough” to appeal to a crowd who loves dark narratives and tragic backstories.

In fact, some of my friends reached out, assuming I’d already seen Squid Game, being the most vocal about encouraging others to watch more Korean dramas. I hadn’t, and I excitedly dove in.

This unstructured rant will contain spoilers.

Join me if you’ve seen the show and you’re ready to debrief and also in that state of mind where you’re filling the void by watching 1823712837 Youtube videos about fan theories and missed Easter eggs.

Join me if you haven’t seen the show but, you’re like me, and you love spoilers. To me, spoilers are like the appetizer that increases my appetite to watch something. Even if I know something will happen, I get excited because I want to see how the writers will build up to it, how the actors will enact the scene, and the myriad of cinematic expertise poured in to make this plot point possible.

Join me in this downward spiral into the 128312873 thoughts I’ve had about Squid Game.

Cinematography That Speaks Volumes

It breaks my heart sometimes that people dismiss Korean dramas as “cliché” or “too romance-focussed” because the truth is, there are a variety of narratives and genres produced. When you dismiss the quality of stories told because of one stereotyped notion of a country’s work, you really miss out on a wonderful storytelling experience.

Sure, the romance stories that are sweet to the core might have been how I dove into Korean dramas as a teen, but the fantastic storytelling and cinematography is why I’ve stayed committed all these years.

Look, I don’t even know whether I’m using the cinematography right. I know some people might be able to talk about camera angles for hours on end, or filters and sequences as if reciting some complex formula.

For me, the cinematography in this kdrama is an experience, particularly that Korean dramas like Squid Game use visual presentation to evoke emotions.

First, there’s the candy pink and mint green walls that mimic an Escher-like visual illusory experience that makes me dizzy as I watch players get ferried back and forth between games and their resting place. The vibrant colours remind me of childhood joy but this juxtaposition in Squid Game adds to the eeriness as a juxtaposition to the terrible things they’ve done in the games.

There’s also the brightness that permeates the games themselves. While the main characters are playing these childhood games to secure their survival, the brightness is at max. It’s a 180 degrees turn from an experience like watching Dark (and other visually dark) movies and tv shows where it’s so dark that you see your own reflection. Here, the brightness is so high it feels like a deep fried meme. The brightness adds an additional layer of eeriness as it washes out all the details.

I hope this encourages others to watch Squid Game because the thought into visual elements was incredible.

Walking Through My Reactions To The Show

Episode 1 & 2: Red Light Green Light

Watching episode 1 of Squid Game was really interesting because it was exactly as expected, as described from the memes and the trailer. If you’ve been exposed to any of these references prior to watching your first episode, you know that childrens’ games are being used in a dystopian way to get adults to compete. Death was the punishment.

I think what’s surprising to me (but also shouldn't have been) about episode 1 is that almost everyone chose to return to the games. The old man discusses this in the end, highlighting how everyone had free will to decline, as some did.

Yet, having worked in a profession where we recruit human participants for voluntary-based experiments that include computer tasks and questionnaires that in the grand scheme of things, have very low risk, I know exactly how coercive money can be. We’re forbidden from advertising the compensation amount too centrally because we want people to participate in our experiments primarily out of interest in research, rather than because wanting money. The compensation is simply an honorarium for their time. That’s because people, when desperate for money, might not be voluntarily consenting to what they’re participating in if they must get that money to survive.

That principle really emerged here, because, under the pressure to pay down debt, nearly all of the participants returned to these terrible games.

I also wonder about the people who didn’t join back in after witnessing the first round of games. I feel like I would have been them. My risk aversion is strong and I think I would rather die out here in the real world than to survive in some children’s games in order to win an exorbitant amount of money.

Most of all, I wondered about how eerie it was that the world in Squid Game is pretty similar to ours, save for one key difference. There is a much more obvious black market for organs, and people had been signing away their lives to pay off debt. It really gave me Never Let Me Go vibes.

Episode 3: The Man with the Umbrella

This is the episode that features the sugar cookie, also called stamped dalgona. It features the iconic scene of Gihun licking the cookie to get his complex umbrella shape out. That’s the moment where I realized out of all of the characters, he was the most similar to me. I feel like if I were to participate in these games, anxiety aside, I’d just stumble through the different games trying to survive simply by stumbling into unconventional solutions.

This is also where the Junho plot gets juicy. I find that getting to see this police officer as a shred of hope that the whole dystopian operation might be unravelled is what fueled the plotline forward. We knew the games were happening, but would they be? Does Junho finally foil the plans or does he get found out? That question is one of the strongest reasons I wanted to press on watching.

Episode 4: Stick To the Team

The theme of harvesting organs intensifies in this episode as we learn more about why the doctor was getting special treatment. There’s a whole Black market for organs and there was a side plot to use some of the players from the games to sell body parts. Why is that? Why is there such a demand for organs?

This is also the episode where the fight breaks out overnight. Seemingly unrelated to the games, inequality was fabricated to incite violence. Erupting overnight in the rest area, players dropped like flies. At the time of watching this scene, my only thought was that if there had been any hope that I lasted through the Red Light, Green Light games and the cookie game, this is surely where I’d die. I’d first lose my glasses, then my footing, and then my life.

But then as I write this, something jumps out at me. In later episodes, we learn of how strongly the game organizers favoured equality, yet intentionally underestimated the number of meals to incite violence. Remembering this really threw additional doubt on this supposed “main value” for the Squid Game organizers.

Can we also talk about the cliffhanger that ends this episode? I screamed. It felt like I had personally fallen off that bridge. It was emotionally a cliffhanger in that I had slipped and simply fallen into the abyss when a tense moment just ended like that.

Episode 5: A Fair World

This episode really spotlights Junho’s exploration of the world, uncovering the organ harvesting plot. It was a story within a story. In this episode, he finds out that his brother actually hadn’t died but rather won one of the games.

I think this is a good point to bring forth my ongoing question. We know how people are recruited in to play the game, but how do they run the games? How do they recruit people to join and become “employees”?

Junho’s side plot helped unearth a lot of it. We see how the employees live in the same level of secrecy. We learn that if their identity is revealed, they die.

I ask this because I’m used to dystopian stories giving a sense of the behind-the-scenes of how power is upheld. Here, other than finding out about the VIPs and Front Man in later episodes, we don’t get to see how it works for the smaller shrimps in the ecosystem. I’m still curious.

Episode 6: Gganbu

We’ve finally arrived at Episode 6, which I’ve nicknamed The Marble Episode of sadness. As soon as they were told to split into two, I knew this was an omen. When they walked into the Reply 1988-esque old neighbourhood and handed out marbles, it became even more evidence, especially as Ali and Sangwoo heatedly talked about supporting each other, and GiHun and the old man talked about being Gganbus — the best of best friends.

Emotionally, this is a turning point for the plot. I can see how some viewers thought things were fun and games until this point, but this is where loved characters are killed off. The narrowing begins. There will soon be one, if there is one, after all.

We see Sang Woo’s true colours; we cry over Ali.

Gihun’s “good character” is pitted against Sang Woo as he also betrays his partner. Yet, Gihun’s betrayal is set up to be something you can empathize with, yet Sang Woo’s evil and premeditated.

The parallel between “protagonist” and “antagonist” is strong.

In superhero movies, the difference between villain and superhero is that given the same contexts, the superhero chooses to do the “right” and “hard” thing to do, while the villain chooses the “wrong” and “easy” thing to do.

Here, both antagonist and protagonist make the same decision, the morally wrong one. We see the impacts of their choice on the people they betrayed.

I’m curious about others’ experiences with this choice. Did you empathize with Gihun more than SangWoo? Why or why not?

Episode 7: VIPS

Before I dive into capitalism metaphors, I need to talk about the VIPs. What the heck was up with the 69 jokes? Why were the VIPs set up to sound like teen boys being like “hehehehehehe sex”?

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I want to talk about capitalism metaphors in Squid Game. I feel like analyzing dystopian novels in English never left me, but now I talk about references almost as a joke.

You know, going overboard and talking about how the red of protagonist’s pants represents the blood in his heart and also his deep love for X. Stuff that seems excessive and doesn’t truly feel real. Yet, somehow could be real.

If there’s any explanation for the whole harvesting organs theme, I’d say it was to more deeply highlight the price of human life beyond what we experience it these days as selling our labour and services. It’s something more visceral to say that the money is going towards buying someone’s organs than to point out how much our world runs on selling what we produce at the cost of our physical and mental health. Then, they move deeper to show how lives are lost simply for someone to win an “exorbitant” amount of money — just one. No one else benefits from it, but everyone chases after this ideal to finally solve their personal debt.

The bridge game emerges from this foundation for me to crack the joke that the bridge represents the corporate ladder, complete with its own glass ceiling (floor). The tempered glass is designed to hold two people rather than just one as a way to allow for people to try and overtake and shove someone else off. Your success in a game depends on others’ work in a way that they can no longer benefit from the work they’ve done. I shared this in true meme energy with boyfriend as we’d been sync watching Squid Game together, especially since every previous game had been a child’s game.

Later, repeating this to a friend, I was promptly corrected that the glass game was supposed to be hopscotch.

That’s fair.

I should have seen that coming. (Do you see how I started this segment with 69 and then — 👀)

Episode 8 + 9: Front Man and One Lucky Day

Building up to the end, I’m met with the disappointment that episode 8 is actually only 30 minutes. Then, I’m met with the disappointment that Sae Byeok simply just dies over something she completely has no control over. It angers me that they just … got rid of her. She didn’t even get a chance to fight. Why???

I’m met with the disappointment that Junho never intersects directly with the main plotline. He simply unearths a bunch of information, probably to move along the plot. From the obvious hints, we knew that his brother was the Front Man. I’m met with the disappointment that Junho goes through all that to just … die. Off a cliff.

I’m met with the disappointment, though tempered disappointment, that Gihun wins nobly, having offered a truce, but because SangWoo was fully prepared to fight until the end, until he didn’t. I’m met with disappointment because this was a cliché ending to the whole game. I’m disappointed not because it was necessarily a bad ending, but I expected my expectations to be challenged by Junho flying through the doors, exposing the whole operation or otherwise intersecting with this plotline to create something juicier, something different. So, technically, I’m not disappointed about who won, given that it makes sense, but I’m disappointed that a show that challenged me to my limits at every turn didn’t challenge me at the end. I had really high hopes, though.

I’m met with the disappointment that the old man was behind all of this, only because my partner had picked up the Easter eggs right from the beginning and predicted this ending. If I’d watched it alone, this would have been a plot twist. I’m not that disappointed, I’m simply underwhelmed that my partner could have been right. As a man of details, Easter eggs aren’t really Easter eggs to him.

My actual disappointment with the old man is that his final words were to talk about free will. I wanted there to be something more than “lonely old rich man creates dystopia”.

Most of all, I’m disappointed for GiHun’s daughter. Given her age, it was so mature for her to have said all the things she had so GiHun wouldn’t feel bad about not delivering on his promises. She had such empathy and it was clear that GiHun wasn’t going to visit him after promising her he would. If you were going to whisk off and fight the Squid Game organizers, you could have just not made that promise? I’m so mad on her behalf.

Finally, I’m disappointed about the amount of money he won. Is that wild? I never really paid attention to the amount on the screen and just registered it as “a big sum” in my brain. The final cash reward is for $45.6 billion won, which is roughly 47 million CAD. It sounds like a lot until it coincides with Facebook losing 6 billion USD in hours over recent outage. Given that houses are averaging 1.1million CAD in Toronto, Junho would only be able to buy 47 houses. That’s barely two streets. Think about the number of lives who died for that. Also, think about how spooky housing prices are for us millennials.

Unanswered Questions

From the episode-by-episode recap, you can see that there were a lot of questions that were left unanswered that I would like to know more about.

What was the deal with organ harvesting? Why is there specifically such a demand for organs in the Squid Game world? What important differences are in this world but not ours that they went down this slightly different road?

How does this restricted dystopia run? Rather than a dystopia that permeates the whole society, the games are unknown to most outsiders. The rest of the world runs as normal. (Mostly, anyway, aside from the organ harvesting and signing away your life rights over debt). How did employees become circles, triangles and squares? How do they maintain secrecy, other than executing employees who show their faces? Why do the employees join? How do they determine who becomes a game participant or an employee? What important factors separate them? I have so many questions.

What was the point of Junho’s line? I guess part of it was to show the behind-the-scenes and add pacing and hope. But, I fully expected Junho to finally merge back with the main plotline to interrupt the completion of the games. Instead, he’s just discarded when he’s no longer needed and the games proceeded. If there was anything I was most disappointed about, it was this. In fact, after ten years of not writing fanfiction, this dissatisfaction is what might bring my fanfiction writing back. I would want to write an ending where Junho escapes, returns and interrupts the games to avoid a cliché ending.

Character Appreciation Corner

Ali Abdul

I’m sure there’s a lot of commentary about Ali out there. R/SquidGame is a good place to start for both memes and in-depth reviews. Ali is kind, respectful and loyal. His death was wrongful and he deserved a million times better.

But the appreciation of his character in this story represents something deeper.

When it comes to anti-racism work, I find that my research and learning has been so lopsided, focussing on my experiences here in North America. Here in North America, I’m “visible minority”. In North American shows, we’re still fighting to get Asian representation in TV (Ramos, 2017; Davis, 2021), especially not stereotypical ones that place us in roles like tech and medicine.

Yet as I do this work, I find this overwhelming gap where I don’t have the words or framework or even understanding to phrase what it’s like to watch primarily East Asian shows that also have no diversity. As a Hong Konger, I look within. Despite Hong Kong being touted as multicultural rather than homogeneously Han Chinese, it’s a city that has much work to do towards diversity (Singh, 2013; Resolve, 2018; Man-kin, 2021). Though Hong Kong is comprised of quite a few migrant workers from Phillippines, Indonesia, India, Pakistan and other areas of South and South East Asia, the only representation of South Asian characters on screen is Gill Mohindepaul Singh. He was the first Indian actor to have been signed on by TVB (a major television network in Hong Kong), and ultimately left Hong Kong for Scotland when his wife’s application to be naturalized as a Chinese citizen was rejected. Unspoken and uncriticized are incidents of blackface by Han Chinese actors; rather than casting Southeast and South Asian actors for roles, Han Chinese actors are often cast, wearing darker foundation.

I remember how my cousins made fun of their Indonesian maid for eating halal food whilst choosing not to wear a hijab. This scene was so jarring to me because I had close friends who were Muslim and struggled with which aspects of their religion and culture to bring forward in a parallel second-generation immigrant manner. Both experientially and from afar, I’d seen and let slide racist incidents because I was afraid of being told that I was diluting the East Asian movement towards representation.

I realize now that a) calling out racism towards East Asians and b) calling out racism within our community don’t have to be at odds. Though Squid Game is a Korean tv show, I couldn’t speak directly about Korean society because I don’t have that understanding of their history. But I can’t help but notice the parallels and wonder how similar the experience is in watching a Pakistani character on screen. I can’t help but notice that this is the first non-East Asian character on-screen since Moorim School (featuring Sam Okyere).

Sae Byeok

I was naturally drawn to Sae Byeok as she’s the only woman who is introduced as a core character. Given the caricature of North Korea that Western media likes to paint, I much prefer narratives about North Korea depicted in South Korean dramas (e.g., Crash Landing On You). For a lot of us, the Korean War (which split Korea into two) feels like something that had happened so long ago; yet ending in 1953, there are families from that era who are yearning to be reunited.

The demographics of divided families in South Korea can help give us a sense of the gravity and urgency of the situation. As of November 2019, the average age of South Korean divided family members was 81, and more than 60 percent of the 133,370 applicants who applied for the lottery for inter-Korean family reunions since 1988 have already passed away. (Lee & Lee, 2020)

North Korean defectors who make it to South Korea face cultural shock and need an adjustment period because of the differences.

Every day brought new challenges and the family knew no-one. “There were many cultural differences… we had to start all over again,” she says […] Many have to learn the basics of life in a high-tech, democratic society — from using a bank card to understanding how representative government works. (Williams, 2021)

We see that story unfold with Sae Byeok, where both she and her brother made it safely to South Korea, but she was rejected and fell into the cycle of poverty as she scrounged up money in order to reunite her family. I reflect on her story that’s meant to be a story about finding safety and hope yet also rejection in a place meant to be home.

Jiyeong

Here we go:

“Thanks for playing with me.”

This line has me bawling rivers. In the marble game, her insistence to spend time talking rather than playing for survival allowed us a deeper understanding of Jiyeong and Sae Byeok’s backstory. Her constant forgetting that they were in this horrendous competition together and referencing a trip to Jeju with mojitos were heartbreaking simply because she had so much hope.

It’s especially heartbreaking because we learn that this is probably one of the first times in a long while she’s felt hope, having such a tragic backstory of traumatic childhood.

When she said she had no family name, I cried again. I saw myself in here, even though my story is nothing compared to what she went through. Yet, the “not having a family name” weighed on me. It’s not just … not having a name because you dislike the sound of my parents’ last names. In Korea, your identity is tied by a Family Registry to your family name. In Chinese culture, it’s much the same. No longer having ties to this family name isn’t just a change in name, but rather being segmented from your ancestors, family; it’s doubly frustrating in her situation because she is cut off from her roots for someone else’s wrongs.

I felt that loneliness in this story. That juxtaposition between the loneliness of being rejected by your roots, being rejected by your peers, being rejected by society and her finally connecting with someone in her final moments is probably what hammered these tears home.

Rumoured Second Season of Squid Game

Squid Game was such a good show, I’d want more of it too. Yet, despite this yearn for more, I wouldn’t want a second season of this show. The thing I love most about Korean dramas is that the norm is only to have one season. It’s rather the exception to have continuations. That means that stories are written with the end in mind, and I truly believe that this makes the writing much better. I find that American shows try to drag off storylines far too long and it often starts with a bang and ends with a fizzle.

Instead, I find that I want to know more about the Squid Game world in a parallel manner. If there were a second season, I’m not sure I would like a story continuation, but rather, I’d be curious to see other angles. What’s the story behind how they maintain these terrible games, especially since it’s referenced to happen all over the world? A prequel into how this whole organ harvesting theme became so strong would also be something I’m interested in.

So while I don’t necessarily want a second season of Squid Game in the traditional sense that the plot moves forward, I want to see parallel plotlines unfold in greater detail. Alas, until then, I may have turn to fanfiction. Reading it, or even writing it.

I can’t believe you made it this far

If you’ve made it this far in this huge TV show rant, I want to thank you sincerely for your time. You’ve read OVER 4k words of my take on Squid Game, which may include trashy hot takes or spicy hot takes, who knows?

If you’ve seen this show, let me know what your thoughts are!

If you haven’t, feel free to hop on and watch now, and circle back when you’re done with opinions!

Also, now that I have this void post-Squid Game, please do share if you have any suggestions for other TV shows to watch! I track my TV show recommendations here:

Hi I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and you’ve made it to the very bottom of this huge post. If you still have bandwidth, feel free to hop down the rabbit hole! Or, please just rest your eyes, your eyeballs and brain noodle have done a lot of reading about Squid Game for the last n minutes.

Hop down the rabbit hole? 🐰🕳

^ by Laurie Perez