Squid Game Is Not All Fiction
Also, why is no one talking about how the Americans are portrayed?
It’s impossible to watch a show about a game where only the winners survive and not understand, on some level, that the plot takes some liberties with reality. Or does it? (FYI, spoilers ahead.)
The massive popularity of this Korean production owes, in part, to the anti-natalist times we live in, but with one conceit. In the world created by Squid Game, the brutality of living can be overcome. With loads of money.
For a time it seems the elaborate games are being funded by organ sales. This is not so far-fetched. In China (which is obviously not Korea, but for some reason a place with readily available information on black market organs), harvesting body parts is still happening. Eventually, however, we learn that the organ thing is a side hustle that the big boss allows. And so we discover the real culprits: rich Americans.
Okay, that’s an exaggeration. The group of people who show up in the second-to-last episode to bet on the gaming outcomes are, like all who run the games, masked. They’re never identified in any substantive way, of the six VIPs—a group of light-skinned, mostly overweight men who show up in sharkskin suits reminding me of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction—five had distinctly North American…
