By: Soomin Ryu
On December 26th of 2024, Netflix released the second season to the infamous series, Squid Game. A korean original netflix show, Squid game portrays a series of players who chose to participate in a competition with multiple games after being recruited by a salesman in hopes of earning money to escape their financial burden, only to find out that the consequences of losing these games meant death. Although the story itself is very much fictional, messages such as the materialistic and competitive mindset South Korea holds, and the financial crisis that multiple people in South Korea face are undoubtedly true. According to the director Hwang Dong-Hyeok, he claims that most of the plot related to the struggles of life and loss of money was very correlated to his own story and personal experience.
He claimed “I read some stories about these indebted people entering into these life-and-death games, and that became really immersive for me because I was struggling financially myself. I was even thinking that I would love to join a game like that, if it existed, to make a bunch of cash and get out of this terrible situation. And then that got me thinking, ‘Well, I’m a director. Why don’t I just make a movie with this kind of storyline?’ So that’s how it all got started.” (MLA citation)
After season 1 became a massive hit, 3 years later season 2 was able to make a return gaining even more popularity, claiming the title as Netflix’s biggest and most successful season with over 178.9 million views, and being Netflix’s second best ranked non-english show season, after Squid Game season 1! This new season has undoubtedly been able to reach such a success, as it was filled with even more nostalgic korean children games along with a mixture of new and unfamiliar ones, phenomenal and talented actors starring Lee Jung-Jae, Lee Byung-Hun, and many other famous and recognizable korean actors and actresses, and the intense atmosphere the show was able to bring without a doubt, created not just a fandom of millions of people, of history unlike any other.
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