Long ramble about Squid Game Season 3
Took a little nap after binging the shitshow that was Squid Game 3 and I have a lot of thoughts, both positive and negative. Hopefully I can collect them all within this post because oof I have a lot of feelings that are so volatile at the moment, I'll probably end up not agreeing with parts of this post a couple weeks later, but I'm going to do my best to jot my thoughts down. Also apologies for any grammar mistakes, I'm very dyslexic and I just can't catch all of them.
I guess I should start with probably one of my more controversial opinions and say I didn't HATE this ending, and I fully expected a bittersweet ending to this show considering the show's messaging and themes. I think improvements could've been made, but I'm not as unhappy about the ending as others are. I honestly think some fans were really delusional for thinking that there was ever a chance that we would get something even remotely close to the "Gi-hun survives, stops the games, and go sees his daughter" ending. (Something I love in my fanfiction, btw, but it just wouldn't have been appropriate here.) This show has some positive messaging in the second half of the show (community/coming together and rising up against your oppressors/etc) but at the end of the day, this show was a cautionary tale on the system within late-stage capitalism and how said system will continue to oppress and re-adapt whenever an opposing force attempts to overthrow it and disrupt the status quo. I definitely think this downer of an ending was poorly timed, considering current events, but it also made a point about the importance of keeping to your morals, staying good even in the face of hopelessness, and how that can influence the little things in life. I truly don't think In-ho would've done the things he did post-games -- like raise the baby for 6 months before leaving her and her inheritance with Jun-ho (I can't comment on the foster care system in Korea, but I don't think I would've been happy if In-ho put the baby into the system rather than hand her off to someone he trusts to take care of her) and personally going to Ga-yeong to give her the closure she deserved -- if it wasn't for the actions of Seong Gi-hun, the man that reached deep into his cold chest and pulled out his still beating, albeit barely, heart. Gi-hun was truly an influential and amazing protagonist that stayed consistent until the very end, even when it meant sacrificing himself for that fuckass baby. I can't deny that it was very in character for him.
I can't say the same with many other characters, unfortunately, with the biggest crime against humanity being the character assassination of Kang Dae-ho. (if you could even call it that. It felt more like they murdered it in cold blood and left its corpse in a ditch to rot) Within a few minutes, he dropped from my 3rd favorite character to not even in the top 10 anymore. What a terrible way to squander this character's potential when he would've been an amazing commentary on PTSD, how the military preys on young men and appeals to their need for masculine validation just to have them either die for a capitalist's cause or leave them severely mentally and/or physically traumatized and thrown back into a world that doesn't have the resources nor the care to help them. But instead, he was reduced to a manipulative, albeit terrified, kid for the sole reason to lift the protagonist up and deny any possible moral ambiguity, because God forbid Gi-hun hits his absolute rock bottom, fell into his darkness for just a minute after losing EVERYTHING, including his hope in humanity, and enacted unjust revenge on an innocent person just to offload that guilt onto someone. Someone who sought him out to befriend after seeing how he went out of his way to help people in RLGL. The same kid who chose him in Mingle instead of Jung-bae. There was so much they could've done with Dae-ho and they chose the worst possible path with him by making him just like every other desperate, nameless player in the show. I'm also definitely grieving this character as an autistic person who saw himself in Dae-ho. (like, come on, the way he nervously stimmed and social chameleon'd in order to fit in. Like, me too Dae-ho </3)
I have such mixed feelings about In-ho. I'm not surprised or upset about his fate but I can't help but think that it was... lacking. What made In-ho such an interesting character to me was his relationships with his brother and the one person he felt like only he could understand, could relate to. Another thing I loved about him was his trauma and how it transformed him into the person we see in the show, and I feel like this season didn't give either of these aspects of his character any consideration and didn't bother to delve much into them. I was truly expecting an episode to be dedicated to him and his conversation with Gi-hun, their clash of philosophies that was built up for an entire season to finally reach some sort of finality, for them to finally understand each other on a fully vulnerable level that they never would've been with anybody else. When Lee Jung-jae was asked to say one word to describe season 3, he responded with "forgiveness," and now that I've sat through the season, I'm not sure what he meant by that at all, because there was truly never any forgiveness in this season. I'm sad that Gi-hun was never given the grounds to even begin to forgive In-ho on. He didn't even know his name. He didn't know that they shared the same trauma, and perhaps he could've changed the Frontman's fate if he just knew. This is probably just the Inhun shipper in me speaking at this point, but I felt like their confrontation wasn't what I was expecting, and I can't help but feel a little disappointed in it.
And that's not to say I hated that scene entirely. It was extremely interesting! But I just wished they further expanded on it. The way In-ho was trying to desperately hammer in the fact that Gi-hun and the baby were going to die, the players were going to turn on him, and he NEEDED to do something about it, and so he gave him the tool to do so the same way Il-nam did to him. It felt like panic. It didn't feel fair to him, because it didn't feel fair when his fellow players did the same to him too. He was trying to instill the same fear he had in that moment onto Gi-hun by parroting what Il-nam told him. At least, that's my interpretation of the scene. He thought he and Gi-hun were so much alike that he could recreate that emotions, those actions, for the sake of Gi-hun's survival. He cared so deeply for Gi-hun in a fucked up kind of way and I love that so much. I just wish that their interaction didn't end THERE. I wish they talked more first. I wish In-ho tried more to get Gi-hun to understand, and maybe if he did, and Gi-hun saw the Frontman in a new light, that he was a man just as broken as he is and not just an emotionless being in a mask, we could've had a better, satisfying ending. I don't know, just my thoughts on that scene.
And, God, don't even get me started on the Hwang brothers. What a complete waste of potential. It's so frustrating that I can barely put it into words. They had something amazing building up for the first two seasons, and Jun-ho was, once again, a useless character that spent the entire season finding something he never quite reached, almost like the writers forgot he existed and was like "Oh, right, he's supposed to be the brother of the antagonist. Let's have him just find him repeat what he said in season 1 and call it a day." His character never had a conclusion. It wasn't even HIM that figured out that Park was the rat, the LITERAL POLICE DETECTIVE. He did fucking nothing other than being the reason the Coast Guard was called to the island, causing the chain of events that led to the island's explosion. That's it. He was a plot device. He had no true reunion with his brother, no real conversation. He never learned or got the chance to learn why his brother turned out the way he did, the same brother that possibly became a teen dad and raised him since birth. (not confirmed bc, yk, we didn't get ANY flashbacks with them UGH) I can't imagine having a story just sitting on my lap about a character watching helplessly as their loved one slowly rotted away into a husk of what he once was and never truly understanding why, and then disregarding it completely. It's just... man, they had something amazing there and did NOTHING with it.
I'm definitely not the first person to point out the misogyny that seemed to be unintentionally scattered across the show, but I wanted to throw in my 2 cents and express my disappointment in how many of the female characters were treated in this show, as many were treated as plot devices for male characters and killed in some of the most brutal ways. It's extremely ironic to want to write a show and intend to address misogyny and sexual violence towards women, but do nothing else than just the surface level virtue signaling method of... mentioning them. Like, yeah, Nam-gyu called women bitches and intentionally targeted Se-mi because she was a woman, and a few guards assaulted a woman they were harvesting, but nothing of interest was said outside of those events. It felt like shock value for the sake of shock value rather than a real world issue they wanted to address.
Hyun-ju's death was a tragedy, honestly. I loved the girl group so much. I love that they represented raising other women up and standing with your fellow sisters no matter their age, status, or sex assigned at birth because they were all women at the end of the day in a world aimed to pull all of them down. Watching the downfall of that group, starting with the murder of the trans woman, was heartbreaking to me, and so early on in the season too.
I hope this doesn't come off as me complaining about characters I like dying in a show about death games. I accepted Ali's (My favorite SG character before S2) death quickly when I originally watched the first season all the way back in 2021, I fully expected Dae-ho and Hyun-ju to die, and I braced for the possibility Gi-hun would die too. (Although I have less issues with his death compared to other characters I like) I just feel like there's a right way to kill off characters, and most of these deaths just rubbed me the wrong way in ways I tried to explain above. I know many people also have a lot of thoughts on Min-su and Myung-gi, how they were written and killed off, but I just unfortunately don't have much to say about them other than it felt odd that Min-su made it all the way to the final game and I thought Myung-gi was an okay secondary antagonist.
Am I yapping for too long? Should I stop here? Probably, let me know what you think about this season lol
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