Independent Thinking

456 people dressed in green tracksuits are placed on a giant chessboard. They gamble with their lives for a seemingly grand reward of 45.6 billion won. Yet behind the illusion of fairness, every participant, every guard, and even the viewers beyond the screen are merely pieces in the hands of the system, their distant gazes absorbed as part of its design. When one season ends, a new game begins. Violence is repeated, repackaged, and sold again. This is the very reality that Squid Game reveals, a system that commercializes both violence and humanity. Across its three seasons, Squid Game no longer frames itself as a story of heroic resistance to a dehumanizing game structure. Instead, it turns violence into a consumable moral spectacle by pulling even its most humane characters into its rules. Seong Gi-hun’s crossing the line into killing is not presented as growth but as a deliberate removal of him as a “pure resistor,” allowing the game’s violent logic to persist and remain marketable ...