If being a participant in Squid Game is a near-certain death warrant, you might as well have your best friend right beside you to keep you sane and focused on winning.
The truly misfortunate make up the player pool of Squid Game - compulsive gamblers, debt-ridden slackers, impoverished immigrants and meat-headed gangsters alike are all pitted against each other for a shot at winning an absurdly huge cash reward.
Due to the fatal consequences of failing a game, which are mostly team-based, players wind up congregating into groups and counting on their fellow players to survive. Two heads are better than one, after all, and trust, cooperation and force of will can go a long way into keeping your team alive.
Considering how they think, behave and act, with which player from the show would you be best friends? Would you be Sang-woo’s conniving companion? Or would you become assassination partners with Sae-byeok? Perhaps you’d even like to be big damn heroes like Ali!
Which Squid Game character is your soulmate? Answer the questions below to find out!
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Squid Game is a grim and unforgiving competition, but none of the main characters would have gotten far without relying on the aid of their fellow players. That doesn’t prevent a certain few from betraying their allies anyway, though.
Friendships are a key theme in the series. We get to see different kinds of friends in people like Sang-woo and Gi-hun, or Sae-byeok and Ji-yeong, or even with Gi-hun and Il-nam. These bonds help make the ordeal of the games a little more bearable, even as many of these friendships turn sour or are cut short.
With life and death on the line, the show asks exactly how far a friendship could go without succumbing to conflict, revealing how ordinary people may think and act in truly desperate situations.
Tragically, betrayal seems to be a common motif among many of the show’s friendships. Sang-woo conned a man who looked up to him as a mentor out of his chance to survive, Il-nam misled Gi-hun into thinking he was a defenceless old man, and even Mi-nyeo paid back the gangster Deok-su for an earlier betrayal by killing him.
Imagining one of the characters of Squid Game as your soulmate can be a sobering, but fun, thought exercise for understanding how the people you trust or accompany can act to help or hurt you in difficult situations.
The challenges in Squid Game draw their roots from classic playground games in Korea. While innocuous on their own, the fact that players get killed when failing a game in the series adds a sinister twist to these childhood pastimes.
We’ll discuss the origins of some of Squid Game’s challenges briefly below.
Mugunghwa kkoci pieot seumnida – Red Light, Green Light. The actual meaning of the Korean phrase corresponds to the hibiscus flower (mugunghwa) and its period for blooming (kkoci pieot seumnida).
Dalgona – Sugar Honeycomb. “Dalgona” is a staple South Korean sweet treat, with a shape imprinted on a flat, molten sugar base. Eating around this shape sometimes nets kids another honeycomb.
Ojingeo – Squid Game. Named after the shape of the playing area, players are split into attacking and defending teams vying to cross or restrict access to different parts of the field.
Apart from their insufferable personas in the show, the actors that play the VIPs in Squid Game have been criticized for their stilted and unnatural acting in English.
One of the actors, John D. Michaels, explains that non-Korean dialogues often have to deal with last-minute scripts that are usually translated by people who don’t naturally speak English.
Michaels also adds that they could not completely rewrite their lines as they did not have access to the full story and background of the series.
For a graduate with honors and the “Pride of Ssamun-dong”, Sang-woo seems to have hit rock bottom. While he maintains an appearance as a successful businessman, he is secretly ridden with debts and financial losses amounting to billions of Korean won.
Sang-woo used his mother’s belongings as collateral for his disastrous investments. Despite being seen as a ruthless villain, he couldn’t countenance the thought of breaking her mother’s heart and resolved to join the Squid Game as a way to pay back his debts.
