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As Vicki Li writes in a 2019 examination of the concept in The F-Word Magazine, choice feminism is predicated on the incorrect assumption that choices are equally accessible and socially acceptable for everyone. What is and isn’t a choice is infuriatingly unclear it can be difficult to discern our true desires from the options necessitated by oppressive systems. But the conflation of choice and freedom is too often born from fear of critically engaging with the politics that shape these choices. The belief that “choice” is the paramount tenet of feminism is one that in recent years has been invoked to argue for everything from nude selfies to cosmetic surgery. The fallacy that these decisions are made freely and equally is one that women, particularly women of color, are all too accustomed to. Writing about the show in The Atlantic, Morgan Ome puts it succinctly: “For the players, the daily humiliations of being poor are a worse fate than risking death.” The choice to sink or swim is a false one: No one mentions that the waters are infested with sharks, or that the shore is quicksand. Squid Game represents the razor-thin edge of the “choices” that marginalized communities are forced to navigate in a world that isn’t built for them to succeed (and in many ways is relentlessly hostile toward them). “Out there, I don’t stand a chance,” one player reasons. But they quickly discover that their “choice” is an illusion: Saddled with crippling debt and lacking any real alternatives, even the players who voted to end the games voluntarily return. When faced with the brutal reality of the competition in the show’s second episode, the majority of contestants vote to stop playing, and everyone returns to their normal lives. But there’s one notable difference: Squid Game’s contestants are given the choice to compete.
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The prevalent comparison to Squid Game has been, of course, The Hunger Games, whose players fight to the death for a chance to escape desperate circumstances. And it isn’t as dystopian as we’d like it to be-the grotesque spectacle mirrors real-life game shows like Paid Off with Michael Torpey, in which college grads compete to pay off their student loans, and the erstwhile The Activist, whose original premise pitted activists against one another to raise awareness of and funding for their causes. The candy-colored funhouse aesthetics-slot-machine noises, blinking arcade lights, and a giant glass piggy bank suspended from the ceiling, into which bundles of cash are funneled after each round-project an unsettling veneer of whimsy onto games that are quite literally life and death. The real villain is capitalism, a grim message made particularly insidious by the familiar nostalgia of the games themselves, terrifying and deadly adaptations of playground classics like Red Light/Green Light and Tug-of-War.
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And while there’s plenty of blood, to call the series “horror,” or to label the sinister Front Man and the masked game-runners “villains” would be misnomers. On track to become Netflix’s most-watched original content, Squid Game depicts a fictional series of games in which cash-strapped contestants compete for a ₩45.6 billion (approximately $38.7 million USD) prize. He takes his daughter out for a birthday dinner of the cheapest fast food possible, and gifts her a claw-machine prize from an arcade that he had another kid win for him. After stealing money from her to gamble, he promptly loses it and hastily signs a deal with loan sharks to pay off his debts within one month-or risk losing a kidney. The protagonist of the South Korean dystopian drama series, Seong Gi-hun, is an odd choice for a hero: a whiny, spineless, divorced gambling addict who lives with his elderly mother. If you were looking for a cut-and-dried hero-vs.-villain story, Squid Game is not it. This article contains spoilers for Netflix’s Squid Game. Jennifer Chang is Bitch Media’s 2021 Writing Fellow in Pop-Culture Criticism