Slipperiest Game 2: The Failure of Narrative Design in Squid Game's Later Seasons

My big problems:

The Murder Game. Until Tag was introduced, there was never a game where one player had to go out of their way to murder another player in order to win and survive. In every other game, murder was an *option* and the consequence of loss was always death, but it was possible to win without killing a person yourself. The “System” outsourced most of the actual violence. Tag fundamentally changed this and by doing so changed the dynamic and the social contract of the show entirely. There was no longer a plausible separation between winning and murder. The staff did the murder. The consequence for losing was death and your life was equally on the line. Not so in Tag. 

The fucking baby. One of the fundamental rules of the Squid Game event is that everyone is there by choice. It’s one of the themes that was hammered on in the first season, and it mirrored the capitalist rat race beautifully. Everyone was doing this of their own free will, and the second season even introduced voting between rounds to ensure that people were kept in the games by the Will of the People. But the baby didn’t consent and couldn’t consent to being involved in the games. The baby was an unwilling participant, and making the baby a ‘player’ undermined any trust the real players may have had that the games were in any way fair. 

Now, the games are _not_ fair. They never were. They rely on financial coercion, the illusion of fairness, random chance, positional chance, and the exploitation of personal relationships. But it maintains a facade. All of that breaks down with the baby.

And I kinda get where they were going with this. I get that it’s illustrative of the unfairness of the institutions Squid Game is trying to criticize. The rules were never fair, the people running the games never cared about fairness at all, the whole thing is spectacle. But it also fundamentally undermines the premise of the games in a way that would be ruinous for anything other than a shadowy international rich-man’s dog fight.