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| 'Squid Game': Is the Netflix series based on a true story? (Image Credit: Netflix |
The Netflix series Squid Game (whose violence is not for everyone) is not inspired by a true story. Nor is it the distorted version of some obscure twentieth-century Korean TV quiz that relied solely on adult children's games. In the same way, the series is not based on the myth of any Korean secret society that at some point in history has played with the lives of people with debts who will never be able to pay to satisfy the sadistic interest of a bored elite.
What Squid Game is based on is the survival subgenre manga comics that fell into the hands of series creator Dong-hyuk Hwang in 2008 and his personal experience with debt when sitting down. to write the story, right after releasing his first movie. In 2009 he wrote the first script.
So the inspiration is in his real life and in Japanese comics like Battle Royale, As the gods will, or Alice in Borderland, among many others. For that reason, Squid Game reminds you of that other Netflix series Alice in Borderland that adapts the comic to television: they drink from the same genre. In fact, Squid Game has also received criticism for slightly resembling the movie As the gods will in one of the contestants' first tests (basically the giant doll, the first game in episode 1 of the series).
The character of Gi-Hun (Greg Chun) has a lot of Dong-hyuk Hwang, but it happens as with Bong Joon Ho and Parasites, which was born from the reflection of the director and screenwriter of his experience as a math teacher without training or talent for the daughter of a wealthy family. The rest is fiction and social criticism.
Are the squid game and other tests (such as green light, red light) traditional Korean children's games? That is true. They have not made it up for the series. But why precisely squid game? Why this game and not another? "It doesn't take a lot of time or energy to understand the rules of these kinds of games," explained Hwang Dong-hyuk during the promotion of the series. "I wanted to focus on how people act and respond. Usually, we only look at how winners fight, but [in Squid Game] we wanted to focus on losers. Because without losers, are there ever really winners?" explained.
Why did it take Hwang Dong-hyuk twelve years to pull this story forward? "After my debut, I frequented comic shops, read a lot, and thought about creating a comic story. I finished the script in 2009, but it was unknown at the time, and the script was very violent, complex, not commercial," he explained during the presentation. But try, he tried. "I could not raise enough investment, the casting was difficult, I tried to carry it out for a year, but then I let him sleep."
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