Netflix's Squid Game became a global smash hit in 2021 and managed to maintain that status nearly three years later with the recent release of Season 2 (which ends on an insanely frustrating cliffhanger). Anticipation for the third and final season of the South Korean survival thriller is at an all-time high right now, as the fates of its characters — both fresh and returning — remain up in the air. The true culprits behind the title games are still a mystery to Seong Gi-hoon/Player 456 (Lee Jung-jae), who is seen entering the dehumanizing death match one more time in the second season of the show, because he wants to close the games for good. The latest iteration of the games looks bloodier than everexposing hideous human tendencies when faced with a survival scenario designed to encourage the worst in us.

While the explosive popularity of The Squid Game can be traced back to series creator/director Hwang Dong-hyuk's taut, engaging vision and the spirited performances that anchor it, social media trends undoubtedly played an integral role in helping the series gain attractiveness. The TikTok trends that have swept the series have partly helped cement it in pop culture, be it in the form of viral fancams, theory crafting in bite-sized formats, or hyper-specific memes. Season 2 is no exception to this ongoing virality, as you must have come across the recent "Mingle Dance" trend on TikTok, which is all about a certain challenge of the new season. You may have come across thousands of pop-up fan cams actor Lee Byung-hun, whose turn it is "The Human Front". left audiences curious about his other film contributions over the years.

Unfortunately, this obsessive checking can be a double-edged sword. Days after the show's Season 2 premiere, a now-viral TikTok video claimed that the "real-life" Squid Game took place in 1986, in an "underground bunker in no man's land, where people were kept and had to complete several games to survive" (via Korea Times). This claim was accompanied by images of what appeared to be a derelict warehouse with picturesque walls and staircases, similar to the show's grand labyrinthine lobby. The pictures also show groups of people, presented as unwilling participants in these supposedly inhumane games of death. This video has been shared over 17,000 times and currently has over 50,000 likes.

This claim, and some of the images shared along with it, have been proven undeniably false.

The photos used in the viral TikTok were of real inmates from Brothers Home, an internment camp in Busan that was active during the 1970s and 80s. These real, terrifying images were mixed with AI-generated components of a pink-and-green-walled warehouse to intentionally tie in the Netflix series. False insinuations that The Squid Game is a dramatic reimagining of the real-life crimes that took place in the frat house can be traced back to similar internet rumors surrounding the first season, bolstered by media articles repeating these baseless claims at the time. Needless to say, it's a shame that the reality of Brothers Home is laced with a fictional show to produce shock value, with insight or empathy removed from the equation.

The horrors of Brothers Home warrant lengthy and nuanced discussions, but here are some unusual facts about a Korean internment camp masquerading as a welfare facility. South Korea in the 1970s and 80s underwent grassroots reform efforts as preparations for the Seoul Olympics were rampant, prompting a nationwide overhaul. This period was preceded by the ongoing aftermath of the Korean War, which forced the government to focus its attention on the most affected demographics. However, instead of rehabilitating the most vulnerable social groups, the government decided to "clean up" all symbols of "disorder" in order to strengthen its natural reputation before the Olympics. The Social Services Act of 1970 legitimized the arrest and detention of anyone deemed by the authorities to be a "vagrant", including orphaned/unsupervised children and people with disabilities.

Investigations at the Brothers Home, which was a paper welfare center, revealed that inmates were subjected to forced labor, sexual violence and horrific psychological torture. The testimonies that have emerged post-investigation revealed that chemical drugs were often force-fed prior to abuse, and contemporary reports list a total of 657 deaths at the Brothers Home. No one has been held legally accountable for these deaths and the alleged human rights violations that occurred inside the facility to date.

The primary themes running through The Squid Game may be pretty heavy-handed, but any fictional premise that firmly critiques capitalism and its output (and focuses on what makes us human) is more than welcome in my book. Hwang Dong-hyuk juxtaposes hellish death matches with the borderline unbearable real world, where people are burdened by huge debts and desperate efforts to make ends meet. Although the ethos surrounding The Squid Games is undeniably dehumanizing and hypocriticalthese moral loopholes are easy to bypass for those with their backs against the wall, who are willing to pay anyone price for a glowing piggy bank containing 45.6 billion won.

In 2021 Guardian interviewDong-hyuk explained that the idea for The Squid Game came from his financial situation in 2009, as a result of the global financial crisis that hit him and his family pretty hard:

"I was very tight financially because my mother retired from the company she worked for. There was a film I was working on, but we couldn't get financing. So I couldn't work for about a year. We had to take out loans - my mother, me and my grandmother (...) I read Battle Royal and Liar Game and other survival comics I related to the people in them who were desperate for money and success was a low point in my life If in reality there was such a survival game, I wondered if I would join it to earn money for my family, I realized that since I was a filmmaker, I could put my own touch? stories like this, so I started the script."

Regarding the title of the series, the director stated that as a child he played the "squid game", a version of tag that relies on physical strength for the winner to make his way to a squid head drawn on the ground. “I used to be good at fighting to the squid's head. You had to fight to win,” Dong-hyuk said, laying out his inspiration for depicting the thematic layers behind the pyrrhic victory and Gi-hoon's eventual return.