the game - reality
The game in real life is what Palestinians live daily during this genocide. The Squid Game inspired GHF checkpoints where Israeli snipers shoot at kids running for food and target specific body parts, they are like the Hunger Games too. I have been seeing these comparisons for a long time, before October 7th, 2023, but they are also being recognized daily by Palestinians trying to survive in Gaza right now. Please understand this. This is their reality and their truth, the most important thing to uphold in this time is Palestinian existence and as what. Every Palestinian life is worth documenting. We must see it all because truth must be seen (1). Ideally truth would be seen by all, but in regards to those who allow truth, it is important that this truth be as recognized as all others. Please understand this. It is undoubtedly, empirically, undeniable that the games portrayed in media and the "games" played in real life are related. I see the influence of three popular shows in particular. Squid Game and The Hunger Games are reality (2), while Succession is a drama about the causers of the pain.
As this website is a space for me, I humbly wish to write about my experiences and say this comparison and relationship is one I've been seeing for years. Like most kids that grew up in the 2010s I read The Hunger Games trilogy and watched all four movies. I also read other dystopian fiction series like Divergent, The Maze Runner, Gone, Matched, The Giver (because of school), and The Pendragon Adventure. I get obsessed and that was an obsession at a young age! So when I got obsessed with Succession in 2023, I began seeing so many parallels and similar lessons with the Capitol and our society, people in power like President Snow and Logan Roy and Donald Trump. Then with Squid Game... Succession and Squid Game are both based in our current reality and their critiques of capitalism are more similar than people realize, and different in important, distinctive ways worth thinking about further. I loved season 1 of SG, and season 2 successfully drew me in. Season 3 was so sad, but I understand so much more about humanity now and started seeing three parallel lines, not just two.
The VIPs of the world sustain the entertainment industry and make pictures, films, shows of the game. Reality and fiction are deeply entwined. Fiction exists because reality exists, and reality can change because of the fiction it creates. Realities are created, forced, influenced, in a constant back-and-forth pinging relationship with unreality. Reality is relationship.
- Every Palestinian life is worth documenting and remembering, from the heart-startingly beautiful and good human caretakers at Sulala Animal Rescue, to every child's moments of happiness they are able to find, to records of countless dystopian pleas to strangers on social media, to victories over the monstrosity of the genocide, to documenting the gruesome reality of what it means to be a Palestinian seeking aid right now, and what cruelty Zionists have set up.
- In The Hunger Games, the rebel alliance gets the Capitol to surrender by staging a double tap by the Capitol against Capitol children and the medics coming in to help the people injured in the first blast. In real life Israel just doubled tapped Nasser Hospital. They commit war crimes daily and none of us live in a good society, from the Palestinians being slaughtered daily and us Capitol citizens in America right now, able to go to grocery stores with 20 brands of cereal to choose from. This double strike is horrifically wrong and action must be taken now, by everybody and by me and by you.
As this website is a space for me, I humbly wish to write about my experiences and say this comparison and relationship is one I've been seeing for years. Like most kids that grew up in the 2010s I read The Hunger Games trilogy and watched all four movies. I also read other dystopian fiction series like Divergent, The Maze Runner, Gone, Matched, The Giver (because of school), and The Pendragon Adventure. I get obsessed and that was an obsession at a young age! So when I got obsessed with Succession in 2023, I began seeing so many parallels and similar lessons with the Capitol and our society, people in power like President Snow and Logan Roy and Donald Trump. Then with Squid Game... Succession and Squid Game are both based in our current reality and their critiques of capitalism are more similar than people realize, and different in important, distinctive ways worth thinking about further. I loved season 1 of SG, and season 2 successfully drew me in. Season 3 was so sad, but I understand so much more about humanity now and started seeing three parallel lines, not just two.
The VIPs of the world sustain the entertainment industry and make pictures, films, shows of the game. Reality and fiction are deeply entwined. Fiction exists because reality exists, and reality can change because of the fiction it creates. Realities are created, forced, influenced, in a constant back-and-forth pinging relationship with unreality. Reality is relationship.
definition of the game
People abuse children, creatively and sadistically kill others of all ages, to create and control power and trauma.
I learned about the game from life first and media second. What connects Succession and Squid Game is money. What connects Succession and The Hunger Games is child abuse. What connects Squid Game and The Hunger Games is creative murder. The whole thing all together is a picture of the game, our real game we're in every day.
the game - in media
"Life isn't knights on horseback. It's a number on a piece of paper. It's a fight for a knife in the mud." Until you experience that savagery you don't know what it's like to be human, or understand life. Yet there truly is some line that exists, and we feel when sanctity is taken away.
food
Food is a human right. Therefore. It is easy to control humans if you control food.
- Squid Game: Starving the players versus the VIPs' feast
- Purposefully underfeeding the players to affect their emotions, decision making, conditions of the game
- The final players getting a feast and suits to make them feel like VIPs for getting that far
- VIPs eat off of human furniture. The dehumanization of others is natural to them
- The Hunger Games: Starving people in the districts versus the over-consumers in the Capitol
- Katniss's experience in District 12 where it is common to starve to death and she faced the same situation after her father died
- Tributes getting their luxury train car and room accommodations with mountains of food, entire stylist and prep team to transform them into celebrities before killing them
- Capitol citizens drinking liquids to make them puke so they can keep eating
- Succession: Starving people in the streets versus luxury dinners, private chefs, stocked fridges of the Roys
- Caroline to Shiv: "I'll have the 48 ounce steak and Daddy, please." saying that Shiv chose Logan and luxury young
- Suffering of others is less shown in this show as its focus is on abuse between capitalists/within the whites of a white supremacist world
children
The Hunger Games makes children kill each other and/or themselves, putting them in extreme yet "natural" arenas like the jungle, the woods, tundra, etc. It is adults abusing children for entertainment and control. Even though all of these shows (and real life) are terrible, I think this is truly the worst we can be, if we live in a society where children actively kill each other every year and everybody's forced to watch. (Forced in the districts, willingly in the Capitol.) This does happen in real life though (children killing each other for others' entertainment) so perhaps reality is the most heinous "game" of all.
Squid Game makes adults kill each other and/or themselves, making them play children's games within a child-like environment. The colors and drawings on the wall seem like they're from children's hands, juxtaposing this innocence and bright view of the world with gruesome cruel death. We see people with personal relationships in the games (Sang-woo and Gi-hun, Geum-ja and Yong-sik, Myung-gi and his baby) and how people would kill their own children because of the game.
Sang-woo and Gi-hun were childhood friends, and Sang-woo kills himself because he realized he cannot emotionally kill Gi-hun the way he could kill strangers/people he bonded with in the game like Ali. They were boys together and Gi-hun always treated him in a familiar way. Geum-ja kills Yong-sik with the same knife she used to cut Jun-hee's baby's umbilical cord, life and death from the same object just minutes within each other. She stabs her son to protect Jun-hee and her daughter, then he kills herself the next day because she could not live without her son or with the guilt of having killed him. Myung-gi is willing to kill his baby for money and his own life, and Gi-hun knows he may have to kill the baby's father to protect the baby and was willing to kill himself for her too. So we see intimate relationships between children (childhood friends or parenthood) terrorized by capitalism.
Succession makes adult abuse each other and/or themselves, their upbringings emotionally stunting them at 7 years old so when they're adults in their 40's, they are children. All of them are still their kid selves in the intro. Logan was abused as a kid by his uncle and society. Consequently, Logan abused his kids and they turned out to be abusive children too. They might get a chance to finally break the cycle... but I guess we'll never see because our society is too scared to allow the truth to exist. The 1% doesn't want to stop this game.
Kendall still clings to the promise Logan made him saying Logan's kingdom will one day become Kendall's. Screaming "I'm the eldest boy!" in the conference room for the reason Shiv should give him the company. Shiv does everything to get her father's attention because she's still that girl outside his office waiting for him, even though he never saw any value in her besides his relationship to him. As she says at his memorial, Logan could not fit the idea of a whole woman in his mind. Roman is forever the most abused son, and the abuse doesn't stop in childhood, it merely starts there. We see Roman get his tooth knocked out by Logan's smack in the face during Argestes and Logan hitting Iverson during Thanksgiving, showing that generational abuse can literally extend past the first relation. Roman takes out his pain on "common people" like embracing fascism and seeks Kendall to abuse him because it brings 'comfort' or perhaps familiarity and reason for existence. Connor's fear of abandonment combined with his wealth allows him to buy someone who won't leave him, even though he's already accepted that he lives without his father's love and will die feeling that way too.
Squid Game makes adults kill each other and/or themselves, making them play children's games within a child-like environment. The colors and drawings on the wall seem like they're from children's hands, juxtaposing this innocence and bright view of the world with gruesome cruel death. We see people with personal relationships in the games (Sang-woo and Gi-hun, Geum-ja and Yong-sik, Myung-gi and his baby) and how people would kill their own children because of the game.
Sang-woo and Gi-hun were childhood friends, and Sang-woo kills himself because he realized he cannot emotionally kill Gi-hun the way he could kill strangers/people he bonded with in the game like Ali. They were boys together and Gi-hun always treated him in a familiar way. Geum-ja kills Yong-sik with the same knife she used to cut Jun-hee's baby's umbilical cord, life and death from the same object just minutes within each other. She stabs her son to protect Jun-hee and her daughter, then he kills herself the next day because she could not live without her son or with the guilt of having killed him. Myung-gi is willing to kill his baby for money and his own life, and Gi-hun knows he may have to kill the baby's father to protect the baby and was willing to kill himself for her too. So we see intimate relationships between children (childhood friends or parenthood) terrorized by capitalism.
Succession makes adult abuse each other and/or themselves, their upbringings emotionally stunting them at 7 years old so when they're adults in their 40's, they are children. All of them are still their kid selves in the intro. Logan was abused as a kid by his uncle and society. Consequently, Logan abused his kids and they turned out to be abusive children too. They might get a chance to finally break the cycle... but I guess we'll never see because our society is too scared to allow the truth to exist. The 1% doesn't want to stop this game.
Kendall still clings to the promise Logan made him saying Logan's kingdom will one day become Kendall's. Screaming "I'm the eldest boy!" in the conference room for the reason Shiv should give him the company. Shiv does everything to get her father's attention because she's still that girl outside his office waiting for him, even though he never saw any value in her besides his relationship to him. As she says at his memorial, Logan could not fit the idea of a whole woman in his mind. Roman is forever the most abused son, and the abuse doesn't stop in childhood, it merely starts there. We see Roman get his tooth knocked out by Logan's smack in the face during Argestes and Logan hitting Iverson during Thanksgiving, showing that generational abuse can literally extend past the first relation. Roman takes out his pain on "common people" like embracing fascism and seeks Kendall to abuse him because it brings 'comfort' or perhaps familiarity and reason for existence. Connor's fear of abandonment combined with his wealth allows him to buy someone who won't leave him, even though he's already accepted that he lives without his father's love and will die feeling that way too.
ideas that need further development
Bread and circuses are done for two reasons. 1) It seems to be a necessary tool to use to control people. 2) It fills life with something other than meaning.
Powerful people idly mull over these questions: What do people do for money? What do people do for fun? What will people do for fun? These questions are about themselves too, even when they're presenting challenges to other people. Logan is the VIP in Squid Game, betting a million dollars on 69 and 96 and I'm sure if Squid Game was in America he'd be making racist as shit bets too.
Within capitalism, power is money. Within imperialism, power is aggression.
Meta thoughts: why are these stories so successful in our society? The Hunger Games became a popular franchise, Squid Game achieved global obsession/praise, Succession set a foundation for white "prestige" dramedy television and won hundreds of awards. We live the game and the "winners" of this society make circuses of themselves playing the game. What a world.
Powerful people idly mull over these questions: What do people do for money? What do people do for fun? What will people do for fun? These questions are about themselves too, even when they're presenting challenges to other people. Logan is the VIP in Squid Game, betting a million dollars on 69 and 96 and I'm sure if Squid Game was in America he'd be making racist as shit bets too.
Within capitalism, power is money. Within imperialism, power is aggression.
Meta thoughts: why are these stories so successful in our society? The Hunger Games became a popular franchise, Squid Game achieved global obsession/praise, Succession set a foundation for white "prestige" dramedy television and won hundreds of awards. We live the game and the "winners" of this society make circuses of themselves playing the game. What a world.