Squid Game / Tropes J to Z

Squid Game Trope Examples
A - I | J - Z

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K

• Karma Houdini: All of the game staff, except for a handful of guards, get away scot-free by the final episode.
  • Played with in regards to Il-nam, the Host and founder of the games. He dies at the end, but of natural causes and after getting all the fun he wanted as a player. At the same time, he loses his final "game" with Gi-hun, and gets to see his philosophy proven wrong when someone helps the drunk that he believed would be left to die.
• Kick the Dog: Deok-su is introduced beating on Sae-byeok, establishing him as a brute.
• Killed Offscreen:
  • Gi-hun walks away so he doesn't have to watch Il-nam get shot, only hearing the gunshot. It turns out that Il-nam wasn't killed at all.
  • Similarly, the audience does not see the moment in which Ali is killed—only the shot and Sang-woo flinching. We do see his corpse being taken away in the next episode, however.
  • During the 5th game, Mi-nyeo is left surrounded by guards with machine guns, apologizing for their fate. It turns out she wasn't killed, because not having a partner meant she automatically passed.
• Killer Game Master: While all the games are deadly, the first two contain the possibility, however remote, that every player could survive. From Game 3 on, the challenges are designed to kill other players, if not directly then as a consequence of others winning. Game 5 is technically winnable without death, but the odds are so astronomically long as to be functionally irrelevant.
• Kill the Poor: The contestants for the Deadly Game are drawn from the lowest dregs of society, people who are either very poor or deeply in debt, whether through circumstances beyond their control or through their own poor judgment. Then they are coerced to participate in the Games for a money prize that will solve their financial problems if they survive that long, all for the amusement of a collection of insanely rich clients. This also makes it less likely that the authorities will actually go and investigate the disappearance of all these missing and murdered people.

L

• Lack of Empathy:
  • Inherent to the very idea of the series, with the very point of the games for the creators and ultra-wealthy to observe and bet on human beings facing horrible deaths for the slim chance of money. The Front Man states that it is their version of normal people betting on horses, and while the players legitimately choose to participate, it's clear that debt, bad luck, and other factors they face in regular life means that the choice is effectively a Morton's Fork between a slow death or a quick one, and the organizers take advantage of that suffering to have a steady supply of players. Gi-hun is profoundly enraged and traumatized by the deaths of so many just for amusement of others above them, and ends the series determined to put a stop to the games.
  • The Host, revealed to be Il-nam, explains in "One Lucky Day" that the original idea of the games came from the super-rich having so few problems in their lives that they became profoundly bored, and ultimately got together and discovered a new way to have some incredibly twisted "fun", he flippantly dismisses the deaths of the other contestants (literally over 400 people), as they were never outright forced into it.
  • Appropriately, the final "game" of the series is based solely around this. Gi-hun and Il-nam decide to challenge the latter's perception of humanity by having a simple bet as to whether anybody on a busy street will provide aid to a drunk homeless man before midnight. There's no money involved, no risk to life for either participant, just two men placing their faith in others to achieve the outcome they desire. Despite the clock running close to the deadline, ultimately Gi-hun wins, with Il-nam passing away from his brain tumor shortly after witnessing his loss and realizing that Humans Are Flawed, but there is still goodness in the world. It's this that galvanizes Gi-hun to enter the games again, in order to bring the other game masters down and prevent others from continuing a contest that forces contestants to embrace a dispassion for humanity.
• Last Day of Normalcy: Much of the first episode is spend conveying how miserable and hopeless Gi-hun's life is to explain why he would agree to partake in the games.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: When Mi-nyeo kills Deok-su and herself, one VIP notes that that was the perfect end to their character arc.
• Loan Shark:
  • Their ubiquity across South Korea is a major reason why hundreds of people agreed to enter the game. At the start of the series, a group of sharks threatened to cut open Gi-hun, who had his horse race winnings stolen by a pickpocket. When he begged for just one more month to repay them, they forced him to sign a contract... with his nose blood.
  • The final episode reveals that the Squid Game's creator got the money to fund the game's base, equipment and prize money by being a loan shark preying on vulnerable people himself. He merely got bored with all his wealth and decided to return parts of it to those who survive and win his games.
• LOL, 69: VIP 4 bets 1 million dollars on contestant 069's survival till the very end purely because of the innuendo of that number. After 069 dies, he goes for 096 instead, only for him to die shortly after as well, pushing him to give up on the game and entertain himself with the apparent waiter instead.
• Loophole Abuse: The rules for the games and the players occasionally allow some leeway.
  • In Game 2, players are given a single needle alongside their dalgona candy, presumably to use to extract the shape out of the latter. However, it's not explicitly mentioned that they have to use the needle to extract the shape, which is why Ali and Gi-hun pass the task simply by breaking off and licking the excess, respectively.
  • In Game 4, Deok-su is able to change the game he's playing with his partner because he reasons that it's only fair for both players to get to play the game of their choice. The guard agrees.
  • In the same game, Sang-woo covertly swaps Ali's marbles with rocks and convinces him to go off on a Snipe Hunt. He then presents the combined marbles to the guard and notes that the rules only said they had to obtain the marbles without violence, which he did.
• Lost in Translation: Some crucial information gets lost in the English dub and subtitles.
  • Ali is hit with it possibly the hardest, because it makes him seem "dumb" or makes his decisions hard to understand for viewers. For example:
    • The English dub and subs omit the fact that Sang-woo was asking Ali to call him older brother in Korean (hyung), which better explains why Ali trusted him even when he shouldn't. As a poor, young, dark-skinned migrant who speaks Korean as a second language (i.e. someone exceptionally marginalized in Korean society), the fact that Sang-woo — who is Korean and projects an impeccably respectable (if fraudulent) image — actively invites Ali to use that honorific is a massive deal. It would also be especially meaningful for Ali because the honorific has connotations of family, and Ali's entire family is in Pakistan, far away from him. So, while trusting Sang-woo may be baffling from an outside perspective, it's completely understandable when you factor all of these things paired with the fragile emotional state of Ali (and the players in general).
    • The dub and subs also make it seem like Ali does not know what odd and even numbers are at all, but it's obvious in the original Korean that Ali was simply unfamiliar with the Korean words for "odd" and "even".
  • In the Korean audio, the "Red Light, Green Light" game uses a girl's voice reciting a musical cue to indicate how long before the motion sensor turns its head each round. In the English dub, the voice merely shouts "Green Light! ... Red light!". In the original audio, it's much easier for players to anticipate when the round ends once they become familiar with the tune, which makes it seem in the English dub that some of the players somehow know to stop just before "Red Light" is called.
  • A trivial example, but "Marbles" showcases a giant cultural difference. American and European viewers would expect players to begin drawing circles in the dirt and flicking marbles, but the majority of players default to "Odds or Evens". In Western culture, this is barely a game, but apparently in South Korean culture it's the most widespread use of marbles for play.

M

• Malevolent Masked Men:
  • The Guards are dressed in pink jumpsuits and wear masks with different shapes according to their rank.
    • Workers (being the low-ranked of the three) wear masks with a circle.
    • Soldiers (the middle-ranked) wear masks with a triangle.
    • Managers (the high-ranked) wear masks with a square.
  • Their leader, the Front Man, wears a 3D geometric mask along with a black suit and Badass Longcoat.
  • The VIPs who come to watch the last two games appear wearing shiny, gold-colored helmets with animal motifs.
  • Similarly, the Host sports a gold-colored mask with the animal motif of an owl (symbolizing his intelligence).
  • The waiters serving the VIPs sport black masks with only their eyes showing.
• The Man in Front of the Man: The Front Man is in charge of overseeing the games, but answers to the Host, who does not appear in person until the end. The Host is disguised as one of the players, even faking his own death to maintain his cover. Also an Exaggerated Trope; the players have to follow orders from the soldiers, who follow orders from the supervisors, who follow orders from the Front Man.
• Match Cut: The scene of Mi-nyeo dragging Deok-su to fall to their deaths in the bridge crossing game is immediately cut by their chess pieces falling off the model bridge.
• Mob Debt: Main character Gi-Hun has accumulated a massive amount of debt he owes loan sharks, and they beat him up in a public bathroom for being late on his payment. This, along with being able to provide for his daughter, is his main motivation for initially entering the Squid Games.
• Morton's Fork: The players can vote to Stay or Leave at any time if somebody calls for a vote, but by leaving alive and empty-handed, nobody's situation changes on the outside. The "choice" boils down to possible quick death with a chance at escaping debt, or a slow death by loansharks and poverty. Unsurprisingly, the great majority of people who left in Episode 1 return by Episode 2. It's noted that fourteen people don't come back, and while the company keeps an eye on them, there's no indication that they get punished. Even so, their situation having not changed means that it's going to be a slow death for them.
• Mugged for Disguise: Jun-ho does this twice throughout the series. He first steals a guard's uniform by subduing one of them who are tasked with driving the players to the island, and then he points a gun at one of the Front Man's waiters so that he can disguise himself as that waiter.

N

• Never Found the Body: Jun-ho is shot in the shoulder and falls into the ocean, but we don't see him die, so it's possible he's still alive. His character was later confirmed to return for Season 2.
• Nightmarish Nursery: This is the visual aesthetic of the contest's isolated facility. Because the contest essentially consists of deadly versions of childhood games, most of the arenas mimic the kind of settings the games might have been played in, from parks to schoolyards. Even the bizarre, brightly-colored staircase between arenas looks like something out of a funhouse. The second game's arena hews the closest to this, featuring an indoor playground with walls painted to look like the outside, and giant climbing frames and swingsets clearly meant to make the adult players feel like children.
• No Dead Body Poops: Not only do the players killed in the game never have anything more disgusting than blood and gore, when Gi-hun returns home in the final episode and finds his mother dead, there's no smell in the apartment to clue him in.
• No Fair Cheating: The Front Man makes it clear that anyone who tries to cheat to get an advantage, they'll be eliminated. Player 111 (Byeong-gi) and a few other guards learned that the hard way.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: After a man complains about not getting food, Player 198, who saw Deok-su and his gang go for seconds, points them out. This leads to Deok-su targeting her during the following night, making her the first kill of the night brawl.
• No Indoor Voice: Mi-nyeo makes every conversation into a presentation about herself to the entire room. She even whispers so loudly that she ends up spoiling Sae-byeok's otherwise clean snooping operation to at least one sleeping player in the middle of the night.
• Not the First Victim: When Jun-ho investigates the games' archives in Episode 5, it's shown that the games have been going on since at least 1988, and judging by the number of files, probably a lot longer.

O

• Oh, Crap!: The series has a lot of this. Some notable examples include:
  • A case of Mass "Oh, Crap!"; in the first game, after the first losers are graphically executed, an outright bloodbath ensues, as the rest of the players running for the exit doors terrified triggers the motion sensors, and the bullets start flying.
  • In the second game, Gi-hun gives one when he realizes that he just picked the most difficult shape (the umbrella) among the honeycomb patterns. Mi-nyeo and Deok-su also react similarly once they realized they picked the next most difficult shape (the star).
  • Episode 4 has two cases:
    • In another example of Mass "Oh, Crap!", it clearly hits all the players hard to discover there's no penalty if they kill each other, meaning they all need to keep a careful eye on a lot of people who are very motivated to bump them off.
    • In the third game, Mi-nyeo reacts like this realizing her team's opponents in the tug-of-war are all male — she is, after all, one of three women on the team.
  • The fourth game is full of this. The players are told the game will be played in pairs and are asked to find a partner. Mi-nyeo ends up unable to find one to her shock and gets dragged away by the game staff presumably for punishment (she instead gets to return to the dorms and avoid playing the round entirely). And then the rest of the partnered players are told they will be playing against each other, which leads to serious emotional implications between comrades that have partnered up for friendship or teamwork, and even between the Happily Married couple 069 and 070, who are now forced to kill their spouse in order for either one of them to live.
  • In the fifth game, Player 096 understandably gives one when he just sentenced himself to death by choosing to be the first player.
  • In the same game, Sae-byeok gets one when she realizes that she's just been impaled by a glass shard.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Sae-byeok's breakdown when Ji-yeong sacrifices herself for her, given how reserved and emotionless she usually is.
• Organ Theft: Justified as most of the players were either forced or willingly signed their bodies forfeit unto a waiver due to poverty. A few of the guards start a side hustle where they harvest organs from the dead players. To this end, they recruit one of the players who is a doctor, giving him hints about the upcoming games in exchange for him performing surgery. This ends when the Front Man finds out and murders the guard running the operation as well as the doctor. He states that he doesn't care if they harvest or sell the organs, but he draws the line at cheating, as it destroys the integrity and equality of the games.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic:
  • Employed judiciously in Game 4. Pairs of players are given ten marbles each and told to choose what game to play to ensure one player eventually ends up with all the marbles; the player who loses all their marbles dies. The only caveats are that both players must agree to the conditions they establish for themselves and that they can't use violence to gain each other's marbles. Given the open-ended rules, multiple players think outside the box to achieve their desired result.
  • Sang-woo exploits the fact you don't necessarily need to win games to get marbles and, through glibness and trickery, convinces Ali to abandon his marbles; once given over to the Pink Guard watching them, Sang-woo wins.
  • The games can be thrown by a clever player; Sae-byeok wins in her marbles match with Ji-yeong as a result of agreeing to an 'all-or-nothing' game where the players throw a marble at a wall and determined the winner by whose marble made it closest that Ji-yeong throws simply by feigning a poor attempt. Because both agreed to the game terms, Ji-yeong was able to force the win on Sae-byeok.
  • Finally, the players themselves are allowed to actively cheat so long as the other player doesn't call them out. Gi-hun uses Il-nam's brain tumor to his advantage by preying on his poor memory and altering his answers to a guessing game - though Il-nam is feigning his poor memory. Il-nam was also allowed to simply give his final marble to Gi-hun after giving the man the run-around.

P

• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": When Gi-Hun finally gets his credit card containing his prize money, he wasn't informed what the passcode was. Naturally, he typed out 0456, and it worked.
• Perpetual Poverty: The game players are all either poor, in deep debt, or otherwise in hard financial straits, and are desperate enough to risk their lives for the equivalent of a lottery win.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Il-nam casting the deciding vote to let the players go home and summoning Gi-hun to persuade him to use the prize money.
  • When Mi-nyeo helps Deok-su win the 2nd game by loaning him her lighter, he takes the time to thank her and return the lighter to her.
• Police Are Useless: Double subverted. After returning from the first game, Gi-hun immediately goes to a police station to tell them about what he's been through, but absolutely nobody believes his story because of how ridiculous it all sounds. When Gi-hun provides them with the calling card with a phone number he used to contact the game organizers, it turns out the organizers also account for this as well and connected it to a random person's number instead, which discredits Gi-hun's story even further. Only Detective Jun-ho believes his story, due to his missing brother receiving the same card before he disappeared. And Jun-ho gathers lots of intel on the games and their organizers before he is caught and killed, rendering his investigation useless.
• The Psycho Rangers: Deok-su's gang serves as this throughout the first half of the series.
  • The Big Bad: Or rather The Heavy for Jang Deok-su, being the leader of the gang of players causing the most trouble for the protagonists.
  • The Dragon: Player 278, being his Number Two who accompanies Deok-su up until Game 4. He also comes off as The Starscream, as he has no problem playing against his "boss" during a game of Marbles.
  • The Evil Genius: Byeong-gi AKA Player 111, who (besides being a mole for the game staff due to his malpractice experience) acts as an informant of the next games to Deok-su's gang.
  • The Brute: Players 040 and 303. They're dumb muscles who are mostly used for intimidation.
  • Han Mi-nyeo, The Smurfette Principle of the group who is very outspoken, actually comes up with clever ideas to Deok-su's advantage (i.e. giving Deok-su the lighter, cutting in line for seconds), and briefly enters a relationship with Deok-su. She ends up kicked off the gang during the game of Tug-of-War and joins Gi-hun's team as The Sixth Ranger.

R

• Rags to Riches: Subverted with Gi-hun after he wins the games and the prize money. Technically, he's gone from being so impoverished that he had to deal with loan sharks to having more money than he could ever spend. However, the guilt and trauma that it took to get said money leaves Gi-hun unable to spend any of it. By the time Il-nam summons him, he looks ten times worse than he did at the beginning.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Horrifying as most of the violence is, even when he has one of the guard at his mercy, Jun-ho seems willing to let him go providing he knows his brother wasn't one of the victims. After the guard reveals (in an effort to try and prove the last corpse was a woman) that he and some of the others had sex with her dead body, Jun-ho shoots him anyway.
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: How Jun-ho's arc ends in Episode 8. He can only stare in hurt and betrayal on seeing that his beloved older brother In-ho reveals himself as the Front Man, asking "Brother, why?" as In-ho shoots him in the shoulder and knocks him off a cliff. Yet...he made a Distress Call to his chief, explaining the situation on limited service, and the Front Man acknowledges there is a possibility that the files of evidence he sent made it through despite the single bar reception. Plus, smartphones tend to have automatic backups to a remote cloud, meaning the evidence could be on a server somewhere. There is also the fact that we don't see a body, and In-ho didn't aim for the head.
• Red Herring:
  • Jun-ho is shown through a secret passage that is meant to allow the VIPs to escape, with an explosive meant to collapse the passage. Though almost everything about this passage comes into play later, its actual purpose and the explosive does not, at least not in the first season.
  • We get a close up of the ventilation grate's loose bolt that Sae-byeok hastily jammed back into place before being escorted out of the bathroom, but nobody ever actually notices it out of place.
  • In game 3, when players had to team up for the first time, and those who picked strong teammates ended up with a major advantage. Game 4 requires participants to find a partner to compete with, leading many into attempting to find strong teammates once more. Surely, each duo will compete against others, right? As it turns out, this time around each player will compete not with their teammate like in game 3, but against their teammate, much to the dismay of many. This includes an unfortunate duo who are married to each other.
• Refuge in Audacity:
  • How the game staff get away with their crimes. The entire concept of the game— adults being forced to play rounds of games for children, with death as the losing penalty—sounds absolutely ridiculous, and it sounds even more unbelievable that the perpetrators would offer their victims cash prizes or let them leave. When Gi-hun tries to report the game, the police thought he is a crazy drunk. It helps that they target the dregs of society, who are less likely to be believed in the first place.
  • Jun-ho also attempts to arrest the Front Man and several pink guards when they corner him on a cliff on a deserted island. He reveals that he called for backup, and demands that they surrender to him. The Front Man respects that his little brother has a set of balls on him when attempting to convince him to surrender.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: A revolver to the head is the guards' preferred method of executing contestants. The guards are frequently seen carrying long guns while watching over the games for dealing with an unruly contestant, but a revolver is just more dramatic.
• Rewatch Bonus: There are various hints in the series which are likely not visible upon first viewing, as pointed out in the Foreshadowing page and Freeze-Frame Bonus at the previous trope example page.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Gi-hun's backstory of being a former automobile factory worker who is afflicted with PTSD after a worker's strike he organized was brutally quashed by authorities is most likely inspired by the SsangYong Motor Company strike of 2009, which similarly ended in police violence. Further evidence to this is that Gi-hun mentions that he missed his own daughter's birth because he had to help a dying friend during the strike; Gi-hun's daughter is 10-11 years old, and the show is set in mid-2020. Also, the company Gi-hun used to work with is called Dragon Motors; "SsangYong" means "Double Dragon" in Korean.
• Rule of Symbolism: The figures used to draw the Squid Game have been interpreted as a symbolization of human society. The square represents the bulk of the population, the unwashed masses that simply go through life. The triangle above it represents the privileged managerial class that controls them. The circle at the bottom represents the very poorest people in society who are about to fall out of it completely and are preyed on to take part in the games. The top circle represents the shadowy top of the ruling elite, that conspires to create the games.

S

• Sacrificial Lamb: Two players, 324 and 250, are given enough focus when the games start to make viewers think they're going to be among the main cast. They are the first two to be eliminated.
• Sanity Slippage: As can be expected in a high-stakes series of games where the losers get "eliminated" — or literally killed off.
  • After the sugar honeycomb game, the already high-strung No. 119, knowing he's lost, snaps and shoots a guard, then threatens to shoot another — before shooting himself when the guard unmasks himself and reveals he's barely much older than a teenager.
  • No. 111 loses it after he is repeatedly told by the corrupt guards he's working with that they don't know what the next game is. The sleep deprivation, hunger, and stress from the challenges do not help with how it's implied he's uncomfortable with performing impromptu organ extraction.
• Scenery Dissonance: The games take place in brightly coloured sets inspired by playgrounds. Meanwhile, the people playing are killed for losing, either as a consequence or as part of the game.
• Sentry Gun: How players are eliminated in the first game. In subsequent games losing players are either shot by the guards or die by falling.
• Sequel Hook: Come the end of the Season 1 finale, multiple plot threads are either put in place or left unresolved to potentially set up the events of Season 2.
  • While we don't see if Jun-ho's proof got sent to his boss, the chief did receive his Distress Call and became alarmed when Jun-ho said that he needed backup on an island in the middle of nowhere. Not to mention most smartphones automatically save copies of their data to a remote cloud, meaning the data may still exist somewhere. The Front Man also acknowledges that it would be an extremely long shot that the Korean police would open an investigation, but that if it happened, it would take so long owing to the police's corruption and lack of efficiency, long enough for the organization to initiate a coverup.
  • The Salesman is still recruiting people every year and even gives Gi-hun a So Long, Suckers! wave when he sees him giving the card to another potential player and fails to stop him. Looks like the 2022 games are going on as planned.
  • Gi-hun gets his second chance to mend ties with his daughter thanks to the winnings, which would probably help him pay the child support he owes. But after his run-in with the Salesman, he's motivated to confiscate the card from the man he was playing ddakju with, tell him not to dial the number or play the games, and call himself to demand answers. The Front Man comes on and gently but firmly orders Gi-hun to let it go and get on the plane to see his daughter, revealing that his every move is still being tracked. This call motivates Gi-hun to turn around, determined now more than ever to put a stop to the games for good.
• Serious Business:
  • These recreations of children's games are a matter of life and death. It's darkly humorous to watch grown adults trying to carve out honeycomb shapes in a giant fake playground with their lives hanging in the balance.
  • Mi-nyeo is revealed to have smuggled contraband into the games via her Victoria's Secret Compartment. It turns out to be... a few cigarettes. The lighter, however, does turn out to be a Chekhov's Gun, saving her and Deok-su during their challenges.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • Jun-ho is shot dead by his own brother, the Front Man. It's implied his message to his superiors doesn't get through, though his boss is alarmed to receive a Distress Call and a garbled Jun-ho telling him he needs backup, and his entire investigation comes to nothing, without any of the contestants knowing that he was ever there. However, his plot thread does give us a lot of insight and exposition into how the games are run, and why.
  • Gi-hun only returns to the game because his mother needs an operation that costs 4 million won. She dies while he's competing.
• Shout-Out: The series makes several to the various films of Stanley Kubrick:
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey:
    • The version of the Blue Danube Waltz that plays when the players enter the game is the same as in 2001.
    • The Ascetic Aesthetic of the waiting room for some games, with the pink outfits of the Guards contrasted against the stark white, calls to mind 2001's moon lobby with its pink chair.
    • The reveal of Oh Il-nam as the host of the games as he lays dying in bed strongly mirrors 2001's final shot of Dave Bowman lying in bed with the Monolith in front of him. Il-nam's bedsheets are even the same shade of green as Dave's, with Gi-hun, dressed in all-black, presumably standing in for the Monolith. That the players even had a fancy dinner shortly their final game also mirrors this portion of 2001, as even though it's been a year's time later, 2001's ending is also implied to take place over the course of a very long time.
  • The VIP's costumes seem to be drawn from Eyes Wide Shut, with similar golden masks and a similar depiction of depraved elites.
  • The bunkers the players sleep in have been compared to the barracks from Full Metal Jacket, albeit on a much larger and more surreal scale.
  • Unrelated to Kubrick, there's also a little bit of The Prisoner (1967), with the way characters are unexpectedly doused with sleeping gas and wake up in a dystopian prison that mixes innocuous imagery with brutal authoritarianism, and are referred to only by assigned numbers. Gi-hun's final words to the Front Man before hanging up was "I am not a horse. I am a person", which resembles Number 6's arc words.
  • The Matrix gets name dropped. Mi-nyeo only remembered it as "that movie where that guy swims backwards".
• Sigil Spam: The circle, triangle, and square symbols of the games are everywhere: the calling cards, the guards' masks, and the sets where the games take place.
• Sinister Geometry:
  • The game uses a circle, a triangle, and a square as its symbol, and appear all throughout the games. They're derived from the final, actual Squid Game.
  • Several of the shapes in the honeycomb game are also geometric figures, except the umbrella.
• Slowly Slipping Into Evil: Sang-woo seems to be friendly, and encouraging to both Gi-hun and Ali, but as the game goes on he eventually becomes vicious and willing to murder to get the money.
• The Smart Guy: Sang-woo is the strategist of Gi-hun's team of allies. He makes it to the final game mostly through his clever tactics and willingness to exploit others.
• Soft Glass: Very much averted when the glass bridge explodes at the conclusion of Game 5, sending shards of razor-sharp glass flying everywhere, slicing into the skin of the remaining players, most notably impaling Sae-byeok in the abdomen.
• Spotting the Thread: Jun-ho manages to hide from everyone, even from the Front Man himself, by hiding in the Front Master's office. Until in episode 7, The Front Man notices that the telephone receiver is on the right side (he usually puts it the other way) and only the Front Man & the VIPs are allowed inside.
• Suddenly Always Knew That: In the fifth game, it turns out Player 017 is an experienced glassmaker, which allows him to tell the difference between the safe and deadly glass panels. The game makers failed to account for this when designing the game, even though it was in his file, so the Front Man lowers the lights to take away his unfair advantage.
• Suddenly Shouting: At first, Deoku-su tries let Mi-neyeo down SOMEWHAT gently on not letting her join his team, but she continues to persist Deoku-su throws any civility (as well as Mi-neyeo herself) to the floor and yells for her to get off him.
• Survivor Guilt: The players feel this the further they progress through the games. Ultimately, Gi-hun manages to survive all six games. However, most of the people he knows are dead and he is completely consumed with guilt about it to the point that he doesn't even touch the reward money for a year.

T

• Technical Euphemism: In the first episode, Player 324 is caught moving during the game of Red Light, Green Light. The announcer says he's been "eliminated", and he is shot dead.
• Terminally-Ill Criminal: Il-nam, who's dying of a brain tumor, is ultimately revealed to be the contest's Host, although he began his job well before his diagnosis.
• There Can Be Only One: It takes some time for the players to realize it, but there can only be one winner, as Jun-ho discovers when he finds the history records for the winners of the game. Gi-hun attempts to defy this by offering to split the money with Sae-byeok if they team up to defeat Sang-woo, but Sae-byeok's murder stops this from happening.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: The guards and staff who run the game are no more than regular everyday people, just like the contestants. When Player 119 learns about this by forcing one of the guards to unmask, he is so horrified at the implications that he immediately shoots himself. Oh Il-nam, the creator of the game and the true Big Bad, is literally a frail old man whom nobody even suspected until The Reveal.
• Tiger by the Tail: The players slowly become more and more despondent as the games go on, especially after the third and fourth games where they're essentially sentencing other players to death to survive. While the option for all of them to quit the game again with another majority vote was always present, none of them try to do so, simply because they've come too far and their lives outside the games are that much worse.
• Time-Delayed Death: Sae-byeok completes the fifth game but ends up with an Agonizing Stomach Wound after getting impaled with a shard of glass. This results in Sae-byeok being unable to eat the final meal of the game and a slow death of internal bleeding during the night.
• Time for Plan B: When Gi-hun's team's original plan (everyone starts by leaning back, only pulling the rope when the opposing team's guard is down) in the third game starts to fail, they have to think of a new plan. Sang-woo suggests that everyone takes three steps forward to make the opposing team fall over, and then start pulling the rope again when the opposing team is on the floor. Sang-woo's idea works and Team 4 wins.
• Timed Mission: Most of the games have a time limit, after which anyone who hasn't completed the game is immediately killed. The exceptions are Games 3 and 6, which are versus matchs between teams that don't need one.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Deok-su's subordinate as they plan to ambush the Squid Game messenger. Maybe it wasn't such a bright idea to tell your violent, psychopathic boss that you just betrayed him, especially when you know he's carrying a weapon.
  • Player 271, who's clearly one of the weaker players, decides to confront Deok-su and fight him over his food. Deok-su beats him to death.
  • Also worth mentioning is the woman who points to Deok-su and his gang after Player 271 complains about not getting any food. Deok-su targets her in the following night.
  • While it's mostly because of his goodness and he does some justification for his ignorance too (as a non-Korean he doesn't know the game rules well), Ali ultimately falls for a very obvious swindle, which indeed costs him his life.
• Trauma Conga Line:
  • The games put essentially all of the contestants through one. They aren't told in advance that being "eliminated" from the games means being executed, and when they discover this in the first game a large chunk of the contestants panic and are killed while the rest are de facto Forced to Watch. It only gets worse from there as later games shift from being merely about personal survival to also actively taking others' lives, with the fourth game presenting a particularly Sadistic Choice for most players. And don't expect any relief during the interim between games, once it's established that contestants can take each others' lives without consequence even then. Those who make it to the final games have watched hundreds die before their eyes, and some are Driven to Suicide. And many contestants were preyed upon because they were already in the midst of one of these; Gi-hun was being threatened with never seeing his daughter again and grappling with his inability to help his ailing mother, while Sae-byeok was struggling to help her family escape North Korea.
  • For Gi-hun in particular, in addition to the above, he has to deal with knowing he dragged Oh Il-nam into the fourth game to his apparent death when leaving him behind would have spared him, watching Sae-byeok die right after he promised to ensure her survival, and seeing Sang-woo take his own life even as Gi-hun attempted to end the games to save him. Then, once he's returned home, he learns his mother died of diabetes while he was playing, leaving him feeling it was All for Nothing, and he lives the next year of his life without touching his winnings, consumed by grief. To top it all off, he then learns Il-nam is still alive and was behind it all.
• Treachery Is a Special Kind of Evil: It's understood that dirty tricks are inevitable in the games, but any specific attempt to cheat or beat the system is viewed extremely badly.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: The A-plot follows Gi-hun and the other players playing the games. The B-plot features Cowboy Cop Jun-ho going undercover among the guards and finding out more information about the games for the audience's benefit.

U

• Uncanny Valley: The "red light, green light" doll in the first episode is an intentional example. At toy-size, she'd be weird at most. As it is, she's about three times as large as an average human, and able to move her limbs. When her head spins, she locks eyes on any players that are still moving, filtering them in red.
• Unfolding Plan Montage: In Episode 4, when Il-nam explains Tug-of-War, we see all the players in Gi-hun's team preparing in the way he describes.
• Unsportsmanlike Gloating: Sang-woo has Gi-hun down in the final game, but instead of killing him or simply going over to base and winning, he gives a "The Reason You Suck" Speech.

V

• Villain Has a Point: As cruel as the games are, many of participants don't seem to have much hope outside of them, either. The Front Man lets the players find this out for themselves when he honors their vote and lets them return to their old lives, only for most of them to come back. Even if this was all a Manipulative Bastard trick, the harshness of the real world is certainly enough to push desperate people into continuing the games, where they feel like they at least have a chance of success.
  • Deok-su was wrong to betray Mi-nyeo, he was not entirely wrong about her just using him.
• Villain's Dying Grace: Sang-woo, having been beaten in the final game by Gi-hun and given the opportunity to leave alive with him, chooses to take his own life instead so that Gi-hun can get the money and give some of it to his mother.
• Violence Is Disturbing: A lot of the violence, especially the hand-to-hand combat, is graceless and viscerally unpleasant to look at. Special mentions go to the sleeping quarters brawl in "Stick to the Team", which is a chaotic, strobing nightmare of random people killing each other in the dark that looks very much like a Prison Riot, and the fight between Gi-hun and San-woo in "One Lucky Day" that degrades into them flailing their fists at each other and one biting the other and managing to tear off a chunk of flesh to boot.

W

• We Used to Be Friends:
  • Gi-hun first comes to this realization after witnessing Sang-woo kill Player 017 to save his ass and ensure he moves on to the final game. Yet despite that, he still tried to save Sang-woo, and is devastated when Sang-woo kills himself to let him be the winner.
  • Gi-hun later has it when he finds out that Il-nam is the Host of the games. It got to the point that he even threatened to hurt the dying man on the bed upon being told of it.
• Wham Episode:
  • Episode 6, which is when the fourth game takes place. Up until this point, there have been many contestant deaths, but otherwise the named characters are still doing well in the game. This episode marks the point where even they are no longer safe and close allies are turned against each other to survive, forcing some players to reveal their true colors. It only goes downhill from this point on.
  • Episode 9. Gi-hun and Sang-woo have a bloody and scrappy death match, ending in Sang-woo's suicide. Gi-hun wins the game and goes home, never touching his money out of guilt. After finding his mom dead in their apartment, he is invited to play one last game with the mastermind behind the games, who turns out to be none other than Il-nam. After the latter passes away right when Gi-hun wins their bet/game, Gi-hun goes to fulfill his promises to Sang-woo and Sae-byeok. He discovers that the games are still up and running and after witnessing the Salesman recruit another person, vows to take down the games himself once and for all.
• Wham Line:
  • Episode 6 begins with players forming into teams like the previous game, where this is announced.
    Announcer: In this game, using your set of ten marbles, you will play the game of your choice with your partner. The player who manages to take all ten marbles from their partner wins.
  • In Episode 8, the Front Man takes his mask off in front of Jun-ho, who is shocked by the Front Man's real face. He identifies him with a single name - In-ho.
  • In the final episode, Gi-hun is drinking his sorrows away when he buys a rose bouquet from a lady, and finds a game card, behind which is The Reveal.
    FROM YOUR GGANBU
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • After the massacre in episode 1, 201 players are left alive. They invoke clause 3 of the player agreement and vote to leave the game, though upon returning to their dreary lives most opt to come back to the game to try and win the money. Most. 187 players return, leaving 14 who didn't. The Front Man makes an offhand remark about keeping tabs on the ones who did not come back, but they're never mentioned again.
  • A disproportionate number of players also disappear during the fourth game. Four teams of 10 survived the Tug of War, but Byeong-gi was killed for his part in the organ smuggling scheme. Mi-nyeo is removed for not having a partner, but in fact got to skip the game and survive. The remaining 38 players form 19 teams of two, of which half should survive, for a total of 20 players remaining. However, the counter is at 17 when they return to the dorm. It's possible that three players were eliminated for breaking the rules by using violence or by not completing the marble game in time, but this is never clarified.
  • VIP 4 isn't seen again with the other VIPs after a guard goes to check his unconscious body from Jun-ho knocking him out. However, if the Deathly Unmasking rule applies to them in the same way as the guards, it can be assumed that he was executed due to him being unmasked at the time.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: This is explored as a subplot of the show. Though the contestants are all herded like cattle and casually gunned down by the masked guards, the guards actually aren't much better off, as they too are subject to a set of strict rules that they must follow to the letter and the smallest slip-up will arouse a scolding at best and suspicion at worst, with the punishment for breaking the rules being death. The Workers (circle-masked guards) are treated rather poorly, essentially living in prison cells. And when a Supervisor (square-masked guard) takes off his mask at the demand of a contestant that took him hostage, he is casually gunned down by the Front Man for it. They are all just cogs in a machine run by those at the top.
• What You Are in the Dark:
  • In the second game, Sang-woo has deduced what the game will be before it is revealed. Even so, he doesn't try to talk Gi-hun out of picking the most difficult shape.
  • Gi-hun, from the first episode, repeatedly demonstrates his kindness to other people even when it's unnecessary. During the Marbles game, when he realizes that he has to beat a terminally ill old man to save his own life, he begins cheating to win. This seems to have had an effect on him, as in the final game, he stops short of winning to offer Sang-woo the chance to go home empty-handed just so neither of them need to die. Sang-woo makes the decisions for him.
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: In Game 4, the contestants are told to pair off, but one person is left out because there are an uneven number of players, which makes them think that it will be an automatic execution for the unlucky outcast. Mi-nyeo is excluded for being too clingy and desperate, but this allows her to skip the game entirely because it wouldn't be fair to kill her for not having a partner.
• Woman Scorned: Mi-nyeo warns Deok-su that she will kill him if he betrays her. He cuts her out of his group after learning from the doctor that Game 3 is tug of war, focusing on recruiting large strong men. During the bridge game, Deok-su holds up the line to force others to go before him. Mi-nyeo volunteers to go. She tells him that she warned him not to betray her before grabbing onto him and pulling him off the glass panel with her. This is Lampshaded by one of the VIPs, who incorrectly attributes it to William Shakespeare (and he's corrected, no less).

X

• Xanatos Gambit: Sang-woo's plan before the last game. He anticipates that Gi-hun may try to stop the games to save Sae-byeok from bleeding to death, and kills her to prevent that. Then he proceeds to face Gi-hun in the final round, knowing full well that even in the case of defeat, all he will have to do is refuse to stop the game and eventually die anyway, whether at Gi-hun's hand, a guard, or his own so that Gi-hun will get the money and eventually help his mother. The last one is exactly what happens.

Y

• You Are Number 6: Each player is assigned a number at the beginning of the game in accordance with when they signed up, though we learn the names of the significant characters later on. Additionally, the Guards and the VIPs are subject to this to keep their identities discrete.
• You Have to Believe Me!: When the players vote to discontinue after the first game, Gi-hun immediately goes to the police station to report the games. It's only after the disbelieving officer repeats his claims back to him that he seems to realize how crazy he sounds.

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