Squid Game / Tropes A to I

Squid Game Trope Examples
A - I | J - Z

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A

• Absurdly High-Stakes Game: The participants are staking their lives for a chance to win the prize pool of tens of billions of won.
• Accidental Pun:
  • The fourth game revolves around the game of marbles, with the episode even being named that. One of several plots in that episode is that Oh Il-nam loses most of his marbles due to his deteriorating mental state. In English "losing your marbles" is slang for declining cognitive ability.
  • In Korea, the currency is called "won", pronounced in English "wahn". It's spelled like "won" as in "to win (a game)" in English. This leads to a little minor confusion as the players "win won".
• Actor Allusion: This isn't the first time Gong Yoo plays a character who seems to have some connection to trains.
• Affably Evil:
  • The game staff is this in general. While they remorselessly kill players if they lose or disobey, they politely inform them about the rules and what's going on, and always assure to give them a fair chance.
  • Despite being revealed to be monstrously evil, nothing indicates Il-nam's friendly nature to Gi-hun, Sang-woo and Ali was an act. Il-nam even admits to Gi-hun in his final moments that he genuinely did grow fond of him and enjoyed playing with him.
• Air-Vent Passageway: The night after the contestants return to the games, Sae-byeok climbs into the vents from the toilets to snoop around. She discovers a kitchen where the workers are melting large amounts of sugar, which later helps Sang-woo figure out the second game before it begins.
• All for Nothing:
  • Ji-yeong throws her game with Sae-byeok to allow her to progress, as she believes Sae-byeok's family gives her something to live for outside of the game, but Sang-woo ends up unceremoniously killing her offscreen the night before the final game, voiding Ji-yeong's sacrifice.
  • After he wins the game, Gi-hun gets the promised 45.6 billion won. But one year later, he's so disgusted with himself and the very idea of the Deadly Game that, aside from dealing with his most pressing financial troubles, he's barely touched that money. On top of that, the reason Gi-hun went back to the games after voting to leave was that his mother needed an operation that would have cost him four million won to pay for; while he was in the game, his mother died. This means that Gi-hun went through all of that trouble for nothing.
• Aloof Ally: Sae-byeok makes it a point throughout the series that she doesn't trust any of the other players and prefers to work alone, even after joining Gi-hun's team.
• Anyone Can Die: Named characters like Ali, Il-nam, Deok-su, and Mi-nyeo, to list a few. Fitting for a game that encourages its players to kill each other at one point. In fact, by the end of the nine episodes, the only living major characters are Gi-hun and the Front Man.
• Arc Number: The number 456 recurs a bit; Gi-hun wins 4.56 million won betting in the first episode (which Sae-byeok then pickpockets from him), and there are 456 players in the game, with a grand prize of 45.6 billion won (100 million per player). In the final episode, the PIN number Gi-hun uses to access his winnings is his player number, 0456.
• Arc Symbol: Circle, triangle, and rectangle. They adorn the masks worn by the guards, are three of the four shapes players can choose from in the Honeycomb Game, and make up the chalk drawing used for the titular Squid Game. When Gi-hun, Sae-byeok, and Sang-woo are served fancy dinner before the finals, the table is arranged in a triangle on top of a circular platform with checkered pattern.
• Arc Words: "Can I borrow 10,000 won?"^note About $8.50
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • Towards the end of Game 4, Il-nam offers to play one more game with Gi-hun with it being All or Nothing. Gi-hun is initially outraged over betting all 19 of his marbles for Il-nam's only marble and says that makes no sense. Il-nam responds "Does tricking your friend like that make sense to you?", revealing he was faking his dementia and knew Gi-hun was lying to him several times through the game.
  • During an argument between Gi-hun and Sang-woo, Sang-woo calls out Gi-hun on how his poor life choices left him so deeply in debt he had no choice but to play the game. Gi-hun says Sang-woo is right, but then points out that the same thing happened to him, despite the latter being a genius who graduated from SNU at the top of his class. He then concludes by asking, "Is it my fault you're here?", leaving Sang-woo at a loss.
• Artistic License – Gun Safety: One guard kills one of the players after the player loses a game by spraying the player with bullets from a sub-machine gun — while another guard is standing directly behind said player.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Some players, such as Jang Deok-su and many of his gang members, become this when they're killed due to being sadistic jerkasses.
  • Ali's boss at the factory refuses to pay him his salary due to being greedy, and when Ali demands getting the money, he accidently pushes the boss into the machinery, who gets his fingers crushed as a result.
  • Deok-su's subordinate who ratted him out. While Deok-su is a monster, the subordinate's unnecessarily smug Jerkass attitude makes it hard to mourn him when Deok-su stabs him to death.
• Awesomeness by Analysis:
  • The Front Man knew the intruder was part of the police, despite not having seen them. He learned of it by extracting a bullet from one of Jun-ho's victims and realizing it was from a police revolver. The Front Man had also been counting the bullets used and deduced that Jun-ho only had one bullet remaining.
  • Player 062 is a math teacher who uses his skills to progress as far as the fifth game.

B

• Bad Boss:
  • The Front Man executes any guard who removes their mask in front of a player.
  • Deok-su casually screws over his own henchmen, which comes back to bite him in the ass numerous times both inside the game and out.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Although Gi-hun manages to win the games and receives the 45.6 billion won, the game staff are still able to continue the games beyond Il-nam's death without any consequences, and Jun-ho, the only person trying to gather evidence of the games, is seemingly murdered by the Front Man, who is his brother no less.
• Batman Gambit: After the second round, the game organisers give the players tiny food rations to encourage them to fight each other. It works as Deok-su and his cronies cut in line to get more food and proceed to kill the other participants who try to call them out on it.
• Beauty, Brains, and Brawn: A rare male example with Ali, Sang-woo and Gi-hun, who lead the main team in the middle set of the games. Ali, the physically strongest and capable, is brawn, calculating and educated Sang-woo is the brains, and the sociable Gi-hun, who emerges as the group leader, is the beauty/heart.
• Berserk Button: Mi-nyeo has two. The first is her age; has a rather comical reaction when Gi-hun innocently addresses her with a Korean honorific for "grandma". The second is doublecrossing her; which she takes a wee bit more personally.
• Big Bad Ensemble: While the Host is the true Big Bad of the series, he leaves the Front Man in charge of overseeing the games. On the other side of things is Jang Deok-su, who's the most antagonistic of the games' contestants and therefore the most direct threat to Gi-hun and his allies, at least before he bites it in the seventh episode, as well as Sang-woo, who later becomes the Final Boss to Gi-hun after the former reveals his ruthlessness to the latter.
• Big Bad Friend: Il-nam, the first player who bonds with Gi-hun in the game, turns out to be the game's creator, playing along for the thrill of it.
• Big Brother Is Watching: The game organizers have access to a powerful network of information and surveillance to order to find prospective participants for the games and to keep tabs on any entrants who leave. A year after Gi-hun wins, they still have precise information on his whereabouts and activities.
• The Big Guy: Ali is the physically strongest of Gi-hun's group of allies, having done factory work up until recently, and fits the trope by being good-hearted on top of it.
• Bittersweet Ending: Gi-hun wins the game, but all the other players end up dying, none of the people involved with the games have been brought to justice, and he realizes his mother died alone while he was in the game. He eventually overcomes his year-long depression after a final game with Il-nam, and then uses some of his prize money to fulfill the wishes of Sae-byeok and Sang-woo, but turns away from the opportunity to reunite with his daughter to instead go back to the games in the hopes that he'll be able to shut them down for good.
• Bizarrchitecture: The staircases, since one could get lost easily in them like Player 111 when he snaps and kills the guards running a organ trafficking ring with his help. The set was actually inspired from Relativity by M.C. Escher.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Admittedly most of the players aren't exactly model citizens, with a fair amount being criminals in some capacity and Gi-hun himself being a bit of a self-centered leech and deadbeat dad. Nevertheless, the protagonists are saints compared to the mass-murdering, organ-harvesting (and occasionally necrophiliac) guards; the depraved Psychopathic Manchild VIPs; and the classist Manipulative Bastard that's playing god behind the scenes. Arguably the only major characters that could be considered outright "good" are Ali, Ji-yeong, and Jun-ho.
• Book Ends:
  • As lampshaded by Sang-woo, the first and last games take place on the same court, since the field is ideal for both.
  • Gi-hun's interaction with Player 001/Oh Il-nam starts and ends with the latter on a bed.
  • The first mention of the games' existence comes in the form of the smiling salesman. Gi-hun mistakes him for a preacher and tells him he isn't interested in his religious spiel. When the games have ended and Gi-hun is sent home, he's dropped on the sidewalk next to a man who's proselytizing publicly.
• Boom, Headshot!: Guards usually execute losers via a close-range gunshot to the head.
• Bottle Episode: The eighth episode, "Front Man". It mostly takes place on the island and in the dorm room. Only three players are left, they eat dinner and then try to sleep. The episode is only a half-hour long, with absolutely no filler.
• Brick Joke: When the Salesman appears and tries to pull Gi-hun into the games, Gi-hun's first response to him is "I don't believe in Jesus", thinking him to be a Christian evangelist. When Gi-hun is brought back to South Korea after winning the game, he is dropped off right next to a very vocal Christian street preacher who asks him, "Do you believe in Jesus?" when he wakes up.

C

• Can't Move While Being Watched: The first game is Red Light Green Light, with a giant doll with motion detectors in its eyes that are set to shoot any contestant who moves when it is facing them.
• Celebrity Paradox: Ji-yeong specifically namedrops Lee Byung-hun (who plays the Front Man in the series) and cites his famous line from Inside Men, "Let's have a drink of Maldives at mojito."
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Mi-nyeo's lighter allows her and Deok-su to pass the second game by heating up the pin.
  • Subverted when Gi-hun keeps Il-nam's last marble from the fourth game. Near the end of the fifth, Player 017 reveals he's a glassmaker and can tell the difference between the tempered and real glass by hearing something bounce off each panel. Gi-hun offers up the marble for one panel, but when Player 017 states that he needs a second marble to use for comparison, Gi-hun has nothing left to offer, making it pointless.
• Chekhov's Skill: A player mentions that he's a math teacher in the lead-up to the fourth game. In the fifth game, he pauses to calculate his odds of survival, realizes that they are so low that he has no reasonable chance, and just tries to sprint across the glass as fast as he can without breaking it. It doesn't work, but he clears four panels before luck betrays him.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder:
  • Deok-su makes no attempt to hide how lethal it can be to work with him, but also makes it clear that working against him gives you even worse odds.
  • Sang-woo backstabs every one of his supposed teammates the moment that doing so puts him at an advantage.
• Cliffhanger: The end of Episode 4 has an almost literal one that isn't resolved until the start of the next episode. As Gi-hun's team is steadily losing in the tug-of-war game, Sang-woo suggests that everyone moves three steps forward, even if it could send them over the edge. He counts to three, the team moves forward, with Gi-hun's feet fast approaching the edge — and the episode cuts to black and rolls credits.
• Cold Equation: Sang-woo takes this approach to the games, being willing to do whatever is necessary to increase his chances, up to and including cold-blooded murder.
• Comically Missing the Point: Mi-nyeo emphatically advertises how great of a con artist she is while trying to get a partner for Game 4, which she's failing at because everybody already distrusts her.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • Of all the workers Jun-ho could have murdered to sneak his way onto the island, he happens to pick one that was involved in the Organ Theft side hustle. This is a problem because he has no idea what's going on and can't just follow the others, but also gives him an opportunity to get deeper because the side hustle is abusing various hidden passages that he'd never have learned about otherwise.
  • Of all the places in Ssangmun-dong, Il-nam ends up bumping into Gi-hun again in Episode 2 outside the same convenience store, and the two drink and talk about life outside versus the game. It turns out this was most likely not a coincidence at all, as the eagle-eyed can spot one of the contestant transport vans in the background.
  • Jun-ho, disguised as one of the lower-rank guards, gains the suspicion of a higher-rank guard who asks to see him after the second game ends. The guard happens to be the one who is held at gunpoint by a player who failed the round and told to remove his mask, which gets him killed by the Front Man for violating the rules, allowing Jun-ho to keep his cover and even use the higher-rank guard's mask to gain access to more areas.
  • In the fifth game, despite their progress being severely hindered due to numerous senseless sacrifices, the fourth-to-last player (017) happened to be a skilled glassmaker who was able to help the last three players (our three most prominent protagonists) make up for the lost progress, before being unceremoniously sacrificed for the last glass panel after his advantage was taken away.
    • Additionally, whenever the players turn on each other and start throwing each other forward, it's always onto the weaker glass panel, dooming the thrown player.
    • And right after clearing the game, Sae-byeok receives a Game-Breaking Injury from the game area's destruction, leading to Sang-woo eliminating her before the last game, making it a one-on-one Duel to the Death between him and Gi-hun. Fittingly balanced for a game that requires only two parties.
• Crapsack World: The world outside of the games is a very realistic example. Financial issues run so rampant that even after learning of the games' true nature and being given a chance to escape, a hundred players would rather play with their lives than try to survive their daily life.
• Cringe Comedy: Gi-hun's daughter's birthday in the first episode. After winning a large sum of cash betting on horse races, Gi-hun promises his daughter an extravagant birthday party where he'll get her any food and present she asks for. Then he loses that money to a pickpocket, so he can only afford a tteokbokki meal for her as well as a gift he got from a UFO Catcher machine, which turns out to be a fancily-wrapped gun-shaped lighter. That scene makes Gi-hun appear pathetic in a way that can make you both laugh and cringe at his misfortune.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: There's no surprise that these pop up in a series of this nature.
  • The deaths of the players that die in rounds three and five apply here in particular.
    • In the former, the team that loses tug-of-war will be pulled off of a platform, left to dangle by the rope they are chained to until it is cut and they fall to their deaths.
    • The latter also involves falling, but by stepping on glass that has a fifty-fifty chance of shattering, which will likely cut them on the way down.
  • There's also the extremely unlucky players who are sealed in coffins and sent to be incinerated while they're still alive; or worse, sent to have their organs stolen without any anasthetic.
• Cue the Rain: Rain shows up during the final game, which is lampshaded by the deer-masked VIP.
  "Good rain knows the best time to fall."

D

• Deadly Euphemism: Players who don't complete a challenge following the rules or in the allotted time are "eliminated". On the first day, the players learn that being eliminated means being killed.
• Deadly Game: A series of six games, in fact. Most are based on children's games popular in Korea (and some worldwide). However, the whole series is a reconstruction of the concept, since it examines and fixes a lot of the common issues surrounding these kinds of stories. For one, the players all voluntarily choose to be there (even if they're not told it's life-or-death at first), it's for a prize other than just escaping, the players sign away their right to complain, and they're allowed to leave by majority vote whenever they want. The latter even gets invoked after the first game, when the players choose to leave, and the bad guys let them go, just as promised. But most are so down on their luck and desperate for cash that they come back anyway.
  • Round One: Red Light, Green Light. The version played in Korea uses the phrase "mugunghwa-kkochi pieotseumnida" (무궁화꽃이 피었습니다, "the mugunghwa flower is blooming"). Anyone caught moving during Red Light, however slight, is shot dead, as does anyone who fails to reach the end by the time limit.
  • Round Two: "Honeycomb". Removing shapes stamped into dalgona (a candy made with sugar and baking soda; unrelated to the 2020 food trend) unbroken, with a sewing needle provided as a tool. Each shape has a different degree of difficulty, with the triangle being the easiest and an umbrella the hardest. Anyone who breaks the shape or doesn't finish within the allocated timeframe is killed.
  • Round Three: Tug-of-war on top of elevated platforms. Players are divided into several teams, and two teams compete one at a time until only the winning teams remain. The losing team falls to their deaths.
  • Round Four: Marbles. The players are given ten marbles each and split into pairs, the goal being to win all their partner's marbles. It is up to the players to decide what game they'll play, so long as both players agree and violence isn't used. Both are executed if neither wins by the time limit.
  • Round Five: Players have to cross a bridge made of pairs of glass panels. The panels are either regular or tempered glass, only the latter being strong enough to hold the weight of two people at maximum. No prizes for guessing how players die in this round. The bridge is destroyed when the timer ends, taking anyone who hasn't crossed with it.
  • Round Six: The titular squid game. Players are divided into offense and defense, with the offense having to make their way across the squid outline while the defense tries to prevent them from doing so. Any form of violence is allowed, as the game is already noted to be more physically violent in nature. The game ends when either the offense touches the goal (making whoever does it the winner), or all but one person is unable to continue playing (the only way for the defense to win).
• Deathly Dies Irae: The masked guards have a choral version of dies irae as their Leitmotif.
• Deathly Unmasking: The guards are explicitly informed that their lives are forfeit as soon as the players learn their true identities. As such, when one guard is forced by Player 119 to unmask, he's shot dead by the Front Man almost immediately afterwards.
• Death or Glory Attack: When Gi-hun's team starts losing the tug-of-war game, Sang-woo comes up with the idea of taking three steps forward to throw the other team off-balance. It nearly dooms them as Gi-hun teeters over the edge of the platform, but the opposing teams fails to fully recover and Gi-hun's team pulls a narrow victory.
• Deceptively Silly Title: The series is inspired by and named after a Korean children's game but has extremely grisly deaths in store for the losers... that is, if other players don't get to them first.
• Depraved Bisexual: One of the VIPs, VIP 4 with the tiger mask, is the most outwardly depraved of the members. He rests his head against the breasts of a woman serving as "living furniture", and is attracted to a male waiter, even deciding to quit watching to take him to his bedroom and coerce said waiter into having sex with him. Unfortunately for him, it happens to be Jun-ho that he targets.
• Denied Food as Punishment: One way the players got screwed around with is at mealtimes. They were given only small amounts of food such as a drink and a bun, a drink and a corn cob, and what amounts to a TV dinner for supper. A lethal fight actually erupts because so little food was given (at the time it was a soda and an egg, with no extras once five of those meals were stolen).
• Dirty Coward: Deok-su, for all that he acts tough, freezes up and refuses to go any farther once he ends up at the front of the pack in Game 5, instead demanding that someone else do it for him.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Deok-su is the most openly antagonistic player in the game, who causes the deaths of several other players and screws over his own allies just to get ahead. However, he dies in the penultimate game, when his former ally Mi-nyeo drags him to his death with her to get back at him for betraying her.
• Disney Death:
  • Il-nam supposedly dies off-screen via a gunshot to the head in episode 6, but it's later revealed in the last episode that he survived and that he was actually one of the people behind the games. He does actually die in the last episode, albeit through natural causes.
  • Mi-nyeo is abandoned, the odd man out in pairs, and as everybody leaves she is surrounded by guards with machine guns who apologize to her for her fate. When the survivors return to the bunks, she's still alive, and the guards explained that since she didn't have a partner, she automatically passed that round.
• Disney Villain Death:
  • Games three and five kill the players in this way; Mi-nyeo and Deok-su go out this way in the latter game.
  • Jun-ho dies this way as well, falling from a high cliff after being shot by the Front Man.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The Front Man immediately executes a guard who was forced to remove his mask at gunpoint. He makes it clear that the same will happen to anyone else who will "reveal his identity", even though it's quite clear that simply showing one's face is not nearly enough to do the trick.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: It's possibly intentional that the games are designed to bring to mind some kind of school sports event or P.E activity. Everyone is made to wear a tracksuit that resembles a student's gym uniform, the games they play are easy to learn, the rations they are given are filling if you were the size of a child and distributed as if it were recess, and they follow the guards around in lines like a teacher guiding a class to their venue.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: Il-nam, the sweet, frail old man with a brain tumor, turns out to have been the creator and host of the game.
• Dominance Through Furniture: As a sign of how obscenely rich and powerful they are, the VIPs use live human beings as footrests and pillows, most of them naked except for a coating of body paint. Most notably, VIP 4 is seen resting his head on a woman's enormous breasts.
• Doom Troops: They guards are creepy Malevolent Masked Men with Psycho Pink suits, and are greatly feared by the players. Most of them do not speak to the players and coldly execute losers, never speaking or showing emotion, and only a few characters are shown barely able to fight back against them, making them a major source of fear both in and out of universe.
• Dramatic Slip: Towards the end of the "Red Light, Green Light" game, just as Gi-hun is about to make his way across the finish line, his foot catches on a dead body in front of him, and he trips just as the doll turns around, all but solidifying his doom...if not for the righteous hand of Ali catching him just in time, with the music in the background even stopping for a moment.
• Dressing as the Enemy: Jun-ho is able to move through the enemy ranks by stealing their outfits/masks to blend in, which is helped by the fact that the masks are demanded by the staff to make sure no one knows anyone else.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • After being sent home when the majority votes to stop the game after "Red Light, Green Light", Sang-woo attempts suicide by laying next to a charcoal briquette burning to inhale the fumes, but is interrupted before he dies. Come the final game, however, he does kill himself with his knife to end the game and give Gi-hun the prize money.
  • In the honeycomb game, Player 119 breaks his shape, but before the staff member observing him can kill him, he attacks him and steals his pistol to hold him at gunpoint. 119 orders the guard to remove his mask, and after the guard complies, revealing that he appears to be no older than a young adult, he turns the gun on himself in despair.
    "You’re just a kid. What did they do to you?"
  • Player 069 hangs himself with his bedsheets after allowing his wife to die in the marbles game.
• Dub-Induced Plot Hole: In the Korean version of red light green light you can only move as the doll is saying the phrase "mugunghwa-kkochi pieotseumnida". In the English version of red light green light the doll says "green light" if tou can move and "red light" when you have to stop moving. This creates a problem in the English dub when several contestants seem to stop before the doll says "red light".
• Dwindling Party: The number of living players decreases as the games go on. By the time the final game of six starts, only two people are left, out of 456 people who started.

E

• Establishing Character Moment: The first game includes a number of these, including some that are more subtle than others.
  • Ali is introduced by catching Gi-hun when he trips over a dead body and holding him still while the cameras scan them for movement. This establishes him as very strong and willing to risk his own life to help out others.
  • Sang-woo advises Gi-hun to protect himself by hiding behind someone else so the cameras won't see him move. This cements him as an ally to Gi-hun, but also shows that he's willing to let others die to protect himself.
  • Player 001 is clearly having the time of his life playing the game. He has a spritely step and a smile on his face as he advances forward. He turns out to be the games' creator and joined in because he thought it would be more fun to play than to watch.
  • In an example that's the aftermath of the first game, Han Mi-nyeo is introduced pleading to the guards to let her go because she has a kid (who she doesn't name), only to question how much the prize pot would be once all six games are completed then proceeded to vote to stay in the games, establishing a two-faced nature to her.
• Even Evil Has Standards: As stated below in Fair-Play Villain, the Front Man respects the results of the vote in episode two and only continues the games with those who choose to come back willingly.
• Evil All Along: Il-nam, the friendly and kind old man, is actually the creator and host of the game.
• Evil Stole My Faith: In Episode 5, Ji-yeong mocks a pastor who prays to God after the third game. It is then revealed in the next episode that her father was a pastor who killed her mother and raped her, only to then immediately pray for forgiveness as if that made it okay. Ji-yeong murdered her father for the former and ended up becoming one of the contestants after getting out of prison.
• Exact Words: Thoroughly deconstructed. As the guards tell the scared contestants after the first game, "Follow the rules and we will not hurt you." They justify that everyone who entered signed an agreement and thus should know how to abide by child's play. One brave player, who doesn't return for the remaining games, points out that they weren't told about the fact that the games are an instant death sentence if you fail. Credit to him that he doesn't come back, along with 13 other players. As the returning players also find out, gangs and factions within the game can still kill other players between games, and the guards are ordered to not intervene for a time interval.
• Eye Scream: Offscreen. The organ-harvesting doctor complained about the guards not checking because the previous "corpse" they harvested from was still alive when she woke up as they were removing her eyes.

F

• Face Death with Despair:
  • As a Deadly Game, many of the titular contest's participants face immense despair in their final moments as they're at the mercy of the game's guards, sobbing, begging, or otherwise showing a complete loss of hope.
  • One of the most poignant examples comes from the death of Deok-su in "VIPS". After spending the whole game killing, stealing, and being a complete piece of shit to get ahead, Deok-su is put in a position at the fifth game that all but guarantees certain death for him, and decides to hold up everyone else so that they can die before him. One of his victims, Han Mi-nyeo, decides to pull a Heroic Sacrifice by falling with him to their deaths, giving everyone else a chance to live. Deok-su breaks down into pathetic begging and screaming as Mi-nyeo prepares to drag him off the bridge.
• Fair-Play Villain: The central tenet of the games is that everyone has the same chance at survival, even if the players are pitted against each other or luck plays a role in success.
  • Part of the contract is the players can forfeit any winnings and leave the game by majority vote. When the players all vote to leave in episode two, the Front Man lets them leave no questions asked, just as he promised. While most of the players do come back, fourteen of them stay gone. While the Front Man tells the guards to keep an eye on those fourteen, there is no indication that he tries to drag them back or punish them in any way.
  • The Front Man executes a guard who has been giving a player an advantage as part of a side-hustle, specifically noting that the side-hustle wasn't an issue, it was that he bartered foreknowledge of the games to be played with the doctor he enlisted to help him.
  • In a game that involves pairs with an uneven number of remaining players, the one who gets left out gets to skip the game, because losing without a chance to win isn't fair.
  • In an example that works against the players (and can arguably be considered a break from fairness), in Game 5, one of the last contestants turns out to have had a job making glass. Thus, he is able to tell from inspecting the side of each glass panel which one is tempered and which one is not. The Front Man dims the lights so he can't do this for the final panel after one of the VIPs complains, but it could be considered fair play as he had an advantage over other players due to his background. On the other hand, nothing in the rules states that such knowledge would be illegal, and it's the creators failed to account for his background, which was in his file. This shows that ultimately the rules matter less than the VIPs' entertainment.
  • Oh Il-nam, the creator of the games, is the same way. He enters the games as a contestant, but doesn't give himself any unfair advantages, other than knowledge most any Korean would have from playing the games as children. Though he ultimately doesn't allow the guards to kill him when he's eliminated in the fourth game, he could have easily died in the tug-of-war and seemed open to that possibility. He even casts the deciding vote to let the players go home in episode two, choosing to give them the chance to return of their own accord rather than keeping them trapped in the games.
    • There are, however, hints that the game treats Il-nam more leniently than other players, such as the motion sensor in the first game tracking him later and with a different color. Only in the tug-of-war game was he certainly risking his life, but even there the risk was greatly minimized - Il-nam was the only player who wasn't chained to the rope so he won't get dragged over unless he's still hanging onto it or worse, if the other players behind him were dragged and pulled him down. Then there's also the fact that Il-Nam provided the winning strategy that allowed them to beat a more powerful team and dropped his act of a senile old man to tell everyone they aren't dead yet.
• False Friend:
  • Sang-woo, who betrays his supposed teammates to his advantage every chance he gets.
  • Il-nam, who was actually the creator of the contest all along. Subverted when he tells Gi-Hun that he genuinely did grow fond of him.
  • Deok-su to Mi-neyo. This come back to bite him though.
• False Reassurance: "Follow the rules and we will not hurt you." Yeah, except the rules in question are arbitrary and promise instant death. The only thing that the guards refuse to do is fire at the players after the second round, while many of them beg to go home and promise to pay their debts, giving them a chance to choose their fate when Sang-woo mentions that Clause 3 allows for a group vote. The players can also kill each other between games to reduce competition, and the guards will not intervene unless given permission by the Front Man.
• Fate Worse than Death: Basically what drives the participants to continue on in this Deadly Game. The players can leave the game at any time by majority vote, but choose to continue playing because their normal lives are even worse, either because of financial difficulties or being wanted by the law, if not both. They see the game as a shot to win big and rid themselves of their problems.
• Faux Affably Evil: Deok-su is an utter brute, yet able to put up a charming enough front when he attempts diplomacy. Partictulary toward Mi-neyo after betraying her.
• Fear-Induced Idiocy: During the first game, "Red Light, Green Light" (where you need to stand still when the doll announces "red light"), participants panicked when they realised that being eliminated from the game means getting killed. Many of them started to run in panic and were shot immediately as a result.
• Fiction 500: The VIPs are the world's most ludicrously wealthy individuals; ironically, this makes them all extremely miserable, since nothing is fun anymore because they have the ability to buy everything they could possibly want on a whim with no financial risk.
• Fingore: This happens in Episode 2 to Ali's Bad Boss who refuses to pay his wages. A scuffle ensues in which the factory owner's hand is accidentally pressed into machinery, crushing his fingers. The fact that a byproduct of Ali not having any money was having to get two of his fingers amputated makes the moment strangely poetic.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Despite their different backgrounds, Gi-Hun, Sang-Woo, Ali, Il-nam, and even Sae-byeok become this during the first few challenges, protecting each other during the riots and teaming up during tug of war. Gi-Hun even gets everyone to share their names and where they're from, so they'll build trust and see each other as more than numbers. Subverted by Sang-Woo when he betrays Ali and kills Sae-byeok, but Gi-hun stays loyal to the team even after their deaths and fulfills Sang-woo and Sae-byeok's respective last requests to take care of their families. Despite being revealed as the host of the game, even Il-Nam admits he genuinely did grow fond of Gi-Hun and invites him to his deathbed to shake him out of his PTSD funk.
• Four Is Death: Being from an Asian country, the series has invoked this several times.
  • Player 324 was the first to be eliminated.
  • The fourth episode features a chaotic riot in the hall claiming the lives of several contestants, showing that they can be killed outside the games and the Front Man will simply write it off as narrowing the competition.
  • In the third game (tug-of-war), all of the main characters, except Deok-su, are placed on the 4th team, which has 3 women and an old man, so people expect it to be weaker than the rest.
  • The fourth game, played in episode 6, is where Il-nam, Ji-yeong, and Ali all die, showing that even the main characters aren't safe. Granted, this was bound to happen, but still.
• Freaky Electronic Music: The guards' Leitmotif "Pink Soldiers" consists of an eerie wordless version of dies irae.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: There are hints of Oh Il-nam being one of the game creators throughout the series, most of which you'd probably never notice upon first viewing.
  • The motion camera on the doll in "Red Light, Green Light" scans him a split second later than the rest, and in a lighter shade of green.
  • In Episode 2, there is a van similar to the ones who transport the players behind Gi-hun when he meets and drinks with Il-nam in the convenience store.
  • When Hwang Jun-ho checks the player profiles in the Front Master's archives, it starts at Player 002.
  • When Gi-hun's team is playing Tug-of-War, an eagle-eyed viewer might notice that Il-nam is the only player not cuffed to the rope.

G

• Gambling Ruins Lives: While not necessarily a major part of the series' anti-capitalist message, gambling is prominently depicted in a negative light. In addition to the protagonist Gi-hun starting off as a gambling addict on horse races (which he later overcomes), the collective responsible for financing the titular (but otherwise unnamed) Deadly Game (referred to as the "VIPs") are shown to regularly gamble on the outcomes they predict as an audience, with one member getting infuriated over several failed attempts. The two authority figures responsible for directing the contest also get involved in the Season 1 finale; the Front Man flat-out compares the contest to the aforementioned horse races, while the Host offers Gi-hun to do a bet with him.
• Game of Nim: In "Gganbu", the objective is to pick a game that involves marbles and play it with one's partner. The characters win if they manage to win over all ten of their partner's marbles. Gi-hun convinces a senile Il-nam to play a game of Nim with the marbles. In the first round, Gi-hun loses as he's the one holding the last marble; desperate, he guiltily exploits Il-nam's lapse in lucidity to win.
• The Glomp: Gi-hun does this to a little boy who helped win a prize from a crane game.
• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • The VIPs, a group of wealthy men from mostly the United States and Europe (though VIP No. 6, the stag-masked one, appears to be Chinese). They're the elite funding the contest to watch it for their own amusement, placing bets on which players live or die.
  • Some of the guards cut open the corpses of deceased contestants (the losers) to put their organs on the black market and collect payment from organ harvesters, with one guard mentioning China as one of their largest customers. The Front Man is aware of and tolerates this practice.
• Groin Attack: When Jun-ho is escorted to a private room by a VIP, he takes off his robe, revealing he's fully nude underneath, and asks Jun-ho to "satisfy" him in five minutes while bringing his head to his groin...after which Jun-ho simply crushes it in his hand.
  Jun-ho: Satisfied?

H

• Healthcare Motivation: The straw that breaks the camel's back for Gi-hun to return to the games is his mother suffering from advanced diabetes. Unable to borrow the funds for her treatment anywhere, he goes back.
• Here We Go Again!: The Sequel Hook ending implies that Gi-Hun plans to find a way to bring the organization that arranges and hosts the games down.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Ji-yeong willingly throws the marble game to give Sae-byeok a better chance at surviving. She was only in it for herself but concedes that Sae-byeok's family is worth continuing to fight for.
  • Sang-woo bows out this way, too, albeit without his opponent's life at stake. Rather than voting to leave the game empty-handed, he stabs himself in the side of the neck so his mother can be helped by Gi-hun with part of the prize money.
• Hidden Disdain Reveal: Mi-nyeo learns the hard way that Deok-su is not a big fan of pet names.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: All of the games, for which the players are futilely searching for clues throughout the contest, are actually drawn on the dormitory walls itself, which were carefully hidden by the positioning of the beds, down to the exact order in which they were going to be played. They're only visible in later episodes due to the players literally becoming a handful for the beds to be removed.
• Hollywood Silencer: Inverted. The sniper rifles used to off contestants in the first game are clearly fitted with suppressors in the close-ups we see of them, but their firing sounds are unsuppressed.
• Hope Spot:
  • The series opens with Gi-hun betting all of his life savings on a horse race. He ends up picking the correct horses, winning four million won. He steps out of the betting house calling his family with the good news, on top of the world. But then loan sharks show up to take some of his money, and then a pickpocket steals Gi-hun's money anyway, leaving him right back where he started.
  • Gi-hun discovers that Sae-byeok is bleeding out and starts banging on the doors begging for a doctor. Eventually, the guards do arrive, but they are not bringing doctors; they are bringing a coffin.

I

• Idealist vs. Pragmatist: Protagonist Seong Gi-hun is a flawed Classical Anti-Hero with a gambling addiction, but he does believe in the goodness of humanity, is always nice to people, and immediately votes to end the titular Deadly Game; upon returning, he does everything he can to help others, make friends, and be compassionate, with only the occasional moment of weakness. His childhood friend Cho Sang-Woo, the Deuteragonist, is more ruthless- he immediately votes to continue the game, is willing to screw over and kill even his close allies and friends just to get ahead, and dismisses Gi-hun as a lucky man who can only maintain the moral high ground because other people make the hard decisions for him. This comes to a head in the final game, where they fight to the death to gain the grand prize- Gi-hun defeats Sang-woo but is unable to kill his dear friend and demands the game end with no winner, while Sang-woo stabs himself so Gi-hun can win the prize money and use it to help their respective mothers.
• I Love the Dead: Downplayed. One of the guards admits they've been "taking turns" with an eliminated player as evidence the corpse was a woman and therefore not Jun-ho's brother. Note that the woman was still alive though dying and badly mutilated.
• Industrialized Evil: The organization behind the games runs a very tight ship. Every aspect, from the players to the workers' schedules, is carefully regimented and ordered. The killing methods are simple but efficient, and the corpses from every game are immediately disposed of in industrial ovens in a very clear allusion to Those Wacky Nazis.
• Ironic Echo:
  • A more immediate example in Episode 7. Jun-ho, disguised as a VIP servant, is escorted to a private room by a VIP, who then strips naked and asks Jun-ho to fellate him, saying, "If you can satisfy me in five minutes, I’ll change your life." Jun-ho then crushes his genitals, pulls a gun on him and says, "If you can satisfy me in five minutes, I might let you live" before ordering him to spill all he knows about the game on camera.
  • In the Marbles game, Il-nam wanted an all-in bet for the game, which Gi-hun refused. Come episode 9, Gi-hun agrees to do an all-in bet with Il-nam, as he wanted nothing to do with the blood-stained money he won.
• Island of Mystery: The games are held on an unknown island. The most stated is that it's southwest of the South Korean mainland.
• It Amused Me: Il-nam's reason for both starting and joining the Squid Game in the first place.

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