In a strange way, Squid Game reminds me of Cyberpunk 2077. Both have women as their best characters, be they Kang Sae-byeok, Judy Alvarez, or Panam Palmer. However, both also seem to harbour a deep resentment towards women, whether that’s in their loyalty to gender roles, their unflattering depiction of supporting female characters, the violence they exact upon women (which goes beyond that which is exacted upon men), or the ways they are deemed unnecessary to the wider story, even as they drive the plot. Squid Game is a fantastic show, one of 2021’s best, but the ways it treats women are very odd.
Major spoilers for Squid Game follow
At one point in the show, the characters are ordered to get into teams. Immediately, everyone has the same idea - we need men. The unflinching desire to bring men and only men aboard their teams makes the Squid Game players look like triple-A studio executives, with women being discarded as a possibility almost instantly.
This is a life or death game where one wrong choice means a bullet in the head - there’s no time for political correctness. Men are, traditionally, physically stronger than women, that’s true. But these are children’s games; physical strength is not an advantage. It’s strange, in a series that is so clever and layered in its critique of capitalism, that the men spend a good chunk of time patting each other on the back and attempting to team up with more men, only for the show to prove them completely correct. This game does require men! Men are the best! Huzzah!
It’s not just in the reliance on physical strength that Squid Game puts a weird lens on gender roles either. The aforementioned game where the search for men proves to be the correct one is tug of war. In it, player 001, a weak and elderly man, is the one who comes up with the strategy. Later episodes provide greater context as to why 001 is such a valuable player, but the fact remains that even in a game where women are maligned for being weak, the weakest man still has value. Meanwhile, it’s Sang-wo’s strategy that eventually wins this game - a strategy Han Mi-nyeo, one of the women on the team, is initially too scared to follow through with.
Han Mi-nyeo is an especially interesting character here. It should be noted that native Korean speakers have criticised the English subs and dubs of Squid Game, particularly around the context of Han Mi-nyeo’s arc. If that’s true, we can take much of this article as a criticism of the subs and dubs, although many other incidents still remain. Han Mi-nyeo is portrayed as a street smart character - she helps Sae-byeok explore the vents and sneakily uses her lighter to win at sugar pancakes. But she’s also cloying and defined by her sexual impulses - she teams up with the villainous Jang Deok-su after sleeping with him, only to be discarded when he has no use for her. She begs him for salvation, and even though she eventually kills him, it’s in a murder-suicide that indelibly ties her to a man she slept with once. For all Mi-nyeo’s street smarts, she is often portrayed as naive, foolish, and pathetic.
There is another major incident of casual misogyny the show throws out, which goes by so fast that many viewers may have missed it. A subplot in the series involves police officer Hwang Jun-ho infiltrating the game as one of the guards. He questions another guard, suspecting one of the bodies recently disposed of belonged to his brother. The terrified guard tells him it can’t have been his brother, because it was a woman. The proof? The guards all gang raped the corpse, and they surely wouldn’t do that to a man, right? This line goes by almost entirely without interrogation and the whole idea that several of the guards are raping the dead and dying women of the game is never addressed again. Less damning minor instances include the fact the first contestants to fall to their knees and tearfully beg for mercy are women.
Then we come back to Kang Sae-byeok. As the show’s best character, you’d think she could be held up as evidence against the idea that Squid Game has some odd issues with women. Certainly in episode six, Gganbu, we see Sae-byeok treated with respect. It’s the only essential episode of television I’ve seen in 2021, and Sae-byeok, plus her teammate in this episode, Ji-yeong, are most of the reason why.
While the men try to outwit each other and send the other to their doom, the women just talk. In some ways, it’s another example of gender roles taken to extremes, but it’s so tender and heartfelt that it never feels that way. We see two girls, isolated in the real world and within the squid game, bonding before oblivion. When Ji-yeong, an orphan who murdered her father after he murdered her mother, learns Sae-byeok is playing the game to save her brother, she offers her life willingly. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking, especially when surrounded by men competing, meddling, and fighting with each other to cling to survival.
Unfortunately, Sae-byeok is not offered a glorious ending. She, along with male characters Sang-wo and Gi-hun, makes it to the final three. However, rather than fighting to the end in a grand battle, Sae-byeok is killed off before the final game in her bed. Already wounded from the last game, Sae-byeok is neatly disposed of in order to facilitate the final showdown between Sang-wo and Gi-hun. She is no longer needed, and therefore no longer deserving of any character development.
Squid Game is a phenomenal television series, and through Ji-yeong, Mi-nyeo, and especially Sae-byeok, it has some fascinating female characters. But it’s incredibly odd that it’s so dismissive of them - even more so that for all its popularity, nobody seems to be talking about it.