Adaptation note: This essay is adapted from an episode of the author’s Turkish-language CultPost podcast, recorded in early 2025, shortly after the second season of Squid Game premiered on December 26, 2024, and before the third and final season was released. It has been translated and edited for international readers while preserving the original argument, examples, and critical perspective.

Spoiler warning: This essay discusses important events from the first two seasons of Squid Game.

When the second season of Squid Game arrived on Netflix in December 2024, it became the focus of an intense global marketing campaign and once again generated enormous public interest. Yet only a short time later, it already seemed as though much more time had passed. This impression says something important about contemporary media and consumer culture: subjects suddenly dominate public conversation, are discussed everywhere for several days, and then disappear almost as quickly as they arrived. Squid Game is both a product of this accelerated cycle and an illuminating example of it.

The series tells the story of people whose financial desperation drives them to enter a deadly competition in the hope of escaping debt and poverty. Its narrative, visual language, global circulation, and aggressive promotion all invite interpretation from a postmodern perspective. The costumed figures associated with the series who appeared in Istanbul’s metro system as part of its local promotion, for example, were not merely advertisements for a television program. They also illustrated how thoroughly the fictional world of Squid Game had entered everyday urban life. The series had become more than something to watch: it was a cultural experience designed to surround its audience.

This essay considers Squid Game as a product of postmodern culture. Its central question is not simply why the series became so popular, but how a narrative that criticizes capitalism could itself become one of global capitalism’s most successful commodities.

From Modern Confidence to Postmodern Doubt

Postmodernism is too broad and internally diverse to be defined as a single discipline or a period with fixed boundaries. Thinkers such as Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze are frequently associated with postmodern thought, although not all of them described their own work in those terms. Their writings and critical approaches nevertheless contributed to what later came to be understood as the postmodern critique of knowledge, power, culture, and representation.

To understand this critique, it is useful to consider the confidence associated with modernity. Emerging from the Enlightenment, the modern worldview was shaped by expanding access to knowledge, growing trust in individual reason, the weakening of collective authorities such as monarchy and organized religion, and the rise of secularism, rationalism, scientific inquiry, and the ideal of progress. Industrialization and technological development strengthened the belief that humanity was moving toward a better future.

During the twentieth century, however, that confidence was profoundly damaged. Two world wars, fascism, authoritarianism, totalitarian regimes, and mass death made it difficult to maintain an uncomplicated faith in reason and progress. Science and technology had not only improved human life; they had also made destruction possible on an unprecedented scale. The assumption that rationality would necessarily create a more humane world became increasingly difficult to defend.

Postmodernism emerged from this crisis as a challenge to modernity’s optimistic “grand narratives”: the comprehensive stories that promised continuous progress, universal emancipation, and a rational future. It also questioned the cultural elitism of many modernist projects and became more receptive to popular forms. In place of confidence and unity, postmodern culture often emphasized uncertainty, contradiction, instability, and pessimism. The future was no longer imagined primarily as a utopia; it increasingly appeared as an ambiguous or dystopian space.

Postmodern cultural production is also experimental and hybrid. It takes elements from the past, combines them with contemporary forms, and produces new syntheses. Irony and pastiche become central techniques. Narratives are frequently fragmented rather than linear, while different times, spaces, styles, and levels of reality overlap. Instead of offering a single stable truth, they blur the boundaries between reality and fiction and allow meaning to shift.

One of postmodern culture’s most important characteristics is the relationship it establishes between political discourse and commercialization. Political content does not disappear, but the market increasingly determines the conditions under which that content becomes visible. A critical narrative can circulate widely if it can also be transformed into a consumable product. If it cannot be commercialized, it is much less likely to gain visibility within the dominant media system.

This is precisely where Squid Game becomes such a revealing example. The series appears to criticize capitalism while presenting that criticism as a globally marketable spectacle. It therefore embodies one of postmodern culture’s central contradictions: if critique itself becomes a commodity, can it still function effectively as critique?

Capitalism as Both Target and Marketplace

At the level of its story, Squid Game offers a powerful, Marxist-inflected critique of class inequality. Its contestants are people burdened by debt, marginalized by the economic system, pushed toward crime, or trapped in forms of financial precarity from which they can see no ordinary escape. They represent those who have been abandoned or exploited by capitalism and who are forced to compete against one another for the possibility of survival.

The game turns this condition into a brutal allegory. The contestants’ desperation is used against them, and their hope of becoming rich makes them participants in a system designed to destroy nearly all of them. Above them stand wealthy elites who watch from a safe distance and take pleasure in the spectacle of people killing one another. The arrangement creates a stark image of capitalist hierarchy: those with power remain protected, while those without it are forced into merciless competition.

Yet Squid Game is not only a critique of the commodity system; it is itself a commodity. Its imagery appeared throughout public space, advertising, and social media. In Istanbul, promotional figures dressed in the series’ recognizable costumes appeared in metro stations, including in the city’s busy Kadıköy district. Such high-visibility campaigns helped transform the series into an event that audiences encountered even when they were not watching it.

This commercialization complicates the series’ political meaning. Are viewers primarily responding to its account of class inequality, or are they simply consuming its suspense, violence, and visual style? A conclusive answer would require audience research, and different groups clearly interpret the series in different ways. Some viewers approach it intellectually and recognize its class critique. Others may identify with it more intuitively through their own experiences.

White-collar employees working within highly competitive corporate environments, for example, may recognize something of their own lives in the contestants’ struggle to survive. They too may feel pressured to advance at the expense of their colleagues, or they may experience themselves as victims of a system that rewards ruthless competition. Whether or not they consciously interpret the series in class terms, Squid Game gives dramatic form to emotions that are already familiar to them.

At the same time, another part of the audience consumes the series mainly through its commercial imagery. The symbols, costumes, masks, and figurines associated with the game have become merchandise. A narrative centered on exploitation and death is therefore also consumed through an aesthetic of violence. The very images intended to expose a cruel system are reproduced as desirable objects within the marketplace.

The series’ reach among children makes this contradiction especially troubling. Squid Game is clearly not intended for very young viewers, yet children as young as six or seven have become familiar with its scenes, symbols, and games. Some may encounter it indirectly rather than watching entire episodes, but this does not make the phenomenon insignificant. Its broad popular appeal and extensive promotion have allowed it to circulate across dramatically different audiences—from academics and office workers to adolescents and young children. In this sense, Squid Game has moved beyond the boundaries of a television series and become part of the broader machinery of consumer society.

Local Games, Global Capitalism

Another quality that makes Squid Game distinctly postmodern is its hybrid structure. The series takes children’s games rooted in Korean culture and transforms them into a global narrative. These local forms become the vehicle for a story about the ruthless competition of contemporary capitalism—a condition recognizable far beyond South Korea.

The result combines the familiarity and innocence of childhood with the logic of death, spectacle, and financial desperation. The games are presented through an almost video-game-like aesthetic: bright colors, simple symbols, striking costumes, carefully designed spaces, and immediately recognizable visual codes. Viewers know that they are watching a narrative about class violence, yet they are also invited to consume it as stylish entertainment.

This contradiction brings the series close to Jean Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality. In hyperreality, representation no longer merely reflects the real world; it becomes entangled with the ways in which reality itself is perceived and experienced. Squid Game takes inequalities that viewers may live with every day and returns them in the form of an intensely aestheticized fiction. Economic insecurity becomes a game, class violence becomes entertainment, and audiences can even admire the visual world through which their own social anxieties are represented.

Reality and fiction consequently begin to overlap. The series draws on genuine experiences of debt, precarity, and inequality, transforms them into spectacle, and then circulates that spectacle through advertising, merchandise, public events, and social media. Its symbols re-enter everyday life as consumer objects. This movement between the local and the global, the real and the fictional, and the critical and the commercial makes Squid Game an especially powerful example of postmodern media culture.

A Viewer’s Response to the Two Seasons

When I watched the first season, I found it highly effective because it offered an intellectually rich narrative about which a great deal could be said. For me, a film or television series is compelling not merely when it is enjoyable, but when it draws me into a question or debate. I evaluate a narrative partly through its capacity to create this kind of intellectual involvement. By that measure, the first season was very successful.

I do not believe that every work of popular culture is automatically shallow, standardized, or worthless. On the contrary, popular culture is deeply ideological, and in the postmodern period it can also contain critical narratives in paradoxical forms. These forms deserve to be deciphered rather than dismissed. The worldwide popularity of Squid Game does not make serious analysis of it unnecessary; it makes the question of why it appealed to so many people even more important.

I was less persuaded by the second season. The immense success of the first season was followed by an exceptionally aggressive promotional campaign, and the production appeared increasingly sales-oriented. Narratively, the second season returned to essentially the same machinery of competition without taking the story far enough in a genuinely new direction. Its deliberately unresolved ending also made the season feel incomplete. By that point, I felt that I had consumed enough of the Squid Game phenomenon and had little desire to continue with another season.

The second season nevertheless contains one important development that strengthens its class critique. Seong Gi-hun, the winner of the first season’s competition, refuses simply to accept his wealth and withdraw into a comfortable private life. He recognizes that his fortune was built on the deaths and losses of others, and his conscience will not allow him to enjoy it without confronting the system that produced it.

Gi-hun’s decision is significant because it preserves his capacity to remain human within a structure designed to destroy solidarity. Rather than advancing within the system, he tries to challenge it. He attempts to organize collective resistance among the contestants and foster a form of class solidarity among people whom the game has encouraged to view one another as enemies. His effort ultimately falters, but the attempt itself deepens the series’ critical dimension. It suggests that individual victory is inadequate when the structure that creates suffering remains intact.

The Postmodern Paradox of Squid Game

With all its strengths and limitations, Squid Game has become one of the defining popular-culture phenomena of recent years. It can be discussed through many concepts, but postmodernism brings its most striking contradictions into view. The series is local and global, critical and commercial, political and entertaining, realistic and hyperreal at the same time.

Its class critique is not necessarily erased by its commercial success, but neither can that success be treated as irrelevant. The series condemns a system that turns human desperation into spectacle while participating in a media economy that turns this condemnation into merchandise and global entertainment. It exposes the violence of competition, yet invites audiences to enjoy that violence through an unforgettable visual world.

This tension does not make Squid Game meaningless. On the contrary, it is precisely what makes the series worth examining. Its power lies not in resolving the contradiction between criticism and consumption, but in embodying it. Squid Game does not stand outside postmodern capitalism and denounce it from a safe distance. It speaks from within the system, circulates through it, profits from it, and reveals some of its most disturbing truths—even as those truths themselves become products for sale.