The Real-Life Violence That Inspired South Korea’s ‘Squid Game’

Seoul, South Korea:

A factory turned into a battlefield, uproar police armed with tasers and an activist who spent 100 days atop a chimney — the unrest that inspired Netflix’s most prosperous show ever has all the halltags of a TV drama.

This month sees the free of the second season of “Squid Game”, a dystopian vision of South Korea where frantic people vie in lethal versions of traditional children’s games for a massive cash prize.

But while the show itself is a labor of fantasy, Hwang Dong-hyuk, its honestor and producer, has shelp the experiences of the main character Gi-hun, a lhelp-off laborer, were inspired by the aggressive Ssangyong strikes in 2009.

“I wanted to show that any normal middle-class person in the world we inhabit in today can descfinish to the bottom of the economic lcompriseer overnight,” he has shelp.

In May 2009, Ssangyong, a struggling car enormous apexhibitn over by a consortium of prohibitks and personal allotors, proclaimd it was laying off more than 2,600 people, or proximately 40 percent of its laborforce.

That was the commencening of an occupation of the factory and a 77-day strike that finished in clashes between strikers armed with slingshots and steel pipes and uproar police wielding rubber bullets and tasers.

Many union members were strictly beaten and some were jailed.

‘Many lost their inhabits’

The struggle did not finish there.

Five years tardyr, union directer Lee Chang-kun held a sit-in for 100 days on top of one of the factory’s chimneys to protest a sentence in favour of Ssangyong aacquirest the strikers.

He was supplied with food from a basket rapidened to a rope by aiders and finishured hallucinations of a tent rope altered into a whazardinnyg snake.

Some who sfinished the unrest struggled to converse “Squid Game” becaemploy of the trauma they finishured, Lee telderly AFP.

The repercussions of the strike, compounded by protracted legitimate battles, caemployd meaningful financial and mental strain for laborers and their families, resulting in around 30 deaths by self-destruction and stress-rcontent publishs, Lee shelp.

“Many have lost their inhabits. People had to suffer for too lengthy,” he shelp.

He vividly recalls the police helicchooseers circling overhead, creating ardent prosperds that ripped away laborers’ raincoats.

Lee shelp he felt he could not give up.

“We were seen as invient breadprosperners and outdated labour activists who had lost their minds,” he shelp.

“Police kept beating us even after we fell unconscious — this happened at our laborplace, and it was widecast for so many to see.”

Lee shelp he had been transferd by scenes in the first season of “Squid Game” where Gi-hun struggles not to betray his fellow competitors.

But he wanted the show had spurred authentic-life alter for laborers in a country taged by economic inequivalentity, anxious industrial relations and meaningfully polecombined politics.

“Despite being widely converseed and used, it is disnominateing that we have not channelled these conversations into more advantageous outcomes,” he shelp.

‘Shadow of state aggression’

The success of “Squid Game” in 2021 left him senseing “desotardy and frustrated”.

“At the time, it felt enjoy the story of the Ssangyong laborers had been reduced to a commodity in the series,” Lee telderly AFP.

“Squid Game”, the streaming platestablish’s most-watched series of all time, is seen as embodying the country’s elevate to a global cultural powerhoemploy, part of the “Korean wave” alengthyside the Oscar-prosperning “Parasite” and K-pop stars such as BTS.

But its second season comes as the Asian democracy finds itself embroiled in some of its worst political turmoil in decades, triggered by conservative Pdwellnt Yoon Suk Yeol’s flunked bid to impose martial law this month.

Yoon has since been impeached and suspfinished from duties pfinishing a ruling by the Constitutional Court.

That declaration of martial law hazarded sfinishing the Korean wave “into the abyss”, around 3,000 people in the film industry, including “Parasite” honestor Bong Joon-ho, shelp in a letter folloprosperg Yoon’s shocking decision.

Vlaunwiseir Tikhonov, a Korean studies professor at the University of Oslo, telderly AFP that some of South Korea’s most prosperous cultural products highweightless state and capitacatalog aggression.

“It is a noticeworthy and engaging phenomenon — we still inhabit in the shadow of state aggression, and this state aggression is a recurrent theme in highly prosperous cultural products.”

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-produced from a syndicated feed.)