Spoiler alert: this article contains spoilers for Netflix’s “Squid Game.”

Enticing, sickening and yet eerily familiar, Netflix’s “Squid Game” is the latest dystopian drama to catapult into the center of popular culture, becoming a global sensation within mere days of its Sept. 17 release.

The show centers on protagonist Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), also known as Player 456 — a divorced father with a gambling addiction who resides with his elderly mother. Buried in debt and lacking the promise of any prospective income, Gi-hun is deflated in a train station when a charismatic man challenges him to a game of Ddakji with a monetary wager. Gi-hun plays and eventually accepts the man’s invitation to a larger series of games with a much greater sum of money at stake: 45.6 billion won, equating to approximately $38 million.

Quickly rising to number one on Netflix’s popularity charts in 90 countries — the U.S. being among them — “Squid Game” is, according to co-CEO Ted Sarandos, well on its way to becoming Netflix’s most-watched show of all time. 

The series’ rapid trajectory to the top is due in part to widespread sharing of memes on social media platforms such as TikTok, Twitter and Instagram, which allowed the series to gain worldwide attention despite a relative lack of marketing outside of South Korea, which was where production took place.

The third episode, called “The Man with the Umbrella”, inspired one particular brand of memes involving a Korean honeycomb dalgona candy, which players in “Squid Game” were required to flawlessly carve shapes out of under a time constraint. People started photoshopping shapes onto stills of the candy and joked about how they would’ve behaved during the game. 

Beyond dalgona and boiler suits, “Squid Game” memes include poking fun at Gi-hun’s initial optimism, setting funny music to the murderous doll who dances in the first episode and comparing “Squid Game” to out-of-context stills from other shows. The memes are highly specific and seemingly endless, making it near impossible to exist on the internet without wondering what these jokes mean.  

I heard the buzz about the show and started watching it with my roommates, but I found myself so perturbed by the violence and gruesomeness of the first episode that I stopped in the middle, deciding it wasn’t for me. 

But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Though I had little desire to continue, I found myself engrossed in the series once again less than 24 hours after I’d turned it off in defeat.

And therein lies the disturbing brilliance of “Squid Game” — as a viewer, your experience mirrors that of the characters. Even when they desperately want to leave, stop or step back, they cannot bring themselves to do it. Even when you want to turn away from the upsetting, graphic and a-little-too-realistic-for-comfort chaos on the screen, you find yourself clicking the “next episode” button after making it to one of the signature cliffhangers that writer and director Hwang Dong-hyuk executes so irresistibly. 

The majority of the show is set on a remote island where Gi-hun is one of 456 players competing in children’s games like marbles and tug-of-war with deadly stakes for the ultimate cash prize, which only one winner can receive. Each player joins the game with the intent of winning money, and each player knows that 455 others will have to die in order for that to happen. 

Of the other players, Gi-hun makes several friends and foes: childhood friend and well-educated businessman Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae Soo), fiercely independent and resourceful young pickpocket Kang Sae-byeok (HoYeon Jung), kind and trusting migrant worker Ali Abdul (Anupam Tripathi) and wise elderly man Oh Il-nam (Oh Young-soo), among others. 

The ensemble cast gives the already riveting show an even heavier emotional impact, causing audiences to simultaneously root for secondary characters while knowing they’ll inevitably die if protagonist Gi-hun wins. I was gutted by the death of Il-nam, because Oh Young-soo’s standout performance deeply invested me in the tender, patient Il-nam, who had little riding on his success, and yet still had me hoping he’d triumph.

Perhaps the most unsettling part of the entire show is how easily children’s games can be morphed into deadly contests, watching something so familiar transform into something so dark. For me, the first episode’s “Red Light Green Light” competition was one of the highlights of the series, as it was the game I played most as a kid. The sudden massacre was both satisfyingly surprising and numbing, with so many players perishing in such a short span of time. 

The final episode’s “Squid Game” — for which the series was named — had the opposite effect. The deaths were tortuously slow, graphic and painful, with very little gameplay involved. As a viewer, I found the scene nauseating, though I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, because it was as if I finally felt as horrified as I should’ve for the entire series, but I’d been too numb to the violence before.

After each death, no matter how tragic, viewers learn to expect the steady, even chirpy voice to ring out over the intercom: “Player ___, eliminated.” More than I flinched at the deaths, I dreaded the impending announcement — somehow both shocking and desensitizing every time, a contrast that prevails throughout many elements of the show. 

Upon their arrival to the island, players don’t know that “elimination” equates to death, but they quickly learn and are given the choice to cease play or make the conscious decision to continue, knowing their success can only occur through the certain death of their opponents.

It is within this concept of choice that “Squid Game” differs from other dystopian hits like “The Hunger Games” and “The Handmaid’s Tale" in which characters have less perceived control over whether or not they participate in the horrors they face. Choice, in “Squid Game,” though, is really just an illusion, as the players face such brutal realities due to financial stress that the deadly games seem a worthwhile alternative. 

Viewers are left, then, wondering which fate is more painful for the characters: the torture of the games or the torture of their daily lives.

While I’m usually partial to a more optimistic worldview, I can’t pretend that I didn’t love “Squid Game.” While the distinct costumes, apt score, stellar acting and captivating pacing are compelling on their own, the show’s commentary on capitalism makes it difficult to turn away from. The world is talking about “Squid Game,” because “Squid Game” is talking about the world.