Alice in Borderland
Squid Game’s perverse competition takes place on a secluded island hidden from the outside world. In Alice in Borderland, Ryohei Arisu (Kento Yamazaki) and his friends fight for their survival in a parallel world called Borderland. That similarity alone illustrates how divorced from reality one must be in order to do the inhumane to win a game. In the series, people play deadly competitions to earn “visa days” that help them stay in Borderland. If their visa expires, a laser shoots from the sky and kills them instantly. People will lock others in a room to burn them alive, form alliances even though only one person can win, and voluntarily keep playing after being given a chance to escape—because they feel they have no life in the outside world. As we see in Squid Game, when societal norms are no longer around to keep people in line, their true selves roam free in the deadliest ways.
