Where everything seems possible and nothing is what it seems.

As Squid Game's season 3 is about to drop, I found myself hankering for an Alice in Borderland rewatch, so I decided to do that. They're both death game media, but I guess I'm in the mood for nightmare realm survival over capitalism critique.

I realized I never posted about AiB's season 2 here, and I can't really remember what all my thoughts were at the time, but I do recall being WAY more excited about the reveals of the face card games when I read the manga, and the TV show didn't hit that same level of whoa. Also, season 2 compressed a lot more manga content than season 1 did and had to add a new game for Usagi specifically (I get it, the manga's sexism doesn't do her any favours). I think there could've been two more seasons instead of one, but it was a better idea to only do one more season in order to complete the story instead of risking cancellation.

The cost is that the various face card games have to be simplified (which works for everything except the Jack of Hearts, IMO) and side character development has to be sacrificed. In the manga Arisu only plays the King of Clubs and Queen of Hearts, so we spend more time with new side characters, but you can't do that in a TV show format. On the flipside, the TV show does get rid of a lot of faff, drops the manga's focus on game strategy, integrates characters across games better, and follows its chosen emotional throughline about living well and survivor's guilt more closely than the manga's exploration of different themes.

I still enjoy the show but what I miss most of what was lost was the glimpse into the King of Spades, the only face card who isn't motivated by a sense of superiority over other players or a desire to play the games to their most extreme conclusion. He doesn't want to play at all, and that's super interesting to me! In the TV show the King of Spades is positioned into a boss fight figure who takes out most of the gang in order to leave Arisu and Usagi alone to handle the final Queen of Hearts game, so he's a shadowy military man who has been traumatized by the games, and that's all he needs to be.

But in the manga there's specificity in King of Spades having witnessed the horrendous suffering of someone he loved in the games and having to mercy kill them. In the aftermath he made a conscious decision to snipe other players as quickly as he can before they can suffer any more in the gamescape. But in rejecting the games and all its macabre rules (he is the only face card not constrained by an arena!), the King of Spades tragically becomes a face card himself, and it's a shame that in the TV show he's a terminator with no face until his last episode, and no interiority save a glimpse at the literal last moment. :( I love him as a character! He is a dark mirror to Arisu, driven by a corrupted hero complex that has him believing that a quick death at his hand is kinder than the torture of the games! But alas.

PS. What is my timing! I just found out that there's going to be a season 3, which I thought at first was a fan concept but nope, it's legitimately dropping in September this year. I'm tempted to read the manga sequel that covers Arisu's return to the Borderland, but it might be more fun to go in with no expectations whatsoever. I have read the Alice on Border Road manga though, and I wonder if season 3 will incorporate anything from there. If they do, I'm at least mostly confident that the show won't port over much of Border Road's increased violence against the female characters, wooff.

Also curious is that when I looked up responses to season 2, people thought that the season 2 finale was more open-ended than I interpreted it to be. Like, it was obvious to me that the Joker is the psychopomp running the Borderlands (a trickster in charge of games that are as vicious as they can be unfair? you don't say) and, following the previously established mechanism where upon clearing a game the equivalent card is revealed, that the reveal of the Joker card as the final shot means that the equivalent game has been cleared, i.e. the Borderlands as a whole. But what felt so obvious to me is not so to many people! And I guess season 3 will/may do something else with that.

PPS. Talk about a fandom that's difficult to get content that threads a fine line for my own enjoyment. :/ I enjoy the AiB games but am not that interested in game strategizing, and I love the cerebral elements of the show but I don't think it's that deep, either.

PPPS. I made the mistake of reading the comments on the season 3 teaser. Media literacy for this show is dire. (Not uniformly, there are people who get it, but there's so many confused comments about the s2 finale.)

Partway through watching The Devil's Plan season 1, I did a quick search on youtube for TDP-related content to get an idea if TDP is/was popular. The algorithm fed me a video by TaranArmstrong commentating over Genius Game, a UK version of the original The Genius, which I forgot existed but at least knew existed at all because David Tennant is the "host". (Not really, he's in prerecorded video footage explaining the games and tallying results, but he's not physically there to host.)

I watched bits of Taran's videos and really enjoyed his commentary! He has a good handle on strategy and figuring out game mechanics to explain them in ways that I can understand (a blessing!), plus he has a good grip on the social aspects of the game. Most important though, I think, is that Taran's enthusiasm is nice and he gets invested in a fun-to-watch way, with good humour, and it's fun to see him so critical of Genius Game's mostly wishy-washy players and the UK audience's dislike of complicated games. The reason the algo fed me his videos is because he mentions that he loved TDP season 1 and wants to do commentary over TDP season 2. He couldn't upload the videos to youtube, so he put them on patreon instead, so I figured hey, once I started watching TDP season 2, I can intersperse that with his commentary videos.

TDP season 2 I think starts strong, there's a good selection of contestants, some of whom are well familiar with board games and/or card games, and the showrunners changed the format up where instead of two players going to prison at the end of every main match, half the players would go there, and instead of a prize match that all the non-prison players have to play to get prize money, there's a death match where all the prison players have to play to survive. Plus because the thing about season 1 was the hidden prison game, both sets of players immediately get on trying to figure out the hidden games in both areas, which are found pretty early in the season.

Unfortunately as the season went on, the flaw in the overall game design had an accumulative effect, and I found myself enjoying the show less and less, and ended up mostly (though not always) watching Taran's commentaries instead of the actual episodes. I bailed entirely in episode 10 of 12. I might go back, I might not, but it's just not fun anymore.

( Cut the rest for length. )

I picked up Brittany Kaiser's Targeted: My Inside Story of Cambridge Analytica and How Trump, Brexit and Facebook Broke Democracy when it first came out in paperback a handful of years ago, but hadn't read it because, well, I figured it'd be stressful. And it is stressful to read, which I have just done, considering where the world has gone since the first Trump election! But I think it worked out in the end because the book is already dated, and that helps to put some things in perspective in how facebook is no longer the powerhouse it once was, and our understanding of Big Data and data protection has evolved somewhat.

So Kaiser was an employee and eventual whistleblower of Cambridge Analytica (CA), I think it's quite widely known now how CA used Big Data to develop highly detailed psychographics of US voters to manipulate them in the 2016 election, especially towards the goal of voter suppression. What the book does is provide Kaiser's understanding of the timeline of events plus the details of the wheeling and dealing of players behind the scenes who were funding and/or moving money around, plus how the data was scraped and hidden in the first place (like, I knew all those facebook quizzes were part of data scraping and psychological profiling, but reading about it is still upsetting). But Kaiser says she had no hand in the data herself, since she was mostly pitching customers towards signing a contract before handing off to the operations team.

Since Kaiser didn't handle data herself I didn't get what I would've loved to know more about, which is how manipulation happens, beyond Kaiser's description of customized advertisments to incite anger and fake grassroots movements, but we knew that already. The psychology of it is interesting, and I would've liked deeper analysis of how to process news in a noisy world, and of the psychological and societal consequences we're still living in. But that's not the point of the memoir, and Kaiser's main emphasis is the attempt to redeem herself for her role in CA by focusing on data protection moving forward, which feels at this point a little horse-out-of-barn situation, but that doesn't mean we can't become more conscious of our online safety and support legislation to better protect everyone's privacy. (Facebook also being a case study of new social media being the wild wild west and allowing such abuse because no one knew what to protect themselves from.)

Plus when I say the book is dated, I'm also specifically referring to how Kaiser's exit strategy to get out of CA was to join the blockchain community.👀

I have finished Chucky season 2, what a fun time! Not a strong start for me, because I found the season's set-up of Jake, Lexy and Devon getting sent to a Catholic boarding school in lieu of going to juvie somewhat hackneyed, plus I don't care much for the use of Christian symbols and themes in this particular franchise, but then! Character work! (Which I'd missed at the end of season 1.) Jake and Devon get to have character-driven conflict! Devon gets to be angry and express it! Jake is distracted by his own guilt! Lexy gets crunchy emotional stuff with her addiction and via their friendship with the new adorable character of Nadine! Yum yum yum.

So it's all about being orphans and the fallout of when parents let their kids down. The first three Child's Play movies were entirely about this: traumatized children who are not believed or protected by their parents/guardians, so the show coming back to that and setting it in a Catholic institution is a bit too on the nose for me, but I did very much enjoy the trio getting to fully mirror Andy and Kyle's experience as children lost in the system and eventual turning to violence in order to find meaning (violence against Chucky, but violence all the same), and that mirror going all the way to the finale where everyone gets their catharsis, and Andy and Kyle gaze upon on the trio and are glad that at least they get to grow up without the fear of Chucky hanging over them.

Which is why I wish the show ended right there, with that oh so satisfying win. That was a great murder of Chucky that Andy did! (Were his gunshots meant to mirror how Chucky was shot to death in the first Child's Play, only Andy is his own hero now?) Episode 7 is such a banger, and allowing everyone to vocalize their fears and regrets just gives so much emotional weight around the horror camp elements, what a great balance.

But this being a horror franchise and the show having been renewed, that's not the end and the trio get to be traumatized some more. :(

Other stuff:

• The absurdity of Devon Sawa returning to the show as a brand new character after being killed off twice in season 1 is fantastic. I also think I laughed the hardest at the prep montage where Father Bryce changed his cassock solely to show off his abs.


• Good Chucky was such a fun little gimmick and, besides being fun in itself, I like how it informed Jake's grappling with his own guilt and projecting his hopes that if one of the Chuckys could be redeemed, maybe Jake can, too. Brad Dourif's voice work with Good Chucky is phenomenal. I cared less for the other two Chucky variants, though.


• Lexy's little sister Caroline was so much more interesting in the season opener, and I was bummed that we didn't get much more of her, though it looks like she might have a bigger role in season 3. (Unless the show is going to further push how young their victims can be.)


• Jennifer Tilly was way more delightful this season, I think because having Tiffany at odds with Chucky is just more interesting for longer arcs, plus the very fascinating tonal dissonance between her being charming and having her own insecurities, while at the same time doing such monstrous things to Nica and, as revealed this season, Chuckyverse!Jennifer Tilly.


• Sadly, I did not care for Glen and Glenda. It felt like Mancini had trapped himself with the vague ending of Seed of Chucky, and the machinations to get the twins out of the way felt more contrived than anything else. I think my main issue is that I could not buy Glen and Glenda's characterization as relatively normal teenagers despite having been raised by goddamned Tiffany Valentine.


• The meta episode where Gina Gershon, Joe Pantoliano, etc. were at Tiffany's house for the twins' birthday, is a fun gimmick but some of the gags were a bit much, a bit too Seed of Chucky for me. Loved seeing Meg Tilly, though!
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• Sister Catherine as a legitimately normal and kind character really grounded the season. Same goes for the sincerity of emotions in the Christmas finale between the trio and Lexy's mom. You need that sincerity when there's OTT horror-comedy going on everywhere else, plus the breath of fresh air that is an adult who does want to protect the kids and listen to them.


• Freddie Lounds! Okay well, it's Lara Jean Chorostecki as Sister Ruth, a bit part that I WISH was bigger because, what a weird character who's so hungry for praise and to feel special, that she could've been pulled into the Chucky conspiracy but her quirkiness only ended up maneuvering her into becoming fodder.


• Nadine is a great new character, what a great actress, and I'm glad they added her in to give someone for Lexy to bond with, though I did say out loud at two different points, "Oh she's a goner." And then... yeah.


• Nica, sadly, I feel was kind of just... there. I think this is an unfortunately natural progression from her role in season 1, where she's cordoned off from the other storylines and trapped with Tiffany. I wonder also if this is a consequence of her two movies (Curse and Cult) being straight up horror, and the aftermath of that leaving her in a situation so awful that there's no place for levity, let alone relief. The only connections she makes are with the twins, and later Andy and Kyle, but they're so brief and don't break her out of her (and her story's) isolation. The status quo finally ends in season 2 with her freedom, so I'm hopeful for more interesting things for her to do in the next season.

While casually browsing Netflix for something that could be playable out in the open while repairmen go around the house, I saw a Korean reality/game show The Devil's Plan. I clicked it and after a while went huh, the game vibes are similar to The Genius, which I very much enjoyed a few years ago. So I looked it up and oh, there's a creative team overlap, that makes sense!

So The Devil's Plan, although it opens melodramatically, it is almost the same format as The Genius in that there's complicated board-type games to play, and there is an accumulative currency ("pieces" in TDP, garnets in The Genius) gained through games that confers survival and other benefits in the long term. But the major difference between the two is that The Genius was played one day a week over multiple weeks, while The Devil's Plan is played continuously over a week while the players live together in the set over that time Big Brother style.

I wonder if what happened is that the makers of The Genius got the idea from seeing how some of the players (primarily season 2 onwards, is my impression) organically met up for dinner after recording sessions, where they socialised without game stress, analysed the games they just played, and worked out feelings that might have accumulated on-camera. I think I remember some of the players mentioning that some production staff joined them for those dinners as well, and from there maybe someone got the idea that these off-game sessions could be part of the show itself. Plus the shorter timeline really amps up the intensity of the game relationships and does not give the players true breaks to recover regular headspace.

I think it's really interesting that TDP season 1 isn't as cutthroat intense the way I remember season 2 and 3 of The Genius being, which you'd assume it would be considering that all the players MUST have watched The Genius and other similar shows beforehand. It might be the choice of the players themselves, but the show format itself has two games a day, where one game match has the players competing against each other, and another game that they have to win collectively, and the teamwork of that second game counters negative feelings that might have come out from the regular match. I liked that, I thought it was very clever! I also wonder if the living-in format also reduces drama since players have to spend ALL their time with each other, and Korean social community rules guide them into working out peaceable solutions.

( Cut for The Devil's Plan season 1 winner spoilers. )