I am still not over the tone-deaf advertising around ‘Squid Game’ season 2

A few weeks ago, I flicked to the “media” tab of my PlayStation 5 and was greeted by an unexpected ad for an unexpected collaboration: Call of Duty (the very American military shooter) and Netflix’s South Korean phenomenon, Squid Game. The event (which recently ended) offered you all kinds of fun. Play “Red Light, Green Light”! Dress up during a shoot-em-up as either a contestant or as one of the pink guards! Even the Front Man! Will you be the oppressed or the oppressors?!

Wait, I’m sorry—what?

Squid Game’s first season broke Netflix’s internal records and then some. There are easy ways to describe its success: the show’s action is thrilling and unpredictable, the visual aesthetic is unique and distinctive, and the music is instantly iconic. But there’s another, deeper explanation: as the wealth gap widens across many countries and inflation rises beyond wage growth, the idea that someone could be so desperate for cash that they would submit themselves to a mysterious “game” resonated with people.

But Squid Game’s inherent anti-capitalism goes even further. It’s not just that people are desperate; it’s that the fatal games that desperateness drove them toward are literally an event to amuse the ultra-wealthy. As the poor are getting poorer, the rich are jovially getting richer at their direct expense. That, too, resonated.

That’s exactly why everything Netflix has sanctioned and unleashed since the first season of Squid Game is fundamentally at odds with the series’ themes. It would be funny if the conditions surrounding the series weren’t reflective of exactly why we all gravitated to Squid Game in the first place.

Missing the point

From all the bizarre advertising tie-ins to Squid Game: The Challenge to Netflix’s many Squid Game pop-up experiences, you might be willing to point your finger at the show’s creator and say he sold out. It’s darker than that.

Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk forfeited all intellectual property rights to Netflix in his initial contract. So not only did he not have to consent for Squid Game: The Challenge to go forward, but he’s gotten no licensing or residuals. In fact, he explained in interviews that the main reason he returned for season 2 was because Netflix severely underpaid him for season 1, and that the first season was so stressful to film, that he lost teeth.

So it’s Netflix. All these tie-ins are coming from the C-suite. And seeing what corporations are coming up with in response feels tone-deaf at best, and exploitative at worst.

Take Duolingo’s Squid Game-themed advertisement, “Korean or Get Eaten.” Duo shows up with a legion of pink guard dancers before stuffing a guy in their van for losing his streak—but not before the guy, about to be abducted to god knows where, gives Duo the heart hand signal. Because we love corporations, even when they throw us away, apparently.

Or take the bizarre suite of Domino’s commercials also released for Squid Game 2. Both feature a contestant about to lose one of the now-iconic games, then conjuring a smartphone to order an emergency pizza, which somehow saves their lives. “Capitalism will save you!” implies the ad.

The price of buyout

I feel like I am losing my grip on reality when I watch these ads. “Tone-deaf” doesn’t even begin to describe the tonal mismatch.

Perhaps I’m in the minority here, but I don’t want to be part of a recreation of Squid Game’s “red light, green light.” I don’t need to reenact a game where I get shot if I mess up. Especially because I identify far too much with the financial stressors that brought the fictional characters into that game in the first place. Having a wealthy company insist I want to have that experience in Call of Duty, Roblox, or a real-life pop-up event feels deeply weird.

Squid Game is voraciously anti-capitalist. But because the gigantic, powerful studio that ordered the show wrested licensing power away from its creator, they can do whatever they want with it. Saying that the higher-ups at Netflix willfully missed the point of their biggest series is underselling the issue. Netflix sailed beyond misinterpretation and inevitably reduced Squid Game to, “This show is popular. Let’s milk it for everything it’s worth and make more money from the masses off its popularity!”

It feels so much like something within Squid Game itself that I imagine Netflix’s board consisting of people in the gold masks of the Squid Game spectators.

Granted, Netflix’s buyouts worked. Squid Game: The Challenge was popular. They probably made bank off all those advertisement deals. But it also arguably worked at the expense of Squid Game itself. Not that Netflix cares—to them, Squid Game is just another product.

TIME magazine titled their review of season 2 “Capitalism Killed Squid Game,“ and you can’t really get more concise than that.