late nights, bright lights

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.)

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.👀