#leeyomi

ᝰ.ᐟ ───── ❛❛ porque minha vida só fica boa no final ? ❞ ───── ⊹ ࣪ ˖

ART CREDIT @claieart

The thirty-minute marbles game in Episode Six of Squid Game (Netflix) killed me emotionally. (In millennial terms, I paused to tweet #wtf once I heard the rules). The episode has its own hashtag there and is destroying people. “Squid game ep 6 reaction mashup” is a whole thing on YouTube.

For quick review, until episode six, where marbles are featured as the fourth game, none of the games are played in pairs. When the players are asked to choose partners, their instinct is to choose someone they trust, or, if that’s not possible, because trusting in the games is like quicksand, then to find someone who seems like they could win. In other words, the players are looking for their plus ones. Then, the rules are revealed. Each player is pitted against their partner and the losers will be eliminated; we know by now what that means.

We’ve felt plenty of emotional and cognitive cruelty from the Front Man and his higher ups until this point, but this specific perversion of trust, trusting already a pipe dream for the players, is venomous. The games bet on the players knowing they’ll be tricked, but the house always wins. Still, the players try to outsmart what they think will happen but end up more compromised before they even start playing. No pair approaches the lump-in-your-throat Kang Sae-byeok (Jung Hoyeon) and Ji-yeong (Lee Yoo-mi) make in their marble game pairing. Here are seven places Kang and Ji-yeong ache; wrestle through humanity’s fundamentals with their compact, emotive prose, and show us that love is raw, beaming against odds, time irrelevant.

1. One Is the Loneliest Number

Solitude doesn’t imply loneliness, but they could be kissing cousins. Kang and Ji-yeong’s first interaction is before the last game of tug-of-war, when Kang recruits Ji-yeong, hanging out by herself in the barracks, to join her team. Instinct compels Kang to Ji-yeong; they speak the same body language, tight, not trusting or giving, aware of everything. Ji-yeong is attracted to Kang for the same reasons, so, in Episode Six, she tells her they should be marbles partners. Two self-reliant people could form a duo, or maybe what results instead is a loose alliance of distinct souls, each knowing what survival is and dancing to survivalism together.

2. Dialogue

Interpersonal growth gets a leg up by putting aside distraction, shifting focus from obstacles, and talking one-on-one, honest and direct. Ji-yeong will protect Kang at all costs (she tells her that), so, for her, evaluating the potentials of their time is a no-brainer. Why don’t they just hang out, she tells Kang, because the result of their time is pre-determined. Kang agrees. Theirs is no-nonsense commitment, without an agenda, tenuous but somehow freeing, and a delicate one. Conversation is a stand-in for lengthening their lives, a little, or, in other words, allowing the time they have to fill with what connection can bring.

3. Focus

…is how anything gets dissected, created, made a whole. The other players, most of whom are in shock knowing they are sending their allies to their deaths, immediately start playing. Their approach, deer-in-headlights, makes sense. Yet, Ji-yeong and Kang demonstrate another possibility: their concentration is simultaneously present and forward-thinking. They understand the stakes implicitly, because they’re both intense and exacting as hell, so, they make the present count. They don’t avoid the future so much as comply with it, but make it theirs, determine themselves how they will get there.

4. Pull Off the Band-Aid Fast

Let’s circle back to Ji-yeong’s pitch to Kang, that they play their game of marbles at minute twenty nine and get to know each other until then — it’s brilliant. They know, cerebrally, those thirty minutes end with Ji-yeong being shot by a red suit guard. But, look at what Ji-yeong’s idea refines around the concept of endurance. With the game’s outcome set, the two women have the possibility to inhabit a space removed from the pressure of circumstance, while holding their devastation that this experience is their last together; moreover, these are the final minutes of Ji-yeong’s life. There is no space to wallow in inevitability, neither is there space to prolong it.

5. (Taking People at) Face Value

Ji-yeong and Kang are cut from the same soul cloth. Their stamina, and resolve to achieve, is a response to their early traumas at home, when they weren’t in control. They recognize a toughness in each other, a defense that plays like offense, which is both true and untrue. No one, at least, not me, was prepared for Kang’s hysterical insistence that Ji-yeong roll her dice again, even though Kang wants to win, even though she knows Ji-yeong is throwing the game for her. So, there is something underneath these exteriors, in Ji-yeong’s cracked voice, seconds before she is shot, when she thanks Kang for choosing her; experiencing what it feels like to be chosen.

6. Fantasy

Ji-yeong’s word is bond, as she chides Kang with saucy, sad eyes to let her lose in style (for Ji-yeong, that means carefully dropping her marble at her feet, nowhere near Kang’s, and no, she will not roll it again). Ji-yeong swore her life away to protect Kang’s, by some sort of soul impulse, but gets even more affected by Kang hearing her goals to bring her mother over from North Korea and get a home for her mother, her brother, and herself in South Korea. Moreover, Ji-yeong feels a verve in Kang’s motivation that she can’t locate in herself. Ji-yeong fantasizes about an island, which lights up Kang’s eyes for the first time. The women need fantasies, dreams of accomplishment, to have a chance at survival in the games. But, for Ji-yeong, Kang’s fantasy is the one worth putting everything on the line for.

7. Love

It’s the age-old, gold state of being, threading Ji-yeong and Kang’s thirty minutes together. Love is an elasticity, also a causation, something your body writes that your mind receives, that says, I must be here for this person because. The question is not, does Ji-yeong value Kang’s life over hers? That inquiry reduces conversational chemistry, how they heal and enlarge each other by listening, their profound convergence of thirty minutes proposing that individual life does, and doesn’t, have value that can be compared. So, there are gradients to loving, and to its scarred sibling, sacrifice, or maybe love is only gradients. It is, for sure, not measured in minutes. Love is a position.

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