Squids are definitely not involved in Squid Game. The Korean drama that hit Netflix on Sep. 17 has been at an all-time high in streams. Unlike any other K-drama, this series trended worldwide–especially with the students at Stone Bridge.

The drama starts off with Seong Gi-Hun, a gambling-man strapped for cash. Gi-Hun meets a businessman who offers him ₩100,000 each time he wins ddakji. Later on, Gi-Hun is joined with other cash-strapped contestants who also played ddakji to compete in children’s games for money.

The only two choices in the games are life or death.

“I want to play it but I don’t want to die,” freshman Sachitha Umasenthil said.

In a poll conducted on our Instagram, out of the 94 students that participated in the survey, 63% of the students have seen the Korean drama while 38% have not.

“Everybody on TikTok was talking about it,” sophomore Kylie Jackson said. “I saw it was #1 on Netflix, so I decided to give it a watch.”

Whether it’s finding the series on the Netflix homepage after it ranked #1 or simply discovering it on social media, students have been indulged with the Korean drama.

“I saw it and I was like ‘Oh? What is that, that looks interesting’,” senior Larissa Armenta said. “The picture was cool, and it was the famous stairs going in different directions and these dudes with masks and blood so I searched it up.”

The show itself included sets that were built from scratch such as the playground, the outdoor field for “Red Light, Green Light,” and the stairs that were inspired by a painting — “Relativity”.

“The sets really wowed me,” Jackson said. “The fact that all of it was built in real life was incredible. Areas like the playground and the colorful maze of stairs were my favorite rooms.”

Many are watching the show due to a distinctive plot, wanting to see what might happen next in the nine-episode show.

“I really like the show overall and I just think it’s really interesting,” senior Cameron Chua said. “I keep watching because I just want to see what happens next.”

Some claim that it is too gorey, while others enjoy the series because of how transparent it is with the violence throughout compared to other series.

“The horror elements weren’t too much for me, and the show was really well done,” Jackson said. “I’m in the middle of watching it for the second time, and now I’ve gotten my family into it because of how much I talk about it.”

With many, many, deaths and tear-jerking occurrences, viewers found moments in the series itself despairing as they grew attached to the characters involved in the games.

“I definitely grew attached to some of the characters,” junior Cori Teel said. “There were a lot of parts that made me sad, but it was so intriguing.”

Despite the genre being ‘dramas’, Korean dramas have a wide range of options for viewers to watch.

“K-dramas give the viewers [a] plethora of options to choose from different genres like rom-com, sci-fi, thrillers, melodramas, fantasy, historical, and action,” Times Now News said.

Unlike many TV shows on Netflix such as Riverdale, Money Heist, Outer Banks, and You, shows like Squid Game is possibly the first and only Netflix Korean series that blew up amongst the students.

“I hadn’t been really into [K-dramas],” Armenta said. “But after watching the show, it was actually really good. There must be a reason why they’re good. I guess it’s not just this certain show, there must be others of the same quality of just acting, the plot, and everything. I think I would be more open and compelled to watch another Korean drama.”

With the Korean-drama that took the school by storm, many students plan to watch more series in the genre now that it has been introduced to them.

“The concept of playing childhood games to the death is really intriguing,” Umasenthil said. “Korean shows may be in a different language but all of them have such good plots.”