From Seoul to shelves: how collectibles became Squid Game’s second script

You don’t win Squid Game by being lucky. You survive it by reading the signs, decoding symbols, anticipating patterns. And the show itself has played by the same rules.

Since its explosive debut, Squid Game has turned its own language of brutality and spectacle into a visual archive. The moment Young-hee’s giant robotic head tilted sideways to scan the players, a new kind of horror was born: one with eyelashes, pigtails, and blinking sensors. Months later, she was no longer just a character. She was a doll, a Halloween costume, a blinking souvenir in neon-lit claw machines.

Disclaimer: Neutrality was never on the shelf. This essay tracks how pain gets shrink-wrapped, how power slips into packaging, and how certain stories turn to toys while others disappear between price tags. It reads the market not by what it displays, but by what it refuses to carry.

The game never ended. It just changed platforms. In the uncanny silence of retail displays, in subway ads and pop-up shops, Squid Game continues to narrate, not through dialogue or plot, but through posture, color, object. From life-sized replicas to pocket-sized figurines, every item extracted from the series carries with it a residue of control, surveillance, fear. These aren’t just collectibles. They’re extensions of the script. Props reborn as prophecy. Consumer goods as emotional triggers.

Young-hee’s eyes never closed

The dress is yellow and orange. Her eyes stay still, black pupils that turn red when motion is detected. She doesn’t blink, breathe, or twitch. She simply stands and watches.

The moment she says “무궁화 꽃이 피었습니다” (The mugunghwa flower has bloomed), her head turns, the pupils flash red, and the world holds its breath. She isn’t there to entertain. She’s there to catch, calculate, terminate. Built to register gestures, not hesitation.

Young-hee became icon before the credits rolled. Then she became product. Full-scale replicas with rotating heads and glowing eyes appeared in malls. Mini versions with motion sensors followed. Collectible dolls, lamps, vinyl figures, robotic props filled the shelves.

She claims space. Her gaze moved from screen to shop, from fiction to ritual.

CHUL-SU enters as escalation

When Netflix revealed CHUL-SU in the teaser for Squid Game Season 3, he appeared wordless, expressionless, already familiar. Same proportions. Same robotic stillness. His presence reframes the system. Young-hee signals the beginning. CHUL-SU establishes the continuation.

His outfit is precise: a striped polo shirt in red, white, and blue, paired with a matching cap. His eyes remain fixed, unreadable, built for repetition.

Before stepping into any scene, he was already in circulation. Promo posters. Prototype figures. Branded miniatures. His body was designed to echo. A second tower. A second trigger. A new form with the same purpose: observe, isolate, repeat.

CHUL-SU extends what Young-hee initiated, raising surveillance to its next phase.

The second script is made of plastic and glass

In Squid Game, symbols always speak first. Shapes on masks dictate rank. Colors separate obedience from control. And after the blood dried, those same symbols exploded across shelves. Phone cases, alarm clocks, candy tins, costumes.

Burger King launched a themed snack, complete with collector masks. Children’s toys were rebranded to match the show’s designs. Lollipops and chocolates copied the Dalgona. The volume of merchandise became impossible to track, a product line multiplying faster than any plot twist.

These objects extend the series. A motion-sensor doll reenacts the first game in your living room. A keychain shaped like Dalgona candy fractures on command. A limited-edition watch flashes red in the same cadence as the game’s elimination signals. Each item mimics a rule, a gesture, a loss.

Collecting becomes a ritual. You stage the story again, piece by piece, through ownership. Squid Game scripted a world built on violence, spectacle, and debt, then licensed every fragment. The most brutal critique of capitalism became its most profitable product.

The Dalgona as a ritualized relic

In the streets of Seoul, the candy returns with new meaning. Teenagers crowd around folding tables to break sugar with needles and focus. It’s the same game from the show, but the intention shifts. What once decided who lived now invites a different kind of control, playful, public, voluntary.

The Dalgona becomes more than a snack. It acts as a charm, a fragment of fear reworked by repetition. By cracking the candy, they rewrite the memory. The danger fades, but the gesture remains, precise, careful, echoing. Capitalism turned anxiety into product. The street turned it into ritual.

Power, packaged

The first items to hit the shelves were masks. Triangle, Circle, Square. Roles assigned by geometry. The same signs that regulated violence in the arena reappeared as wearable trends. Burger King printed them onto packaging. Bershka and SHEIN turned them into fashion accessories. Symbols of control became style codes.

Wearing a triangle mask means more than cosplay. In the show, it signals the enforcer, the one who executes. On Instagram, it becomes performance without consequence. The iconography stays, but the blood is gone. Oppression turned into outfit. A system of hierarchy transformed into selfie filter.

Squid Game sold more than visuals. It sold function. It let the user rehearse proximity to power, to wear control like a costume, to embody the executioner without carrying the weight.

What isn't sold also speaks

Among the avalanche of merchandise, one absence stands out. While Young-hee became a doll and CHUL-SU joined the collection before even debuting onscreen, the Front Man remained mostly peripheral. His silver mask appears in select items, but never reached the same ubiquity. His figure never filled shelves. The masked VIPs, blunt symbols of elite brutality, vanished from the product lines entirely.

The faces of explicit control are carefully excluded. Marketing leans toward the eerie but cute, the iconic but palatable. Young-hee's gaze is marketable. The Front Man’s power isn’t. Violence filtered through childhood nostalgia sells. Institutional dominance, not so much.

Even the series' most critical symbols must first be softened to circulate. The system doesn’t just commodify critique. It curates which parts of it are safe to display.

Squid Game and the gap between objects

Not every story reaches the shelf. In Squid Game, Ali Abdul — player 067, the migrant worker betrayed and crushed by the system — never appeared in the merchandise wave. No figure, no costume, no product. Was his absence a matter of licensing, or is his narrative simply not considered marketable? Does the system know which deaths sell?

And then comes the contradiction. Twin Peaks released a Funko Pop of Laura Palmer—embalmed, wrapped in plastic, lips blue, eyes closed. The dead girl who launched a series became a miniature. Her stillness turned into icon. Her body, now boxed, is part of a numbered line.

The question remains: why is one story commodified while another disappears? What makes the image of a murdered girl collectible, while others fade behind silence? Between absence and display lies the market’s quiet answer: not every pain is printable.

When toys tell stories, surveillance becomes style

CHUL-SU watches. Young-hee judges. Their bodies perform decisions, not emotions. That function extends beyond the arena. It migrates into packaging, into shelves, into algorithms.

In Squid Game, power moves without noise. It observes, selects, arranges. The dolls and figures carry that logic in every replica sold. Stillness becomes choreography. Gaze becomes instruction.

This is trauma economy. Squid Game transformed the spectacle of suffering into currency. Every collectible acts as a certificate of symbolic survival. Fans pay to carry fragments of a nightmare and call it ownership. Young-hee remains present, even in silence. Her image trains more than memory. It teaches submission.

Even dystopias become consumable. The culture of exhaustion devours its own warnings and calls it merchandise.