“Squid Game” season 2 followed up the global phenomenon with a darker, bloodier season that weaponized audiences’ familiarity with the story and nearly made me regret I ever wanted more of the show. Even if we had some characters that were easier to root for and follow than back in season one, we somehow also had some even more despicably evil players in the games.
Among them is Thanos (Choi Seung-Hyun, also known as T.O.P.), one of the best new characters of “Squid Game” season 2 and a hilarious chaos gremlin. Thanos is a former rapper who lost all his money investing in crypto and now desperately wants the games to continue until the cash prize is big enough that he actually can pay off his bills. He is a big part of the biggest change this season, the new dynamic wherein the players get to vote at the end of every round on whether they want to continue the games for a bigger profit (and a bigger body count) or split off their current profits and leave with their lives.
Thanos embraced the madness of the games from the beginning, dropping embarrassing rap bars on occasion to try to seem cool, flirting with every girl in the game — even after they start getting killed off — and always advocating for more rounds and more dead bodies. Oh, and Thanos also randomly switched to English every once in a while.
During a behind-the-scenes video for Netflix, Choi talked about making Thanos purposely bad at speaking English so he’d sound more cringe. “This guy has never been to the States or taken English lessons. I was told his English pronunciation shouldn’t be too good,” Choi said, explaining that he’d mispronounce words because “sort of thing would be funny for foreign viewers, so I used my imagination to make the details stand out.”
Thanos is meant to be cringe-worthy
We all know that there is a lot of “Squid Game” that gets lost in translation, and season 2 is not any different. According to Choi, he wanted Thanos to “make viewers feel uncomfortable and unsure about whether they find him annoying or cringey,” so he used gestures that are outdated and exaggerated, as well as specific Korean phrases that are old-fashioned for Thanos’ age to inform that he is a rapper stuck in his youth, circa the 2000s. This makes the character funny in a rather pathetic way, which also helps sell his shockingly quick death in a bathroom brawl.
As for the English phrases, this is not new. Many bilinguals around the world throw in English words or phrases mixed in another language to sound cool, sarcastic, or funny. We do it in English too when we mix in French words to sound pretentious, especially when mispronouncing said words horribly or with an overdramatisized accent. It’s no different than someone saying they’re going to the store “Target” but calling it “Tar-jé.” It’s embarrassing when we do it too!
Thanos may be gone, but his spirit of chaotic rebellion, of horrible disregard for human life, of greed over anything else lives on.