The Existential Modern Dystopia of Arcane and Squid Game | Hello Future Me

if you want to find out what society fears look at their dystopias and judge you by squid game and the hunger games will fear any kind of competitive physical activity i don't really have a copy of the hunger games on hand so instead you're going to be stuck with this version of the 2011 smash hit divergent the ugly stepsister of the team dystopia it's even got the the beautiful irremovable sticker divergent now a major motion picture in case you forgot it's kind of weird how often games and competitions show up in dystopias right there's got to be something to that either way following the hiroshima and nagasaki bombings there was an explosion in dystopian fiction featuring nuclear holocaust of some kind and in the 80s fears of growing corporate power the mega mall sprouting across the country like weeds i love the smell of commerce in the morning late to the rise in the cyberpunk dystopias these labyrinths of metal and smog like modern day beijing except with a more ominous blah dystopian fiction has always evolved with the times playing on problems humanity hasn't quite yet solved unresolved cultural conversations saying hey this is where we're headed if we don't get our crap together it gives us a snapshot into the fears and hopes of the past and with them being more popular than ever right now with squid game and hunger games and divergent and snow ps4 and kinder arcane at least 75 percent of you seem to think it's a dystopia though i don't quite agree when people look back on us 50 years from now what are our modern dystopian stories going to say about us [Music] we will show you more [Music] time moves slow what are we waiting on arcane is an incredible animated series based on the worst game league of legends incredible animation brilliant writing memorable characters you know all of this all of the things that leave you crying on the floor it's set in the city divided into two piltover the wealthy beacon of progress and science and trade in the world and then zorn the undercity rife with addiction and poverty we are so used to dystopian stories about oppressive governments with their boot on the neck of the working man killing and imprisoning us and watching and surveilling us at every turn usually for no real benefit just power or maybe some high-minded utopian ideal taken way too far and you can see where that comes from because you know the 20th century was kinda bad sometimes eugenics and nazis and stalin and ideological state building and a massive expansion of the state's capacity to police thought and action this kind of the 20th century was humanity's dark emo phase with heavy emphasis on the dark and our dystopian stories reflected that but now we don't have to worry about being tracked right sorry google was just asking me how i'd write the toilets at the denny's that i was at five minutes ago [Music] no we just don't care anymore but our dystopias have changed right because we don't see as much of that heavy-handed conscious oppression from the top down in arcane things suck sure the rich and powerful families of piltover rule over the city and profit off hex tech technology while zone is forced to work for whatever pennies they can get the sewer networks of piltover literally run through zorn their trash piles heap poison into its air this underclass literally suffocating on the everest and apathy of piltover and it's all part of maintaining this pristine facade of progress and science and hiding anything ugly underneath keeping the excessive wealth to themselves it's just good business right but it causes zorn to turn to drugs and crime and black market trading which in turn justifies more police crackdowns which in turn makes life harder again harder to find jobs that bring them out of this there's all this idealism in the city about keeping piltover as this place for scientists and progress but that means that the poorest the uneducated the ones born at the bottom have no way of rising out of their squalor people like victor are the lucky ones and he only got that far because of his connections but all of this all of this bad stuff it isn't big brother the people with power and prestige and wealth and opportunity aren't overseeing all of this in fact the show goes out of its way to show that they don't really realize what's going on down there they don't even really care for the most part their way of life and piltover is dependent on the suffering of this invisible underbelly of people that they are willfully ignorant of not so much cruel as apathetic not conscious but ignorant and we see this again in probably the most iconic modern dystopia the hunger games you remember right there was this fever dream of hunger games clones of like five years in a world where everything you do is tracked by a chip in your arm at age 17 your career is given to you by the collective based on your personality malory wintersnap is deemed too individualistic and sentenced to hard labor until she meets a handsome man hurricane eating and must choose between him an identical boy with different colored hair coming inevitably closer by the day judging by jeff bezos's expansion plans and it's easy to think of penim as that all-powerful evil dystopian government because you know president snow is brutal and keeps his boot on the neck of the districts to maintain power but the hunger games has an even bigger critique of the ignorance of all the people in the capital it's all bright and colorful and wealthy but the people living there barely comprehend that their way of life is dependent on keeping this massive underclass of people in squalor sure president snow is bad but these walking candy wrappers should damn well know better iffy trinket's famous line that is mahogany is just so funny so perfect because of how disconnected from reality it really is she's sitting on this train where she knows one of these kids is going to die and she's thinking about the wooden table it is satire of the highest order and in arcane caitlyn's arc is much the same as effie's emerging from this ignorance about the suffering that underpins their way of life people are sick starving ravaged by shimmer they live in constant fear caitlyn pleads with the council and the reason that effie and caitlyn is such important characters is that you know they're not dictators they're not the one holding a gun to these people's heads they're not the one running the child labor switch shops they are just the average normal people of the capital and piltover because it's about them their guilt their responsibility the moral consequences that others have to bear the modern dystopia shifts the blame from the all-powerful big brother in the sky to well us to me to you and this idea keeps cropping up snowpiercer resonating so much that we adapted it twice in under a decade disco elysium so many more stories feature this dynamic of the blame relying on those ignorant willfully ignorant of how their lifestyle works but it's about so much more than people just not knowing what's going on right because dystopian fiction has a long history of characters rising out of their ignorance and discovering the way the world truly works soylent green is people blue pill or red pill die hard isn't actually a christmas movie feeling happiness for the first time which would be a lovely thing to experience i understand but this is different the modern dystopia doesn't look so much at how we get line two but how we lie to ourselves willful ignorance it's about why we don't know things even when the facts are all right in front of us and how we twist the truth when we do learn these things and i know what willful ignorance means according to levin meats and perfect parking ltd this includes knowledge pertaining to willfully shutting one's eyes to the obvious willfully and recklessly failing to make such inquiries as an honest and reasonable person would make knowing of circumstances which would indicate the facts to an honest and reasonable person and knowing of circumstances which would put an honest and reasonable person on inquiry look i spent like fifty thousand dollars getting a law degree i had to use it somehow it's all worth it right and nothing demonstrates how all of this works better than squid game it's about people trapped in debt competing in deadly childish games in hopes of winning money like the american healthcare system but with marbles but there's a weird quirk unlike in say the hunger games players are free to vote to leave the games at any time and that's a weird detail right and the more i thought about it the more obvious it became it's because it creates this illusion of consent in the system and it falsely absolves the people responsible of any guilt of any responsibility because they didn't make them come here they didn't force them into this position they chose to put their life on the line right this is just the system as it is meant to work right there's this moment in the series where they hang people for trying to cheat for having the smallest advantage and they're as if that is the sinister the unfair the impure thing about all of them participating in this and even though the hunger games doesn't let the contestants leave the whole media blitz beforehand is all about the capital manufacturing consent from these people the capital selling themselves on the idea that the contestants want to be here or they recognize they have a duty to always focus on what they're gonna do if they win not what they're gonna have to do to get there or what brought them here in the first place if it weren't for the baby and it's broadcast to the nation but it's not only for the districts is it it's for the people in the capital because all of this how we think about all of this it's not a bug it's a feature some older dystopians do the same thing like stephen king's the running man and again i don't have a copy on hand so we're stuck with this 2-2 measure the gathering card which also features a running man which is about people who volunteer to get hunted down for money and if they survive they're rich but stories like these they're pretty rare and it's easy to think of tiger man and his gang oh god damn it as the villains after all they're the ones betting on murder sports but squid game purposely puts a lot of emphasis on the everyday people behind the games and when characters go hey why are you participating in this why are you letting this happen they go well you chose to be here like the average citizen of piltover or the capital would think and that's the crazy thing we we like to think that once we know the truth once the facts are laid out in front of us we're gonna change our mind how we think how we act but the reality is most of the time we're the guy eating the steak in the matrix who just wants to be plugged back in the modern dystopia goes out of its way to show how all of these people absolve themselves of guilt how we absolve ourselves of guilt rather than thinking about why people have to make these choices in the first place ignorance isn't just something we have it's something we craft for ourselves squid game's first episode is exciting and fast paced throwing you right into the games the meat of what you want to see but its second episode is slow at the end of the first the characters just vote to leave the games and it can kind of feel like the show is pedaling backwards after it was so exciting but the thing is the second episode is really important for critiquing what consent means in this context that the characters only come back at the end because they had no other choice no money no options no opportunities no future showing how easy it became to exploit them but the big question is why has this kind of dystopia become so popular it's the same reason that any dystopia was ever popular we see this stuff in the real world and worry about where we're headed and stick with me because i'm gonna say it anyway this is what you're here for you're stuck with me on a beautiful ride it's gonna be lovely at the end of world war ii international trade accounted for like four five percent of gdp and it wasn't even until the fall of the soviet union that it started to account for around a quarter of global gdp now since then global trade has increased immensely and it has improved the lives of billions of people making needed resources cheaper and more readily accessible and raising living standards around the world intertwining our economies in a lot of really good ways it now accounts for about 50 percent of global gdp but like with all things it has a dark underside like over the last 20 years there have been these great environmental efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions right yeah cool great that's fantastic a plus mini stellar goods you don't use plastic straws now greta thumbberg is proud of you and supposedly a lot of countries have actually managed to hit their targets and there's some good trajectories happening but the stupid reality is that a lot of these countries aren't so much lowering their consumption as they are exporting the environmental cost the eu has famously reduced their crude oil production over the last 30 years but its imports have continually risen from 1400 to nearly 2 000 tons more per day that's 22 000 tons more oil every year here in new zealand we've been closing down coal mines left right and center but we're importing more coal from overseas than we ever have in 14 years in these cases we're not so much lessening our environmental impact as we are exporting it to other countries and the ones who have supposedly be doing worse than all of us the usually wealthier western countries kind of look down on them for it you know and this doesn't just apply to the environment arcane and squid game and the hunger games are talking about other things even more importantly you know nike doesn't so much improve its business practices so much as it exports that child labor to other countries where it's still legal where it's still unnoticeable incidental in the background and this is the case for our clothes and our phones and our jewelry it's close enough for us to reap the benefits but distant enough for us to not think about the consequences willful ignorance like this is so often born from having time and wealth which is why the richer the characters are in these stories the more ignorant they tend to be and don't get me wrong getting rid of plastic straws and paying carbon offsets and passing domestic exploitation protections are good things but it's like the distance makes it feel more okay like it's not our problem we're not responsible when it's that far away over the ocean and we can't see it i mean in arcane when jase and vai decide they do need to do something to fix the undercity what do they do they destroy one of silko's refineries only for jace to end up killing an innocent kid and jay says we're done here do you not understand i am part of this now the next parents who get a message their kid isn't coming home but vi rightly says you've always been a part of this you just never had to look it in the eye one dead kid there's hundreds more where he came from thanks to silco and thanks to people like you who stuck their heads in the dirt selgo being a product of the void that piltover has left behind the conditions that they have created that he can take advantage of jace only internalizes that he has any responsibility whatsoever when he is the one doing it in person in front of him but the modern dystopia recognizes how distance obscures that sense of moral responsibility because again we are so used to that heavy-handed intimate dystopian violence of the state of the individual in north korea and tiananmen square the killing fields of cambodia when someone comes down with their guns and their tanks and they kill a child for being in the wrong place but a lot of the biggest injustices we just never see because they're incidental to the way that we live likewise this juxtaposition between the bright and good of piltover and the suffering of zorn rife with addiction and poverty it's crucial to again demonstrating how wealth and peace and success and beauty can obscure how it is supported or maintained when we see it side by side i mean it's so easy to go hey this isn't okay but put an ocean between the united states and the philippines or new zealand and indonesia and suddenly i don't know the best dystopian fiction mimics the real world often in these exaggerated fantastical ways and arcane hunger games snow ps and squid game all play out this dynamic that truly does exist between wealthy and poorer countries in miniature i and probably you live in the shining cities of the world dependent on the say terrible working conditions or the labor and exploitation in other countries but those problems are just incidental right we didn't make them didn't make them take that job and their deadly coal mine they did it of their own free will we aren't the ones beating them when they don't work hard enough that's just the way the world works because like the capital does to the districts and snowps it does to the tale and piltover does design we outsource the moral implications of our lifestyle so that we can party on without a care in the world and it's complicated right because it's not like these people have no responsibility whatsoever to themselves and their communities and their country they can't just blame everything that they've ever done on the people over there you know silco is exploiting zorn as well with the other drug lords and in squid games xiangihan is a reckless gambler and he gambles with the money meant for his kid like that's that's not on us that's gotta be on him to some degree you can't excuse all of that and say that they had no choice humans are really good at assigning blame for things that impact people individually on an immediate individual level you know i punch you in the face uh the state kills your parents in front of you but we aren't very good at taking responsibility for things or even noticing things that aren't individual that aren't immediate that we may be playing some small tiny pattern or might only have a fix far in the future but that we are definitely still a part of in some way you know no one thing i do is going to destroy the planet if i use another plastic straw or create a child labor-based economy if i buy a badly sourced shirt but i have to have some responsibility right i just don't know how to quantify that a lot of the time the moral calculus is hard so we default to whoever is doing the immediate harm like jace does in arcane he defaults to silko being purely responsible for life in zorn and he destroys the drug refineries because that is so much more quantifiable isn't it you can understand we sweep in and we dismantle the sweatshops and we set up new governments but those same economic conditions those same social pressures that existed before haven't gone away and something's got to fill that vacuum all jace did was make zorn more economically and politically unstable and give those who already had power more of it the silkos of the world and again don't get me wrong destroying the drug refinery probably a good idea but we're defaulting to these immediate individual solutions like not using plastic bags and straws or personally exploiting others and these are all good things you know don't be the bad person that gives the drug but also these problems are so much bigger than us individually you know and in a lot of these cases i think it's often about giving ourselves a sense of hope about the feeling that we're actually doing something to help to fix things because otherwise we just resign ourselves to an infinite hellscape when nothing we do ever matters or changes anything and it's intolerable to live in a world where we feel that way the modern dystopia recognizes that harm has become so much more complicated than it ever was before or at least that we're thinking about it it's harder to destroy because revolt against two and it's harder to help than ever before yes it's president snow but what about the rest of them at the end of mockingjay president cohen pushes for a new hunger games featuring the capitals children a righteous retribution she calls it and obviously that's too far but that's a valid question isn't it how culpable are they they have to have some responsibility right but what these stories do best is they personalize these issues in a way that we don't in the real world you know when we think about slave labor making our clothes you know we don't think of a person we think of a country or a continent and how many times have you heard you should eat this there are starving kids in africa the shimmer it's a drug and hex tech fulfills similar roles in people's lives in arcane they make you stronger more able but hextech is a clean version of this power while shimmer is a destructive force in someone's life we see this best exemplified in the second vai versus civica fight mirror characters with similar abilities but one is slowly destroying her mind and body you see people in poorer countries often have to turn to more ethical or questionable methods to do the same stuff as us you know and there's a moral question there like what's the responsibility alas there is another element of the modern dystopia that i need to talk about that i haven't mentioned but you've all been thinking about it because it's very very prominent and that is of course that it's just packed full of teenagers right just just millions of them just saturated with it and there is a reason let me tell you why as harvard professor of history joel lapore wrote in a golden age for dystopian fiction dystopias featuring teenage characters have been a staple of high school life since the lord of the flies came out in 1954 but the genre only really took off in the aftermath of vietnam and watergate but they became more popular when distrust of adult institutions and adult authority flourished all of them are characterized by a withering contempt for adults and an unshakable suspicion of authority adults in these stories are often painted as ignorant either unwilling to see the truth or challenge the system or willing participants in it while children a lot less so dystopian fiction looks to the future of where we are headed and it builds a monument to the failures of the past because you know we can see that sentiment in a lot of young people today this frustration with what feels to them like they're inheriting a broken world forced to participate in it and forced to live with the consequences of others whether or not that's fear the sentiment is very much there question is what do we do about it the time jumps between the first second and third acts of arcane see our protagonists growing older but only more disillusioned with the way that adults kind of run things jason heimerdinger's relationship is indicative of this with heimerdinger repeatedly insisting that hextech needs more time that he's not seeing the problems going on in the city that they could solve he's too caught up in his supposed principles and ways eventually jace even gets fed up with the rest of the council too and their continuing ignorance of the problems at hand the way things are working and he says with respect i don't give a what any of you think of me anymore and jinx is ending well even more so it's her taking her frustration out on the system this these adults that seemingly took everything from her these are feelings that you can probably understand to one degree or another and i'm sure that the generation that comes after me is gonna be just as frustrated the world that i have created because there are things that i'm never going to see that i'm not going to deal with like there are things that you were never going to see like the fact that i've been hiding dominoes in the background of this video the entire time and you didn't even notice because they were in the background incidental barely noticeable right because sometimes it feels like the dominoes have already started falling that they were knocked down a long time ago and there's no way in hell that we're ever going to be able to get a chance to stop them that's the thing about dystopian stories isn't it we're not there yet even if a lot of the time it feels like it's looming on the horizon and maybe just maybe [Music] we can stop the dominoes from falling too far [Music] you know kill me oh [Music] [Music] so [Music] so

Channel: Hello Future Me

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Keywords: explained, theory, lore, analysis, how to

Id: GIbGbFmp9Lo

Length: 28min 4sec (1684 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 04 2022