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Comment by nnoitra | Hacker News Reader

The acting is superb, I really have not seen a single actor fail to deliver. They are all shocked beyond reason given the circumstances. It's like watching what would happen in real life.

It has high realism precisely because not everyone believes in a dog eat dog world. There are those that sacrifice themselves to save someone else. The immigrant that believes he is inferior simply because he came to the land and you have genuine human elements come to the surface even in the brutal world.

It doesn't lose a second on pointless discussions. It just starts strong and goes on and on until the very end. Substance all the way through. It's not just gore for the sake of gore or for shock value.

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> The acting is superb, I really have not seen a single actor fail to deliver.

Have you seen the episode with the VIPs? They are terrible across the board. Their delivery sounds like NPC background dialogue from a third-rate low-budget video game.

Yeah, I agree the VIPs' acting kinda sucks. But everything else is uber good.

I thought that the casting & acting for the scene was on purpose to demonize the VIPs / controllers (westerners).

Evan costumes were horrible MardiGras masks would have even been a step up.

If you were to view their script and line delivery through the lens of a non-English speaking Korean audience, which this show was targeting, I think you'd find that this is a non-issue.

The same way that the vast majority of shows and movies produced in America for American audiences contain absolutely atrocious foreign dialog...

This is exactly how I interpreted it. I'm Dutch and the film interpretation of my countrymen is usually someone with a German accent, someone who gets high or a prostitute. No American will ever complain about that.

You picked the worst acting of the series as an example here. The previous episodes actually did have superb acting. One huge difference to American and British shows is that nobody tried to be cool in squid game. They were acting like humans would.

If someone claims that not a single actor failed to deliver it's a perfectly valid response to use the worst actor as a example to the contrary.

It's also not afraid to have protagonists of questionable character. Northern Asian media at least understands that people aren't perfect and crafts excellent stories of growth at the hands of a self-inflicted struggle.

Western media is full of level-headed, mild-mannered, sharp, witty, moral paragons of protagonists with motives that are practically announced from loudspeakers.

Northern Asian media

OT, but I have never heard of South Korea described as "North Asia". Is that a common thing? Just looking at a map it is clearly way to the south.

South Korea is always considered as part of "northeast asia" region along with Japan, China, HK/Macau and Taiwan. If you work in MNC with presence in that region, NEasia is common designation in their sales meeting.

FWIW aside from the delivery working better alongside the original Korean (which seems appropriate for a series made for a Korean audience first), the dialogue was intentionally aloof and pretentious (while also being tasteless and crass). I don't recall the exact quotes but the actors pretty much stated that their instructions boiled down to channeling the spirit of the equivalent of a fedora wearing teenage 4chan user: stilted to make up for a lack of sophistication but also deviantly self-indulgent and crass.

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