I don't know when it happened, but past a certain age I stopped wanting to watch "realistic" depictions of people experiencing pain and suffering. Posted by Countess Elena at 10:03 AM on Octo I mean, we played pretend games about horror movies back in the '80s too, but we weren't supposed to. I saw a damn ad for a Youtube video with a thumbnail of a bunch of popular kids' game characters playing Red Light Green Light - the Minecraft guy, an Among Us guy, all kinds - and it was clearly meant for kids to watch. There's a little old-fashioned crankiness to my feelings though, too. The Hunger Games was a soft sci-fi story with outlandish challenges involving nonexistent technology, but the whole infrastructure of the Squid Game was nothing that someone couldn't accomplish with enough money, and there are people who have it. It's not as if anyone missed the point of the series, which is as dark as it comes it's that inequality is so firmly entrenched that no one's threatened by the fact that it's so popular - not even Jeff Bezos. I'm a big fan of Squid Game, but I kind of hate seeing the inevitable aftereffects of its popularity - the Halloween costumes, the kids playing at it. These projects can lose steam and we've all seen terrible endings, and I would not place Squid Game's finale among the worst by any measure. I totally consumed that package, but it's weird to enjoy something like that? The season finale was not terrible, all things considered. kind of feels like the increasing pressures we see everywhere, and the way competition can bring out the worst in desperate people, packaged in entertainment. From what friends tell me, the dubbed version is atrocious (is it ever not?). For entertainment purposes I think the subtitles are fine, I assume I'm missing things but it still flows. I've discussed the show with a Korean friend, we meet for language lessons, and that perspective has been great. It is the kind of viewing that definitely plunges the casual "just one episode" person into three in a row before you know it. So much buzz about this series, finally got to watching it. The closest I can think of is maybe "Daddy", but that term has a ton of other subtext in English that wouldn't translate back either. "Babe" doesn't seem like an exact translation for that.
The original Korean she is speaking reportedly directly translates to "big brother" (as spoken by a child), but is contemporarily used as a term of endearment for one's lover, but also with a weirdly childish angle to it. The best example given there was how the character Han Mi-nyeo (#212, played by Kim Joo-ryung - the shameless lady trying to schmooze up to everyone) was using the term "babe". The Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast episode on Squid Game featured a new guest, Jae-Ha Kim, who was more familiar with the Korean language to speak a bit about some of the lost context in the subtitles.
In regards to the subtitles, I would be really interested in seeing something similar to what the anime subtitle-ing community does for particularly beloved anime series including additional contextual subtitles (in other colors or parts of the screen) to explain a particular idiom that's being translated literally (typically providing a much better understanding of the tone that the dialogue or situation was trying to create).