Notice! This article contains SPOILERS for Squid Game Season 2.Gong Yoo's enigmatic Salesman had a new game coming squid game Season 2, but what does “bread and lottery” really mean? squid game The second season started very quickly thanks to Seong Gi-hun's (Lee Jung-jae) hunt for the Salesman. After the end of squid game In the first season, Gi-hun decided to go back and hunt down the people who organized the games. To do this, he first had to find them, as most of the people in the cast of squid game Season 2, like Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), had no idea where the island was. This put Gi-hun on the Salesman's trail.
Gi-hun orchestrated a large search party to find the Salesman, hiring his former loan shark Mr. Kim and his men to search every subway station in Seoul. When they finally found him, Mr. Kim and Woo-seok (Seok Ho-jeon) followed him around town and watched him implement a new game, called "bread and lottery." squid game it wasn't entirely clear what bread and lottery are or what they actually mean, so the Vendor's cruelty was a bit confusing. Fortunately, the show gave some insight into what the game was actually about.
The seller offers homeless people the choice between bread or lottery
Vendor's Sadistic Game Lets Homeless People Choose Between Food and Chance to Make Fortune
In squid game In Season 2, Episode 1, the Salesman bought 100 loaves of bread and 100 scratch-off lottery tickets and took them to a public park. While there, he approached a large group of homeless people and offered them a choice between a loaf of bread and a single lottery ticket. The vast majority chose the lottery ticket and none of them won any money. After, the Seller threw the remaining bread on the floor, informed everyone that they had thrown the bread away, not him, and began to stomp on all of them in a fit of blind rage..
Interestingly, and contrary to its role in squid game In the first season, the Salesman didn't offer any of the homeless people a chance to participate in the actual games. It appears that he was still playing ddakji to recruit players and that his bread and lottery game was purely extracurricular in nature. The Salesman tormented the homeless people in the park completely of his own free will, not because the rich people who run the games forced him to. It was an expression of pure hatred and sadism on the part of the Seller.
What the Bread or Lottery Game Really Means in Squid Game Season 2
The Salesman Game foreshadows the game's voting system and is designed to be cruel
The Salesman's game is essentially a preview of the new twist squid game season 2 was introduced into the games. Players can now vote after each round to decide whether they want the games to continue and the prize money to be accumulated, or whether they want to forfeit and split the winnings they have already won among the survivors. The bread and lottery game is essentially a smaller version of this choice: players are able to choose between a modest sum that would help them now, or the likely disastrous chance that they will be financially prepared for the rest of their lives..
In addition to foreshadowing the rest squid game In season 2, the game of bread and the lottery has a function: cruelty. The objective of the game is for the Salesman to try to "prove" that poor people are very willing to help themselves and that they prefer to take the easy way out, even if it is to their own detriment.. This is obviously an inaccurate way of looking at the very complex problem of poverty, and the Salesman's game inherently dehumanizes poor people. The choice is not between “supporting yourself with your own strength” and “choosing the easy way out”, the choice is between a single piece of bread and a small chance of getting out of the nightmare of poverty.
This is obviously an inaccurate way of looking at the very complex problem of poverty, and the Salesman's game inherently dehumanizes poor people.
The name “bread and lottery” also seems to reference the old saying “bread and circuses”. The ancient Roman poet Juvenal described “bread and circuses,” or, more broadly, food and entertainment, as all that was needed to control the masses. Juvenal's line is usually about something that isn't actually a public good, like infrastructure or education, that is used by people in power – usually politicians – to appease the public and stop them from focusing on real issues. It seems squid game is commenting on how people in power will harm personal health and some distractions to prevent people from making systematic changes.
Squid Game's bread or lottery game perfectly sums up Gong Yoo's character
Hwang Dong-hyuk thinks the salesman is full of self-hatred
The game of bread and the lottery not only has a lot to say about society and the plot of squid game Season 2, however, also reveals a little about the Salesman. squid game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk explained the bread and lottery game and said that Salesman sees himself in the homeless people he harasses.
I believe that Gong Yoo's character [the Salesman] is someone who has lived a difficult, harsh and precarious life, much like those who are portrayed as homeless in the series.
And he is someone so full of self-hatred that it expresses itself in the hatred he has for other humans. And because he hates these people, he believes he is different from them. [He is] showing and expressing his hatred for people who choose lottery tickets over bread, almost as if he was trying to escape his own self-loathing nature.
Hwang Dong-hyuk's comments also fit into the Salesman's story in squid gamewhich he told Seong Gi-hun later in the episode. As the Salesman explained, he rose through the gaming ranks, starting as one of the squid gameof the masked workers and eventually graduated to become a recruiter, but only after he killed his own father in the games. Although he didn't say it explicitly, the Salesman almost certainly rose from poverty to work in the games, and is now rich enough to afford expensive suits and tens of thousands in winnings in bread and lottery tickets.
The Salesman was upwardly mobile, which is something most poor people squid game you just can't reach it. There are too many structures to keep poor people in poverty, like loan sharks and debt. Because he is the exception to the rule and has managed to build a better life for himself, the Salesman despises the poor and tries to distance himself from them.. Now, he takes his anger out on anyone he thinks is unwilling to improve their own lives. The Salesman's story was a great start to squid game Season 2, and it paved the way for a very exciting show.