re: Alice in Borderland S2 - drops Thursday

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Can anybody explain what Arisu and Usagi saw in the hot spring pool? I still have no idea what the frick that was or was supposed to mean. I thought it was maybe a camera (similar to the one in the flowers in the croquet game), but I didn’t see a camera. Also, the cameras and whatnot don’t make much sense in the explanation of the borderlands.

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It was just a dead person crushed between some concrete I believe.

Squid Games and AIB both kinda suffered from the same issues. Really good idea but uneven at times.

Squid Games got more popular I think bc of the strange music and also the games/arenas were a little better thought out.

**SPOILERS**

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I agree with all of that. My main gripe with it is that it seemed to be inconsistent with S1 a bit. Things that would "normally" kill people for most of the show did just that. It wasn't until several outliers with the main cast came about that changed that (like Narugi, King of Spades, Aguni, high school girl, Usagi, etc.).

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I haven’t read the entire thread yet so maybe this has been addressed, but here is my take:

In the real world, they are all injured at the same time when the meteor strikes. They are then found, brought to a hospital, and in some cases placed on life support.

We know that in the end, the survivors had to suffer the same injuries (or at least similar injuries) in the borderland to make it out alive. If the borderland was a closer mimic of real life, they would suffer their injuries in the first game. But there is no hospital staff, no life support, etc. in the borderland. So someone like Aguni would have no chance at survival.

The show establishes pretty early that time works differently in the borderlands. So in the borderland they either manage to come back from severe injuries (Naragi’s burns, the high school girl’s leg, etc.) against all odds OR they receive those injuries at the very end and manage to stay alive long enough to outlive the Queen of Hearts.

You can chalk that up to their subconscious mind maintaining the “illusion” in the borderlands, or you can call it artistic license. Either way I think it works well enough.

My point is that we have to remember that the borderland isn’t the real world. So there will be some implausible outcomes because in the real world their survival is being aided by first responders, doctors, etc.

The reason things that “normally” kill people did kill people for most of the show, as you pointed out, is that the ones left at the end are the outliers.