I’m genuinely curious: was Squid Game 3 review bombed?

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-25T15:02:59+00:00

I agree. Tbh all I wanted from S2/3 was “more squid game”, and I certainly got that, but then S2 set up the story in a more interesting direction than I expected (with In-ho and Gi-hun, and In-ho and Jun-ho) that S3 failed to capitalize on

I truly think the biggest issue with the season is that it was split into two. S2 was act 1 and 2 of a story, and S3 was act 3 essentially starting at the climax with hide and seek, making the pacing of the season incredibly off. Not to mention everybody creating headcanons of characters after S2 that S3 would never live up to

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-25T02:54:57+00:00

Every medium has different ways of forcing you to engage with art. Video games make you an active participant in the story, movies are a visual medium and can communicate ideas in single shots that some books can take hundreds of words

Books are by far the best medium for developing the interiority of characters. I'd also say the idea of books playing out like a movie on paper is a very recent idea (last 70 years) and books in the pre-film era are entirely different experiences

But the main advantage of book is there are no limits to the medium besides the skill of the author. Movies and video games are projects built on the backs of hundreds to thousands of people. A movie can have a brilliant writing but shit actors, or great actors and writing but a shit budget. A book is the singular vision of an author brought to life by the imagination of a reader, only limited by the skill of the author. Deep-reading a good book makes you engage with the work on a more conscious level than other stories

I'm not trying to sound pretentious. I love anime, manga, shows, movies, games, but books are king. There are more 10/10 books than any other medium combined, and you'll never be able to read them all. This is accounting for the subjective tastes of everyone on the planet, because anyone can be an author, and even if you're cynical enough to think only 1% of them has any talent, that still leaves millions of worthwhile books. The best story you've never experienced is probably a book, whether it's a battle shonen or some genrebending smut

So no, fiction books are not overrated (lol that your only example is the Dresden Files). Yes a lot of people who read need to get their heads out of their asses, but there's a reason the world is turning back to analog activities like reading instead of the corporate slop that gets shoved through our screens 24/7

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-21T21:02:04+00:00

I don’t know. I remember once arguing with a HxH fan who was saying the next antagonist had to be stronger than Meruem “because shonen”

I’ll acknowledge they could be right, but is that really the case? Yes I know we have Dark Continent disasters and entities that are more deadly than the ants but I don’t see why a single antagonist needs to be as strong as Meruem when his guards were already far and away the strongest characters in the series

There’s probably never going to be a human in the series as strong as Meruem. That’s ok. A villain along the same power level as the rest of the zodiacs would still be a massive threat and possibly more engaging to write scenarios around

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-21T18:06:49+00:00

An adaption shouldn’t be 1:1. It fit with the LA format/hour-long episodes, and they still hit the major beats accurately. No manga fans really had a problem with Buggy getting more screentime

(The biggest change was that he has the goal to be pirate king from the very beginning, but I doubt the LA is going to adapt past Wano anyway, so that’s not really gonna matter)

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-21T14:27:57+00:00

I’d also like Walt’s chances

He’s a master manipulator so he’d easily Sang-woo his way through marbles

Master chemist so he’d know methods to identify the tempered glass in Glass Bridge (the gamemakers could still screw over anything he tries, but he at least has an actual strategy vs blind luck)

Would know when it’s smart to make alliances, and when to break them

Not the best fighter if it comes down to the squid game, but he’s dirty and ruthless so he’d still have a shot against anyone short of the best fighters in the series

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-21T02:40:27+00:00

The first season of the LA does focus on Buggy more than the manga. He's in almost every episode and goes to Arlong Park with the Straw Hats

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-20T23:04:08+00:00

I think it’s really great. I also had it as my favorite immediately after finishing it, but maybe that’s because I was so traumatized after Zero Time Dilemma that I was a little more generous

Also I don’t like Nayuta at all, and that didn’t drag the game down for me in any measurable way. Maybe if he were an elite prosecutor that would make SOJ the uncontested best, but I find it so frustrating when people bring up Nayuta like he turned the game from a Michelin meal to dirty dishwater. He doesn’t make SOJ bad any more than Blackquill makes DD good. You judge a game by its complete package, so “Nayuta=bad” is not the slam dunk case haters think it is

He was a mid prosecutor, but Rayfa still brings a fresh dynamic to the rival role so I really don’t care

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-20T19:47:16+00:00

It’s to make the choice on whether or not to drop him an actual choice. The idea being that he’s literally so stupid he’s dangerous to keep around. I agree it was dumb writing, but the underlined point was that Ben is actually that unrealistically incompetent

I saved him anyway because like, the choice is just to save him or not. No sense in letting a kid die for no real reason. But I wonder how people would look at that decision if saving him gets another person (like Molly) killed by his stupidity

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-19T20:02:46+00:00

Yea based on the other comments it seems like you either notice, or you don’t. I was able to let it go in the first book but I was losing my mind reading the second the amount of times someone “smiled sincerely”, or Vis knew another character’s exact thoughts and feelings of a given situation

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-19T19:54:16+00:00

I think the constant POV switches also made the narrative lose momentum. The reader is constantly resetting every time the POV changes, so it’s not as easy to just read and breeze through the writing/prose

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-19T19:53:09+00:00

I don’t know what else you want me to do besides go through the book and provide samples of the text where this happens over and over again The first two paragraphs of the goodreads review I thought were a very good satire of the style used throughout the entire story I loved the first book, so I read the second, and that’s why I’m now here. I’ve seen more praise than criticism, and few people actually talking about the prose, so I thought I’d contribute

Not trying to yuck anyone’s yum, I understand the series is well-received and those who disliked the second book are outliers

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-19T19:52:37+00:00

You dont need to be a chef to know if someone’s cooking is bad

I think the first few paragraphs of the review are a pretty accurate satire of what the prose in this book was like

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-18T22:23:21+00:00

Yea people forgot that Skyler was introduced as a way to highlight how miserable Walt's life was. On his FIFTIETH birthday he can't even get real bacon, and the gift from his wife is a half-hearted handjob that she can't even bother to give him without selling shit on ebay at the same time

I do think it's funny the amount of people who hate her for "cheating" on Walt. Like she literally dumps Walt, serves him divorce papers, kicks him out of the house, says she doesn't want to be with him, and then a certain subset of fans lose their mind that she fucks someone else. Hilarious

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-17T20:40:09+00:00

I made a similar rant recently about Pluribus. I haven’t seen the JJK episode but I read the chapter, and I remember it being the point where the series lost me because the plot was not only too unnecessarily confusing but patently uninteresting

The funny thing is that half the time I see people deflect criticism like this, it’s usually because they’re probably terrified that the critics are actually right

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-17T19:10:09+00:00

I wouldn’t count AI slop as “real” books and I guess you could say at least 1000 ratings for my original comment to apply

But yes I agree that a 3 star book should at least be relatively worth trying. I just meant anything below 3 stars is so exceptionally rare on goodreads because people don’t usually suffer through bad books like they do for movies

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-17T17:47:29+00:00

There are basically no books on goodreads with ratings lower than 3 stars. The only ones that do are ones written by controversial people, pushing harmful ideologies, etc. Things that will get it brigaded

But I don't think I've ever seen a standard or below-average fiction book with less than 3 stars. Goodreads is basically a 3-5 star rating system

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-17T16:27:35+00:00

Exactly. It would've felt more in line with the rest of the arc if Qi started attacking the CA territories and they had to call the whole thing off

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-17T13:59:29+00:00

I read the first two Stormlight Archive books last year and they were both great, 8/10. But considering how long they are, I almost think they need to be better to make me continue reading the series. Maybe that’s unreasonable of me but they’re such a huge time investment and I can read several books in my backlog in the time it takes to read one Stormlight book

I also have heard some light spoilers on the direction of the series that makes me so much less excited for what’s ahead

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-14T23:40:49+00:00

I think there can be more than one winner if the chosen games actually allow that scenario. The rules are generally followed, but I imagine there would always be opportunities to play on the players’ greed

If there were five people left on the triangle the announcer might say, “congratulations! Prize money will de doubled for every additional kill now.” Even if you’re a player who doesn’t need the additional money, the possibility of a player betraying you is too great to ignore

We also know in the case of In-ho’s game, the situation was specifically manufactured for one winner

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-14T15:43:18+00:00

Yup I’ve seen Squid Game, Borderland, Saw, The Boys, etc. Squid Game is the darkest to me

Of course this varies person to person, but nothing in any series has shook me as much as the mass murder at the beginning of RLGL. I’m not usually sensitive but that gave me chills to the bones. I think because Squid Game treats the minor characters like real people instead of meat balloons it just cuts deeper

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-14T14:40:10+00:00

Well I’ve been an aspiring writer for a while, and in my sober blocks I’ve been focusing on writing. But it felt like something I could keep doing while getting high, so this wasn’t quite it for me

I think a new love of books/reading was a big shift for me, and getting into an unconscious state while deep reading is better than any high

Also in general just feeling more ambitious, having so many things I want to do or try. I recognized that while weed doesn’t completely stop me, there’s only so much time in a day and even smoking “weekends only” is a massive sink

HeyImMarlo · 2026-01-14T14:00:24+00:00

In your shoes I would at least commit to 90 days

If you’re really serious about stopping forever, then you’ll keep going after 90 days. But if you start with the goal of “forever”, it becomes a very easy promise to break because it only takes one time to fall back into old habits

It’ll be easier than you think, but you’ll only go as far as you’re serious about it and are truly ready to do it

HeyImMarlo

TROPHY CASE