Squid Game | Yangjae Citizen's Forest Station — A Folded Square on a Gangnam Platform

The Shinbundang Line drops you into a station named for a park you cannot see from the platform. Fluorescent tubes. Tile. A bench that looks like every other bench on the line. Yangjae Citizen's Forest Station sits under Seocho, one stop south of the moneyed names of Gangnam, and it is here that a man in a cheap tracksuit meets a man in a suit.

Episode 1 of Squid Game puts Seong Gi-hun on this platform with Gong Yoo's recruiter. They play ddakji. The paper square slaps the tile. Ten thousand won becomes a slap across the face, then another, then a card with a number on it. The station keeps announcing trains as if nothing has changed.

The platform is public. You can stand where the camera stood. No doll, no arena. Just the ordinary machinery of a Seoul commute, which is exactly why the scene works. Walk up afterward into Maeheon Citizen's Forest if you want trees. The game started underground.

Photo: hyolee2, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.