Letter #149.5: Alice in Borderland

Good morning, Erin.

Bet you don’t remember recommending this to me! (Unless you do. In which case…I always knew you would! Because of course you remember. My seonbae is the best!) It was on that original list of shows you prepared for me right before you left at the end of the semester in December 2021.

See? It’s right there in the middle of the page.

…which you can’t tell is the middle of the page from how I’ve cropped the picture, but it is, I promise. 

Point is, you recommended it, and I watched it—and I needed that bit of throwback to when things were just that little bit simpler. Plus, I thought it would be a nice surprise to tide you over as I waited to drop my obviously much-anticipated Valentine’s letter.

…which went out the window when my appendix decided to explode, but, hey—you make plans, and God laughs, as the saying goes. We’ll just pretend I was typing away at this on February 7th instead of doubled over in agony as I drove myself to the emergency room at 4AM. Problem solved. 

So, come with me to a couple of weeks ago, dear seonbae, and keep all space-laser guidance chips inside the borderline at all times—we’ve got Japanese death games to discuss.

1. A YouTuber I watch has been using Alice in Borderland as his go-to example for excellent TV writing for as long as I’ve been watching him, and, after finally watching this series, I…don’t really know why.  

1A. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed the series, and I’m glad you recommended it to me. But this whole thing was 150% “anime,” and that means it’s got aaaaaaaalllll the storytelling downsides that come along with that: the heroes having ridiculous plot armor; the power of friendship trumping literally everything; in-world time slowing down so that people can stand dramatically in profile and talk about how cool they are with their luck running out (because at least they had the power of friendship); and half the dialogue being someone dramatically saying someone else’s name for no reason. So, top-tier TV writing? No, sorry. But it was certainly an entertaining time—and not infrequently because it was so very “anime.” I mean, I’m an anime fan, after all. 

2. It didn’t take me long to notice that our protagonists were Arisu and Usagi—that is, the Japanese pronunciation of “Alice” and the Japanese word for “rabbit.” Which was a little on-the-nose, given the whole Lewis Carroll pastiche, but cheeky enough for me to approve of. 

3. In a similar vein, I found it noteworthy that our proper introduction to Usagi is seeing her kill a rabbit. What’s it mean? I dunno. Maybe symbolic of the whole deathmatch concept, where you might have to kill “your own” to survive? Because it’s gotta mean something, right? You don’t just have “rabbit” killing and eating a rabbit simply because wild rabbits are the easiest thing for her to catch…do you?

3A. That said, the whole point of the series is a little bit Lost, isn’t it, when you figure out what was really going on, so maybe the rabbit thing doesn’t mean anything specific. 

4. Speaking of: I feel like a bit of a dope for taking the better part of two days to actually realize what the ending of the story really meant. I mean, I got that they had been in an accident and that they’d had a shared experience in some kind of between-life-and-death world, but the cleverness of the fact that there were death games in that in-between world had to percolate in the unconscious part of my brain for a while before leaping up to smack me in the face: the folks impacted by the meteor strike were fighting to survive, fighting to prove that they wanted to survive badly enough to be allowed back into the land of the living rather than having to move on to the afterlife or oblivion or whatever unknown comes when you die in the universe of this story. I thought that was a really interesting way of framing the seemingly random way some people survive accidents while others don’t. 

5. …that said, I have so many questions about that idea because the games ABSOLUTELY DO NOT function in a way that is conducive to that theme. Sure, a lot of the traps in the Saw movies are really unfair or seem counterintuitive to Jigsaw’s whole “fight for your life, learn that you cherish your life!” ethos, but they are—overall—set up to pit an individual against a painful task that makes him or her choose: will you suffer now to embrace your life later, or have you given up and are willing to die right now? With the death games in Alice in Borderland, that’s frequently not the case, relying on other participants (working with or against you, depending on the game) more often than relying on your will to survive as the key to your chances of survival. It doesn’t matter how strong or sincere your will to live is if you get saddled with bad teammates or enter an only-one-winner game or suddenly get shot to death by the Winter Soldier while you’re sleeping at night. I mean, the games are interesting in the same vein as the games in Squid Game or any other decent death game show would be, but…I just don’t see how they ultimately serve the conceit of the story. 

5A. Of course, I’m also assuming the idea that you had to prove you wanted to live badly enough to be allowed to come back to life is what the theme was supposed to be. So, maybe the issue is with me, rather than with the story. But…I dunno, seems more in my direction than not. Or does it? Did you see it another way? Does…does everyone but me see it another way???

6. Believe it or not, I actually recognized one of the actors: the dude playing the rapey thug from The Beach who’s dying of…so many things, in Season 2, including nearly being burned to death at the end of Season 1, is from Good Morning Call, an adorable (if quite low-budget and silly) romcom that I absolutely love, where he plays the sweetest nice-guy second male lead. I was absolutely agape when I figured out why he seemed so familiar to me. Talk about a 180. (And here I was worried about eventually watching him play the male lead in the live-action adaptation of Scum’s Wish. But I guess seeing squishy squishy Dai-chan as a skeevy horndog high school boy doesn’t seem too bad, now. Yeesh.)

7. The Beach (the hedonist enclave for folks to spend their downtime and team up to win games) was maybe the most wonderfully “anime” thing about this series. It’s completely ridiculous and obviously just an excuse to get as many hot people as possible into swimsuits so we can gawk at how hot they are. With the exception of the ex-soldier and this one middle-aged dude during the murder mystery purge, literally everyone there is basically a 25-year-old sports model. And I f***ing loved it. 

7A. Seriously, I was so pleased with how unabashedly this show embraced the sexy. It was never tawdry, but it wasn’t going to pass up a chance to give you something to look at. Which is great. Great because most of the sexiness I’m talking about was coming from a litany of hot girls who had way more opportunity to be hot than the guys? Yes. Without hesitation, yes. Kuina, Thicc Office Lady, Forensics Bae, One-Legged Hottie, the schoolgirls who ended up being agents of the game masters, the Queen of Hearts, the Queen of Spades, literally every woman in the militant group at The Beach, those two nameless “good guy” background girls from The Beach who make it into the first episode of S2 before being gunned down by the Winter Soldier—I mean, talk about a stacked deck. (Like, sorry, Sweet Home, but even combining all three seasons, Alice in Borderland wins on sheer numbers. You’ve been dethroned.)

7B. …point is, it was kinda refreshing to watch something that wasn’t afraid to give us anime-levels of fanservice—particularly without straying into gratuitousness. 

7C. Well, okay, the sex scene between Thicc Office Lady and the nervous friend was a little…awkward. And it never impacts the story in the way that it’s clearly intended (at least by her) to. But, on the other hand, naked Thicc Office Lady, so it all balances out. 

7D. Relatedly, I was very surprised by how comfortable the actress playing Thicc Office Lady was with taking off her clothes (since it happens more than once), so I looked her up. And, as I suspected, she’s a gravure model (basically a pin-up girl, if you aren’t familiar). Or was—and is kind of back at it, I think. Anyway: not wearing much in the way of clothes isn’t something alien to her. And, as someone who was playing a very sex-as-strategy character, her level of comfort with such things definitely made a difference with her performance. 

7E. …though I don’t think anyone was as comfortable with being naked as the leader of that rock band in Season 2. 

8. I still can’t believe the first thing Arisu and his two friends do when they think everyone else in the world has disappeared is split up to search individually. That is the LAST thing I would do. Like, no joke, I’d probably suggest not just sticking together but holding hands.

9. I appreciated that the dude who ran The Beach was called “Hatter” not just because of the whole Alice in Wonderland motif but because, in-universe, he’s literally a haberdasher. Again, very cheeky, show. You got away with that one. 

10. Kuina (the transgender girl, if you don’t remember the name) and…uh, Silver-Haired Hoodie Dude were by far the best characters, and I wish we’d spent more time with them both. I’m glad they stuck around, and I thought the episodes focused on his collar bomb game in the prison were probably the best parts of the show. And they were a waaaaaaaaaay more interesting duo than Arisu and Usagi. 

11. But to give Usagi some shine (especially after, y’know, noticeably not including her in a certain list from earlier in this letter): the character is a rock climber, and this actress absolutely sells that. Sure, if you look closely, you can see that she’s not as muscular as she “should” be, but the actress is clearly in great shape, her arms are certainly toned enough to give off a sense of physical strength, and between the clever choice of tank tops (which make her seem broader) and her general physicality she seems…solid. I thought she did a great job with all of that, whether it was the parkour or taking on bigger opponents in a fight. Very good casting, and a very believable performance. 

11A. …except for two moments in Season 2 which were not her fault: 

• Usagi hops over a guardrail in her way—as in she stops, places her hands on top of it, and then hops herself over it. This is undoubtedly how most people would do this…but Usagi (the character) would have parkour vaulted over it and never broken stride. I’m guessing the actress doesn’t actually do parkour, and it was probably cheaper just to have her hop over the guardrail rather than rig some wirework so that it looked like she was vaulting it. After all, it’s not like the world’s greatest detective would be watching, right? Heh. How wrong they were.

• During the game against the naked guy and his team, Usagi uses all her athletic might to sprint along the tops of the shipping crates and make the huge leap from one stack of them to the next, certain her pursuer would not be able to follow. (She’s right, of course.) To do this stunt, the actress is, unsurprisingly, rigged up in a harness so that she can safely get from one stack of crates to the next without falling to her death. However, the harness is holding her up at a slightly awkward height, so, when she’s sprinting along the tops of the crates, her feet are maaaaaybe only just barely making contact with the surface of the crates. So she looks like she’s only pretending to run. Which looks very silly. 

12. I’m a little bummed that the pop star on the suspiciously prominent billboard in the opening section of Episode 1 didn’t end up being a character. 

13. I’m also bummed that Kuina didn’t end up in a love triangle over Arisu. 

14. Speaking of #bestgirl Kuina: I kind of love that, in the wake of the destruction of The Beach, she still chooses to wear her bikini top. Everyone else has returned to whatever they would be wearing normally, but Kuina’s like, “Nope. I look amazing, and everyone needs to know that.” Like, seriously, later on in S2, the weather has clearly gotten colder, with Arisu and Usagi donning sweatshirts and the group huddling around a campfire—and Kuina’s still just in her bikini top. Because she looked amazing, and everyone needed to know that.

14A. Well, I say everyone went back to what they’d normally wear, but, where Usagi went back to her preferred rock climbing attire, Arisu opts to put on a nice button-down shirt—because he clearly wants to impress Usagi. Which is a great detail. 

14B. …actually, wait, I think Forensics Bae stays in her throwback poolside loungewear from The Beach. Hm. Maybe only Usagi goes back to what she normally would wear. Though Silver-Haired Hoodie Dude just puts on long pants, so maybe he’s back to what he’d normally wear, too. I mean, we only ever see him dressed in his scrubs, when we get a look at his backstory, so who knows. But we know that Arisu dresses like a slob, and Kuina wasn’t visiting her sick mother in a bikini top. 

14C. Also, jokes aside, I think it’s probably telling that Kuina opts to stay in the bikini top the whole time, that she wants everyone to have her femininity overtly on display for everyone to see and acknowledge. I say “probably,” of course, because I can’t be certain that it’s not just about how hot the actress is. But I think, given the struggle that led to becoming the Kuina we meet, there’s a good argument that the character herself made a deliberate choice to keep it.

15. Y’know, while we’re on the subject: the feminine actor they had playing young Kuina in the flashback really threw me for a loop—because I didn’t realize it wasn’t the same person. Like, the idea is that it’s supposed to be obvious that Kuina is a dude, but I initially thought they just did a little makeup work to make the actress less super-cute for the purposes of showing that she used to be an athletic girl instead of…I dunno, not so obviously an athletic girl. But then, before my brain could work through the disconnect between that thought and what it was perceiving as the flashback progressed (that is, that I was looking at a totally different person as young Kuina), they outright told us Kuina was a guy who felt like a girl, and then he went off to…actually, he gets kicked out, doesn’t he. Well, then he leaves and presumably gets surgery to become the Kuina we’d been following since her introduction. So, yeah, a little too subtle for me, apparently. Or, if you want to be generous to me, a little too quick to do the outright reveal. 

15A. I know it’s a TV show, but I found it funny that, to go from young Kuina to our Kuina, the character must have had plastic surgery to soften his facial features, give him a bosom, and decrease the entire width of his body by about five inches. Again, I know it’s TV, but the actor playing young Kuina was noticeably broader than the actress playing his older counterpart. And it made me chuckle.

16. Whatever else can be said about this show (good or bad), the special effects were really good. The CGI looked polished, the greenscreen was seamless, and the practical effects—like when we watched all those collar bombs go off (particularly the edit that swapped from a real person to a replica dummy at the moment of explosion)—were spot-on. I’d love to know the budget for this series, because it looks great. Did they do a lot with a little? Did they do what you’d hope to get from a big budget? I’m pleased either way, but curious nonetheless. Because, whatever the budget, they did quality work.

17. Stunt work was also really solid. That car chase at the start of S2…or, really, that whole Winter Soldier (...that’s what I called the King of Spades) sequence that starts S2 is fantastic! And pretty much all of Usagi’s stuff was quite well done, too. Just really good stuff. 

18. The acting was…passable. Though I think the naked guy gave a legitimately good performance. Everyone else was mostly shades of okay-ish, with occasional moments where someone would step things up. (One-Legged Hottie, for example, gets to shine a little bit.) It did the job.

19. Have I mentioned that the naked guy was a great character? Because he was a great character. Easily the best after Kuina and Silver-Haired Hoodie Dude. 

20. Oh, going back to the clothes discussion for a moment: around Episode 3 of S1, Arisu, his friends, and Thicc Office Lady all get changed into new clothes. The boys opt for everyday casualwear. Thicc Office Lady keeps up the tight skirt-suit and high heels look, because she knows what she’s about. I guess. (It’s quite silly. But it made me laugh.)

21. Speaking of Thicc Office Lady: to underscore how…I want to say stupid, but I’ll be kind and say taken aback Arisu and his friends are by the bizarre situation they find themselves in at the start of the series, not one of them asks Thicc Office Lady how she knows that “leaving the borderline” is an instant death sentence. Or how she knows that a “borderline” exists. Now, they’re dumb, here, because the story wants them to be shocked by the game and Thicc Office Lady’s willingness to sacrifice the schoolgirl for her own benefit. But she’s just so shady, even from the very start. And she CLEARLY isn’t new to whatever they’ve stumbled into. There’s winking to the audience so we know something the characters don’t, and then there’s something like this. Which was a big strike, right up front. 

22. Actually, to that point: it’s kinda funny how hard-wired Japanese character archetypes are to their pop-fiction. Not that fiction everywhere isn’t tropey (cough second male lead syndrome cough cough), but you don’t even need situational information to know who is going to be what in anime-style stuff. One look, and you know EXACTLY who is going to play what role—and pretty much how the overall story is going to progress for them. 

22A. From my notes about our first look at the folks at The Beach: “The baddies will turn out to be the militant guys. Hatter will be killed so the baddies take over. Sarong-hime [(that is, the eventual Queen of Hearts)] will be one of the baddies. Ann [(that is, Forensics Bae)] will survive whatever is coming to be Arisu’s advisor and surrogate mother/maid. Kuina is going to be the much cooler second female love interest. And the silver-haired dude is going to end up as the cool, detached new best friend.”

22B. Which is not 100% accurate, but it’s pretty damn close, right?

22C. Also, in case it’s necessary to explain: I called the Queen of Hearts “Sarong-hime” at first because she A) initially wore a sarong at The Beach, and B) had a hime cut (and because -hime is the Japanese honorific for a princess—whose hair was cut that specific way to indicate her rank). And because I obviously didn’t yet know she was the Queen of Hearts. 

23. As an anime fan, I cannot tell you how delighted I was to see that, yes, even Alice in Borderland worked in a hot springs episode. 

24. Now, while Kuina is obviously #bestgirl, I don’t think it will come as a surprise that I fell in love with Sarong-hime as soon as I saw her. She jumped IMMEDIATELY to the top of my list, even though she wasn’t the prettiest or the hottest or the most charismatic of the girls in the cast. There was just something about her that made me go, “That’s my girl.” Which is why I absolutely kicked myself for never thinking she’d turn out to be the main villain of the entire series. Because of course she would! That’s my whole deal! Smittenness on your part is a sign of evilness on her part, Daryl, you know this! Ugh, I couldn’t believe I missed that. I’m such a dope. (I mean, I even noticed when she seemed to disappear during the end of Season 1, but I just thought she, to my great disappointment, had been shoved aside as a minor character. How wrong I was!)

24A. …seriously, though, her villain speeches during her battle with Arisu were…look, I know I have a problem, but I thought it was genuinely hot. Like, watch out, Go Min-si in The Frog—you might lose your “sexiest thing I’ve ever seen” crown. 

24B. And how cool is this shot, by the way?

25. But don’t think I didn't make note that Thicc Office Lady looked silly when she smoked. My world’s greatest detective skills weren’t totally on the fritz.

26. During the game of tag, Usagi gives everyone a “something worth fighting for!” speech that lasts for 8 minutes…of the 5-minute round where they’re “it.”

27. Speaking of the game of tag: how frikkin’ cool was the Queen of Spades? As soon as she sees that she’s lost and will now have to die, she take a running leap off the tower so that she gets lasered to death as she plummets to the ground. Badass as f***. 

28. I like the blimps in Season 2. I thought they were cool.

29. I also liked the way the game locations would light up in Season 1. I thought that looked cool.

30. I don’t think I was making a controversial statement, earlier, by saying that Kuina and Silver-Haired Hoodie Dude were better characters than Usagi and Arisu, but I want to make a point about why I think Silver-Haired Hoodie Dude would have been a better protagonist than Arisu: for all his amused stoicism, he’s methodical about how he approaches the obstacles in front of him. Arisu, on the other hand, despite being announced as having a knack for figuring out games, often comes across more as lucky than good, frequently flailing about and being pushed to the edge of losing only to pull a rabbit (...heh) out of his hat at the last second. Which is fine, when it comes to moments where he’s truly unprepared (like the very first game he’s in or when the Winter Soldier attacks at the start of Season 2), but it becomes harder to accept that he’s particularly skilled when this formula applies to every scenario he finds himself in, his protagonist powers keeping him alive juuuuust long enough for him to figure something out. Meanwhile, we don’t get to play along with his process, don’t get to experience it with him, because we need to be amazed by the surprise solution. Silver-Haired Hoodie Dude, on the other hand, keeps us abreast of what he’s seeing, what he’s thinking, what he’s learning as things play out. He’s all skill, and we get to ride along as he deploys it. Sure, it easier to do that when he’s in the collar bomb game than, again, when the Winter Soldier shows up out of nowhere and just starts blasting people, but that’s sort of my point: we’re still riding along with him, at that point, as taken by surprise as he is, watching him try to get out of danger—frantically, perhaps, but still methodically—in real time. I admit Arisu comes across as more, I dunno, human (if that’s a fair comparison), but it wouldn’t take much to make Silver-Haired Hoodie Dude emotionally resonant—particularly if you surround him with characters (like Kuina and Forensics Bae) he connects with and wants to keep safe. 

31. When they get separated in the middle of S2, both Usagi and Arisu have little side adventures where they are paired with a younger character they connect with. For her, it’s a pudgy prepubescent boy; for him, it’s a hot, one-legged schoolgirl who wants to f*** him. It’s…not a great parallel, but at least we get Arisu nervously trying to avoid explaining what he was up to when he meets Usagi, again. That was pretty funny. 

32. Oh oh oh—relatedly: when One-Legged Hottie officially joins the rest of the team as they set out to take down the Winter Soldier, I absolutely LOVE that she’s standing there giving Arisu this utterly disgusted “...the hell is this harem of sexy b****es you’ve got?” look while he’s in an absolute PANIC that she’ll tell Usagi that she straddled him in the woods. The look on his face is priceless. 

33. Just as The Beach is about to descend into chaos, Usagi is grabbed by the rapey thug and his gaggle of, I dunno, rape enthusiasts and brought into one of the bedrooms to be held down and violated. When she escapes their clutches, she runs out of the room—but not before grabbing her shoes. So…two things about this:

• First: I’m not saying she wouldn’t decide that she had to stop during her escape from a rape gang to grab her shoes…but it does feel just a bit like the show knowing that she’s going to want to have shoes for the upcoming portion of the story and not, y’know, a conscious decision on the part of the character.

• Second: when Usagi is carried into the room by the gaggle of rape enthusiasts, she’s barefoot. So, um, who brought her shoes? And why? Or are they someone else’s shoes, politely taken off before entering the room? And, if so, doesn’t that make it even stranger that she’d stop to take them? Doesn’t that make the likelihood that the story (rather than the character) wanted her to have shoes? 

34. The final fight against the Winter Soldier is utterly absurd, and I didn’t like any of it. Structurally, it made no sense—but, worse, THEY KILLED EVERYONE. (Except Arisu and Usagi, of course.) Which…what the f***, show?!

34A. …and worse than that is that WAIT ACTUALLY NO ONE DIED LOL. No, I know everyone got perforated by automatic weapons fire at point-blank range, but so what?

34B. …but worse than that is that BUT ACTUALLY ONLY FORENSICS BAE IS DEAD LOLOLOL. Everyone else is still breathing, even though they suffered substantially greater injuries than she did. Sure, Kuina being vaguely okay makes sense, given the way in which she’d been beaten, but…come on! Even the rapey thug was still breathing! Why the f*** was Forensics Bae the only one who died?!

34. …BUT THEN EVEN WORSE THAN THAT was that, despite literally every other instance of this, Forensics Bae IS SOMEHOW ALIVE when everyone wakes up at the hospital in the living world. H-How?! I mean, yay, because I like Forensics Bae and don’t want her to be dead, but…she died in the other world. Why isn’t she dead here?

35. I dunno what Season 3 is going to look like, given the end of Season 2, but…that slow-zoom on the face of the joker card at the end sure creeped me the f*** out. So…there’s whatever that means to look forward to. 

And that, after much more typing than I thought I would wind up doing, is that. One more item off your very first To-Do list.

Three years is a long time, seonbae. But it also kinda feels like yesterday, too. To me, at least. 

I hope you enjoyed that, at least. Next up, we’re going to…to…

Hang on, why is our beloved Good Boy trending? [click click scroll] He changed agencies to join Fantagio. Okay. Why is that such a—wait, that’s Weki Meki’s old agency! Booooo!!! You ditched my girls! Booooo!!!

Though—wait…waaaaaaiiiit…Yoojung is still at Fantagio. Does…does that make it more likely that I could see the two of them in a thing together??? Is that how these things work? Because, if this is how things work, then I will rescind my boooo and celebrate this as the best thing ever. 

…um, anyway.

Up next are letters I had planned for Valentine’s Day and my birthday. (The Valentine’s one was going to be a surprise. The one for my birthday…much, much less so.) But, because of the, um, unexpected delay in my schedule, things got a bit turned around. Which means you’ll have to wait just a little longer to get your Valentine’s surprise. 

I know, I know: such a tease. But it’ll be worth the wait. 

I hope. 

No, I’m sure you’re gonna like it. 

…80% sure you’re gonna like it.

But that’s for later. For now, I hope you’re doing well and feeling good and occasionally wondering if my  plans to turn my memory of our conversations into a board game about choice, perception, and navigating despair have gotten anywhere. 

More soon.

Promise.

—Daryl