Rotten Mango
The Real Life "Squid Game" - Thousands Of Koreans Forced To Play Children's Games To NOT Be Killed
08 Jan 2025
They’re all wearing the same blue tracksuit. Thousands of them standing out in the middle of the woods wearing the same thing. What is this place? They’re out in the middle of the woods - in what appears to be a small secretive city? A military base? How did they get 60+ buildings out here in the middle of the forest? And that giant wall… it’s 30 feet tall. Tall enough to keep people out. Or keep them in. The guards are watching each of the track suit wearing people with precision. One wrong move and you get beat. That’s when they hear it… The man starts running up onto the roof of one of the buildings - and there he goes. He flies off the top and lands in front of everyone. On his head. Someone standing right there says - “honestly, I didn’t know the sound of someone’s head exploding could make such a loud splitting sound. I saw his skull explode open.” A guard member walks out and sweeps up his brains and bones as if nothing happened. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? It kind of sounds like the plot of one of the most famous series on Netflix, Squid Game. But it’s not. This is the real life case of the Brother’s Home in South Korea. The true story behind Squid Game. Full source note: rottenmangopodcast.com
Full Episode
The locks come off these big heavy doors. Interestingly enough, the locks are on the outside. Hundreds of these doors, they open in unison. They open at the same time. And thousands, a thousand, two thousand, it feels more like four thousand people. They walk out of these different doors that have now just been unlocked.
They're walking out into the sun and a lot of them are squinting because they've been inside all night long. They've been trapped. essentially padlocked from the outside. And now they're walking into what feels like a massive atrium. They're staring up at the sky. They're doing circles. They're doing like a 360 turn. And all you see around you are these buildings, buildings.
And then beyond those buildings, woods, It's so strange. It feels like its own secret country in the middle of the woods. There's 60 something buildings. They're all this brutalist style cement blocks. Very unwelcoming. The scale of this place is massive. How do you even build infrastructure like this in the middle of the woods? It's dense woods.
Dozens of dozens of buildings just circling the center field where they're all standing. And there's also these walls. There are some walls that are built to keep people out and there are some walls built to keep people in. This is one of those walls. Because how do you climb 30 feet up with no grip, no help?
Beyond that, beyond the wall centering this field, there's a fence just as tall, potentially taller. And even if you get beyond that, what do you do? You don't even know where you are. You're in the middle of nowhere. Which way do you run? What if you run deeper into the woods or you run straight off a cliff or you run and run and run until you circle back to whatever this place is?
Regardless, it would be impossible to get past all the guards. The guards are holding these wooden bats and they're shuffling all these people to the center of this field. Every single one of the 3,500 something people are wearing identical tracksuits. Blue tracksuits. Think of like the Adidas jumpsuits. Their heads are shaved, but it's clear whoever shaved their heads did not care.
They did not pay attention. There's scars all over their scalp. And behind these people, the rooms that they just came out of is even more bizarre. Every single room is occupied by stacks and stacks of bunk beds, just rows of bunk beds. Practically on top of each other. One of the people in the blue tracksuits blinks. What the hell is this place? A lot of the people gathered are minors.
Some are young as four years old, but there seems to be no consistent pattern to even the people that are there. There are children, there's teenagers, adults, elderly people. Everybody is wearing the appropriate sized blue tracksuit without distinction. How do you even get a four-year-old size tracksuit? And pinned to each tracksuit are numbers. That's what they're known by here.
Nobody goes by names, they just go by numbers. Most of the people in the tracksuits, they look scared. Some of them remember the first words the guards said when they were brought here. This is a quote. From today, you will abandon your rotten mentality and be born as a new human. And then there's a scream. Hey, get down from there.
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