[Squid Game] There will be major spoilers in these thoughts. If you're interested in this show do yourself a favor and go in blind. Here we go.

Looking at general reactions I think there's a kind of genius in how this show made the audience hate Sang-Woo more than Il-Nam.

Like, Sang-Woo does some awful shit but honestly? How many people can honestly say they wouldn't have made those same choices?

Ali won the marbles game, if Sang-Woo didn't trick him he would have died. How many people would honestly die for some guy they'd known for less than a week? Regardless of how nice he was.

If Sae-Byok and Gu-Hun teamed up against him on the final game he would have died. Again, how many people would honestly die rather than take the opening to even those odds?

Il-Nam though? Il-Nam is a fucking MONSTER.

People are even getting on Gi-Hun's back for not going down and helping that homeless guy on the finale himself, deciding to stay for the best instead.

But Il-Nam could have not only done the same but for how much that one year of the games must have cost, he probabaly could have housed the city's entire homeless population.

Hell, he could have just rounded up 455 random people and just paid off whatever debt they had if he wanted to.

Instead, he poured money into his death games because he was bored being rich.

Sang-Woo is in just as dire straits at everyone else. There are people coming for his HEAD outside of the game. and as the games progress you get a ton of characters realizing they have to personally kill the people they've come to know

but then you've got Il-nam who did all of this because he was bored

He is, bar none, the most irredeemably, unquestionably evil character in the show and while people are pissed he doesn't get half the hate that Sang-Woo does.

even his justification for the games, after all the flowery dialogue, boils down to "these people are worthless and it's fun watching them die"

Beans : Yeah, exactly. If Sang-Woo leaves the game empty handed he's basically a dead man and his mother is going to lose everything.

Il-Nam gets all philosophical and poetic about his motivations but he's still just a heartless piece of shit who exploited desperate people so he could watch them die for his own entertainment.

But Sang-Woo is the guy everyone hates.

people have problems with morally grey characters

Beans : Apparently. It's just weird that people are less angry at the actual mass-murderer-by-proxy