When we first meet Gi-hun, he's stealing money from his mother to bet on horses. He misses his daughter's birthday because he's at the track. He's drowning in debt to loan sharks who literally harvest his organs as payment. By every measure, he's a failure—and the show makes sure we know it.
And yet, I found myself rooting for this man with my whole heart. By the end of Season 1, I understood why. Gi-hun becomes the moral center of Squid Game, a character whose fundamental decency survives even the most dehumanizing circumstances. How did Hwang Dong-hyuk pull that off? I've thought about this a lot.
Understanding His Desperation
Here's what got me: Gi-hun's backstory shows how quickly life can spiral. A factory worker who participated in a strike that turned violent, he lost his job, lost his sense of self-worth, and gambling became an escape that became a trap.
His debt to loan sharks—₩255 million won (roughly $200,000)—represents not just money but years of compounding bad decisions. And here's what makes his character work: his desperation makes him vulnerable to the games' recruitment, but it also makes his later choices meaningful. He has nothing to lose, and he STILL chooses compassion.
That's not weakness. That's strength.
The Choices That Define Him
What sets Gi-hun apart from other players—and what made me love him—is his refusal to fully embrace the game's dehumanizing logic:
- He saves Il-nam during Red Light, Green Light when he could have easily left him behind
- He shares information about the Dalgona shapes instead of hoarding that advantage
- He supports fair play during Tug of War despite the life-or-death stakes
- He cannot bring himself to deceive Il-nam during marbles (which nearly kills him)
- He stops short of killing Sang-woo in the finale
Each choice costs him strategically. Each choice could have gotten him killed. And each choice preserves something essential about his humanity that the games are designed to destroy.
That's not the smart play. It's the HUMAN play.
His Arc Across All Three Seasons
Season 1 Gi-hun survives through luck, help from others, and his opponent's mercy. He wins but refuses to spend the money for a full year, traumatized by what he experienced and witnessed. That detail hit me hard—the money doesn't fix anything.
Season 2-3 Gi-hun is different. He returns deliberately, no longer desperate but determined. He wants to destroy the games from within, to save others from what he endured. This Gi-hun is strategic, hardened, almost unrecognizable—but still guided by that same moral compass.
The question the show asks through him: can one person change a corrupt system from within? His arc is the answer—complicated, painful, and ultimately ambiguous. I'm still processing it, honestly.
Why He Works (My Take)
In a world of antihero protagonists—calculating geniuses and morally gray operators—Gi-hun is refreshingly simple. He's not the smartest player. He's not the strongest. He's not the most strategic. He's just someone who can't stop caring about other people even when it would be so much easier to stop.
That's why his survival feels like a victory to me. Not because he beat the system—arguably he didn't—but because the system failed to break him. The games are designed to strip away humanity, and Gi-hun walked out still human.
If that's not winning, I don't know what is.