Violence in Pop Media

Introduction: The Marketing Lie

Netflix's promotion of Squid Game 2 presents a case study in modern media deception. The streaming giant markets the second season of the dystopian thriller with the same glossy energy one might reserve for Moana—colorful tiles, upbeat energy, celebrity appearances. Yet the content itself is brutally violent. The games depicted are not entertainment. They are death traps designed to kill contestants in graphic, unflinching ways.

This disconnect between marketing and content is not accidental. It is a deliberate strategy to broaden the audience for increasingly violent material by downplaying what viewers will actually experience. And in doing so, Netflix—and the broader entertainment industry—is participating in the systematic desensitization of society to violence and death.

This is not a thesis about whether violent media causes violent behavior. That question has been studied to exhaustion with inconclusive results. This is about something more insidious: the slow, deliberate erosion of our emotional capacity to respond appropriately to depictions of suffering. It is about the industry's complicity in making violence feel normal, anticipated, and entertaining—and about the long-term psychological and cultural consequences.

The Marketing-Content Disconnect: A Strategy for Normalization

The strategy is simple: obscure the true nature of the product to reach the widest possible audience. Market the form; conceal the substance.

Squid Game 2 is not unique in this approach. The Hunger Games employed similar tactics, though with less blatancy and arguably less cultural impact. But the trajectory matters. Each subsequent iteration of this marketing strategy pushes further—normalizing the downplay, perfecting the technique. We are witnessing the progressive march toward a point where the industry no longer feels the need to obscure violence at all. The marketing of violence becomes indistinguishable from the violence itself.

When a story's marketing deliberately contradicts its content, something fundamental is broken. Marketing is not separate from the story. It is part of the story. Every trailer, every poster, every strategic placement of a celebrity on a talk show is an extension of the narrative the work is telling about itself. When you lie about what the story contains, you are corrupting the story itself.

This is mass manipulation. It's the bait-and-switch applied at scale. A viewer comes expecting family-friendly entertainment and instead experiences graphic death. The industry counts on this shock value. It counts on the violation of expectation to trigger engagement. But it also counts on people not questioning the mechanism—on audiences accepting the deception as normal.

The Psychology of Anticipation: From Tragedy to Spectacle

There was a moment in television history when a single death—J.R. Ewing being shot in Dynasty—could dominate the cultural conversation for months. It was shocking because it was unexpected. It was tragic because it mattered.

The Walking Dead destroyed that model entirely. By the time the Season 7 premiere arrived, the network had spent months engineering anticipation for a specific character's death. Every marketing image, every interview, every social media tease built toward a single moment. The death, when it came, was drawn out. It was brutal and unflinching. It was not tragedy. It was spectacle.

But what's crucial is what happened to the audience in the months leading up to that moment: they learned to want the violence. They learned to anticipate it, to discuss it, to theorize about it. They transformed a moment of narrative consequence into entertainment. The emotional response shifted from shock and sadness to curiosity and anticipation. We were conditioned to look forward to the act of killing.

This is how desensitization works. It doesn't happen through gradual exposure to mildly violent content over decades. It happens through the deliberate construction of emotional investment in specific acts of brutality. When a story makes you care deeply about a character and then makes you wait—weeks, months—for that character's violent death, it hijacks the same emotional circuitry that would normally be triggered by a genuine tragedy. But the outcome is different. You emerge from the experience not traumatized, but satisfied.

The industry has weaponized emotional investment. Character development is no longer primarily a tool for exploring human complexity. It's a setup. It's a way to ensure that when the violence comes, it hits harder.

Video Games Don't Do This: Why the Medium Matters

A common defense of violent media is the video game argument: Games are full of violence and no one claims they cause harm. That argument misses a crucial distinction.

Video games operate within systems of rules that are fundamentally different from narrative storytelling. In a game, you kill something because the game requires a pattern. Press button X, avoid obstacle Y, follow mechanic Z. Your brain understands, at a level deeper than conscious thought, that you are performing actions within an artificial construct. The mechanical nature of the interaction creates disassociation. You are not killing; you are solving a puzzle that involves the elimination of an opponent.

This mechanical disassociation doesn't exist in narrative media. A television show or film presents itself as a window into human experience. It uses the same emotional and narrative apparatus that we use to understand real events. When a character dies in a show, your brain processes it through the same neural pathways that would activate if you witnessed a real death. The emotional response is functionally identical.

But here's the difference: in a game, the death is absurd. The character respawns. The narrative resets. There are no consequences beyond the game state. Your brain knows this. It compartmentalizes. But in narrative media, death has weight. Death has consequences. The chaotic, unpredictable nature of the fictional death mirrors real death. And that similarity—that realism—is what makes the emotional impact so much more profound.

When you spend weeks anticipating the death of a beloved character and then experience that death presented as brutal spectacle, you are not experiencing a game. You are experiencing something that your psyche processes as traumatic—the difference being that you are simultaneously meant to enjoy it. This is a unique form of psychological training. It teaches your emotional system to treat serious human suffering as entertainment.

The Normalization of Dystopia: The Slow Acceptance of Darkness

The trajectory from The Hunger Games to Squid Game to whatever comes next represents something larger: the normalization of dystopian frameworks as entertainment. We are being conditioned to accept brutal, dehumanizing systems as the backdrop for stories.

This is not accidental. There's a reason that The Hunger Games did not receive the aggressive marketing push that Squid Game 2 is receiving. Twenty years ago, there was still cultural resistance to presenting extreme violence as light entertainment. The industry has spent two decades wearing down that resistance.

Each iteration pushes slightly further. Each new show is slightly more violent, slightly less apologetic about its violence. And the marketing gets slightly less concerned with obscuring the nature of the content. We are not at the point where violence is being sold as violence. But we are moving inexorably in that direction.

The cultural consequence is the normalization of dystopia. We are being trained, through repeated narrative exposure, to accept the idea that brutality is inevitable, that systems designed to kill the powerless are simply how the world works. A teenager watching Squid Game 2 is not just consuming entertainment. They are rehearsing acceptance of an inhumane system. They are practicing the emotional tone of passive spectatorship in the face of mass death.

This is a step toward blind acceptance. Not blind acceptance of real violence—the vast majority of viewers will never encounter anything like a real Squid Game scenario. Rather, it's blind acceptance of the idea of such systems. It's the erosion of the instinct to resist. When brutality is normalized as entertainment, the capacity for outrage atrophies.

Desensitization, Normalization, and Numbness: The Cascade Effect

Desensitization is often described as a simple phenomenon: exposure to something disturbing over time makes it less disturbing. But the actual mechanism is more complex, and more troubling.

There are three stages in the process the entertainment industry is engineering:

First: Desensitization. Repeated exposure to depictions of violence reduces the emotional response to those depictions. This is measurable and well-documented. But it's not the end state.

Second: Normalization. Once an audience is desensitized to depictions of violence, the industry then normalizes the violence. It presents it not as transgressive or shocking, but as natural. The framing becomes: This is just how the world is. The violence is no longer marked as aberrant. It's the default state.

Third: Numbness. This is the endpoint—and it's what concerns us most. Numbness is not the same as desensitization. A desensitized person can still recognize the difference between violent and non-violent content. A numb person loses that capacity. More troublingly, they lose the capacity to respond. They become frozen.

This third stage is what we should be worried about. We are not seeing widespread violence in streets as a result of violent media. What we are seeing is a population increasingly unable to feel appropriate emotional responses to real suffering. A generation trained to watch death as spectacle is a generation trained not to intervene when they encounter crisis.

The industry has built a system that trains people to simultaneously care deeply about fictional characters and treat their suffering as entertainment. This creates a fractured emotional state. The capacity for empathy is activated and then weaponized against itself. You care about the character. You anticipate their suffering. And you look forward to experiencing that suffering as a consumer. The response to real suffering becomes confused by this training.

We are not becoming more violent. We are becoming less responsive. There is a crucial difference. A violent person might commit acts of harm. An unresponsive person will watch harm being committed and do nothing. The industry is optimizing for the latter.

Everything Connected to the Story Is Part of the Story

This is the foundational principle that the entertainment industry has abandoned: when you tell a story through any medium, everything connected to that story—every piece of marketing, every promotional appearance, every strategic partnership—becomes part of the story you are telling.

A trailer is not separate from a film. A teaser campaign is not separate from a series. A celebrity's discussion of the project on a talk show is not separate from the work itself. These are all extensions of the narrative. They are all tools for shaping the audience's understanding of what the story is and what it means.

When marketing deliberately contradicts the content, you are telling two contradictory stories simultaneously. One through the marketing apparatus and one through the work itself. The cognitive dissonance this creates is not a bug. It's a feature. The industry leverages it. The shocking mismatch between marketing and content generates discussion, drives engagement, creates the cultural moment the industry is after.

But this violates something fundamental about storytelling. A story should be coherent. A story should make internal sense. When you use deceptive marketing to lure people into violent content, you are not telling a coherent story. You are executing a manipulation campaign disguised as entertainment.

There is a word for this: bastardization. When you take a story—in this case, a story about human suffering and dystopian systems—and corrupt its narrative coherence in service of a marketing strategy, you bastardize it. You turn it into something else. You turn it into a tool for mass manipulation.

The Responsibility of the Storyteller

The entertainment industry exists within a culture. It shapes that culture, just as culture shapes it. When the industry chooses to market violent content deceptively, it is making a choice about what kind of culture it wants to build. It is choosing to prioritize engagement metrics over ethical storytelling.

There are creative professionals within the industry who understand this. There are filmmakers, writers, and producers who believe that storytelling carries responsibility. But they are operating within a system that has optimized for engagement and profit at the expense of everything else. The system does not reward coherent storytelling or ethical marketing. It rewards engagement—whether that engagement comes from genuine interest or from manipulation.

For an industry built on the power of narrative, this is a profound failure. Stories matter. They shape how we understand the world. They train our emotional responses. They rehearse our futures. When that power is deployed deceptively, when stories are corrupted by marketing strategies designed to manipulate rather than communicate, something important is lost.

We lose the capacity for stories to mean anything reliable. We lose the trust that a story is what it claims to be. And in losing that, we lose the possibility of shared meaning through narrative.

Conclusion: The Choice Ahead

We are at a crossroads. The entertainment industry has demonstrated that it is willing to deploy deceptive marketing to expand the audience for violent content. It has demonstrated that it is willing to normalize dystopia as entertainment. It has demonstrated that it prioritizes engagement and profit over ethical storytelling.

The consequence is not a society suddenly flooded with violence. It is something quieter and more insidious: a society learning not to respond. A population trained to treat suffering as spectacle. A culture slowly accepting the normalization of brutality.

The responsibility for changing this does not lie solely with the industry. It lies with audiences. With critics. With the cultural conversation we choose to have about what media we consume and what it means when we consume it.

The next time a massive marketing campaign arrives with a promise of entertainment, it's worth asking: What is this campaign hiding? What is the disconnect between the marketing and the content? Am I being invited to engage with a coherent story, or am I being manipulated?

Because every time we accept the deception, we normalize it. And the industry takes another step forward. Not toward more violence—they already have that. But toward a world where violence requires no justification, where suffering becomes background noise, where the appropriate response to human tragedy is passive spectatorship.

That world is not inevitable. But it requires a deliberate choice to build it. The question is: how many more Squid Game campaigns do we accept before we realize what we've been trained to accept?