Two of Netflix’s biggest survival thrillers dropped new seasons within months of each other in 2025, and the overlap was immediate and impossible to miss: a pregnant contestant, a baby counted as an official player, a returning protagonist pulled back into the game by choice, and a closing scene teasing global expansion. Fans across Reddit and YouTube asked the same question almost instantly — did Alice in Borderland Season 3 copy Squid Game Season 3? Here’s a full breakdown of every parallel, what’s actually confirmed, and a genuinely important update: a manga epilogue that’s since reframed how critics view the ending.
Fans are asking the same question across Reddit and YouTube:
“Did Alice in Borderland season 3 just copied Squid Game?”
No formal copying is confirmed — Alice in Borderland’s manga actually predates and outsold nothing near Squid Game’s fame, and its Season 3 exists entirely outside the source manga, which ended with Season 2. Critics broadly read the overlaps (pregnant contestant, returning protagonist, global-expansion ending) as Netflix chasing Squid Game’s winning formula once the show ran out of manga to adapt, rather than deliberate plagiarism.
What the Similarities are:
- Pregnant Contestants as the Emotional Core
- Babies Counted as “Players”
- The Protagonist’s Voluntary Return
- Recruitment Symbols: Ddakji and the Joker Card
- Global Expansion Endings
- Shared Visual and Thematic DNA
| Parallel | Squid Game 3 | Alice in Borderland 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Pregnant contestant | Jun-hee | Usagi |
| Baby counted as player | Confirmed | Confirmed (Joker Game) |
| Protagonist returns voluntarily | Gi-hun | Arisu |
| Global expansion tease | International recruiter scene | Los Angeles café scene |
1. Pregnant Contestants as the Emotional Core
Both shows introduced a pregnant character as a central emotional anchor. . Both pregnancies function less as plot devices and more as moral anchors for the entire season.
In Squid Game 3, Jun-hee becomes one of the season’s most affecting characters, her pregnancy forcing every challenge to double as a question about protecting two lives instead of one. Expecting a child, she’s forced into life-or-death challenges that test her humanity every second. Her pregnancy becomes the show’s moral compass — a constant reminder that survival now means protecting two lives.
Alice in Borderland 3 mirrors this directly through Usagi, whose pregnancy ties into the show’s long-standing themes of death and rebirth within the Borderland itself who we discover is pregnant. Her unborn baby isn’t just a plot twist — it’s a symbol of hope amid despair. The Borderland has always been about death and rebirth, and Usagi’s pregnancy captures that theme perfectly.
2. Babies Counted as “Players”: Innocence vs. System
Just when viewers thought things couldn’t get darker, both shows doubled down.
In Squid Game 3, Jun-hee’s newborn is actually counted among the players, turning a symbol of innocence into part of the system’s cruelty. It’s a moment that horrifies and fascinates — the Game now recognizes even a baby as a participant.
Alice in Borderland 3 mirrors this unsettling idea. The Joker Game — the final deadly stage — acknowledges Usagi’s unborn child as an official player.
The message is clear: in these universes, morality doesn’t matter. Whether you’re innocent or guilty, born or unborn, you’re trapped in a machine that values spectacle over life. This narrative parallel sparked countless Reddit threads and YouTube breakdowns — because coincidences this specific rarely happen twice.
3. The Return of the Protagonist: Gi-hun & Arisu’s Comeback
Both main characters — Gi-hun and Arisu — escaped their respective games. Yet both decide to go back.
Gi-hun’s ending in Squid Game — turning back toward the game rather than boarding his flight home — became one of the most talked-about moments in the show’s run.
Arisu’s arc in Alice in Borderland 3 follows a similar emotional shape: having escaped, he’s pulled back not by force but by an inability to leave the trauma, and specifically the desire to protect Usagi, unresolved
Both men embody a deeper theme: trauma doesn’t end when the game stops. The need to confront evil — even at the cost of peace — becomes irresistible. This parallel marks a shared shift from physical survival to psychological survival. It’s no longer “Can I escape?” but “Can I live with what I’ve seen?”
4. Recruitment Symbols: The Joker Card and the Ddakji
In Squid Game, the ddakji — a simple folded paper tile — acts as the invitation to chaos. In Alice in Borderland 3, that symbol takes the form of the Joker card, which plays nearly the same narrative role.
Each item carries mystery, color, and meaning. The ddakji’s red-blue duality reflects choice and manipulation. The Joker card represents unpredictability — a wild element that can change the entire system. Both are silent recruiters, inviting new victims while teasing deeper secrets.These tokens prove that in survival-game worlds, symbols speak louder than words — and both Netflix series mastered that art.
5. Expansion Hints: Both Series Going Global
Both shows conclude their latest seasons by suggesting that the games are no longer confined to one place.
In Squid Game 3, the final scenes hint that recruitment has spread beyond Korea. The implication is chilling: the Game is going international.
Then Alice in Borderland 3 drops an even bigger bombshell — a mysterious scene set in Los Angeles, featuring a woman named Alice sitting in a café. This single scene changes everything. It confirms that the Borderland’s influence has reached the West, echoing Squid Game’s earlier global tease.
Whether by coincidence or Netflix strategy, both series seem to be moving toward the same idea: the survival game is now a worldwide phenomenon.
6. Visuals, Symbolism & Style: A Shared Aesthetic DNA
On a production level, Squid Game and Alice in Borderland look increasingly alike. Both use masked guards, geometric arenas, and vivid color palettes that turn violence into visual art.
- Squid Game uses sharp reds, greens, and minimalist shapes to represent order and hierarchy.
- Alice in Borderland uses neon hues, chaos, and card-based imagery to symbolize randomness and fate.
Despite their differences, both employ ritualistic cinematography — wide symmetrical shots, slow pans, and surreal staging. It’s no surprise fans feel they belong to the same creative universe. Each show transforms its set design into storytelling: control versus chaos, law versus luck.
Strip away the games, and both stories are about humanity on trial. In the first seasons, the focus was on greed and survival — ordinary people pushed to extremes. By Season 3, both series evolve into meditations on legacy and morality. The pregnancies of Jun-hee and Usagi symbolize more than motherhood. They question what kind of world these characters are bringing new life into.
Are they preserving humanity… or passing on its corruption? This question echoes across both universes. It transforms the survival genre into philosophical storytelling, where living becomes less important than deserving to live.
Did Alice in Borderland Really Copy Squid Game?
The honest answer sits between “yes” and “no.” Alice in Borderland’s manga predates Squid Game’s global breakout and concluded with Season 2 — meaning the TV show couldn’t have copied Squid Game’s plot from the source material, because the source material had already ended.
Season 3 is original content created specifically for the show, entering what its director described as unknown narrative territory beyond the manga’s scope. That’s precisely where critics locate the problem: freed from the manga’s guardrails, Season 3 drifted toward replicating the exact formula that made Squid Game a global phenomenon, rather than continuing Alice in Borderland’s own established voice. Critical reception bore this out — several major outlets specifically called out the finale’s Los Angeles stinger as a near-direct echo of Squid Game’s own ending, describing the season as feeling more like sequel-baiting fan fiction than an organic continuation.
Did Alice in Borderland 3 actually copy Squid Game 3 ?
Many fans think so. The parallels — the pregnancy arc, the infant twist, the global expansion tease — all appeared in Squid Game first. To them, it feels too deliberate to be coincidence. The likely truth lies in between. With both series under Netflix’s global spotlight, it’s plausible that creative influence flows both ways — shared ideas, parallel development, and a bit of corporate direction to maintain thematic synergy. Instead of copying, it might be convergence: two cultural giants exploring the same modern anxieties — power, dehumanization, and the price of survival.
The Update: A Manga Epilogue Changes the Ending
Here’s the genuinely new piece of the story. VIZ Media has since released the English translation of Alice in Borderland: Retry, an epilogue manga written by original creator Haro Aso himself. Critics who found Season 3’s TV ending disappointing have specifically praised Retry for effectively making up for it, offering a different, more grounded continuation of Arisu and Usagi’s story that isn’t bound by the same pressure to chase Squid Game’s exact formula. If you finished Season 3 unsatisfied with where things landed, Retry is worth seeking out as the creator’s own answer to where the story goes from here.
Is There Actually a Shared Universe?
Despite the parallel endings fueling plenty of fan theorizing about a Netflix “survival multiverse” — complete with speculative crossover scenarios involving Arisu and Gi-hun — there’s no official confirmation of any shared universe or crossover between the two franchises. The overlapping themes and endings are best understood as two of Netflix’s biggest global properties converging on similar ideas — power, dehumanization, survival — under similar corporate incentives, rather than an announced connected universe.
Why Netflix Might Be Connecting Both Worlds
Here’s a fascinating theory: Netflix wants a shared survival-verse.
Think about it — both shows:
- Feature deadly games run by mysterious organizations.
- End with international expansion teases.
- Center around characters who can’t escape their trauma.
If Netflix truly plans to merge or cross-reference these stories, it would create a global franchise rivaling any cinematic universe.Even subtle marketing hints at it — similar promotional imagery, overlapping release windows, and mirrored moral questions. Imagine a crossover where Arisu and Gi-hun meet in a neutral “Game of Games.” Fans would lose their minds — and Netflix knows it. While there’s no official confirmation, the groundwork is undeniably there.
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Conclusion
Whether you see it as influence, coincidence, or collaboration, one thing is certain: both shows have redefined the modern survival-thriller. They aren’t just about people dying in games — they’re about societies dying from within and as both universes tease global expansion, we might just be witnessing the birth of something massive — an interconnected narrative where human desperation becomes a worldwide currency.
The parallels between Alice in Borderland Season 3 and Squid Game Season 3 are real and specific enough that they’re not coincidental — but “copying” oversimplifies what actually happened. Alice in Borderland ran out of manga to adapt and, in charting new territory, ended up leaning heavily on the exact playbook that made its genre-mate a worldwide hit. Whether that reads as homage, convergence, or creative shortcut depends on how forgiving you are of a beloved show borrowing from its biggest competitor — but with Retry now offering a genre-true alternative ending from the original creator, fans disappointed by the TV finale finally have somewhere else to turn.
Do you think Alice in Borderland leaned too hard into Squid Game’s formula, or is this just two shows reflecting the same cultural moment? Let us know in the comments.
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