The fictional show follows cash-strapped players as they battle it out in a series of traditional Korean children's games - with a gory twist, as losers are killed in every round.

Squid Game has sucked in viewers since 2021 with its candy-coloured sets and bleak messages about capitalism and humanity. And with its third and final season released last Friday, fans across the world are returning to reality.

Some South Koreans, however, have found themselves reflecting on the society that inspired the dystopian series.

"I feel like Squid Game 3 revealed the true feelings and raw inner thoughts of Korean people," reads one YouTube comment under a clip from season three.

"It reflected reality so well like how in real life, at work, it's just full of ruthless people ready to crush you. This show nailed it." Relatable struggles

Squid Game was born against the backdrop of cut-throat competition and widening inequality in South Korean society - where people are too stressed to have children and a university placement exam is seen as the defining moment of a person's life.

The diverse characters of the show - which include a salaryman, a migrant factory worker and a cryptocurrency scammer - are drawn from figures many South Koreans would find familiar.

The backstory of protagonist Seong Gi-hun, a car factory worker who was laid off and later went on strike, was also inspired by a real-life event: a 2009 strike at the SsangYong Motor factory, where workers clashed with riot police over widespread layoffs. It's remembered today as one of the country's largest labour confrontations.

"The drama may be fictional, but it feels more realistic than reality itself," Jeong Cheol Sang, a film enthusiast, wrote in his review of Squid Game's final season.

"Precarious labour, youth unemployment, broken families - these aren't just plot devices, but the very struggles we face every day."

Those darker messages seemed to be brushed to the side on Saturday night, as a massive parade celebrated the release of the blockbuster's final season. A giant killer doll and dozens of faceless guards in tracksuits - among other motifs of the deadly games - marched down central Seoul to much fanfare.

For South Korea's leaders, Squid Game has become a symbol of K-drama's success on the global stage. It is also part of a string of successes - along with K-pop act BTS and Oscar-winning film Parasite - on which newly elected president Lee Jae Myung wants to capitalise as he sets his sights on exporting K-culture far and wide.

There are signs the Squid Game hype may even go further: the show's final scene, where Cate Blanchett plays a Korean game with a man in a Los Angeles alley, has fuelled rumours of an American spinoff.

The series ended on an "open-ended" note, Lee Jung-jae, the star of the series, told the BBC. "So it poses a lot of questions to the audience. I hope people will talk about those questions, ponder upon themselves about the questions and try to find an answer."

Mixed reactions

In the show's later seasons, viewers follow Gi-hun's quest to bring down the eponymous games, which are packaged as entertainment for a group of wealthy VIPs.

But his rebellion fails, and by the end Gi-hun is forced to sacrifice himself to save another player's baby - an ending that has polarised viewers.

Some argued that Gi-hun's actions did not square with the dark portrait of reality that showrunners had developed - one that had so well captured the ruthless elements of human nature.

"The characters' excessive altruism was disturbing - almost to the point of seeming unhinged," reads a comment on popular South Korean discussion site Nate Pann. "It felt like a fake, performative kind of kindness, prioritising strangers over their own families for no real reason."

But others said Gi-hun's death was in line with the show's commitment to uncomfortable truths.

"This perfectly describes humanity and the message of the show," another commented on YouTube.

"As much as we wanted to see Gi-Hun win, kill the frontman and the VIPs, and stop the games once and for all before riding off into the sunset, that's just not the world we live in and it's certainly not the one that Gi-Hun lived in."

Hwang Dong-hyuk, the show's creator, told reporters on Monday that he understood the "mixed reaction" to the final season.

"In season one there were no expectations, so the shock and freshness worked. But by seasons two and three, expectations were sky high, and that makes all the difference," Hwang said on Monday.

"Game fans wanted more games, others wanted deeper messages, and some were more invested in the characters. Everyone expected something different."

For some, at least, Gi-hun's final choice offered a hopeful reflection of reality: that even in times of adversity, kindness can prevail.

"That paradox - of cruelty and warmth coexisting - is what made the finale so moving," said Mr Jeong, the film blogger. "Watching the Squid Game made me reflect on myself. As someone who has worked in education and counselling, I've questioned whether kindness can really change anything."

"That's why I stayed with this story. That's why I call this ending beautiful."

St. Paul, for example, required an apartment building to have one parking space for each 1- or 2-bedroom unit, but more parking for bigger units. Meanwhile, St. Paul golf courses would need four parking spaces per hole, but their mini golf courses would need just one space per hole.

Today, these rules are gloriously gone: if you’re constructing a new building, you can build as few parking spaces as you deem prudent. In 2021, both St. Paul and Minneapolis voted to fully eliminate minimum parking requirements from their zoning codes.

By ending strict minimum parking requirements, the Twin Cities have been able to improve both housing affordability and our urban form. Based on evidence both local and from across the country, it’s becoming clear that this is a winning policy choice.

The case for eliminating parking requirements centers on the idea, largely popularized by scholar Donald Shoup, that minimum parking mandates don’t consistently reflect the actual demand for parking, relative to the cost of supplying it. The appropriate amount of parking will be different for every building based on its land cost, proximity to transit, and customer base, among numerous other factors.

In some instances, developers or tenants are willing to pay for more parking spaces than required by law, but parking mandates often result in buildings with more parking than developers would otherwise choose.

This creates a host of problems. Parking takes up a lot of space and is costly to build, whether you put it on a surface lot or in a garage (a 2021 estimate pegged the average above-ground parking structure at $27,000 per spot, and much higher if you’re digging below ground). These costs drive up rents, or else make housing projects unfeasible to build at all.

When parking mandates force excess parking spots, they also subtly reshape our transportation choices across a city. Excess parking makes car travel excessively easy, acting as a subsidy to car trips over other travel options — despite the pollution and traffic externalities that cars create. It also results in what journalist Henry Grabar terms “parkitecture,” or a sacrifice of our urban form and design at the altar of parking lots.

At the same time, eliminating parking minimums doesn’t cause off-street parking to disappear entirely. Even when apartment developers aren’t required to build parking spots, many prospective residents will still want parking (and be willing to pay for it). A world without parking requirements will still have parking, but supplied in quantities responsive to actual demand.

Recent empirical research shows how parking reform has played out in other cities. Earlier this year, researcher Catie Gould at the Sightline Institute highlighted two recent academic studies that analyzed housing developments in cities that eliminated or reduced parking requirements.

Examining Seattle and Buffalo, the researchers tracked development after parking minimum elimination to see how new buildings responded to the relaxed rules. As Gould described, Seattle and Buffalo are completely different housing markets; one is a booming coastal city while the other is an older industrial city with less than half of its 1960 population.

Yet in both instances, the majority of post-reform buildings took advantage of their new flexibility and built less parking than was previously mandated. In both cities, parking reform helped increase the overall supply of homes, reduce the cost of construction, and shift the cities toward a less car-centric design.

Since Minneapolis’s 2021 elimination of parking minimums, evidence shows that this too has been an effective change for increasing housing affordability and improving city design. A 2015 reduction in parking requirements had already sparked a reduction in the parking being built in new Minneapolis housing. Since 2021, when all parking minimums were eliminated, city data show parking construction has further declined.

The reduction in average parking spot per unit obscures an equally remarkable shift in the whole distribution of parking-unit ratios in Minneapolis. While some apartment developers have still opted to build relatively high quantities of parking, there’s been a rise in apartments with very little parking, or even none at all.

While this data isn’t comprehensively available in St. Paul, one housing project anecdotally displays the promise of eliminating parking minimums. A large apartment building on Lexington and Randolph Avenues, which sits on two bus lines and across the street from a Trader Joe’s, was initially proposed prior to St. Paul’s parking reform, with 91 housing units and 88 parking spots. When unrelated circumstances led to a redesign, the developer took advantage of the recent elimination of minimum parking requirements. The developer bumped the project up to 114 homes with 82 parking spots. More homes, less parking — and no need for a parking variance.

The short-term results of eliminating parking minimums aren’t radical, but reflect a smart change that will improve the places that we live in. In municipalities across Minnesota and across the country, strict parking minimums remain the status quo — removing or reducing parking minimums represents a promising route for reform, improving housing affordability and making our cities and towns better places to live.