Player 399 From Squid Game: The Challenge Addressed Her Elimination

One of the most heartbreaking games featured on Squid Game was marbles, and that remained true on Netflix’s new reality show Squid Game: The Challenge. In the show’s sixth episode, all of the 63 remaining players were paired up and tasked with determining one winner and one loser using a bag of marbles. This led to some heartbreaking goodbyes, but no elimination was more frustrating to watch than Player 399’s.

Throughout the first half of the competition, Aurora had been adept at navigating the complex social and gameplay structure, but she met her final obstacle in Player 065, Dylan. As she proposed different options for how they could compete in marbles, Dylan stubbornly shut down every idea, insisting on a game of throwing that would be advantageous to him.

Finally, Aurora relented as time ticked down, and both she and Dylan landed one marble in a nearby jar, resulting in a tie. Aurora argued she should be declared the winner since she got her marble in first, but Dylan refused to give her the win. Instead, both players were eliminated since they couldn’t pick a winner.

It was hard to watch, and as Aurora has since revealed, even harder to experience. “The experience was super traumatizing for me,” Aurora wrote on Instagram the day her elimination episode aired. “I hope that my scene shows people to stand up themselves against manipulation and bullying tactics. There is so much that did not make the cut and that makes me feel super angry, but I hope that what happened was clear from what was left. I have a lot of negative feelings about the way that I left, but I am doing my best to stay positive and still waiting for clarity about why I was a part of this experience.”

Dylan also took to social media to speak about the controversial double elimination. “What you see is only the edited version of what really happened,” he wrote on Twitter. “Per productions request every marbles game had to have the rules and how to win established BEFORE playing the game, nothing could be changed once the game had started.”

“You couldn’t determine the winner at the end of match because that breaks the agreed upon rules stated earlier, which is what we see at the end of the game,” he continued. “Me following instructions, isn’t a judgment of my character or who I am as a person.”