Not to touch a sore scab, but when the eighth and final season of game of Thrones… happened…I, a fan of the series throughout the show, naively assumed that all author George RR Martin had to do was write a different bookend to the series to regain all the series’ lost goodwill. I didn’t know that was A delicate topic among book readers. who have been tortured by the author perpetual procrastination for years. Condolences.
While the same scenario is not completely analogous to what happened with Netflix’s live action Alice on the border VIZ Media’s English-language manga and television show release of the series’ extended epilogue, Alice in Wonderland: Retrythe manga more than makes up for the huge disappointment I felt watching the show I loved in its entirety. Squid Game in the worst way possible in his last season.
Alice on the border is a cutting series in which a man named Arisu becomes trapped in a sci-fi death game where a group of kidnapped survivors must compete in a litany of challenges in an abandoned city. Think Gantz meets Kaiji. Its rules are cruel, but never completely stupid, and players logically outdo each other to win games so they don’t get hit on the top of the head by a laser from the sky.
The show was so good that I didn’t realize it was based on a manga by Haro Aso (Zom 100: Wish List of the Dead) which was also adapted into an anime, a fact that speaks to its overall quality in a Sea of mediocre live-action Netflix projects. And for two seasons I went back and forth, adapting that previous story to Squid Game mania and, subsequently, in the midst of their takeover of pop culture. That is, until a third season was released last year, ripping Arisu and his lover Usagi from their peaceful lives after the Death Games and throwing them back into the fray like a child with a magnifying glass peering over an anthill.
I was rocking the series for a while even though the show was clearly making things up as it went along until it committed the cardinal and tasteless sin of copying what it The squid gameThe third season did it in its final moments.desperately sequel itself by asking the question no one was ever curious about: What if it took place in the United States? Hopefully that answer never comes down the path it took to tarnish the program’s reputation. As far as I’m concerned, there was no third season.
Alice in Borderland Retry is now available in print and digital formats!
Read a free preview: https://t.co/OJcjm9wliH pic.twitter.com/8iqGzwjTIV
— VIZ Media (@VIZMedia) July 21, 2026
So imagine my surprise to discover that Viz Media’s recently published localization of Aso’s 2020 epilogue manga for the series, set 10 years after its conclusion, would retroactively act as a remedy for the final season of the Netflix series that I wish I could erase from my mind palace. The manga begins almost exactly the same as the third season of the Netflix series (obviously, the manga came out first), with Arisu going from a NEET to a psychologist and Usagi expecting her first child. That’s the last thing similar between the two.
Unlike the Netflix series’ contrived reasoning to get everyone back into the games, Arisu ends up in the games for a pretty simple reason. He and five other contestants are hit by a sign and end up in Borderlands. If you’ve seen the show or read the manga, this inciting incident is far from the catastrophic events that sent Arisu to Borderlands the first time around, but what it lacks in spectacle, it more than makes up for in the challenge that awaits them.
In contrast to the more-is-more inventiveness of the Netflix series’ games in its latest season, Arisu and company only have to play one game, which is essentially musical chairs, but forever. Despite the game’s simplicity, the stakes in the 300-plus page epilogue far exceed that of the Netflix series, where its collective of players, consisting of an insurance employee, a daycare teacher, an emergency room nurse, a doctor and an unemployed man, have to debate whose life matters most.
It’s rare that manga gets the chance to reach a conclusion without receiving the axand just like It’s rare for a series on indefinite hiatus to start again. regardless of whether a The creator is healthy, willing and able to weave more narrative threads. years after the fact. Which begs the question of whether it’s worth the juice to return to a series that’s already ended. Evidently, I wasn’t the only one who had doubts about what, if anything, could be gained by revisiting a series whose manga concluded rather succinctly. Aso also had his doubts, which he reveals about half of the manga, writing the following:
It’s been ten years since I started working at Alice on the border Like Arisu, I never wanted to revisit a horrible world like Borderland, but I was given the opportunity to write a sequel and I couldn’t pass it up. What does it mean to live? What do our lives mean? Now, at 40 years old, I want to try to answer these questions again.
While its gameplay is deceptively simple, a fatal path of agony, betrayal, and doubt about the inherent good of the human spirit left me in awe when I flipped through its pages and discovered that Aso still had the ability to invent an intense, not-so-unwinnable death game, and that what he had to say serves as a footnote to a series that has more than earned its place in the pantheon of death game narratives.
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