Ending Discussion

I’m emotionally conflicted. Still a 10/10.

I think the ending is fine though. I was really p*ssed in ep7 when everbody (basically) died in abt 5min, that wasn't neccessary.

King of spades was too OP,
it felt like, if he had unlimited ammo,
survived everything like several gunshots, mass fights against 100ppl and he literally dodged guarantee kill shots. unkillable

Last fight against Queen of hearts was too long, the story with his therapy was very good though!
But the rest with aliens and humanity in 1000years was overkill...

All in all, I bingewatched S1 & S2 today and I think AIBL is a very refreshing and good series. It really reminds me to the "Gantz" universe (manga/anime). I like S2 better, more action and kills with stage 2!

Spoiler ahead. This is what I understood:

In simple term whenever someone is about to die he/she will be teleported(?) to Borderland. Joker is I guess a being who looks into the activities in Borderland. 

Now the people who were King or Queen in the game are the one who I guess had face similar situation like the meteor fall over Tokyo. Some might have died in car accident other might have died while doing some special force mission. They already played the game before and we're given two options just like Alice was given. But they decided to stay back, just like the two guys from the Prison game. I guess they will become King in the Borderland.

Now if you decide not to stay then after winning all the games that means you are revived back in real world.

In gist:

If something unfortunate happen which can lead to death -> then we get teleported to Borderland

If we die while playing a game in Borderland -> Die in real world 

If we survived all games then there are two options

-> You stay in Borderland and become King/Queen/Partner of King Queen. Also you die in real world.

-> You don't stay in Borderland -> You revive in Real world.

As a manga reader, the ending was perfect for me since the main theme of Alice in Borderland is about the existence of a person, of life, as evident in the characters' conversations and thoughts. The series tying up the Borderlands to the idea of a purgatory where the players literally fight for their life perfectly concludes the theme of living your life with or without reason, in my opinion.

Episode 08 actually gives us all the possible endings and explanations for the existence of the Borderlands - see all the options about an alien invasion or a futuristic virtual reality? For me, those would've been unsatisfying as it does not completely encapsulate the existential theme of Alice in Borderland. So yeah, 10/10 :)

The more I think about the ending, the more I convince myself that the borderlands are in fact a real place. If we accept that the supernatural is real, we can basically come up with an explanation that people who are on the verge of death are sent to the borderlands and fight for their lives in the (very much real) games. It's like a different supernatural dimension. 

The people who work there are probably human who are in a coma IRL but could also be supernatural beings themselves (some of them) who are basically the rulers of the borderlands. When the games are finished, the people who survive them can return to their world because they won the right to survive their deadly accident, and the people who choose to stay despite their victory are essentially choosing to live in a coma with their cognition residing in borderland since returning to their regular lives is too painful for them.

This is basically the only way I can explain this to myself, since the biggest argument against the whole thing being made up by Arisu is how in the hell did he know the condition of every single person around him that he never met and while he was in a coma. I'm more likely to accept that the memory wipe just didn't work as well on him, maybe partially because the borderlands wanted him to remember that entire experience.

The only thing I'm wondering about is how the borderlands could work outside of the accident. Maybe there's different locations and dimensions within the borderlands for people who come there for other reasons, or maybe the players who enter the borderlands on an individual basis play different types of games or do different things to return to their world (since a scale this big for smaller scale deaths would not make much sense). This could really be fun as a spinoff!