The original post: /r/television by /u/Perchance2Game on 2025-09-27 01:33:48+00:00.

So, the basic spoiler for this show (around Season 2) is that the land of games they’re in is the borderland between life and death because they were injured in a real life disaster and those who were physically able to recover hand a chance to mentally hang on to life by winning the games. However, there are people who can “stay” in the borderlands without actually dying for a while.

Don’t read on if you don’t want anymore spoilers as I won’t tag the above info anymore.

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While this land is a vague psycho-spiritual land in the end, it has many technological elements and features. People who break rules and get “off’d” for doing so are shot in the head by lasers from the sky. There’s a system of technology used to monitor people and run the games, including cell phone apps. While some of this is allegorical for modern life, and could be part of a psycho-spiritual interpretation, I think there’s a better explanation.

Psycho-spiritual would mean a manifestation of the collective subconscious, made real within an otherly realm of spirit.

In the beginning of Season 1, Arisu’s bookshelf is stocked with books about quantum physics, the afterlife, spiritual questions, computing. I think this is to set a tone for the coming vibe of the psycho-spiritual realm, in that these are elements of the collective subconscious which would give the world its form as people’s minds/spirits try to interpret the experience. So, a belief that it’s a government conspiracy, or the matrix, or UFOs would inform how the world presents itself.

However, I believe there is an actual explanation for this and more is going on.

First of all, the psycho-spiritual collective unconscious would exist, and would be tied to near-death experiences and other unexplained phenomenon. However, the Borderlands would be something very specific.

I believe the Borderlands is in fact a quantum computer system (funded by the government but at such secrecy online the mad scientist working on it knew of its true purpose, maybe had everyone else killed while the servers are powered by a dam in some bunker somewhere). What this computer does is impose structure within the collective subconscious that would not be possible with living people, because their consciousness is true strong, but is able to impose mass structure onto those minds in the process of dying, within the dissolving boundaries of consciousness connecting those caught in their final moments life before death.

It’s like a Matrix but the technology only works on minds that are in the process of dying. However, this type of mind has a collective quantum resonance, so they can be corralled into a single imposed structure.

I think the purpose of this computer is to trade time between dying souls, sacrificing the lives of some souls so they die a bit earlier than otherwise, but then their share of the collective unconscious can be transferred to extend the lives, or half-lives, of others.

Because of quantum teleportation, entanglement, and so forth, also because of people who “return” from the Borderlands to real life, the people who choose to remain inside the Matrix (neither die, nor return to life), can piggyback between death events of the national population, and stay effectively immortal.

What the games do is they

  1. Kill off people early to steal part of their dying consciousness for the interlopers or “citizens” to inhabit.

  2. Limit the number of survivors where possible (where the physical injuries of a mortal death blow are right on the line where life or death will be determined by the processes of the brain - more minor injuries will guarantee winning the games, more severe injuries mean you’re fated to fail at the games).

  3. By making returning to life a “choice”, piggyback through this back channel into living subconscious in order to string along until the next set of death events. This also has the effect, in Season 3 of allowing resource intensive intrusion of the Matrix inhabitants to manifest as hallucinations in the real world, or even possess bodies.

  4. I assume the scientist who built this apparatus is The Joker, who created the computer system so that he could extend his life forever by linking his consciousness to the collective unconscious of near-death and piggyback on stolen time from people in the process of dying.