Afterthoughts on *A Killer Paradox*

Recently I watched the Korean drama A Killer Paradox on Netflix, which is adapted from a webtoon. Since I watched it while fast-forwarding, to be honest I was a bit confused in the first few episodes and only started to get a grip on the story later. Part of the reason I watched it was that the lead actor was Choi Woo-shik, who starred in Our Beloved Summer (그해우리는) 😂

Spoiler alert

The protagonist is a plain, ordinary college student named Lee Tang. He doesn’t know what he wants to do, spends his days loafing around, and is only so-so when it comes to schoolwork.

He works part-time at a convenience store. One day, a terrible customer comes in to buy something and is rude and physically inappropriate. Later, when Tang gets off work, he happens to run into that person again on the street, and after another argument, he kills him with a hammer in a fit of rage. But mysteriously, the police can’t find the key evidence, and it turns out the victim is actually a long-wanted murderer.

Then a witness comes to extort him for 2 million won every month, or else he’ll report Tang’s murder and evidence to the police. Since this witness was getting far too greedy, Tang kills him too.

Then a similar plot happens again: the police can’t find the crucial evidence, and it’s discovered that the victim had previously killed his parents and collected insurance money. Later, Tang kills a prosecutor, and finds out this prosecutor has a lot of videos of sexually assaulting young women.

At the end of the story, a copy of Crime and Punishment appears. That was when I realized this Korean drama is more like a tribute to Crime and Punishment.

In animation, we feel thrilled when we see villains being brought down by heroes, just like Saitama in One Punch Man—no matter what kind of monster it is, one punch and it’s dead.

But if you move that into real life, the only way to make wrongdoers suffer punishment is to ask judges and police to seek justice for you. And the wrongdoing has to be clearly written into the criminal code; otherwise, they can’t be arrested. But in this world, it’s hard to find absolute evil or absolute good—everything exists on a spectrum.

Should vigilante justice exist? If ordinary people are not allowed to take the law into their own hands, then why can the state decide whether someone is guilty or not? While watching this drama, I kept thinking about this question.

My answer is that we live in a society governed by the rule of law. Although the justice system is imperfect, it is still the greatest common denominator under the current system, and it provides a relatively rigorous process for punishing those who commit crimes. In a normal system, justice is indeed more stable than vigilante justice. At the same time, I’m also grateful that I haven’t yet reached a dead end where I have to make life decisions while taking on the risk of committing a crime.

Thinking about this, I can’t help wondering what mindset the scholars who originally drafted the criminal code had, what they hoped to achieve, and what kind of people they imagined those offenders to be.

Murderers, insurance fraudsters, and sexual predators—the people killed in the drama are mostly vile criminals. If the same plot happened in real life, one can even imagine people applauding.

But doing so is like denying the judicial system that human history has evolved into over time. I think it would be terrifying to live in a society like that. How would you define the “justice” you talk about? If one day cilantro were also treated as an unforgivable sin, would that mean vigilante justice should be applied too? It’s precisely because everyone’s standards are different that, as time has progressed, we have arrived at the relatively complete judicial system we have today.

On the other hand, just like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, he kept convincing himself from the very beginning that he was eliminating evil for the people, and that when the system reached its limits, stepping over corpses was necessary. But in the end, he still could not escape the condemnation of his conscience and turned himself in at the police station to face trial.

That said, Lee Tang never faces trial in the end, although there is a setup hinting at something there.

Recently I discovered an interesting phenomenon in Taiwan, which I call “selective rule of law.” Take the case of Goodnight Chicken being sentenced in Cambodia. Although the fake-video livestream was exposed, which was satisfying to see, the Cambodian government was able to issue a verdict in such a short time on the charge of “inciting social unrest,” with a sentence of two years.

Based on my own understanding of the law, in Taiwan it would at least take several months from detention to the first hearing. Even after the formal hearing begins, there would be defense-lawyer arguments and rebuttals. A two-year sentence is not a short period, so there should be a more rigorous process.

Things that are taken for granted in Taiwan are not the same in Cambodia, where the concept of human rights has not yet fully developed. And yet there are so many people openly admiring this kind of authoritarianism. I really think the word “knee-jerk conformist” couldn’t be more fitting.

Yes, one of the precious things about a democratic society is freedom of speech. But to prevent it from being taken to extremes, the criminal code specifies which kinds of speech can make you criminally liable—you can’t just say anything recklessly. Fake news, fake videos, and rumors are all phenomena this society should condemn, and I fully agree. But what the Cambodian government did was this: if you do something that makes the government unhappy, it can arrest you at will, convict you arbitrarily, and issue a ruling in less than a week.

The fact that Goodnight Chicken made a fake video was wrong to begin with, but that should not be used as a reason to justify the Cambodian government’s judicial breakdown. Seeing so many people praise Cambodia’s judicial efficiency, I instead felt a chill run down my spine. No country’s justice system is perfect, but I am absolutely certain this is not something I want to see happen in Taiwan.

One final point I want to add is that malicious attacks and comments online are not necessarily the views of the majority, because people who haven’t studied enough are often the ones most likely to pontificate on things they don’t understand. They don’t do much homework, watch a few short videos, and then think they’re qualified to offer profound opinions. For more, you can check out my previous article: “Internet Comments Are Toxic”.