Reflections After Watching A Killer Paradox

Recently, I watched the Korean drama A Killer Paradox on Netflix, which was adapted from a webtoon. Since I fast-forwarded through parts of it, to be honest, I was a bit confused during the first few episodes, and only started getting into the groove later on. By the way, part of the reason I watched it was because the lead actor is Choi Woo-shik from Our Beloved Summer (그해 우리는) 😂

Spoiler Alert

The protagonist is Lee Tang, an ordinary college student who doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life. He idles away his days, and his academic performance is just mediocre.

He works part-time at a convenience store. One day, a rude customer comes in to buy something. Beyond having a terrible attitude, the customer also gets physically aggressive. Later, right after Lee Tang finishes his shift, he runs into the man on the street and another dispute breaks out. In a fit of rage, Lee Tang kills him with a hammer. Miraculously, however, the police cannot find any critical evidence, and it turns out the victim was a long-sought-after serial killer on the run.

A witness then approaches him, blackmailing him for 2 million KRW per month, threatening to expose his crime and hand the evidence over to the police if he doesn’t comply. Because this witness keeps pushing her luck, Lee Tang ends up killing her too.

Then, a similar plot unfolds: the police find no crucial evidence, and it is discovered that the victim had previously murdered her own parents to collect insurance money. Later, Lee Tang kills a prosecutor, only to discover that this prosecutor possessed numerous videos of sexually assaulting young women.

Towards the end of the show, a copy of Crime and Punishment appears. That was when I realized this K-drama feels more like an homage to Crime and Punishment.

In anime, watching evil wrongdoers get struck down by heroes is always deeply satisfying—just like Saitama from One-Punch Man, who defeats any monster with a single blow.

However, if applied to reality, when you want wrongdoers to be punished, you can only rely on judges and the police to uphold justice for you. Moreover, the bad deeds committed by the person must be clearly written into the penal code; otherwise, they cannot be arrested. But in this world, absolute evil and absolute good rarely exist—there is always a spectrum.

Should vigilante justice exist? If ordinary citizens are not allowed to administer vigilante justice, why does the state have the authority to decide whether someone is guilty or not? As I watched this drama, I kept pondering this question.

The answer I arrived at is that we live in a society governed by the rule of law. Although the judicial system is imperfect, it represents the greatest common denominator under our current societal framework. Furthermore, it provides a relatively rigorous process to hold criminals accountable. Under a normal system, the judiciary is certainly much more stable than vigilante justice. At the same time, I feel fortunate that I haven’t been pushed to such desperate extremes where I had to risk committing crimes to make life choices.

Thinking about this, I couldn’t help but wonder: what kind of mindset did the scholars who originally drafted the penal code have? What outcomes were they hoping to achieve, and with what sentiments did they imagine the faces of those potential offenders?

Serial killers, insurance fraudsters, rapists of young girls—most of the people killed in the show were vile individuals who had committed atrocious crimes. If the same scenarios played out in reality, one can even imagine people applauding.

Yet doing so seems to negate the judicial system that human history has evolved into up to this day. I think living in such a society would be terrifying. How do you define what you call “justice”? If eating cilantro were deemed an unforgivable sin one day, would that also warrant vigilante execution? It is precisely because everyone’s standards differ that, over time, our relatively refined legal framework came into being.

On the other hand, just like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Lee Tang initially keeps convincing himself that he is ridding society of vermin—believing that when the system reaches its limits, stepping over corpses is a necessary path forward. However, Raskolnikov ultimately couldn’t escape the torment of his conscience and turned himself in to the police to face judgment.

That said, the protagonist Lee Tang never faces legal judgment in the end, although there is a hint left for the future.

Recently, I noticed an interesting phenomenon in Taiwan, which I call “selective rule of law.” Take the case of the Taiwanese YouTuber “Goodnight Chicken” (Wan An Xiao Ji) being sentenced in Cambodia. While it felt vindicating to see his fake livestream debunked, the Cambodian government managed to issue a ruling for “incitement to cause social disorder” and hand down a two-year prison sentence in such a short amount of time.

Based on my understanding of basic legal principles, in Taiwan, waiting from detention to the actual trial takes at least several months. Once the formal trial begins, there are legal debates between defense attorneys and prosecutors. A two-year prison sentence is not a short period; it warrants a much more rigorous process.

Things taken for granted in Taiwan are not treated the same way in Cambodia, where human rights concepts are not yet fully developed. Yet so many people publicly praise this kind of authoritarianism. I truly think calling them “sanctimonious hypocrites” is the most fitting description.

Yes, in a democratic society, freedom of speech is precious. But to prevent it from going unchecked, the penal code specifies which types of speech carry criminal liability; one cannot simply spread lies without consequence. Fake news, fabricated videos, and rumors are all phenomena that society should condemn, and I wholeheartedly agree with that. However, the Cambodian government’s approach is: if you do something that displeases the government, it can arbitrarily arrest you, convict you at will, and hand down a verdict in less than a week.

The fact that Goodnight Chicken was in the wrong by staging fake videos should not be used as an excuse to justify the breakdown of due process in Cambodia’s judiciary. Seeing so many people praise the judicial efficiency of the Cambodian government actually sent chills down my spine. No country’s legal system is perfect, but I am certain this is not something I want to see happen in Taiwan.

One final thought: the malicious attacks and toxic comments online do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the majority. People who read less are often the most eager to speak loudly about subjects they do not understand, feeling qualified to voice grand opinions after merely watching a few short clips without doing any research. For more on this, feel free to check out my previous post: “Why Internet Comments Are Toxic”.