#(and kyungyi is the actual 4D chess opponent)

[sexyglances]

Chief Yong and Her "Chess Moves" vs Yikyung in Inspector Koo

Chief Yong and Yikyung's dynamic is fascinating. They're both used to being the smartest, most tactical and manipulative people in the room. So theoretically, together, they should be a power duo of murder, especially with Chief Yong's money and resources. Burt it's precisely those tendencies they have in common that make them at odds with each other.

By "recruiting" Yikyung, Chief Yong thought she was gaining someone more powerful than a pawn--a rook, perhaps--in her game of human manipulation chess, but by trying to keep Yikyung under her thumb, what Chief Yong really got wasn't another piece to play and orchestrate, but instead, another adversary, an opposing queen in disguise simply because she tried to treat Yikyung as beneath her and not as an equal.

But here's the thing Chief Yong failed to see, Yikyung wasn't found through Chief Yong's efforts. Instead, she allowed herself to be seen by Chief Yong, and she was the one who pursued and who found Chief Yong on the mountain trail, not the other way around. It's just that Chief Yong had been pursuing K first and for longer, so her perspective was distorted and that made her feel like she could still be completely in control with Yikyung. It was Chief Yong's own hubris that made her say to the monk that she was the one found Yikyung (and not the other way around), and it was her own myopia that made her think K was "helping" her thus whole time and not that it just happened that for a brief period of time their goals happened to align. But in reality, it wasn't Chief Yong pulling all the ropes like she thought she was. Yikyung was the one who approached her, Yikyung was the one who was "benevolent" enough to not make a violent move on Chief Yong while she was unprotected by guards, and it was Yikyung who made the proposition that they work together first, saying that she needed, "someone with a lot of power to watch my back," which framed it as Yikyung recruiting help, not Yikyung entering into a subordinate employee relationship.

Yikyung has her own chess master motives at play, and then later when Yikyung asked if her next target deserved to die and Chief Yong tried to pander to her by calling him the "vilest man to have walked on earth," and intimidate her through the idea of fear by saying he "sells girls like you who have nowhere to go," rather than respect Yikyung as an equal, is when Chief Yong really started to lose her game.

Chief Yong has become so spoiled by her money and power that she has come to accept it as an incontrovertible fact that she can outsmart and manipulate anyone for her own personal goals, and if they fall out of line, she can punish them so they succumb back down to her power. We see her do it with her secretary, with Jehui, and even with her own sons. People are her chess pieces, and she is the grand master at play, and she will not hesitate to sacrifice them if necessary.

Yikyung, however, is not intimidated by Chief Yong's manipulations because of three reasons: 1) Chief Yong doesn't really have anything to give her that she hasn't been able to achieve on her own, aside from some slight convenience at clean-up, but as Yikyung found out, it is at the expense of her personal freedom so it's not really that desirable, 2) Yikyung is used to playing the long game (after all, some of her murder cons took months to play out), so she can see as many--if not more--moves ahead than Chief Yong can, and 3) when you have a literal serial killer mastermind under your employ, they don't really have the same boundaries that normal people do over human life and destruction and don't heed any rules you might try to impose on them either. Chief Yong has had people under her that may have possessed one or two of these traits (like her secretary and the secret house henchman who do not care about human life), but combine all three together, and you have someone that cannot be held easily under another Chief Yong's thumb, no matter how hard she tries.

Case in point, Chief Yong thought she would be able to throw Yikyung in the dungeon and torture her to teach her a lesson, but in actuality, Yikyung wanted to go to the dungeon because she was planning her escape. Would a normal person purposefully get thrown into a torture den, figure out a way to trap her captor in her prison cell to kill him, and plan an escape through a sewer system? Would a normal person be able to make that sort of plan? Yikyung is not a normal person, she works beyond the money and power game that Chief Yong is used to playing, and by trying to push her into a box like any other lackey of hers, Chief Yong made the (potentially fatal) mistake that will be her downfall.

Chief Yong thought she could dictate exactly how YIkyung would move like any predictable piece in chess, but Yikyung is a queen of her own and she will move freely exactly how she wishes at any point in time. She isn't a player of Chief Yong's, she is an opponent.