Why Did She Do It?
Ava Bailey Player 212, Han Mi-nyeo, had some obvious (and some not so obvious) motivations to make the choices she did during the glass stepping stones game.
Warning: SPOILERS ahead for Squid Game.
Why did Squid Game's Player 212 sacrifice herself to take down the gangster Deok-Su, Player 101? In the exciting first season of writer/director Hwang Dong-hyuk's Squid Game, only a half-dozen characters are singled out and developed of the 454 players who met violent and grizzly ends in the series. Of those deaths, the suicide-murder of Player 212, Han Mi-nyeo (Kim Joo-ryoung) and notorious bad guy Player 101, Jang Deok-su (Heo Sung-tae) stands as one of the most exciting fatalities of the hit Netflix series. The pair died together in episode 7, "VIPS", when during the glass stepping stone bridge game Han Mi-nyeo grappled Jang Deok-su into a hug and forced them both through a glass pane to fall to their deaths. Mi-nyeo had some obvious (and some less obvious) reasons to make such a final choice, that of death and murder over the potential riches offered by victory in the squid game.
Despite its footage of hundreds of violent deaths - or perhaps because of them - Squid Game has been a hit for Netflix and could become even bigger. Squid Game chronicles the misadventures of Player 456, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) when a series of events lead him to take part in a violent reenactment of school yard games. Gi-hun competes alongside 455 other contestants for a tremendous financial reward on a remote and isolated island to an audience of masked guard-executioners and wealthy gamblers. The losers are eliminated by nearby guards, if the game itself does not kill them. In the case of Mi-nyeo, she killed herself to take Deok-su with her.
Mi-nyeo publicly vowed revenge on Deok-su, and episode 7's glass stepping stone bridge game was her first viable opportunity. The two characters became lovers over the course of the game, though Doek-su abandoned her almost immediately after she stopped being of use to him. However, it's not clear how sincere or opportunistic their feelings for each other were. Mi-nyeo's murder-suicide prohibits any chance of her inheriting the pot, and seems a very drastic move for her to have taken. There are multiple reasons Player 212 could have been motivated to do what she did - ranging from a need to one-up Doek-su, to the simple fact that Han Mi-nyeo is established as a very impulsive individual.
It's worth noting that anyone returning to the Squid Game after it was initially abandoned is desperate enough to be willing to murder (even passively) so that they can inherit the game's reward. Mi-nyeo seems to be one such character, given her seemingly endless lies. For example, one of Squid Game's biggest mysteries is where Mi-nyeo's baby is, as her first lines of dialogue in Squid Game were a plea to leave the game on the grounds that her newborn baby did not yet have a name. Yet, Mi-nyeo was among the majority of characters who returned to the game after being given a chance to leave it, and her baby was never mentioned again, suggesting it may never have existed. At one point, Mi-nyeo even boasted she was convicted of fraud five times. This suggests that Mi-nyeo was merely opportunistic in her feelings for Doek-su, but at a certain point it was more important for her to reject her former lover, prove his cowardice, and to kill him, than it was for her to survive.
It was clear early on that Squid Game was the kind of story where barely any of the characters would survive to the end, to the point where it was even questionable who would win the squid game. Player 212 death may have seemed surprising in the moment, but Squid Game boasts complex characters with interesting motivations, and the dynamism Kim Joo-ryoung brought to the role of Mi-nyeo was one of the show's stand-out performances. Mi-nyeo had complex reasons for her murder-suicide, and Squid Game is better for her character.
