Excellent comfort sageuk. Big budget production.
The salty beginning abounds in double entendres surrounding sex and marriage, both gay and straight. The end episode is a lot of fun likewise. I liked the silly moment where the king decides not to have sex with So Rang because he suddenly is enlightened about how dangerous childbirth actually is for mothers. Since sneakily the show implies that they have become lovers relatively early on, this makes no sense but it's still cute.

In the middle the baddies stay very very worrisomely bad until their satisfying punishments. Unsatisfactorily, the madness of the king means that So Rang is removed from the streets where she shone and is confined to the palace. She weeps and suffers and actually visually and in behavior returns to her well-brought up self before having escaped her stepmother's murder attempt many years before.

Aired in 2022, this feels as if it were from a more hopeful era. The FL Park Ju Hyun is the clever jokester girl we see portrayed in a time of gender role change. Confucian values are sometimes relied upon and sometimes undercut. The bits and pieces of the plot sometimes feel as if they are surrounded by air -- this is not an elegant show, not nuanced, not a great love story (yet their affection and desire feels very real), but it is a story with enough heart, in the end, to win you over. Underlying issues brought up are sex trafficking and improved government support for families.

As with many basically good kdramas, the secondary characters shine. My favourites, eccentrically: Court Lady Won and the chief eunuch, played by true veterans. Kim Woo Seok of course. Also the strangely glowing Ban-tan (Noh Min Woo, accompanied by his actual brother!), who runs a secret haven for lovers and their children.

first posted on viki july 10th 2024