The Mother of All Concubine Scheming Palace Dramas
Truly a classic. I don't believe that Zhen Huan, Yanxi, and Ruyi deserve to be uttered in the same breath as this gem.Maybe I'm exaggerating, but the last time I watched this in full was >10 years ago and I've seen quite a bit of palace dramas since. Nothing compares to just how wonderful the twists are here. At 30 episodes, the pacing is tight and I appreciate that it doesn't meander like the ultra-bloated aforementioned dramas. The emphasis on this drama is plot, plot, and more plot. This isn't 60 episodes of moving paintings like Yanxi or whatever. Just pure, scrumptious scheming and backstabbing.
Gigi Lai, Sheren Tang, and harem drama veteran Charmaine Sheh star as the archetypal pretty-and-spoiled neophyte, senior concubine villain, and sweet ingenue respectively. But do they really? W&B still has the best character writing among all the palace dramas I've seen across HK/Mainland/Korean dramas.
War and Beauty is genre-defining and a must-see for all palace drama enthusiasts
Was this review helpful to you?
This was such an intense drama honestly.
Story: This story was really good. There's a lot of rivalry in this and Gigi Lai's character is so desperate tbh. So basically to sum this story up, it's about concubines in the palace just battling each other to be the king's favorite. And then everything fails and falls apart.Acting/Cast: Ok, Gigi's character is so annoying. Bowie Lam's character just pissed me off. Gigi basically used Bowie's love for her to promote herself and then in the end he still loves her and wants to die with her when she could careless about him like man really. So upsetting, but the actors themselves were phenomenal.
Music: Great music
Rewatch Value: Yes.
Overall: I recommend this drama to people who like historicals and want to watch these concubines pull evil tricks on each other. This drama did that quite well. Good portrayal of palace life as a concubine.
Was this review helpful to you?
This review may contain spoilers
10/10, Emotionally Devastating
I honestly don’t even know how to rate this drama after that ending. I finished the last episode and just sat there feeling genuinely heartbroken.What I really loved about War and Beauty is that it doesn’t simply divide its characters into “good” and “evil.” The deeper the story goes, the more you realize that many of the women who seem cruel or manipulative were once innocent themselves, and the palace gradually turned them into what they became.
Consort Yu is probably the character who surprised me the most. At first, I thought she was simply another scheming villain, but learning about how innocent and hopeful she was when she first entered the palace, and how the loss of her son and years of palace intrigues changed her, made her character much more tragic. By the end, I couldn’t even look at her in the same way anymore.
And then there’s the ending… genuinely brutal.
On Tsin finally escaped with the person she loved, only for us to discover that she had already been wounded by an arrow and died on the way. The fact that he didn’t even know she was injured while carrying her made the scene so much more painful. And Art Sin never even found out that her real sister had died. That detail absolutely destroyed me.
Dr. Sun’s death also hurt. At some point, I was basically watching the finale thinking,
“Can ANYONE in this palace just survive and be happy?” Apparently not. 😭
What makes the ending even more frustrating is that the people responsible for so much suffering don’t necessarily receive the punishment we expect. The Queen, especially, made me furious. She committed terrible things and yet the story doesn’t give the audience the satisfying “villain finally gets what she deserves” ending. And honestly, I think that was intentional.
The palace's world is cruel because power doesn’t automatically come with justice. The people at the bottom suffer the consequences while the people protected by the system can survive.
I also couldn’t stop wondering about the Emperor during the rebellion. The fact that he left very early that morning, before sunrise, with relatively little protection made me suspicious that he may have known that something was going to happen. The drama leaves enough ambiguity for you to question how much the people at the top actually knew about what was happening inside the palace.
And that’s probably what stayed with me the most: not everyone dies knowing the truth, and not everyone who deserves punishment receives it.
War and Beauty is tragic, political, ruthless, and surprisingly emotional. It’s also one of those dramas where the “villains” become more understandable the longer you watch, because you start seeing how the palace itself destroys people.
I came for the palace intrigue and ended up emotionally attached to a group of doomed women. Terrible decision. Would absolutely do it again.
Was this review helpful to you?
