This drama had one of the most atrocious costume and set designs I've ever seen in my life. It's as if I've been teleported back to 2010s Chinese period drama era where everything is in contrasted and clashing colors. If I see one more BRIGHT pink curtain overhanging a BRIGHT green door, or a dress of BRIGHT purple and BRIGHT yellow, I will toss myself off a cliff. Everything looks garish and cheap and utterly distracting. I can't even focus on the bland and utterly predictable Mary Sue romance because the Loud everything keeps on distracting me. Also, the king can't afford more than three spots of embroidery on his goddamn wedding attaire, and honestly that's just an insult to Korean culture.

Besides that. Plot was very romance heavy. They took out all the despair and angst over the inherent unfairness of the imperial system our female lead suffers through and replaced it with romance angst. Which made the court intrigue bits extremely juvenile and hard to take seriously. The cheap costumes certainly didn't help with its seriousness.

The one shining spot in this effortful trashfire was the acting. Everyone brought their A game. Especially Lee Joon-Gi. He honestly should've won something. All the idol actors performed way above my expectations, and I was surprised how solid they all were. Which, inevitably, lent the whole production a quality of "they put a lot of effort into it, they tried really hard, but they veered off onto the wrong road in the first place and now there's no way to get them back." Also, all the male actors need to have better posture. You can't have any princely royal gravita if you're slouching all the time.