Eleison

What were the other dramas that won?

Some people still seem to not get the idea behind Kdrama rom-coms. That doesn't mean they can't be bad, but some elements that people gripe about are literally here to stay, and as far as the genre is concerned, are going NOWHERE. 😅

I'm a sucker for them, too; biding my time with this one until it's completely released so I can binge it with a free Hulu trial (if it doesn't take a nosedive in the 2nd half, which Kdramas tend to do, especially recently), but I love several of the other dramas like this (The King 2 Hearts and Goong)!

Oh good! 🥰 I absolutely love it even though some parts are heartbreaking to watch!!

I can agree with that. :) I just finished Cdrama My Unicorn Girl and it was the same thing. It knew it was cringey and embraced the cringe fully and ran with it. 😅

It's a monarchy set in modern day Korea. There's no getting around the cheese on this one. 😉

I see your comments here and there on MDL, and while I sometimes see what you're saying I usually don't resonate with the intensity of critique you assign to things, so I usually don't respond, but for some reason this time I did. 😅

That said, I like SWDBS, too, and also think the leads carried it. :) They were SO cute. It's got the weirdest tonal shifts from serial kidnapper moments to goofy, adorable cringe. So much whiplash. 😅

Yeah, he's pretty awful.

Kind of a bummer; I'm afraid his lack of vulnerability with the Captain will frustrate me.

I think they only put xianxia in the list of secondary tags.

Is this a drama with torment and suffering with an open/sad ending?

It has a xianxia tag so that's why I'm asking. 😅

Hope it's good! Loved him in NIF.

I agree, many say the ratings are wrong/unhelpful, but I find them very helpful, especially paired with comments, reviews and the number of people who've rated it. I just have to take really high ratings from recent dramas into account as they tend to be over-inflated for while. I usually can see why people liked it, even if it's not to my taste. A rating I don't always agree with usually has a reason for being well-liked or disliked even if I felt differently. I don't think rating systems are really as fickle and inaccurate as people like to think. 😉

I got turned off by the heaviness that just started weighing down the plot and characters. I'm not used to detective/mystery plots being quite so somber. I suppose it's a kind of mystery/detective storytelling, but not one I think I'm into.

Eventually he gets canned, and the ML (at the very end) becomes the new crown prince. Both his wives get free of him.

Oh gosh, it's been a minute so I don't remember which episode, but there's an arc with him and the woman he marries and about she gets free from him that he gets more screen time (which I didn't love because i don't like his character), but he does not feature heavily outside those episodes (which I remember being in the middle-ish). I will say the rest in a spoiler.

It just blows my mind that we still have this kind of deference for human beings simply because of their bloodline or because of tradition. We know there's nothing special about them anymore so why do we let such treatment continue? When I think about it for a bit is just makes no sense why anyone should get treated this way in our modern world. 🧐

I'm fine with it in a fictional drama, of course, but in real life I just don't get it.

What I meant by the trime travel was that the drama was not trying to do "good sci-fi" in the way that a story centered around the sci-fi aspects would attempt to do, so keeping the rules consistent was never super important to the story (the finale was more about the magic of love across time and space transcending logic (as cheesy as that sounds), and THAT kind of stuff is what people watch these kinds of rom-coms know they're signing up for). Is it cheesy and silly? Yes, but people enjoy that kind of fantastical romance that can obviously never work, make sense, or happen in any kind of logical reality.

But I have a feeling we'll disagree about this if we keep going since you clearly have your opinion and I have mine.

Interesting claim that Kdramas are the most bland genre in the Kdrama world, yet they're often the most popular genre of Kdrama. 😉 I guess the vast majority of Kdrama watchers have a higher tolerance for "bland" than you do. 😉😅 I agree some rom-coms have bad stories, and some go way too far with just showcasing the actors' looks and cute moments and chemistry between the beautiful leads, but there can be many things that contribute to why so many people love Kdrama rom-coms, so reducing the reasons to simplistic categories is fairly dismissive.

Or, Under The Queen's Umbrella and At A Distance Spring Is Green. ☺️

Care to elaborate? 😉