linjitah

Yeah, opinions always differ so much between English-speaking and Korean-speaking audiences, but at this point I just find it funny. I get the feeling that Western audiences most of the time are used to a more naturalistic, documentary-style approach, whereas K-dramas stem primarily from theater rather than naturalistic cinema. Well, it’s their loss, what can I say? Let them keep complaining.

And if you want to consider c-dramas too, I’d recommend A Dream Within a Dream, which is similar conceptually, and Blossom, which is similar emotionally, I think?

Depends on what you personally liked about this drama, because it mixes a lot of different things, but my main recommendations would probably be My Dearest and Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo, because MRN reminded me the most of the feeling I had while watching those. But also Mr. Queen, Chicago Typewriter, maybe even Alchemy of Souls too.

I think this is partly a case of mixing up two different standards, naturalistic acting vs controlled stylization, and judging one through the expectations of the other.

Lim Ji-yeon isn’t really a pure naturalism actress, her strength is controlled stylization, very deliberate vocal tone, rhythm, emotional containment, and physical economy.

With Seo-ri specifically, a lot of what gets described as “grandma speech” is actually Joseon-coded linguistic behavior filtered through modern ears. Late Joseon speech (especially when reconstructed in drama form) tends to emphasize highly stratified honorifics, indirectness, sentence-final endings that signal deference or restraint, and a much slower, more deliberate turn-taking rhythm.

So when that is carried into a modern setting, it naturally produces a mismatch with contemporary conversational Korean, which is faster, more casual, and much more emotionally explicit. What some viewers interpret as “older person energy” is often just that older communicative system being preserved.

And I’d add this is exactly where subtitles flatten things. From the perspective of someone who actually understands Korean, these are not “grandma mannerisms” in the modern sense. I personally don’t read her delivery as “old woman acting” at all, it reads as consistent Joseon-derived speech logic carried into a contemporary body.

So I don’t really see it as “excuses for bad acting.” It’s more that people are projecting a naturalism expectation onto a performance that is intentionally operating in a more stylized, register-conscious mode. That’s why opinions split so sharply depending on what acting grammar you’re used to.

I find it funny that Seo-ri goes to consult a shaman about her problems and later about her relationship with Se-gye. Meanwhile, Se-gye goes to a therapist at first because of his insomnia and nightmares, but eventually ends up discussing his relationship issues as well. In 300 years, nothing has really changed haha — therapists are just the new shamans.

Overall it’s trending clearly positive. Most recent peak reported ~9.4% average / 10.7% peak (Episode 7) and 10.4% average (Episode 8), placing it #1 in its time slot and among weekly mini-series leaders. In Korean terrestrial drama terms, this is a strong “hit-tier” trajectory, especially for a fantasy romance airing on SBS in a competitive weekend slot.

And what I saw myself across Korean media viewers reaction are unusually positive and stable, and we are all know how netizens tend to be. In terms of the main leads, at the beginning of the drama I saw a lot of praise focused mainly on Lim Ji-yeon’s acting, probably because she was already more well known. But these days, more people seem to be discovering Heo Nam-jun, and he’s definitely generating quite a buzz among new male lead actors, so without doubt he’ll become much more widely known after this.

I decided to look up a Saju charts of both main characters since we finally know their birthdays, mostly just for fun, but the results ended up being unexpectedly fitting, so I am sharing my reading here! Honestly, I feel like the creators definitely chose their birthdays intentionally because the symbolic structure matches the characters almost too perfectly. It is a little scary actually. Let’s unpack.

For people unfamiliar with Saju, it is a traditional Korean system of reading personality and relational dynamics through birth pillars and elemental structure.

What struck me immediately is that these two charts do not suggest an easy or light relationship at all. Their dynamic, just by chart alone, feels intensely karmic and fated. The kind of relationship that becomes psychologically transformative, emotionally obsessive, difficult to forget. There is a very strong push-and-pull aspect to it, but also longing, restraint, emotional recognition through distance rather than direct communication. Honestly, perfect melodrama material, haha.

Now about their individual charts.

Seo-ri’s Day Master is Yin Wood (을목), which in Saju is symbolically associated with grass, flowers, vines, delicate but adaptive living things. Yin Wood survives through flexibility, emotional intelligence, atmosphere-reading, and indirect influence rather than force. That alone already feels extremely fitting for her character.

Her chart overall feels very emotional, perceptive, aesthetic, and psychologically layered. There is a strong water presence in it, which often creates people who experience life narratively rather than practically. They live through emotional meaning, symbolism, memory, atmosphere. People like this tend to romanticize suffering, longing, nostalgia, impossible attachments. They absorb emotional environments almost too deeply.

But what makes the chart more interesting is that she also has strong 상관 (“Hurting Officer”) energy. In Saju this often gives rebelliousness, emotional impulsiveness, frustration with rigid systems, refusal to quietly submit to expectations. It creates tension between softness and defiance. So despite her gentle image, there is something emotionally disruptive about her presence. She changes the atmosphere around her without necessarily intending to.

Her love tendencies are also very fitting. This kind of chart usually points toward loving intensely and symbolically rather than lightly. Emotional fusion, attachment, longing. But at the same time, she easily becomes the subject of gossip, projection, fascination, public emotional scrutiny. How fitting is that, honestly?

Se-gye’s Day Master, meanwhile, is Yang Metal (경금), symbolically associated with raw metal, iron, blades, swords. These are people who often value dignity, hide vulnerability, endure pressure silently, and maintain emotional control even when internally overwhelmed. Compared to Seo-ri’s emotionally permeable chart, his feels much more restrained and armored.

But what makes his chart fascinating is that despite this “metal” structure, he also has strong water energy, which creates emotional depth beneath the rigid exterior. So the result is emotional containment. Someone who feels deeply yet suppresses or disciplines those feelings instead of expressing them openly.

With all the combinations in his chart together, it creates an image of someone lonely, psychologically isolated, carrying an unusual worldview for his social environment or era. There is hidden romanticism in it, but also emotional distance. In Korean Saju culture, this kind of structure is often associated with artistic sensibility, spiritual loneliness, attraction to tragic beauty, separation from ordinary social life.

Honestly, even details like his attachment to beauty out of season — plum blossoms in snow, fragile beauty existing against harsh conditions — feel strangely aligned with the symbolic atmosphere of the chart.

This type of structure appears very often in artists, writers, scholars, people who feel emotionally “set apart” from others no matter how socially functional they appear.

And together, their elemental dynamic becomes even more melodramatic. Metal and wood traditionally exist in tension: metal cuts wood, while wood gradually reshapes and softens its environment.

To me, it doesn’t really matter whether Seori and Danshim are strictly “different people” or not, because the drama itself already frames identity as something unstable. At the beginning there is a reference to Zhuangzi’s famous butterfly dream, which goes roughly like this:

Zhuangzi once dreamt he was a butterfly, freely fluttering and unaware he was Zhuangzi. When he woke up, he suddenly wondered: *Was I Zhuangzi who dreamt I was a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly dreaming I am Zhuangzi?* The point is that there is no stable, final way to separate dreamer and dreamed — identity itself becomes uncertain and reversible.

Seen through that lens, Seori and Danshim don’t have to be read as fully separate or fully identical in a literal sense. The linguistic shifts, the changes in speech register, even moments like switching between modern and more traditional Korean can be understood less as “proof” of reincarnation and more as signs of a fluid subjectivity that moves between states.

So rather than resolving her identity into one fixed answer, the drama seems to keep that ambiguity open — much like Zhuangzi’s story, where the question is not meant to be solved, but experienced.

Oh no, they really took every single one of my favorite tropes and threw them into one drama, huh???😭 This is basically pure crack for me!!!! WE WON

Wow. Still continues to be, from episode to episode, the best drama in its genre in recent years. Let's go!! So many details and care in every scene, deep bow to the director and the whole team!

Currently reading different Korean discussions around the drama, and this is so interesting. I found this exchange about the scene where Seo-ri writes a handwritten letter on the back of a wall calendar:
- Using the back of a calendar as a letter, the writer has good sense!
- I was genuinely impressed by this part… small details like this make dramas worth revisiting.
-Calendar paper is the closest thing to hanji (traditional mulberry paper).
- Wouldn’t this actually be the props team’s idea?

Personally, I don’t think it is meant as a direct Joseon reference, but I do think the choice creates a subtle visual association with older Korean writing culture. Calendar paper has that thin, slightly rough texture that feels more intimate and lived-in than clean stationery, so the handwritten letter immediately feels more emotional and personal. I also like that a calendar itself carries the idea of time? fate? Which quietly adds another layer to the scene.

To me, the point of him mentioning that she can't separate personal and professional is a projection. He was frustrated because he realizes he’s no longer capable of separating those emotions either. He was always composed, controlled, rational, and now she destabilizes him to the point where fear comes out as anger. And him screaming is a plea for her not to do everything on her own, to let her know that someone is there for her, that she can ask for help. So I think the forest scene is quite important in their progression of relationship, less like man saves helpless woman, more like both characters confronting the limits of emotional self-sufficiency.

Caught another interesting detail. In episode 2 (around the 33-minute mark), Seo-ri goes up to the rooftop and tells herself that she must survive in this life.

In Korean visual language, characters climbing mountains or high places often signals transition, purification, or confrontation with oneself. In modern stories especially, rooftops and towers function almost like artificial mountains - emotional escape points separated from ordinary social life.

These are the spaces where characters become emotionally honest. Confessions happen there, social boundaries temporarily dissolve, and people speak more openly than they can below. Even the physical act of climbing stairs often symbolizes emotional exposure, a brief separation from rigid systems, or temporary transcendence. That also adds another layer to why Se-gye confesses first on the rooftop later on.

But there is another detail. The direction Seo-ri faces. In this scene, she faces east, which in East Asian symbolism is associated with beginnings, renewal, rebirth, and hope after suffering. So the scene quietly frames her not just as someone trying to endure, but as someone standing at the start of another life.

I think this really comes down to a difference in what people are looking for in a drama, rather than the show being inherently “childish” or “fake.”

The humor here is intentionally stylized and often slapstick. It’s not aiming for naturalistic realism in the way some slice-of-life or social dramas do. That heightened performance, theatrical delivery, and even the exaggerated reactions are part of the genre logic it’s working within. So if someone is expecting grounded behavior and subdued humor, it will understandably feel “too much” or unconvincing.

But “stylized” doesn’t automatically mean “childish” or “flashy.” A lot of the comedy is actually very self-aware. For example, the way it references older classic dramas or that cut in episode 3 where a slap fight mirrors what the receptionist is literally watching in a historical drama is doing something quite deliberate. It’s commentary on drama conventions themselves and how they circulate across genres and time periods.

And I think it’s totally okay to say it didn’t land for you (all). Humor is extremely subjective. But I’d be careful with framing it as “childish”, because that turns a stylistic preference into a value judgment. What feels “overdramatised” to one viewer can also be read as intentional theatricality to another.

In the end, it’s less about real vs fake and more about different aesthetic modes. Some viewers prefer minimalism and psychological realism, others enjoy heightened tone, genre play, and comic exaggeration. Neither is inherently more mature than the other, they’re just different languages of storytelling.

Hopefully that at least clarifies what the show is doing stylistically, even if it still doesn’t land for you personally.

Later in episode 1, when the radio announcer explains the meaning of a sunshower, the Korean term used is 여우비 — literally “fox rain.” The association comes from Korean folk belief where foxes are shapeshifters linked with illusion and liminality, and a sunshower itself is also a liminal phenomenon: sun and rain occurring simultaneously, two contradictory natural states coexisting.

When the “wedding of the fox and the tiger” is mentioned, it feels more like a modern reinterpretation or pop-cultural fusion of folkloric motifs rather than a single traditional myth. In folklore, foxes are often imagined as holding secret weddings in the sky (the “fox wedding” motif), while the tiger represents a mountain guardian - authority, danger, and strength, sometimes even being tricked by humans or foxes in stories! So this pairing can be read less as literal mythology and more as a symbolic contrast, almost like a yin-yang dynamic: fox as ambiguity and illusion, tiger as force and order.

I love this drama so much for all these details!

Rewatching the whole series with korean subtitles to catch the finer details, I think there may have been a small foreshadowing in episode 1 (around 50:35). When Se-gye’s right-hand man explains how to date a chaebol, he uses the word 짜릿해, which can mean “thrilling” or “electrifying.” Then in episode 6, when Seo-ri tries to wake Se-gye up, she first slaps him and later they both get electrocuted together. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it’s a funny coincidence either way, haha.

If you had read the manhwa that the drama will be based on, you would have known that his role there is quite important and even more interesting as a character than the first male lead. Plus it suits Heo Nam-jun very well, while I was reading, I saw him as this exact character.

Yes, the comments about their looks still shock me. I've been following both, Im Ji-yeon and Heo Nam-jun, basically since the beginning of their careers and can proudly say that I bet on them getting their moment in the spotlight in leading roles, but both then and now I've encountered comments that they don't have face cards for leading roles??? People are so delusional these days.

I also often joke: be careful of actors who used to play villains. Once they finally get the chance to play a leading, more positive role, they come fully prepared to steal the spotlight and remind everyone what they’re truly capable of.

Yeah, I think part of it may simply be that their strategy was different from the beginning compared to Perfect Crown. PC was clearly positioned as a huge prestige project from the start (massive budget, very big stars, heavy media push everywhere) so naturally the promotional style was more aggressive and frontloaded.

With MRN, the cast is strong but not necessarily composed of the absolute biggest names in the industry, so SBS and the production team probably played it a bit safer at first to see how audiences would react organically. I also noticed they started releasing more behind-the-scenes content, interviews, and extra promotional material during the second week rather than immediately during premiere week. That feels intentional to me.

And honestly, yes, the fact it’s growing this strongly mostly through plot, acting, chemistry, and audience engagement probably makes the success feel even more genuine.

I think it can be said pretty confidently that both MRN’s production team and SBS definitely hoped this drama would become at least a solid success. With projects like this, momentum matters a lot, and the fact they chose a May–June release with a Friday/Saturday slot already shows they had confidence in it performing well within its genre. Add to that the strong cast, good writing, and decent production values (visuals, costumes, overall presentation) and it’s clear they invested in it seriously.

Of course, in the current drama industry it’s genuinely difficult to create a massive hit. The market is fragmented, competition is huge, and viewers drop dramas quickly if the plot loses momentum. But big hits can still happen if the story keeps audience attention and word of mouth grows.

And honestly, the ratings curve already looks very good. It started around 4% for episode 1 while airing during the finale period of Perfect Crown and competing for viewers’ attention, then rose to 6% by episode 3, and now it’s already hitting double digits before even reaching half of its total episode count. That’s usually a very positive sign of strong audience retention and growing buzz.