Solo Dodo

🤣😂

That's his title. Aide = aid, assistant. He serves as a butler, confident, friend & secretary. He is the person who anticipates his master's wishes and executes his commands.

I appreciate the subtleties. Scratch the surface behind their privilege, wealth & status, these are damaged individuals—adult survivors of harsh upbringings, respectively. The actors are playing layers upon layers where their character's true feelings are both repressed due to not having models of love during their formative childhood years but also hidden due to their constant need to protect themselves from those who seek to defeat or take advantage of them.

I notice the differences between how they behave with those few confidants they can trust vs how they act around others. And I especially enjoy watching the change in degrees of opening up to each other vs. putting on masks or deflecting when the other starts to get too close, too quickly.

Choi Hyeon is the grand prince's personal aide & assistant. He has an interesting backstory:
https://mydramalist.com/character/choi-hyeon

Yes. Anytime you see an Original Network listed on a drama's MDL page, you can assume it had commercial breaks during its original broadcast. Sometimes these are obvious, as you noticed here.

The greatest impact of these breaks is on the writers. They work very hard to balance out the pacing so events can occur between these breaks. They also strive to keep viewers from changing the channel during the commercials by scripting mini-cliffhangers, providing extra motivation to stick around. This all makes the task of writing a broadcast screenplay incredibly challenging in comparison to writing a Disney or Netflix original, where they only need to focus on the narrative and consider overall episode lengths. And this becomes even more complex when designing it to work in both broadcast and streaming formats. So much effort is essential to these productions which never gets noticed by viewers.

FYI, FWIW, This is the writer's first project. Her script won the grand prize at the 2022 MBC scriptwriting contest (out of 997 entries). Disney joined MBC in an active co-production partnership (instead of merely paying to license the drama to stream on D+).

I respect your right to an opinion. Personally, I think the script is brilliant.

Thank you for sharing this great anecdote about IU IRL!

Yes. FL's dad is like your aunt.

Dad likely sees his kids as his property &/or as an extension of himself and feels disinclined to allow anyone to mess with what is his.

She feels the weight of generations of traditions that it seems no one but she is willing to preserve. Her upbringing—family, training—all made her this way. Watching the system crumble before her eyes makes her feel like a failure—that all of her sacrifices were moot. On the surface she is a queen but inside she feels hollow & unfulfilled. Hers is a tragic story!

It’s for the history books—a sort of faux immortality.

Who was the first person to step on the moon? Everyone knows it was Neil Armstrong. But who can also remember the last guy to step on the moon. Even he doesn’t remember! “Harrison Schmidt! Who the heck is Harrison Schmidt?”

I am never surprised by ratings. What I am surprised by—still, after many years—is why MDL chooses to enable dedicated partisans to manipulate the ratings, even while a series is ongoing. It's hard to have much, if any, esteem for the ratings, IMO. To me, they're just some numbers taking up space at the top of the page—and living rent-free in a lot of people's minds!

We're still waiting for the episode 2 epilogue. Maybe we get two post-credits epilogues today?

The days of yore—way back during the previous millennium (years that didn't start with a '2')—the age of analog.

MD has dance-fu fighting, but CP has waltz

It's a HUGE list. MDL should have a character page for the WTOD with a complete list!

You noticed! The reason for those blackout breaks is because this drama is a co-production between domestic SK broadcast network MBC and Disney. Each episode airs first on MBC—with commercial breaks—before it is released for streaming by D+ without commercial breaks.

Some D+ dramas are Disney originals, but the global streamer's appetite for content is too large for them to produce every series themselves. Sometimes they license an existing series from a domestic network, and other times (like here) they partner with a network on a co-production. The same goes for other streamers such as Netflix, Prime Video, etc..

The Royal kitchen has been serving fast food ever since Joseon times when head royal cook Mr Queen invented Macdonalds. I hear their dragon-whisker fries are the best!

I agree with both your takes. I just wanted to add the 2nd ML in CLOY is my favorite second male lead ever. His redemption arc!

It's clearly topping the charts because of the production, and also the script, but of course most of all it is the acting!

I've seen a lot of criticism about the male lead's acting. Honestly, for me it's the opposite. He's doing a brilliant job slowly revealing the true feelings of a man who was raised under harsh conditions which would repress any normal person for life. He lost his mom at a young age. His dad neglected him or was harsh to him with nothing in-between. He was raised to live within the gilded cage of the palace, always as a spare-to-an-heir whom he was never to eclipse or over-shine. He was raised to be non-controversial. Here, we get to see him meet someone who offers him the chance to voice his true desires, act in accordance to his conscience, and risk everything he has and is, in a courageous play to seize the day.

I've seen a lot of criticism about the female lead's acting. I was harsh on her, myself, after watching Hotel del Luna. (In the first episode she was great—she was intense and wielded a shotgun and looked hot in her frilly dress. After that, it was more about the wardrobe than the acting—that was my complaint.) Here, I get to appreciate how much she's grown as an actress. She has a range with both subtlety and intensity that's delicious!

I get that others disagree. Subjective, isn't it?