irmar

After the trauma of Queen for Seven Days I vowed never to watch a sageuk with sad ending if I can help it.

Yes, I loved the Crowned Clown. And Queen's Umbrella is on my watchlist as next to watch after this is over.

If you watch the Tale of Nokdu, it's exactly about that (and a very good drama too!) Also Bossam.

That was the dumbest move. Together with her going out with an uncovered face.

@hazepaseast. If she were a royal concubine it would have been okay, but it's not even that. She was a servant. Who then became a courtesan.

Yes, many of us agree with that. It's so obvious that it would be the best for everyone.

Yes, it was the wrong choice of an actor. He's not that young either, but has a baby face and he usually plays wistful, sweet characters with deep romantic eyes. He's trying to be a baddie here, but unsuccessfully, it's too far from his comfort zone as an actor.

This kind of fantasy sageuk usually doesn't have deaths of the main leads, it keeps it light and with a sugary happy ending. It's not Tree With Deep Roots (but that's a MUCH more satisfying watch, with stellar actors, which this one has not).

The story would have been interesting with better actors. As it is, it's a meh watch. Pity!

Have you watched Ghost Doctor, From Now On Showtime, Forbidden Marriage, Queen's Umbrella, Law Café? These are some that I've enjoyed in the past year.

Shi Yeol has most of our sympathies not only because of his character deserves it (which it does), but also because he's the only of the three young scholars who can convey any depth with his acting. If you purely look at the story, all three characters have interesting backgrounds, secrets, goals etc.
Kang San has good looks but can't act at all (his only attempt at showing any emotion is frowning, and he does it so much that you want to go and stick some tape between his brows). And Yu Ha is so boring you want to kill yourself to liven up the atmosphere. Of course he has the role of "second lead who is a good person and always helpful to the female lead", which is not the best one could offer an actor, and is usually sloppily written by the screenplay writers. But still this actor makes it even more "uninteresting".
The secondary characters (older couple) at Ihwawon are unidimensional stock figures. They have one characteristic, and they play with that from beginning to end, so they are a painful watch and you want to skip their scenes.
As for the leading lady, she's someone I will completely forget when the series finishes. Again, after Hwarang, Joseon Marriage Agency, Forbidden Marriage etc etc., we have a "spunky uncharacteristic Joseon female who, driven by circumstances, has to use her wit to make a living". But Dan Oh is the blandest of the many incarnations of this now cliché character. The writers gave her no development at all, from beginning to the end of ep.14. Whatever has happened in-between hasn't changed her a bit. This is the writers' fault, of course, but the actress is also very monotonous, with a limited set of mannerisms, so watching her is not satisfying.
I mean, all acting is shallow. Even the veterans, they play the parts that they have been playing for years. Decently, but again, you've seen them do that for a zillion times, in exactly the same way.
And don't start me on the king. I used to love Hyun Woo as an actor, only now I see how limited his range was. His desperate efforts of concealing his sweet and charming nature to play a villain are ludicrous if not embarrassing. Dropping his jaw and rolling his eyes... really? Just no!

Yes, you're right. Wikipedia says 1988 and we are in 2023 but I didn't consider the month of b irth and such things, so he might actually be 34 as MDL says.
Anyway, Im Siwan is a very good actor, he should be able to be credible in whatever he does. I will support him no matter what.

It is, I'm not saying it's not.

Is he a real tennis player?

It's not a recent phenomenon even for Korean dramas. Remember Lee Min Ho in "Heirs" He was 26 then, but he looks more mature. No way this man was a high-schooler. At the beginning I thought the American school they talked of was a university, and I was shocked to discover it was supposed to be a high school instead.
And of course everybody and their aunt has played their high-school selves, including Yoo Seung-ho in My Strange Hero. Born in 1993, he was 25 in 2018 when he filmed the drama.
Im Siwan is 35 now.
These guys are not in their 40s, but still...

At least they won't be speaking Chinese.

Auto-generated subs were used first in some French dramas, then we had the big volunteer strike of summer 2019 and after that Viki promised that it would use AI only for abandoned old shows which were incomplete and nobody was working on. And so far it has kept its promise.

After sub-whiners have caused Viki to put paid subbers for most shows, effectively chasing volunteers away, now of course the few dramas that are NOT pre-subbed have no volunteers to take care of them. One is the consequence of the other.

(Replying generally, I don't know about this particular drama).
Nowadays most dramas come pre-subbed, and when it's a drama that has finished airing, they upload all episodes at once. So volunteers have nothing to do but the editing.
It sucks, because all the good Chi-En, Ko-En and Jap-En subbers cannot even make enough subs to keep their Vikipass, and they are massively leaving. And the paid subbers are not always good, unfortunately, many times they are not good like the best volunteers.
It's a very upsetting situation for segmenters (who don't gain contributions for just checking segment quality) and for us editors too. Because if the drama comes pre-subbed, most viewers won't have the patience to wait until it's edited, they will start watching right away. This means that the great majority of them will have finished watching it before the editing, so our hard work as editors will be seen by very few.
Why is Viki doing that? Because of sub-whiners, who kept clamoring that they want the subs finished yesterday, and threatened to cancel their subscriptions because they couldn't wait even for 24 hours. The whining started, can you believe it, even 2-3 hours after the upload, when the video was still getting segmented, before it was even unlocked for subbers to work on it.
But this is not all. Even worse is coming. Viki is pressurizing channel managers to release the episodes to Other Languages BEFORE the editing. This means that any mistakes will be propagated in all other languages. Unless the Other Language editors are willing to go through the episode again after our editing to incorporate any major changes we might have made. But how many are that diligent?

@bubblylynnn: Change from .me to .li and of course install a good adblocker - or two. I'm on Opera browser with AdNauseam and uBlock Origin. Plus of course the browser's ad blocking setting. I don't know which of them does the trick (or maybe the combination), but there's not a single ad there.

It takes time and care to sustain a mushroom haircut. I know because my son had it as a child for a while.