lord_varvara

I just finished watching this drama, wrote a review before checking other reviews so that they don't influence my opinion, and then started to skim through other reviews. Well, yours was so well written I read the whole thing A- Z. I agree with a lot of stuff. I think we defer in that I find ML and FL irredeemably bad: too old for characters who are basically Bella and Edward but in their 30s which makes their basically teeny romance even more cringe; miscast FL who wouldn't make a taxi driver wait for her with his taximeter on let alone a Mountain God for 600 years and no promise of a good tip; douchebag ML Stu who isn't even a character but just this big ego actor smirking in "Ain't I so awesome?" fashion that is supposedly enough to make us forgive his terrible treatment of his younger brother and no care for anyone but saving FL for the 50th time (and that's much less due to true love and much more due to some psychosis like OCD). Also, while everyone is focusing on the last episode due to idiotic killing of Rang, I'd say that real trash is stacked in Ep 15. The last one was really outtakes and cast fawning over ML Stu and it didn't feel like an episode but bonus feature on Blue Ray that most people forget to check. Ep 15, however, had a finale feel to it (there's a big fight between heroes and villains so that's textbook finale) and tons of head scratchers.

it was effin terrible. Boring, stupid, miscast, it's a long list of what went wrong. And it baffles me that they thought that putting more and more focus on it and giving the couple more cringe montages would fix the problem. No, what would have fixed it was discarding the romance altogether and focusing on what worked so well - bromance. But that got resolved in ep 9 and from that moment on it was all dumb romance in the front.

I don't think it's an overstatement. It is very obvious that the "finale" tried to cover up that their star wasn't there to film so they padded the running time with old footage and had the cast sing hosannas to LDW's proxy Yeon. The whole thing felt like a bonus feature on Blue Ray rather than an actual episode. I guess he hoped TOTNT would be his Goblin (as in that he was ML now) but it was just a bad imitation and his lazy too-cool-for-school (read: this drama) shtick got old quickly. So he's to blame for the fiasco too, not just the writer who made a mess out of sheer pandering to his/her star, which left the show directionless with too many underwritten characters (that could have been easily scrapped).

Aint that truth. I honestly have never seen such a thing. Any show and movie that has Good vs Evil premise has at least some clear idea what they want from their villain and hero/villain dynamic since that's the pivot of such stories. However, this drama was completely clueless and they were changing the villain's motivation in each episode. He wants to be Mountain God/Dragon/Whatever...no, scratch that...he wants to be loved cause of some sob story in his past...no, scratch that... he wants rule Samdocheon...no, scratch that...he wanted Granny's son to love only him not his wife or something. Hot mess. No wonder the show crashed and burned. If you lose focus of your hero/villain dynamic, what kind of dynamic you want it to be, everything crumbles. It's writing 101. No rocket science.

I gave it 6 because of Kim Bum, Score and supporting cast. KB and supporting actors had an uphill battle and they did it admirably and the score is fantastic. So I wanted to say "your effort did not go unnoticed" ha ha but otherwise I agree 6 is generous.