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I started off really enjoying The King's Woman. It's beautiful to look at. Zhang Vin carried the first part of this drama for me just by sheer charisma alone. I like watching him even though the character he plays is so bad. For the the first third of the drama or so I was into the plot setup and the martial arts characters and their "quests". I like that sort of thing. There are several passionate love scenes in the first part too. It was pretty easy to watch from episodes 1-24. But somewhere around this point I lost enthusiasm. An actor's charisma can only take me so far.
The King's Woman aims to portray a ruthless tyrant as a complicated character that we can sympathize with in telling the story of his true love for a beautiful and talented woman. It's kind of difficult to do well and basically I don't think this drama did a great job at it. It relies too much on the actors' charisma and good looks, slow mo flashbacks, and pretty cinematography rather than thoughtful story writing and good character development.
By episode 40 or so I had a lot of built up frustration and dislike for the main characters so I didn't really care about them anymore. The side characters were uninspiring, but at least Jing Ke and Han Shen were more consistently written and had some good fight scenes. The main characters behave inconsistently and don't feel like real people. The most problematic character is the heroine, Gong Sun Li. She is supposed to be wise, upstanding and tough. As the story progressed I felt more and more repulsed by the idea of her falling in love with the King and being such a martyr for him. He is murderous one scene and then suddenly cute and seductive in the next. The drama jumps into a romantic comedy tone whenever the king does something terrible and they need you to feel sympathy for him and buy into the love story again. It bugged me that an intelligent woman would become submissive to such a man. The main failing in the storytelling is that there was not a compelling reason for her to be won over by him. They didn't portray much of her internal struggle to be with him. It goes against her character to fall in love with him, so give us an explanation. There were hints that she might have done it for political reasons or to protect others. But mostly the romance is portrayed as just fate - that Li was fated to always protect, love and serve the King no matter what his actions and he would always love her because of it. But why? This wasn't enough for me to buy into the romance.
I watched the last part of the drama mostly out of curiosity to see how the events played out. I knew I was supposed to feel the tragedy of it all as a result of the king's fatal character flaws and feel the heroine's selflessness and integrity, but the feelings just weren't there for me. Still, there were ample slow motion flashback scenes to inform me that something dramatic was happening. And every time they played a certain childhood flashback scene (which was A LOT) I knew I was supposed to be feeling how poignant it all was.
Then again after all my complaints about this drama again, I never once thought of dropping it. On a basic level it is watchable and entertaining enough to see the good looking costumes, actors, cinematography and martial arts scenes and find out what happens in the end.
The King's Woman aims to portray a ruthless tyrant as a complicated character that we can sympathize with in telling the story of his true love for a beautiful and talented woman. It's kind of difficult to do well and basically I don't think this drama did a great job at it. It relies too much on the actors' charisma and good looks, slow mo flashbacks, and pretty cinematography rather than thoughtful story writing and good character development.
By episode 40 or so I had a lot of built up frustration and dislike for the main characters so I didn't really care about them anymore. The side characters were uninspiring, but at least Jing Ke and Han Shen were more consistently written and had some good fight scenes. The main characters behave inconsistently and don't feel like real people. The most problematic character is the heroine, Gong Sun Li. She is supposed to be wise, upstanding and tough. As the story progressed I felt more and more repulsed by the idea of her falling in love with the King and being such a martyr for him. He is murderous one scene and then suddenly cute and seductive in the next. The drama jumps into a romantic comedy tone whenever the king does something terrible and they need you to feel sympathy for him and buy into the love story again. It bugged me that an intelligent woman would become submissive to such a man. The main failing in the storytelling is that there was not a compelling reason for her to be won over by him. They didn't portray much of her internal struggle to be with him. It goes against her character to fall in love with him, so give us an explanation. There were hints that she might have done it for political reasons or to protect others. But mostly the romance is portrayed as just fate - that Li was fated to always protect, love and serve the King no matter what his actions and he would always love her because of it. But why? This wasn't enough for me to buy into the romance.
I watched the last part of the drama mostly out of curiosity to see how the events played out. I knew I was supposed to feel the tragedy of it all as a result of the king's fatal character flaws and feel the heroine's selflessness and integrity, but the feelings just weren't there for me. Still, there were ample slow motion flashback scenes to inform me that something dramatic was happening. And every time they played a certain childhood flashback scene (which was A LOT) I knew I was supposed to be feeling how poignant it all was.
Then again after all my complaints about this drama again, I never once thought of dropping it. On a basic level it is watchable and entertaining enough to see the good looking costumes, actors, cinematography and martial arts scenes and find out what happens in the end.
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