A broken pot

This drama didn't deserve to be longer than 10-12 episodes at best for the amount of material it had to offer. Quickly enough, they deviated from pottery making in favor of typical bland drama antics. Pottery making was its selling point but we barely got a slight tiny glimpse of that field. They kept all details and technicalities to minimum, how do they expect the viewer to care? I guess having a love square is more important to them. Looking at the cast it seemed promising but it turned out to be quite disappointing. Nonetheless, did we really need that awful nasty 17-years timeskip before the end credits? Massive yikes!!

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DOA

The late-2000s/early-2010s extreme edgy vibes were too damn strong with this one, from the awful OST and soundfx to the comical acrobatics and the pretentious attitude. Moreover, an obvious poor job from the directing department worth a slap on the wrist for their empty shots, lousy compositions, hasty transitions and un-cinematic pretentious edits with no purpose trying to mimic cinema as if they were following a template. This is not how you create a slow-burn. The leads story, their entangled relationship and their journey to fall in love all were the furthest thing from being natural and smooth. If the edgy writing full of cringe was playing against them then the directing was the cherry on top to cross the point of no return.

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RUN!

The kid was pulling this drama together from the very beginning. While the chase was interesting to follow at first but soon enough it became tiring and boring and a change of scenery was due at that point which took longer than expected to get to. The drama had some nice side characters which didn't become overbearing, namely So Baek and her father which provided a little distraction from the long wait for the story to move. There were a lot of elements I didn't like in this drama but I probably will remember this drama for the kid. However, there was one particular major issue the drama suffered from and that is the godly impervious plot armor eliminating any sense of danger or stakes driving the drama in an extremely predictable bland route.

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I had a dream...

Casually confirming for nth time how unappealing Choi Soo Jong is in historical dramas as always since the start of his career. Just from reading the synopsis you may expect a big historical drama with big sets, big battles and big production, but this drama was embarrassingly scuffed with minimal efforts after the initial batch of episodes. As always with these type of shows, they blow their budget early on on flashy scenes then left wondering how to produce the rest. You may expect inconsistencies along the way, like having two or more camera angles of the same scene with different color grading and quality. I suppose an intern was editing that day. Anyway, the drama itself was underwhelming and almost nothing about it stand out, not even the cast nor their performance. All of their dramatic creative liberties proved to be unsuccessful and dull, as expected. A lot of petty fights that are always annoying to watch and lasting too long. At least the drama served as an example for how not to tell history in an entertainment medium.

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Power down!

Reminds me of some cheap fantasy anime. Executed as a one and equally as garbage. Terrible writing from the get go. Poor storytelling and structure. Painfully underutilizing the generous long runtime. Filled with irrelevant nonsense that doesn't contribute to anything, not even for a side gag or filler. While the cast may not have been terrible, but they were definitely careless and under-performing. It's not like that had much to work with in the first place. The director doesn't seem to be helping in that regard either. I don't think this drama would have worked even if it was just a 2-hours movie.

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A medical scam

Reminds me of some cheap isekai anime. Executed as a one and equally as garbage. Terrible writing from the get go. Poor storytelling and structure. Painfully underutilizing the generous long runtime. Filled with irrelevant nonsense that doesn't contribute to anything, not even for a side gag or filler. While the cast may not have been terrible, but they were definitely careless and under-performing. It's not like they had much to work with in the first place. The director doesn't seem to be helping in that regard either. I don't think this drama would have worked even if it was just a 2-hours movie.

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Empty

It's impressive how they managed to turn it into 21 episodes with what they had going on. This wasn't worth more than a quick short web drama of 4 to 6 episodes 30 mins. Temper your expectations and expect a quality in accordance to that. This wasn't the last time Seo Woo played an airheaded character.

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Not enough sea action...

What's up with the ending of episode 2 and onward? They straight up gave us random spoiler scenes and cuts from different points of future episodes. This was just a cheap tactic trying to hold the viewers hostage early on. Maybe because episode 1 wasn't well perceived? Kicked off to a bad start already. Song Il Gook and Chae Shi Ra were okay. Choi Soo Jong isn't appealing in historical dramas as always. Park Soo Ae was meh, she's better off in regular melos. The story and directing were equally problematic mainly regarding two insufferable themes that is love and rivalry, of which both were subjected to pathetic writing. If that wasn't enough, you got too many repeated montages of flashbacks to keep you annoyed. At the end, we got a "let's just wrap it up and end it" type of ending. Some characters were completely robbed off of a reasonable ending. It wasn't even a matter of historical accuracy, that's irrelevant. Emperor of the sea but they were 99.9% of the times on land.

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Bearable

Didn't like the introduction of them while kids everything about it felt disingenuous. Pacing issues were too obvious to ignore. The plot moves extremely slow +10 episodes for every single event with little to no side plots to keep you occupied. The problems didn't end there, the drama suffered from the extreme low tension in its writing. Most of the events that were suppose to create tension were caused by health problems. Speaking of which, they pulled the health problems card way too many times on too many characters. Regardless of the historical accuracy but that was poor storytelling for how it was implemented. Which leads me to my next point, regular boring side characters would usually get a 12 course meal for their affairs while super important characters would be cut off short and not get the same treatment. The important characters were robbed off of their climax too. Anyway, the drama had technical issues, the same scene can have different color grading between different angles. The drama had some nice moments with the leads but that's were most of its appeal ends.

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Not good

The drama was infested with cheap drama/melodrama tactics to keep it alive for too goddamn very long 134 episodes because otherwise it can't reach that milestone. Which turned it into a mind melting irritating watch. These details were highly unlikely to be historically accurate. Looking back at it I don't recall a lot of big events/moments happened during these 134 episodes, it feels empty for what it tried to achieve. The bothersome experience doesn't stop here but extends to its production also as if that wasn't enough. About +80% of the entire filmed footage were extreme face close ups. You're most certainly guaranteed to feel nauseous being subject to that for too long. My guess is that it was done purposefully to hide the background and cut on the budget. Cheaper to film and easier/faster to edit. The more I watch Choi Soo Jong the more I realize he isn't suitable for historical dramas.

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Interesting

Historical dramas had been failing me for a long time for one reason or another. Watching this one made me realize what's missing from any semi-/modern historical drama. For the past 20-ish years, historical dramas had been playing it gradually too safe and too clean. This drama isn't perfect or even great but it gave me a fresh and new perspective on the genre. Those who were beaten up or being tortured actually looks like it. Its scuffness is what sold it for me. The set design isn't squeaky clean and polished. The set is reasonably lit at night while taking into consideration they used to use candles instead of high beam studio lights back then! This might be the first historical drama I've seen that didn't feel like a cosplay show. You may find something similar in movies but ever so rarely in K-TV series.

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Do better!

It's called The Iron Empress so it's expected for this empress to carry certain characteristics as implied by the title but eventually everything boiled down to her being super stubborn gradually making me dislike her over time. It messed up her character value in one way or another. All of the characters that were in position of power were delusional and gullible which is exactly what the drama was built on. This is a cheap way to create melodrama to drive the drama, it's fundamentally annoying no matter how they spin it and justify it. So don't expect any clever plays by these samples. The drama clearly lost focus by the end. The writer wrote the story into a corner after a very long, repetitive and tiring melodrama and didn't have much to show for the ending so they resulted in throwing new events to have an ending rather than having both events running in parallel. How historical accurate that last portion was is irrelevant if it was presented with poor storytelling. This wasn't an enjoyable watch. The Iron Empress needs to touch some grass.

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A decent flawed attempt...

This drama was a constant coin toss for me. Sometimes it was good and enjoyable while other times it was over-sentimental, cringe and dull. Although the drama was 36 episodes long and packs a lot of events but most of these events were shoved together into the last 1/3 of the drama while the first 2/3 were very stretched out with little to no movement. The romance was treated as an instrument to push the main lead down or to bring him back up, not really romantic. Baek Do Yang character needed more attention especially that we had an abundance of free time. The last 5-10 minutes had a really unnecessary last minute maneuver. Anyway, the drama is good enough to be watchable but with a big asterisk.

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