#i shudder to think of the inevitable typos and probable dropped word's i'll find tmorrow

[swordsandparasols]

Given all the focus in last weekend’s episodes of Grand Prince on scars and how a woman with scars on her body can’t be a royal wife or concubine, I’m starting to wonder if the show is going to have Hwi and Ja Hyeon separated because he has to return to the palace to help raise and protect the toddler, and their not being able to be together for good until years later when he can leave the no-longer-toddler, since she can’t be his wife unless he renounces his position because of her scars. If they do go that route, I hope Ja Hyeon becomes a famous artist during that time.

 International fandom might not be overly impressed with the show (more on that in a moment) but South Korea certainly is.  It was already Chosun’s highest rated drama ever in its first few weeks, and ratings have only gone up from there, aside from a brief drop around the third week, which is normal for kdramas, before rebounding.  If it gets the usual ratings bump in the last couple of weeks, it might claim the spot for having the highest ratings for a single episode of a sageuk on a cable network from Maids.  (I mean, if it does, it’ll be brief because Mr Sunshine and Asadal are on their ways, but it’ll be pretty noteworthy coming from a much smaller cable network like Chosun, and between Maids and Grand Prince, the writer has probably made hir career writing sageuks pretty stable.)

 I’ve been talking a bit about it with people in the kdramanetwork, and it seems a lot of the international fandom interpretation of it is that it’s ok, but sageuk-lite as compared to the more melodramatic youth fusion romances that have been popular in international fandom in recent years that use history as window dressing.  I’m being literal in that statement, not judging. Moon Lovers chose one of the few periods in Korean history that mostly fit a story already written for Chinese history, Seven Day Queen was essentially a romance novel with historical serial numbers added to it, Hwarang was a setting that let them make everything be about a fluffy collection of pretty boys with a side of angst. Etc.  (I’m not sure what The King in Love was outside of a mess due to the obsessive devotion to keeping the love triangle ambiguous above and beyond all else.) There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that, but those shows-arguably the most popular sageuks in international fandom in recent years-are a far, far cry from the sageuks that became popular both domestically and internationally.  Mixed into that time period we had the more traditional and history oriented sageuks like Flower in Prison, Rebel, and, of course, Six Flying Dragons, which had decent ratings and were well received critically both domestically and internationally, but made less of a splash internationally than the previous group. Even Six Flying Dragons, with its near universal acclaim, had a smaller but very dedicated international fandom. Somewhere in between there was Saimdang, Ruler, and My Sassy Girl,  (I cannot comment on Moonlight Drawn By Clouds because the trailer was…something else, and not in a way that was good for me, and nothing I heard about it made me reconsider.) which had mixed reactions both internationally and domestically, but fared better than the first group in ratings.  (Ruler actually had the highest ratings for a sageuk last year, but I don’t think it was actually considered popular, due to so many people on Naver saying they only watched to see the lead actors get a happy ending?  I quit paying attention to what people said about it when I quit watching it, but I remember seeing comments to that effect at the time.)  There were a couple other sageuks somewhere in there that don’t seem to have made any lasting impact or splash at the time, at least internationally, but I don’t remember what they were. I think Jackpot was one. (A well made and acted drama that somewhat managed to be very forgettable, based on the few episodes I saw.)

 To get back to my original point about Grand Prince (one day I will start one of these posts before bedtime and ramble less),I don’t think it’s something that should be called sageuk-lite. Like Ruler and My Sassy Girl, it’s in a fictional AU of Joseon that can easily be seen as influenced by historical figures, but the similarities don’t really go past that point.  This evening (now technically yesterday) I started watching Chuno with @decaffeinatedhedonist (the first time for her, a rewatch for me) and it reinforced what I’ve thought about Grand Prince since it was only a few episodes in, which is that, despite some surface similarities, it is very much not wanting to be associated with the recent youth fusion romance sageuks (Given that that bubble had its swan song during the Moon/Moon period and entries since then have mostly been the dying gasps of this round of the subgenre, you can’t really blame it.) and is instead pretty aggressively a callback to roughly the 2009-2011 period of fusion sageuks, which could be considered something of a golden age for fusion sageuks.  It’s scaled down-largely because the writer is less interested in politics than in the smaller details of family and homelife and characterization.  It’s essentially a family drama in which people are arguing over the fate of a country, as opposed to which chaebol heir will take over the company.  (This is also why it almost has to be about characters based on historical figures, as you couldn’t tell the story with that approach with the actual King Sejo and Prince Anpyeong.)  It decided what it wanted to be and it very much succeeds at what it wants too be, that we might expect more in the realm of politics or for things to operate on a grander scale is more about viewer assumptions than a problem or weakness in the show, which has consistently been exactly hat it sells itself as.  So while I do think it could possibly be called sageuk-lite in comparison to the shows it emulates (such as Princess Man and Chuno, for the most obvious plot reasons)-I don’t think it is, but I can see the argument-I don’t think it can be called sageuk-lite as compared to the more recent shows I see it being compared to, as it’s much truer to the original spirit of fusion sageuks than those shows are.

I hope all that made sense and didn’t veer off in too many directions.