The Princess' Man

If you want to go through all kinds of emotions and types of love in Korea in the second half of the fourteenth century, I'd say this is the one for you. Hate, trust, loyalty, devotion, intolerance, betrayal, death, but mostly love (lovers, parents and children, friends, ...). The killing is like an assembly line to show how ruthless the guy is. Life is risked here to show how strong feelings of guilt and love for another can be (whoever it is). As long as the main two were still smiling and spending colorful days together, it was fine, you came away beautifully charged with positive emotions; I was satisfied. But when it all goes wrong, the colorful days go to hell and liters of tears and blood start being shed. I'm not saying that these three quarters of the series were bad, but just watching 20 episodes of someone constantly suffering... As time went on, I got tired of the main couple, so the second couple – the princess and her husband – moved into my field of view; they were simply a joy to watch and they were the ones who moved me to tears. Basically, it was no different from other Korean historical series with forbidden love and political machinations (which counts for about half the time here, if not more, which I enjoyed more than the romantic storyline at times). Of course, it suffers from the typical malaise of unnecessarily drawn-out material, but that's almost the rule in Korea, so perhaps it's not worth getting angry about. :-) A better 3 stars. (16/03/2013)