The King: Eternal Monarch
Aug. 4th, 2020 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
go_gentleOkay, if you follow me on twitter, you know I've spent the last week or so losing my mind over The King: Eternal Monarch, and since twitter is a terrible medium for posts of any length, I have dusted off my DW to scream at length.
Very brief intro
He, Lee Gon, is the king of the Kingdom of Corea. She, Jeong Tae-eul, is a police officer in the Republic of Korea (ie, our world). Through the magic of hopping between parallel worlds, they fight crime an attempted coup and also fall in love.
It's a 16 episode Korean drama that originally aired in spring 2020 and is now available on Netflix.
Why I'm into it
I started watching this after seeing some gifsets on tumblr, as you do, and by episode 4 I was reduced to posting in caps on twitter about all the feelings I was having. For all the other stuff going on, it's pretty unabashedly a romance, and I wanted something that really leaned into that. It takes Tae-eul a little while to warm up to Lee Gon, and he reacts by being even more charming in an attempt to win her over, which is adorable. After their romance gets going, there's a fair bit of, you know, crying in the rain about the forces keeping them apart, dramatic rescues, commitment to doing the right thing even at great personal cost. The whole thing is very earnestly emotional, and I love a melodrama. It has many feelings. It made me feel many feelings.
Aso, I said this already, but the leads are very cute together when they're flirting. He, having been king since he was 8, is used to a certain amount of deference. She, on the other hand, has no interest in that and so keeps negging him. He loves a grand gesture, but also knows that he's ridiculous about his grand gestures. If you're into flirting by mock being mean to each other, this is for you.
Brief warnings before I talk about more plot
Violence, suicide, child harm/death, a troublingly extrajudicial approach to justice.
Give me the longer pitch.
NB: I'm going to be pretty casual about spoilers for episodes 1-4ish, and try to avoid them after that. If you need to know about how the ending works out, I've put spoilers for that at the very end of the post.
(Bear with me here, there's a lot of premise and you just gotta work through it.)
SO. In 1994, when Crown Prince Lee Gon is 8 years old, his uncle Lee Lim (his father the king's illegitimate half brother) storms the palace with his followers in an attempt to seize the throne. He kills the king, gravely wounds Lee Gon, but is prevented from killing him by the appearance of a mysterious stranger, who holds off the traitors until the Royal Guard can arrive. In the struggle, the magical artifact Manpasikjeok is broken, and Lee Lim escapes with one piece of it. He uses it to flee through a portal into the Republic of Korea, where he tracks down his double, murders him, and uses the body to fake his death in the Kingdom of Corea.
Also in the struggle, the mysterious stranger drops an ID badge for Lieutenant Jeong Tae-eul of the Seoul police. It's extra mysterious because a) there's no rank of Lieutenant in the police of Corea, b) there's no one named Jeong Tae-eul in Corea, and c) the badge has an issue date of November 2019 despite being dropped in 1994. Naturally, Lee Gon has a lot of interest in unraveling this mystery.
In 2019, Lee Gon is the king of Corea. He likes rowing, locking himself in his study to work on math, and avoiding Lady Noh's suggestions that he get married and make some heirs already. He takes a wrong turn while out riding one day, his half of the magical artifact in his pocket, and finds himself in the Republic of Korea. (Being science fiction aware means he quickly realizes what's happened.)
Jeong Tae-eul is a police officer in the Republic of Korea, working a string of cases that don't seem to make sense together despite their connections. She lives with her father above the taekwondo studio he runs, likes milk tea from her friend's shop in the courtyard, and is on the Violent Crimes Squad with her childhood best friend.
When a man on horseback shows up in the city center at rush hour, she intervenes, with a decided air of 'why is this happening while I'm on my way home'. She's weirded out when he seems to know who she is, and she gets extra frustrated when he answers her questions with nonsense like 'I'm the king of a country in a parallel dimension.' So she arrests him, whereupon she learns he doesn't carry ID, he's not in any fingerprint or DNA databases, and all the money in his wallet is fake. Not even the Racing Association can identify his horse (although they want to come see it in person, the horse is exquisite). And also he can pay for weeks in a luxury hotel with the buttons off his coat, which turn out to be real diamonds.
And all the while they're arguing about parallel dimensions over fried chicken, the traitor Lee Lim is growing his conspiracy again by murdering, blackmailing, and causing trouble across both worlds. Obviously, this is all going to come to a head.
Why do you keep going on about fish out of water stories?
Okay, here's the thing: I hate them when they're played for comedy. You're somewhere you know you're not supposed to be, you're doing your best to fake it, you know you're getting it wrong, and it's being played for laughs? Nightmare fuel.
This show mostly skips that! Right when he first gets to the republic, he thinks it's ruled by an extremely popular queen named Yuna, and that's actually a funny joke. The reactions to Lee Gon's declarations that he's a king in a parallel dimension range from 'you're really into this novel you're writing' to 'please stop making my life difficult and just answer the question', and, other than with Jeong Tae-eul, he's not really invested in making them believe it, so he quickly settles into being 'that weird rich guy, whatever his deal even is'. (This is why cities are great.)
The exception to this is when Jo Yeong and Jo Eun-sup swap places for plot reasons and we get comedy about how different they are. TBH I mostly made use of the fast forward button in those scenes.
Where should I start?
Of course, starting at the beginning is a perfectly fine choice. But! The show is a little slow to get going (see my attempt to summarize the backstory above). The leads don't meet until the very end of episode 1, and the show is very committed to doing set up for a bunch of plotlines that don't really make sense until later. It didn't start clicking for me until the end of episode 4.
If that's too long to wait to see if you're into the show, drop your Netflix slider about halfway through episode 4, skip any scene that doesn't feature either of the two leads, and watch for about an hour until the middle of episode 5 (the basketball scene is a good place to stop, or you can keep going through mid-6 when Lee Gon gets on a boat). By then, you should have a good idea of how you feel about the central romance, which is really the make or break issue.
The context you need if you take this approach: Lee Gon spent several days hanging around the Republic of Korea trying to convince Jeong Tae-eul about parallel dimensions and his general charm (she's not on board with the parallel dimensions, but maybe was being convinced about the charm). When he returns to his own world, she thought she would be relieved not to have him around all the time, but finds maybe she misses him. Plus, she never managed to solve the mystery of where he came from, and that bothered her. There, that's how things stand mid-4.
Some character images for reference
(NB: I'm using the romanizations that Netflix uses, which are not quite the same as the ones on the wikipedia page, I don't know enough about Korean to know why that is)
Jeong Tae-eul and Lee Gon
For these next two characters, I need you to go look at this gifset, static images will not do. Jo Yeong on the left, Jo Eun-sup on the right.
Jo Yeong
The extremely serious Captain of the Royal Guard and Lee Gon's best friend. Mostly wishes Lee Gon would stop making his job difficult. In the kingdom of Corea, there's rumors that the two of them are secretly together, which is what happens when your phone background is a selfie of the two of you together.
Jo Eun-sup
Extremely goofy. Tae-eul's childhood best friend, currently doing his military service in some capacity where his job regularly intersects with Tae-eul.
Kang Sin-jae
Friends with Tae-eul since high school, now they're cops together. He's got a thing for her but manages not to be a Nice Guy about it.
Lady Noh
As Head Court Lady, she runs the royal household. After Lee Gon's parents died, she basically raised him. Now she settles for bullying him on issues like how he needs to get married already and the impropriety of sneaking a woman into the palace. I love her.
Lee Joon-in, Prince Buyeong
Some kind of cousin to Lee Gon, and second in line to the throne. Also helped raise Lee Gon, and now a giver of good advice.
Prime Minister Koo
Ambitious. Wants to be queen and everyone knows it (including Lee Gon). Every single outfit she wears is amazing. I just wish she had a little more depth, she'd be such a great secondary antagonist if the writing for her role was a little less one-note.
The traitor Lee Lim
It's a shame he's evil, since he looks so good in a pin-striped suit.
Is there fic?
I haven't explored AO3 in great detail but it appears the answer is 'no, not really'. Let me tell you about the AU I want once you've finished, tho.
How does the cross dimensional and timey-wimey stuff hold together?
....mixed. Don't think about it too hard in the back half of the show.
More detailed warnings (with some vague spoilers for later episodes)
Police and monarchy: if you've made it this far, you've obviously picked up on these points, but I wanted to acknowledge that neither of these are unproblematic themes
Violence: there's a fair bit of violence on this show, what with the coup and all, but it's not particularly gruesome. By that, I mean that a character will get stabbed and bleed all over the place, but we don't get grisly closeups. If you start at the beginning and make it through the coup, that's about the level we stay at.
Suicide: mostly offscreen, but not always
Child harm/death: mostly offscreen, but discussed onscreen. Two exceptions would be the coup at the beginning where Lee Lim tries to murder 8 year old Lee Gon, and a scene later where there's an attempted murder/suicide involving a child (bystanders intervene before any physical harm takes place)
Troublingly extrajudicial approach to justice: So, because Lee Lim is plotting coup2.0 across the two worlds, Lee Gon and Jeong Tae-eul team up to investigate cross-dimensionally. Where this gets a little uncomfortable is on the Kingdom of Corea side, where he takes what he's learned and has the Royal Guard (who don't ask questions of the king) carry out action based on his word alone, which in a couple of cases makes me go, '...is that legal? Are you just grabbing people off the street? How do the courts even work over here?'
Happy to provide more detail on these or other possible issues, just let me know.
I need to know if it turns out okay before I can commit.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
P
A
C
E
The show ends with the leads alive, together, and making a cross dimensional relationship work.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
P
A
C
E
Very brief intro
He, Lee Gon, is the king of the Kingdom of Corea. She, Jeong Tae-eul, is a police officer in the Republic of Korea (ie, our world). Through the magic of hopping between parallel worlds, they fight crime an attempted coup and also fall in love.
It's a 16 episode Korean drama that originally aired in spring 2020 and is now available on Netflix.
Why I'm into it
I started watching this after seeing some gifsets on tumblr, as you do, and by episode 4 I was reduced to posting in caps on twitter about all the feelings I was having. For all the other stuff going on, it's pretty unabashedly a romance, and I wanted something that really leaned into that. It takes Tae-eul a little while to warm up to Lee Gon, and he reacts by being even more charming in an attempt to win her over, which is adorable. After their romance gets going, there's a fair bit of, you know, crying in the rain about the forces keeping them apart, dramatic rescues, commitment to doing the right thing even at great personal cost. The whole thing is very earnestly emotional, and I love a melodrama. It has many feelings. It made me feel many feelings.
Aso, I said this already, but the leads are very cute together when they're flirting. He, having been king since he was 8, is used to a certain amount of deference. She, on the other hand, has no interest in that and so keeps negging him. He loves a grand gesture, but also knows that he's ridiculous about his grand gestures. If you're into flirting by mock being mean to each other, this is for you.
Brief warnings before I talk about more plot
Violence, suicide, child harm/death, a troublingly extrajudicial approach to justice.
Give me the longer pitch.
NB: I'm going to be pretty casual about spoilers for episodes 1-4ish, and try to avoid them after that. If you need to know about how the ending works out, I've put spoilers for that at the very end of the post.
(Bear with me here, there's a lot of premise and you just gotta work through it.)
SO. In 1994, when Crown Prince Lee Gon is 8 years old, his uncle Lee Lim (his father the king's illegitimate half brother) storms the palace with his followers in an attempt to seize the throne. He kills the king, gravely wounds Lee Gon, but is prevented from killing him by the appearance of a mysterious stranger, who holds off the traitors until the Royal Guard can arrive. In the struggle, the magical artifact Manpasikjeok is broken, and Lee Lim escapes with one piece of it. He uses it to flee through a portal into the Republic of Korea, where he tracks down his double, murders him, and uses the body to fake his death in the Kingdom of Corea.
Also in the struggle, the mysterious stranger drops an ID badge for Lieutenant Jeong Tae-eul of the Seoul police. It's extra mysterious because a) there's no rank of Lieutenant in the police of Corea, b) there's no one named Jeong Tae-eul in Corea, and c) the badge has an issue date of November 2019 despite being dropped in 1994. Naturally, Lee Gon has a lot of interest in unraveling this mystery.
In 2019, Lee Gon is the king of Corea. He likes rowing, locking himself in his study to work on math, and avoiding Lady Noh's suggestions that he get married and make some heirs already. He takes a wrong turn while out riding one day, his half of the magical artifact in his pocket, and finds himself in the Republic of Korea. (Being science fiction aware means he quickly realizes what's happened.)
Jeong Tae-eul is a police officer in the Republic of Korea, working a string of cases that don't seem to make sense together despite their connections. She lives with her father above the taekwondo studio he runs, likes milk tea from her friend's shop in the courtyard, and is on the Violent Crimes Squad with her childhood best friend.
When a man on horseback shows up in the city center at rush hour, she intervenes, with a decided air of 'why is this happening while I'm on my way home'. She's weirded out when he seems to know who she is, and she gets extra frustrated when he answers her questions with nonsense like 'I'm the king of a country in a parallel dimension.' So she arrests him, whereupon she learns he doesn't carry ID, he's not in any fingerprint or DNA databases, and all the money in his wallet is fake. Not even the Racing Association can identify his horse (although they want to come see it in person, the horse is exquisite). And also he can pay for weeks in a luxury hotel with the buttons off his coat, which turn out to be real diamonds.
And all the while they're arguing about parallel dimensions over fried chicken, the traitor Lee Lim is growing his conspiracy again by murdering, blackmailing, and causing trouble across both worlds. Obviously, this is all going to come to a head.
Why do you keep going on about fish out of water stories?
Okay, here's the thing: I hate them when they're played for comedy. You're somewhere you know you're not supposed to be, you're doing your best to fake it, you know you're getting it wrong, and it's being played for laughs? Nightmare fuel.
This show mostly skips that! Right when he first gets to the republic, he thinks it's ruled by an extremely popular queen named Yuna, and that's actually a funny joke. The reactions to Lee Gon's declarations that he's a king in a parallel dimension range from 'you're really into this novel you're writing' to 'please stop making my life difficult and just answer the question', and, other than with Jeong Tae-eul, he's not really invested in making them believe it, so he quickly settles into being 'that weird rich guy, whatever his deal even is'. (This is why cities are great.)
The exception to this is when Jo Yeong and Jo Eun-sup swap places for plot reasons and we get comedy about how different they are. TBH I mostly made use of the fast forward button in those scenes.
Where should I start?
Of course, starting at the beginning is a perfectly fine choice. But! The show is a little slow to get going (see my attempt to summarize the backstory above). The leads don't meet until the very end of episode 1, and the show is very committed to doing set up for a bunch of plotlines that don't really make sense until later. It didn't start clicking for me until the end of episode 4.
If that's too long to wait to see if you're into the show, drop your Netflix slider about halfway through episode 4, skip any scene that doesn't feature either of the two leads, and watch for about an hour until the middle of episode 5 (the basketball scene is a good place to stop, or you can keep going through mid-6 when Lee Gon gets on a boat). By then, you should have a good idea of how you feel about the central romance, which is really the make or break issue.
The context you need if you take this approach: Lee Gon spent several days hanging around the Republic of Korea trying to convince Jeong Tae-eul about parallel dimensions and his general charm (she's not on board with the parallel dimensions, but maybe was being convinced about the charm). When he returns to his own world, she thought she would be relieved not to have him around all the time, but finds maybe she misses him. Plus, she never managed to solve the mystery of where he came from, and that bothered her. There, that's how things stand mid-4.
Some character images for reference
(NB: I'm using the romanizations that Netflix uses, which are not quite the same as the ones on the wikipedia page, I don't know enough about Korean to know why that is)
Jeong Tae-eul and Lee Gon
For these next two characters, I need you to go look at this gifset, static images will not do. Jo Yeong on the left, Jo Eun-sup on the right.
Jo Yeong
The extremely serious Captain of the Royal Guard and Lee Gon's best friend. Mostly wishes Lee Gon would stop making his job difficult. In the kingdom of Corea, there's rumors that the two of them are secretly together, which is what happens when your phone background is a selfie of the two of you together.
Jo Eun-sup
Extremely goofy. Tae-eul's childhood best friend, currently doing his military service in some capacity where his job regularly intersects with Tae-eul.
Kang Sin-jae
Friends with Tae-eul since high school, now they're cops together. He's got a thing for her but manages not to be a Nice Guy about it.
Lady Noh
As Head Court Lady, she runs the royal household. After Lee Gon's parents died, she basically raised him. Now she settles for bullying him on issues like how he needs to get married already and the impropriety of sneaking a woman into the palace. I love her.
Lee Joon-in, Prince Buyeong
Some kind of cousin to Lee Gon, and second in line to the throne. Also helped raise Lee Gon, and now a giver of good advice.
Prime Minister Koo
Ambitious. Wants to be queen and everyone knows it (including Lee Gon). Every single outfit she wears is amazing. I just wish she had a little more depth, she'd be such a great secondary antagonist if the writing for her role was a little less one-note.
The traitor Lee Lim
It's a shame he's evil, since he looks so good in a pin-striped suit.
Is there fic?
I haven't explored AO3 in great detail but it appears the answer is 'no, not really'. Let me tell you about the AU I want once you've finished, tho.
How does the cross dimensional and timey-wimey stuff hold together?
....mixed. Don't think about it too hard in the back half of the show.
More detailed warnings (with some vague spoilers for later episodes)
Police and monarchy: if you've made it this far, you've obviously picked up on these points, but I wanted to acknowledge that neither of these are unproblematic themes
Violence: there's a fair bit of violence on this show, what with the coup and all, but it's not particularly gruesome. By that, I mean that a character will get stabbed and bleed all over the place, but we don't get grisly closeups. If you start at the beginning and make it through the coup, that's about the level we stay at.
Suicide: mostly offscreen, but not always
Child harm/death: mostly offscreen, but discussed onscreen. Two exceptions would be the coup at the beginning where Lee Lim tries to murder 8 year old Lee Gon, and a scene later where there's an attempted murder/suicide involving a child (bystanders intervene before any physical harm takes place)
Troublingly extrajudicial approach to justice: So, because Lee Lim is plotting coup2.0 across the two worlds, Lee Gon and Jeong Tae-eul team up to investigate cross-dimensionally. Where this gets a little uncomfortable is on the Kingdom of Corea side, where he takes what he's learned and has the Royal Guard (who don't ask questions of the king) carry out action based on his word alone, which in a couple of cases makes me go, '...is that legal? Are you just grabbing people off the street? How do the courts even work over here?'
Happy to provide more detail on these or other possible issues, just let me know.
I need to know if it turns out okay before I can commit.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
P
A
C
E
The show ends with the leads alive, together, and making a cross dimensional relationship work.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
P
A
C
E