The third installment. Sorry took longer than expected. Work + my nephew’s HS football game = no blog

8. The books

I jotted down the quotes LY picked from the books because I’m that kind of person who takes note of those little strips of paper from fortune cookies. (The funniest fortune I saw was “You’ll meet someone tall, dark and centaur.” My reaction: A centaur? Just his luck! I’m a unicorn.)

But who knows when these proverbs will come in handy?

The rat poem WonDeuk quoted at the Lord Kim’s feast turned out to be the poem the royal inspector wrote for his state examination. Lee Yul could have randomly picked out these proverbs or he could have intended to send a veiled message to the Ministers. Who knows?

He cited the following —

Analects, chapter 16 of Anyeon. A wise man helps achieve the beauty of people and never lets evil show through. (then, he added) However, I am the opposite.

(Hmmm… if I were Minister Kim, I would consider this a barbed comment.)

Doctrine of the Mean, chapter 20. Be prepared and you shall prevail. Do not be, and you will be met with failure.

Great Learning, chapter seven. Where there’s no heart, nothing can be seen, and nothing can be heard. (I think he adlibbed this one to refer to his loss of appetite because he’s lost his heart.) Nothing can be tasted either.

I applauded the way he told the Ministers to leave. His old arrogance was back.

From the beginning, his character was deliberate, not reactionary. He’d first investigated a situation, then decide his action. I wouldn’t be surprised if he already had the measure of his enemies by now.

He was the exact opposite of Minister Kim’s son. I couldn’t help noticing that Minister Kim would tout that LY’s excellence in both literature and martial arts, like he was his proud father. His own son must have been a great disappointment to him. Lol. His son’s field of study seemed to be Talismans.

Majoring in ineptness. With a minor in tomfoolery. (Wait… could he be the poisoner? lol.)

Lastly, although I understood the intention of the script to show that the link between HongShim and Lee Yul spanned over years, I found it silly that he declined to read Elementary Learning to his unborn child. What’s this? Is he going to shy away from ever reading that book unless he’s reading it to his and HongShim’s child?

I have to insert a mental note here: No matter how depraved or evil the parents are, the unborn baby is always innocent. The CPrincess’ baby cannot be made to pay for the adultery or treason of his parents.

9. MooYoung

I’ve got to hand it to him. Although he consistently treated the CPrincess like she was chopped liver, he spared no effort in showing care for his beloved sister. However, if he was indeed the baby’s daddy, then this sad brother-sister reunion should be called, “Pot, meet Kettle.”

Pot and Kettle in a hot spot. 

He warned HongShim that, “It’s an ill-fated relationship. Even if it were not, he is beyond your reach, so you must sever all ties.” Again, if he was the baby’s daddy, then he should have followed his own advice before getting the CPrincess pregnant and abandoning her. He was a fine one to talk!

I liked how the camera focused on her feet stopping at the door. She couldn’t take one step further because her relationship was “ill-fated”. Fate was an unseen boundary or that invisible line which couldn’t be crossed.  

It was also striking that MooYoon’s nightmares had nothing to do with leaving his pregnant CPrincess, but about his attempts to kill the CP. His guilty conscience was causing his nightmare but, strangely enough, deserting the CPrincess didn’t keep him awake at night.

Lastly, he wasn’t astounded to learn that the CPrincess ordered Beom to shoot at him. If I were MooYoon, I would have been very disturbed.

Here again was the conversation the two had shortly before he was shot.

CP: Where are you planning to go?
MY: I haven’t thought about that yet.
CP: A place next to a field would be nice. Flowers will bloom in the spring. You’ll be as happy as you can be if you build a small house and live there. I envy you. At least you can leave.
MY: My apologies.
CP: Thank you for your work. This is for your great work. (hands him a small purse but he doesn’t accept it)
MY: (bowing head) Congratulations on your pregnancy. (He turned and sighed. She looked at him tearfully. Then an arrow hit him, and she gasped in horror.)

How grasping could a girl get? While she was offering him money in GRATITUDE, she had already ordered the assassin to shoot him so he wouldn’t leave her.

But MooYoon’s stoic reaction fits with the pattern of his behavior when interacting with the CPrincess. He’d always been indifferent to her even when she seethed in rage because he blotched the killing the CP or when he congratulated her on her pregnancy or when she offered him money after leaving her father’s employment. He seemed immune to her wiles and outburst.

That’s why his behavior has fascinated me. It could be interpreted in different ways.

One, perhaps he WAS keeping a tight rein on his feelings because he knew they were an ill-fated couple like HongShim and Lee Yul/WonDeuk.

Or two, perhaps he knew her evil machinations and accepted them unquestioningly like he did with her father’s orders. He understood that he was only being a means to her evil ends.

Same thing with that last sigh he gave when he turned his back on her at their last encounter — that fascinated me, too. I couldn’t tell if he was sighing because of REGRETS that he was leaving her or he was sighing because of RELIEF that he was finally done with her and her family.

lol. It would be @#$@#$ of the writer if he/she didn’t close this probably.

10. Crown Princess

Thank goodness for small mercies! I was afraid that, in this episode, she’d insist on Lee Yul sharing a room with her, so I’m glad that she shut down that pretense in a New York minute. But she had guts to guilt-trip him into caring for her baby as his.

I often think this CPrincess is the most manipulative one in the show (barring of course, that Prince SeoWoon is NOT the baby’s father, lol.) She’s a consummate liar.

I still can’t get over the fact that she ACCUSED her father of trying to kill MooYoon when SHE was the one who ordered Beom to shoot at MooYoon so he wouldn’t leave her side. To top that, she used MooYoon’s accident/assassination that SHE had ordered, to spur her father to go plot against the queen. I thought he was her baby’s daddy? So nasty! She never let a good crisis go to waste.

Here again was the father-and-daughter conversation:

CP: Was it your doing, Father? Did you try to kill MooYoung?
Minister Kim: If I wanted to kill him, he wouldn’t be in there right now.
CP: Then why is it that you’re not doing anything? If it was the queen’s doing, you’d gather the officials and plot against her.
MK: How would I explain MooYoung? Should I open an investigation and reveal that my assassin got hit by an arrow that was aimed toward the crown princess? No good will come out of exposing this matter. (he changes topic) I heard you were with MooYoung alone far away from Lady Kang. The Crown Princess shouldn’t be seen with another man outside the palace.
CP: He has done a lot for me. I wanted to pay him back to avoid any issues later on.
MK: Go back and rest. If you lose the baby this will all be in vain.

I wonder what she’ll do now that her father ordered MooYoon to be captured alive and returned to him. Speculations are rampant that Minister Kim’s planning to confirm MooYoon’s paternity. However, I think that’s anticlimactic. He should have suspected MooYoon from the start and questioned him. To anybody else, he was the most obvious candidate given his proximity to the family. Show, stop yanking this secret-daddy chain. I don’t care which guy was the sperm donor. Just make it logical.  

I once considered exile as the best option for the CPrincess. But I’m rethinking this. It depends on whether she can be reformed or not. I don’t want her threatening HongShim and HER babies from long-distance.

11. The shoes

I liked how the director showed us that our LY and HS were missing each other. With HongShim, it obviously centered around the shoes.

I must have said this a gazillion times, so bear with me please, old-timers. In kdramas, giving shoes is a trope. It’s considered bad luck to give shoes as a gift because it signifies that the receiver of the shoes will one day run away from the giver. To me, giving shoes is kdramas’ klutzy way of forewarning the audience of the obvious and the inevitable. We all know to expect the couple’s separation.

To many viewers, the shoes symbolized a broken promise. He promised he’d be there beside her always, to walk with her as her lifelong husband. So seeing the shoes and knowing that she walks alone would definitely count as a heartbreaking scene.

Of course, HongShim didn’t know that the promise to walk a “flowery path” with her had been broken twice already. (To the newcomers, I’ve given the context of a “flowery path” elsewhere. Please just search for it. 🙂 )

But although it was unknown to her, viewers fully understood the significance of the events. We knew that this was the second time Lee Yul had promised to marry her and failed to deliver.

The first time, when he told her he’d marry her under the petal showers, he was still a young boy. He didn’t know anything much about love but he felt the “stirrings of first romance” (as purple prose would describe it, lol) in the midst of a fairy tale setting.

The second time, when he asked her to marry her in the middle of a busy market, he was a grown man. By then, he knew a lot more about love. He was willing to walk on the not-so-flowery-and-everything-uncertain path with her because she was the one for him.

Sure, he handed her a floral posy (which looked pathetic and dried) to ask her to marry him. But to me the real flowers were to be found up in the night sky. The fireworks were the equivalent of the petal showers when they were young. They were the dazzling pyrotechnic version of the falling cherry blossoms, and they heralded his SECOND promise to walk on a “flowery path” with her.

WonDeuk was right when he observed, “This is all the blood and sweat of the regular citizens, but it still look pretty as if it is celebrating us.” The fireworks did appear as if they were announcing their love in the same way that the petal showers looked like they were marking their occasion of their first love.

But I think he was being ironic, too.

You see, when he was a child, he thought the petal showers was nature’s magical show just for them. But now that he was a grown-up, he immediately recognized that the fireworks were “the blood and sweat of the regular citizens.”  lol. He’d become more realistic, right?

But what he didn’t know – and we bitches know – is their love is IN REALITY the result of the blood and sweat of so many regular citizens, in particular, their loved ones.

Blood: His mother died. Her father died. Her brother will probably will, too, unfortunately.

Sweat: Let’s not forget that the whole of Soongjo sweated to get them together! Her fake father, her friend and GoDol, the county magistrate, even the loan shark, they all worked hard to get their romance going. You could say that their love was a match made in heaven…err…the village.

Many people died and sweated for their love to come TRUE.

Thus, while HongShim is crying over her shoes and her loss of her first love (but she didn’t know it) and her true love, Lee Yul, I didn’t view that moment as the end of the world. To me, it’s only a promise deferred, and not broken.

With so many people sanctifying and blessing their love with their “blood and sweat,” there’s no doubt that she’ll walk along that flowery road with Lee Yul as he promised.

Hang in there, hon. 

Next up should be a post on WonDeuk’s missing her and probably poison.

I’m now off with my husband and nephews and nieces to look for pumpkins, ride a haywagon, get lost in a corn maze…. and shriek to death at a haunted house. It’s fall festival where I am and I love autumn.

Enjoy the weekend wherever you are.