Another fun episode. Sorry for writing on a piecemeal basis. 😂
1. First Mission: Swaying Public Opinion
Grand Prince Yi Ahn agrees to marry her if she can prove herself worthy.
YA: Prepare yourself to become the Grand Prince’s wife. You will be up against the whole nation.
HJ: (smiling)
YA: Before all that, shall we see what you can do?
HJ: (flipping her hair) Well then, how about a generous donation to the Crown?
Note her nervous tic here. She usually fiddles with her hair (i.e., flipping it) whenever she feels anxious, unsure, or insecure. She (and her brother too) did this in Episode 1, before entering the Banquet Hall and joining the yangbans/aristocrats and royalty. She then reminded him that, regardless of their heated business rivalry, they were both still “two-bit peddlers” – or insignificant commoners — in that crowd of nobility.
Here, she assumes that YA is asking to see her financial assets before marrying her. On one hand, it appears as if she’s bragging that she can definitely afford to marry a Grand Prince. But on other hand, I can’t blame her for assuming that YA is talking about finances because, traditionally, in a Joseon wedding, the bride’s family provides a dowry (i.e., her share of her family’s fortune) to the groom’s family before marriage.
Hence, she’s surprised that all he’s asking for is to convince the public of the judiciousness/suitability of their union as they can’t expect any support from the palace.
YA: Sway public opinion first. The palace will remain silent.
HJ: (thinking for a moment, then smiling) Hmm. You had me worried for a second.
Strategy 1: Get her PR team to heavily promote her
Of course, she isn’t worried because her PR team is a pro at this. Didn’t her people just execute a media blitz and sell out her entire outfit a few nights ago at the King’s Birthday Bash?
So, as soon as she shows up holding hands with YA at the palace gates, her team has positive messaging and branding all ready to saturate news and social media.
Strategy 2: Launch Yi Ahn’s image as a besotted prince
This is YA’s brilliant idea. He comes up with when he’s asked by HJ to pick a side should she and the Queen Mother have a fight one day.
YA: The Queen Mother denied the request.
HJ: (somber) Well, we expected as much. But you know, it still doesn’t feel great. Like being bullied by my in-laws. Wait! Hold on a second. What will you do if my in-laws really bully me? I mean, just look at how things are unfolding already. Let’s say the Queen Mother and I got into a fight. Would you take my side?
YA: (sighing and turning away)
HJ: Why aren’t you answering? Will you take their side and not mine because they’re your family? Ha!
YA: (smiling) I will take your side. I must appear insanely infatuated with you…for people to believe this absurd marriage is genuine.
It doesn’t take long for them to implement this strategy. Let me list the ways.
a. First, Yi-Ahn surprises the employees at Subway when he shows up late at night and orders the “Seong Huiju ‘Seduce the Prince’ Combo.”
b. Next, he abruptly leaves the royal ancestral rite ceremony to rescue HJ from palace interrogations ordered by the Queen Mother.
c. Then, as promised, he takes HJ’s side and defends her against the Queen Mother’s accusations.
YA: Is there actually any evidence?
Queen Mother: As if insulting the Crown with such insolent attire and threatening others within the palace were not enough, I hear she was absent at the time of the incident.
YA: Does that constitute evidence?
Queen Mother: Perhaps not. But it should be enough to tarnish her reputation or her company’s reputation.
Furious, HJ steps forward to confront the Queen Mother. But YA blocks her and handles the situation his way.
YA: Then have me questioned too. Every circumstance that casts suspicion on her applies to me as well.
Hmmm…how did he threaten others that night? I get that his cheollik was considered inappropriate attire and that he was with HJ when the blast happened, but I don’t recall him threatening anybody that night… unless he meant that “threat” to quit working as regent that he told Prime Minister Min? Lol.
Queen Mother: Will your confidence hold?
YA: I wonder if yours will hold.
Meaning, he knows that she’s bluffing. Her arguments won’t pass scrutiny.
To end this face-off, HJ’s assistant kicks HJ from behind, sending HJ to her knees. YA quickly scoops her up, and, for good measure, HJ pretends to faint in distress. Naturally, the palace workers feel sorry for her and disapproves of the Queen Mother’s bullying.
d. Thus, in dramatic fashion, he carries her back to his room in the palace.
HJ can’t be any more thrilled with YA’s display of “insane” infatuation. She knows that they’ve set tongues wagging.
Strategy 3: Keep those tongues wagging
Once they figure out how quickly and effectively they’re able to sway public opinions with YA’s public display of affection, they go all in.
For example, when HJ returns to his private residence that night, he shocks the palace staff by breaking protocol and opening the car door for HJ. Then, he also breaks the rule by ordering the services of the Royal Guards. But the icing on the cake? HJ arranges to meet with him at night. He slips out of the palace and kisses her over the wall.
Altogether, they manage to boost public approval of their relationship.
2. Second Mission: Protecting HuiJu
Remember my assassination theory in Episode 1? I said that it looked like YA survived an attempt on his life when he went hunting. He probably kept it quiet because a) he didn’t want to alarm folks, b) he couldn’t prove it happened, and c) he was still trying to determine who was behind it.
To me, this explains his annoyance when he discovers that his aide, Choi Hyeon, is standing guard outside the room during his audience with the Queen Mother. He expects him to be guarding HuiJui, so he rushes off to find her in his palace. To me, this is a sign that he’s wary of a danger within the palace walls.
Noteworthy: if he’s that concerned about HJ’s safety when they’re inside a secured compound, then this tells me that he suspects that an assassination attempt will be an inside job.
Moreover, when HJ recounts her bad day to him, he only becomes grim when she told him how she was egged that evening in her building.
HJ: I was dragged through the mud all day, you see. I was barraged with hate comments on social media. My father suddenly threatened to disown me. Oh, that’s right. I even got egged by your fans today.
YA: (visibly reacting to that last info)
HJ: (joking) I totally forgot to ask if those eggs were antibiotic-free.
YA: (leaning forward) You got “egged”?
HJ: Yeah. Two eggs. No less. Those little pip-squeaks were so damn strong for no reason. It still hurts.
YA: Here?
HJ: Yeah. Just downstairs.
YA: Are you hurt? Are you hurt anywhere?
He sounds like he’s treating it as a serious matter. No doubt she lives in one of those buildings with high security and restricted-access underground garages. But if a group of students can trespass and ambush her, then a would-be killer can, too.
So, he immediately takes her home to his private residence.
For good measure, he orders the Royal Guard for her the following day.
YA: You’ll have the Royal Guard starting tomorrow.
HJ: Really? Is that allowed when we’re not married yet?
YA: It isn’t.
HJ: (jokingly) “Another crazy stunt pulled by the infatuated Grand Prince”?
YA: I guess you can put it like that.
The way I see it, he’s downplaying his worry about her safety because he isn’t prepared to discuss the assassination attempt on him when all is just speculation for now. But he’s taking extra precaution without alarming her.
I must say that I’ve become sensitive to YA and HJ’s banter about death. For instance, when HJ tells him to come home already and he says he can’t because of work.
YA: If I clock out, someone will kill me.
HJ: Who?
YA: (glancing at Hyeon) Him.
Or when he calls her up to check on her and she asks,
HJ: Still alive?
YA: For now.
Lol. I wish the screenwriter would stop mentioning death jokingly like that.🤪
To be continued tomorrow. I’m sleepy.
Thanks for a new thread @pkml3. Before I read it, I’ll put down my thoughts from Eps 1-3.
I like how HJ and YA face rather similar circumstances. Both are the second child and the stronger, more brilliant of the siblings. Both are disapproved of, passed over and somewhat feared. Both do not seem to have received any family love. The only love there might be in the palace is between YA and the young King.
Both YA and HJ are used to having to fight against the odds. HJ fights to win, but at times YA has to pretend to lose to keep the harmony in the palace.
YA has constant sparring to contend with against Queen Mother and HJ always finds herself placed at a disadvantage but she fights her way through and wins.
Both are ambitious. At first YA might not have cared to fight for the throne, but something seems to have shifted in him. He dares to tell HJ that he chose to marry her because if he wanted to ascend the throne, while everyone else would condemn him, she’d probably understand him.
While HJ is used to fighting her own battles, and even offers to take the blame and the hits in the relationship with YA, I like that YA is serious about saving HJ from as much of the pain, insult and injury that a scandal involving him would bring.
The scene where he calls her to check if she was okay spoke volumes. She was stunned that suddenly someone cared enough to ask her how she was. Her face fell when she realised that she was not really okay, that YA cared enough and did not assume as most did, that she would be able to take all the knocks. She could not talk without giving away how touched and how affected she was by that simple question.
It was so heartwarming that he went to see her that night with Subway sandwiches and that they could laugh like real comrades.
While he cites wanting to give the impression that he was madly in love with her as the reason for moving her to his private residence, and for turning up whenever she’s in trouble, he seems to have genuine concern for her.
The only thing that bothers me is why he has not told her that marrying him means that she cannot divorce him, and also that as a member of the immediate royal family, she will no longer be able to trade/do business/be a peddler. (Even at Ep 4, she does not seem to know this, but her sister-in-law who is from a noble family, does!)
Even at Ep 3 and 4, two questions remain unanswered. Perhaps they are insignificant but at the time, the camera zoomed in on some ‘clues’ making these seem important for us to note … but the right question(s) have not be raised.
In Episode 1, we were given a good look at YA’s bloody clothes, at the blood on the floor of his bathroom and he himself said to Aide Choi that after seeing so much blood that morning he still felt fervid. However there is no follow-up on where the blood came from.
Since nothing was mentioned about YA getting hurt, I assume the blood was that of the animals that he’d hunted successfully. The blood motif however has more significance in Ep 4.
The bloody hunting clothes are also the only time YA can wear red in the palace, although he’s not the king.
The other question that seems to not be raised except indirectly in Ep 3, is who/how/why there was an explosion in the palace. YA seems to have successfully blocked news of the explosion and fire, welcoming the furor over his alleged love affair with a commoner as a means to stifle news of the fire.
However the question still remains about what’s going on in the palace and if there is a target on someone’s back. For all the royal guards around, the security in the palace is pretty lax. HJ was able to ‘get lost’ walking around unrestricted, until she entered royal private quarters. YA is able to get in and out of the palace without alerting Aide Choi.
More on this topic of death in Episode 4.
As was the case in the cdrama, “How Dare You,” I truly like the coming together of the OTP over a shared goal, and how that forges their alliance, which then requires them to put on a ‘good show’ for the masses.
I noted with great delight the OTT pageantry of YA coming to save HJ from interrogation and how much improvisation and ad libbing their aides and they had to do to convince on-lookers that HJ really fainted, while getting themselves out of a sticky situation.
No wonder Queen Mother broke the vase in disgust that her plans fell through. Everyone who was there only saw what the public would want to believe ie that the QM had victimised the Grand Prince and his lady love, that they were having a hard time in the palace but romantically, he’d carried away his fainting lady.
The irony is that the QM by being invasive and controlling, had caused her own problems. In Ep 2, if she had not bullied and barged her way into the hotel room, everything would have not blown up in her own face.
There had been nothing started between YA ad HJ, but because QM ‘caught’ them in the room, they were forced to come up with good PR, and this was exactly up HJ’s alley. In the end her premature ‘attack’ backfires on the QM, and works in favour of HJ who wants the royal marriage. Round 1 of the fight goes to HJ!!
QM has inadvertently cemented the alliance (she’d call it collusion) between Yi An and Hui Ju.
While both YA and HJ did background checks on each other (I wouldn’t have expected anything less!) I like that they from their sunbae-hoobae relationship, have gotten into frequent and proper truthful communication in which they shared enough about themselves, and so have started off on a footing of trust.
What augers well for our OTP is the reciprocity.
When HJ finds out that YA is not sleeping well. She gets her own doctor to see to him. When she’s feeling down, he comes to see her.
When they agree to pretend to be in love, YA defers to HJ’s great PR skills and agrees to put on the doting lover act. They take turns to play the genuine lovers who keep having trysts.
To play her part, HJ drives all the way to the palace to meet YA over the wall to give him tea and magnesium to help him sleep.
What struck me was that in their first ‘battle’ with each other, it was in bed and noisily over the blanket. That made for hilarious misunderstanding by palace staff over what was going on in the bedroom, but it also resulted in YA having a good night’s sleep.
On marrying for love … It’s obvious that there’s no family love shown towards YA all his life. He receives adulation and respect from the nation, but his own kin seem to despise him because he can eclipse the Crown Prince (his brother) and the King (his nephew). The only person who sincerely likes YA is little King Yi Yoon. It’s telling that when he cannot sleep, he goes to YA’s quarters and not to his own mother.
While HJ says that YA was screwing her over when he rejected her marriage proposal because she did not offer love as one of her ‘terms’ for marriage, I believe that there was truth in what he wanted.
He claimed that it was his lifelong wish, to marry for love. It’s understandable when we see how he had been treated and was still being treated in the palace, where family relationships were fraught.
What also makes it likely that he spoke the truth and was not screwing HJ over, is that he only finally granted her an audience because of their relationship as sunbae and hoobae. When a hoobae wanted to consult him as sunbae, he could not refuse.
When he found that HJ was caught up in a bad scandal because of him, he chose first to speak with her instead of going to the palace as summoned. He wanted to apologise and to offer any kind of compensation that she wanted, for the distress that she would face. It turned out that she still wanted to marry into the title, but since this truth would result in worse backlash, he put himself on the line by agreeing to marry her with the lie and the appearance that he was madly in love.
With the kind of public who is obsessed with and approving of real life romances behind them, YA and HJ were on their way to obtaining the nation’s support (especially in the face of the QM’s disapproval) for their relationship. In the end, if the pressure keeps up, YA will have all the trappings of a marriage for love.
In any case, by Ep 3, we find that the usually somber YA is smiling a lot more and even laughing out loud with HJ. Even if he has not found love, he’s found in HJ, a companion who is like-minded and possibly a faithful friend.
Dear @GB, my little black heart when HJ made the egging students terrified by her unhinged behaviour was: “she will rise the kids well”.
There are levels of English I am still not sure of. I’ve heard good spouses need to be “complicit” as in having each others’ backs. Sometimes that little show of love can illuminate a life.
Prince YA has never had someone in his side. He was always alone striving for excellence in an environment that asked for his compliance and the extinction of his talents. That little difference of having someone to truly count on can mean the world.
@FGB, what fun reading you and writing to you!
Well, wrt married couples, there is a phrase, ‘marriage is a partnership, which might be what you have come across. Other possible phrases are that couples may “present a united front,” or “be of one mind,” or where families are concerned we might say “a house divided against itself cannot stand” which suggests spouses should not oppose each other internally.
I agree… and so we have the beginnings of their ‘couplehood’ based on being ‘complicit’ in the lies they are brazenly telling and living. I guess being in cahoots is also a ‘good’ way to work towards a healthy marriage??? And it makes a big difference to both our leads who have been fighting battles alone for years.
While YA becomes more courageous, daring to break rules and serve his own needs instead of towing the line, I’m hoping to see HJ becoming more mellow and less narcissistic in how she treats others. I’m looking towards these 2 being good for each other.