REVIEW: My Sassy Girl
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Re-watch value: 1 out of 5 stars
Synopsis
*From MyDramaList*
A love story of a cold city scholar Gyun Woo, who's known as "Joseon’s national treasure", and the sassy princess Hye Myung in a Joseon Dynasty era.
Rambling
*beware of spoilers*
This drama was perfectly fine, nothing to write home about, totally average. It’s not a binge-watch, but it can be if it’s up your sageuk alley.
First off, the best princess-falling-in-love romance in sageuk history is The Princess’s Man (2011). (Catch that, if you haven’t already.) I almost didn’t watch My Sassy Girl because I thought it was the same thing as the movie My Sassy Girl from 2001. To my pleasant surprise, it’s not, BUT be warned that it does have a few fun plot points that match that movie.
The chemistry between Joo Won’s Gyun Woo and Oh Yeon Seo’s Princess Hye Myung was fair to middling. I can’t say they were steamy or commanding. They were fun. This show toed the line between a rom-com and a melodrama, falling somewhere in between most of the time. In fact, the first few episodes could just be considered genre rom-com, and that surprised me. It’s been awhile since I watched a rom-com sageuk. (I’m thinking maybe Sungkyunkwan Scandal [2010] or Arang and the Magistrate [2012] or Rooftop Prince [2012], which throws historical sageuk dudes into modern day to comedic effect.)
I feel like My Sassy Girl was almost feminist. It seemed like the princess who marched to the beat of her own drum was constantly getting dragged down by the patriarchy, which, YES, is fitting for the Joseon time period, but that device felt a little washed up. A princess who snuck out of the palace night after night was such an affront that all the old geezers in the government called for her dethronement. Even without the underlying plot of Jung Ki Joon trying to exert control over the king and keep a lid on all the back-alley treason from 10 years ago, the dethronement protest got no more than an eye-roll from me.
The main way the ~bad guys~ undermined the royals was through spreading slanderous jirashis throughout the capital. Apparently, jirashi means a gossip column, the National Enquirer, Twitter. They’d plaster that defamation all around town, and it would incite the masses or at the very least get people talking and the hashtag trending.
To that end, the corruption subplot wasn’t entertaining or even original. It was totally basic, and other dramas have done it better. None of the members of the bad crew had any depth to them; if they were given a flashback backstory, it isn’t even great or deep. They’re bad for the sake of being bad. When Gyun Woo & co. finally kill bad guy Jung Ki Joon, they literally ask him why he did what he did. Instead of some grand declaration, he spouts that he did it for his country and other elitist nonsense, as he doesn’t consider the peasants worthy of government care. So the showrunners couldn’t even land a great villain; they were all super shallow.
Probably the most contrived part of this show is that Gyun Woo, as an extremely intelligent and well-spoken 10-year-old (you read that right), walked in on the tail end of a murder, brutally misunderstood the situation, and then wrote a scathing, totally untrue piece criticizing the queen, aka Princess Hye Myung’s mother. The events were just so perfect for the opposition to take advantage of it. Gyun Woo visits his favorite brush store (what I equate to Michael’s since you can buy fancy paper, ink, and writing brushes), reads the bad crew’s fake love letter that made it seem as if the queen was cheating, witnesses his favorite brush store owner die (he was the expert calligrapher that copied the fake love letter in the queen’s handwriting), and then Gyun Woo goes home and, overcome with a sense of moral superiority, writes the damning article and posts up one copy.
That same night, bad guy Jung Ki Joon passes by Gyun Woo’s lone post, and thus the bad guys swoop in and exploit Gyun Woo’s exquisitely worded manifesto railing against the queen, which includes all the juicy details about her adultery and treason plot. They simply plastered the jirashi all over town and caused a public uproar, with the populace actively rallying against the innocent queen.
And it’s all 10-year-old Gyun Woo’s fault.
I’m not sure how the show could have done this any better than it did, but it wasn’t enough to impress or convince me. They foreshadowed some life-altering event that Gyun Woo had forgotten, some trauma that kept haunting his dreams, a sentence so powerful people remember it a decade later—“The blind mother ruins everything.” It was all done in earnest, but the showrunners couldn’t make this bird fly for me.
The damning open letter threw a wrench into the romance, of course, but it wasn’t enough to permanently derail it. The show ends on a middling happy note. Gyun Woo proposes to the Princess, but she gives him a rain check: she wants to study abroad in Qing (China) to learn medicine. So she delays their marriage to go to med school? I didn’t understand why they couldn’t just get married and then both of them travel to Qing for her studies…?
The Princess spouts some progressive line to her grandmother and father (Queen Dowager and King, respectively) about how just because she’s a woman, she shouldn’t have to give up her dreams. Her grandma was into it. I wasn’t. It only made sense to me after I realized that getting married inherently meant that the risk of pregnancy grew exponentially higher, so maybe she didn’t want to risk getting married and having babies right away, which would certainly implode her grand plans of studying abroad. Either way, it felt forced to give the Princess that much agency, especially after she very nearly married some Qing prince earlier in the show. It was more like the writer tried to imbue these historical characters with modern sensibilities. Sometimes that works, but this time it didn’t.
All in all, with a corruption subplot that cheapens the story rather than enhancing it and a lightweight romance, this might be worth a skip.
Did you see My Sassy Girl? Tell me your thoughts in the comments below!
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