Nineveh-uk

2. At least half gay by volume

The show is made to sell you on one particular pairing, and I was shocked -- shocked, I tell you -- to find out that I actually wound up buying it.

What you learn in the first episode is that Jang Bonghwan (cishet chef dude) has been transmigrated into Kim Soyong, who by all accounts threw herself into a lake and nearly drowned the night before marrying King Cheoljong and becoming the new queen. This is a political arrangement, not a love match, and each of them already comes equipped with a different (and arguably more interesting) love interest that they're way more into. In fact, to call this thing a love triangle would be to do disservice to nobler and more complicated polygons. Look, I've made a full diagram for you here:

I know that my relationship charts in these rec posts can sometimes get a little jokey and speculative, so let me be clear: Everything in that diagram is canon. The only stretch I'm making here is to imply that there's something textually sexual about the crossdressing, and even that's not as much of a stretch as you might think.

Anyway, of course you know the king and the queen are going to end up together and in wuv, because that's the kind of show this is, and it never pretends otherwise. And you know, whatever; I knew that walking into it. Given their general antipathy toward one another at the start, I was prepared to ignore the main couple as much as I could and pay attention to the other comedy goings-on.

But over the course of the show, they slowly learn to meet one another where they are, and they figure out that they actually like one another. The king is like, my wife is baffling and inappropriate, and I kinda find it hot? Meanwhile Bonghwan is having the intense bisexual awakening you get when the one man legally allowed to be all up in your business turns out to also be very charming and handsome.

As the previous chart may indicate, there is a lot of heterosexuality going on here. However, the prevalence of heterosexuality kind of disguises how much not-heterosexuality is happening at the same time. Obviously the queen is not as much of a lady as she appears, which means all of Bonghwan's horniness for pretty ladies comes off real lesbian, while any guy in love with the current queen is being gay and he doesn't even know it. The show sometimes feels like it's got one button that says NO HOMO and another that says YES HOMO, and it's hammering on both of them with all its might.

Now, it does suffer a bit from the Anachronistic Wokeness Disease you get when you want to make historical settings palatable to modern audiences. I've seen this semi-recently discussed in the context of Regency romances, where you cannot give your upper-class hero characters period-appropriate attitudes toward their servants, or every contemporary reader will hate their fucking guts. This show's a little better about letting our 19th-century heroes be dickbags to their underlings (mostly because it's always played for comedy), but it definitely treats notions of feminism and democracy like good ideas that people soak up the second they're exposed to them ... which, yeah, we all know that's not how that works.

That attitude is what facilitates the main relationship, too, because the only way that works is if the king can be convinced to discard his lifelong notions about the role and function of women in Korean society and to find an inner yearning for Rude, Weird Woman Who Has Agency And Wishes To Be Treated Like She's An Equal Human Being. And he does! So that's nice.

I have never seen a show more firmly in the category of Ethical Non-Monogamy Would Fix All Of This -- which is hilarious, because the king is legally polygynous! And yet, here's another place where that Anachronistic Wokeness Disease kicks in, because modern attitudes toward monogamy are nigh-unshakable. So even though the king has multiple female partners, he only ever fucks the queen, because anything else would read to viewers as cheating.

So yeah, despite the chart above, don't expect any kind of Joseon-era polycule to form. The show pairs off, pares away, and just flat-out ignores characters as necessary until the main couple reigns supreme (pun vaguely intended). But because I really like that main couple, I'm going to mostly give it a pass on that front.

...Still, if you feel like the show's various conflicts could be solved by some three-, four-, or moresomes, pretty please take it to AO3, because there's currently only 202 Works in 철인왕후 | Mr. Queen (TV), and mama needs her bisexuality.

3. You come at the queen, you best not miss

Honestly, the conceit of "the historical queen's a modern dude now" would have been enough to carry the show for, what, a half-dozen wacky episodes? You know, just a bunch of antics about dealing with mismatches in gender, language, habits, technology, and the what-not. If that had been all it'd had, I might still be writing this rec post.

But it's not. It actually has a plot. More than that, it has a complicated plot that could easily have held together a much more serious show. The plot is around for the first half of the series, popping up around the edges of the transmigration comedy. But around episode twelve or so, it kicks into high gear and keeps going right to the end.

Now, let me be the first to admit that elements the plot can be a little hard to follow, since, as this excellent and thorough Reddit post points out, it's banking a lot on native Korean familiarity with the setting. It's okay, though, because you can just sort of roll with it. There's two powerful families! They're being total dicks to one another! There, that's all the context you really need.

The incredibly short version of the plot is that the king is the king, and there are lots of people who want a different king, so they're going to get in there and try to get rid of that king so they can crown a new (and more compliant) king. They don't even all have the same reason, and they definitely don't all want the same new king!

Meanwhile, they're all so wrapped up in their shitty rich-people schemes that they've missed how there's like ten thousand people on just the other side of the palace wall with NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR t-shirts on. That'll be important later.

Even a lot of the very silly stuff ties back into the palace intrigue. There's a whole lot of petty bullshit between the women of the inner court, but while it's being played for laughs, it's also teaching you about the various factions and dynamics at play. Rumor and appearances are powerful currencies. Making someone dependent on you gives them a vested interest in keeping your head on your shoulders. A person who might be on the bottom rung of the ladder in one room can turn out to be the deciding voice in another. There are so many creative ways to poison someone.

Being part of the ruling class means you're always a target. Being part of the ruling class when the entire rest of the ruling class wants you dead means things are more dangerous by an order of magnitude. If our heroes are going to survive, they're going to have to learn how to work together ... with more than a little help from a woman who's really a man who knows what Instagram is.

sidebar: the costumes!

I hope you're getting from all these pictures how beautiful and detailed the costuming is, because holy cow. I hadn't quite gotten to the 30-image limit for this post, so I came to put some extras in here. Aren't they gorgeous? Nobody does color like Korea.

4. Girls! Girls! Girls!

There are so many female characters in this show.

The main squad is so good. When Bonghwan wakes up, disoriented and panicking, he has exactly two people in the world he can trust to care for him: sweet, pure, perfect little maid Hong Yeon, who's been with the soon-to-be-queen since they were both children, and horny, beleaguered Court Lady Choi, whose blood pressure simply cannot take much more of this.

Put aside the romances for a second -- the relationship between the three of them is really what makes the show tick. They love, look after, and absolutely annoy the hell out of one another. Even early on, Bonghwan's attempts to find a way back to the present are tempered (though only slightly) by how he doesn't want to leave the two of them. It is a gal-pal trio of friendship for the ages.

The Queen Dowager and the Grand Queen Dowager hold the positions of the king's mother and grandmother, respectively ... though neither is actually his mother or grandmother. This was one of the confusing points for me, because they make such a big deal about how the rest of the king's family is dead, and yet here are these two matriarchs. Just go with it. All you really need to know is that they're incredibly powerful and incredibly bitchy, and they hate one another as much as they hate everyone else.

The king's main concubine! Oh, that poor girl, she is having such a bad time of it. She's shown up expecting to be the king's true love, and panic is setting in as she's realizing that's not the case.

I think the show falls a little too far into the trap I was talking about with the Story of Yanxi Palace, where they play her character way too close to being a comical crazy jealous girlfriend, without fully acknowledging the real precarity of her position. Of course she's freaking out about the idea that the king might love someone else -- her entire position, and her family's as well, depends on his loving her best! Still, most of the times you wind up shouting "stop fighting and just be besties!" at the screen are at her.

The king's other, second-tier concubines, on the other hand, are pretty okay with not being sexed up by the king. They've secured their families' political positions already, so really, they're just along for the seesaw games and pajama parties. This is the kind of Girl Solidarity I wish we could have seen elsewhere.

While I (of course) wish it had leaned more into its potential for feminist critique, I realize that doing so would have been such a fucking downer. Like, there's only so far you can go with that before your goofy transmigration comedy becomes a dismal acknowledgment of how much women have almost always been treated as disposable beyond their ability to incubate sons, and we're all just trying to have a good time here, okay?

As acknowledgments of historical misogyny go, I'd say this is even more honest than the much more serious (and much longer) Story of Yanxi Palace. A big part of that is how everybody in Yanxi Palace grew up in that world, so while they complain about its particular manifestations, they don't really push against the idea that this is the way the world should be. Bonghwan, Mr. Queen himself, is from a time when these gender dynamics not only aren't normal, they're considered pretty fucked up! He doesn't have to imagine a world where all this isn't true -- he's lived it, and he'd like to go back ASAP.

Still, the show's so into the romanticized notions of royal life that it can't ever quite put forth a critique of the entire system and how gross and exploitative it is, for example, that there are like a dozen women whose entire job is to be on call for the queen's every need. The show can treat some of them like people, but not all or even most of them. It can't offer them a way out of the systemic inequalities they face. It can say that the wealthy women treat one of those women here and there like family, but do they? Sure, Lady Choi and Hong Yeon know and love the queen, and in this they find meaning and purpose in their lives, but what about Random Palace Maid #18 Who Has No Lines? How's this working for her?

Fwoo, yeah, you see why comedies tend to skim over issues like these, and this one is no exception. And if your eyes glazed over reading all that, I don't blame you. (Sorry, the inside of my head is just like this, I've tried to turn it off, I can't.) But my point remains: There's lots of ladies in this! It is a lady-forward story. It has some good representation of ladies from all over the lady spectrum, and if you like that sort of thing, you will probably enjoy this.

5. Cooking up the laughs

Did I mention it's funny? Like, legitimately laugh-out-loud funny. I know that humor is so subjective, and that it often doesn't translate well. But I am here to say, as someone who maybe knows ten non-food-related words of Korean, I still felt every joke hit.

...And, as the images I've gathered here should indicate, a lot of the comedy happens in the royal kitchen.

Look, Bonghwan's a fish out of water! He's going to gravitate toward places he's most comfortable -- and he's a professional chef, so you know what his number-one choice will be. This isn't quite what I'd call a Food Show (like, say, Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty or Otoko Meshi or What Did You Eat Yesterday?), but it is a show with several dramatic food-related moments and plot points. Bonghwan may be out of his depth when it comes to palace protocols, historical manners, and even romance, but he knows how to say it with lunch.

Also, Man Bok, the head chef, is comedy gold -- and he's half of the other best romance in the show (which I shan't spoil you for, so enjoy that when it gets there). We never get a scene where he takes off his shirt to reveal he's unbelievably ripped under there, so, you know, just imagine it with me.

All right, time to say something about the ending.

So if you've heard one thing about this show, you've probably heard how it seems like everyone who's watched seems to have something to say about how it wrapped up, and that something is rarely positive.

I'm going to go against the grain a little and say that it actually has an appropriate ending, in that it has an ending that finishes the narrative, ties up most of the relevant loose ends, and comes to a full conclusion. The show does not pull some weird last-minute bullshit, nor does it walk off a cliff. It starts telling a story, and twenty episodes later, it finishes telling the same story that it started telling. I feel like I got given a whole, finished product.

Look: You know from the get-go that this is a no-win situation. Bonghwan legitimately wants to get back to his modern life -- at one point, he talks about missing his parents, and he gets real choked up about the idea that he'll never see them again. At the same time, that boy/girl is in love and surrounded by a whole lot of people worth staying for. No matter what happens, whether he remains in the past or goes back to the future, he's going to lose something.

So does it have a happy ending? Well, yes. And no. It has a happy ending because it ends happily! And it also has a happy ending because it blatanly ignores many elements that would suggest its chosen ending is not a happy one. So yeah, I get why people who wanted one thing might be upset they got another. At the same time, though, I cannot fault it for having the conviction of its choices.

Listen: You can get mad at an ending because something doesn't end the way you wanted it to end. But you can't get mad at an ending because something does end the way it wanted to end.

Feel like getting historical?

Viki and Netflix both have you covered!

Really, at the end of the day, this one's just fun. It is fun and I am glad we watched it. I'm still laughing about some of the jokes. If you can enjoy it without overthinking, do it. And if you can't enjoy it without overthinking ... well, come be my friend, because clearly we have compatible neuroses.

Route 1: Using Zhu’s Age for Reference

We know Zhu’s birth year pretty exactly. She’s 10 years old in 1345 and 19 in 1354, making her birth year reliably 1335.

Zhu is 12 years old when Chaghan (then Prince of Henan), Esen, Ouyang, and Baoxaing visit the monastery in 1347. The narrator describes the three boys as “radiant youths” and “young,” though their specific ages aren’t given.

When Ouyang returns to the monastery as a General of the Yuan in 1354, Zhu is 19. She recalls him from their prior encounter in 1347 as “younger than she was now.” Meaning, Ouyang was younger than 19 in 1347. It’s not clear how much younger.

If we assume he was between 16-18 in 1347, that puts his birth year in 1329-1331.

Ergo, during the main canon years of TRE, he is 23-25 at the beginning (1354) and 25-27 at the end (1356).

Kinda gives new perspective to that scene in 1354 when he makes fun of the Red Turbans’ general for being 22, doesn’t it? ;)

Route 2: Using Esen’s Spring Hunt History for Reference

Here’s where things get more concrete—but also more contradictory.

Early in SWBTS, Ouyang has a bit of a rambling internal monologue about his past history with Esen vis-a-vis the Great Khan’s yearly Spring Hunt.

Here’s the narration we get:

“Ouyang had attended once when he was twenty, when he had been the commander of Esen’s personal guards. But the next year the Prince of Henan had retired from campaigning, and since then Esen and Ouyang had always been in the south during the Spring Hunt. This would be the first time in seven years that Esen would be available to accompany the Prince of Henan to Hichetu. And it was all because of Ouyang’s defeat.”

Omg this is so much easier! Seven years ago Ouyang was 20, so now (as of the 1355 Spring Hunt at least) he is 27, making his birth year 1327. Easy peasy.

But here’s the thing. If Ouyang was born in 1327, Zhu’s statement about him being “younger than she was now” (aka younger than 19) in 1347 would be simply incorrect. He would be 20 in 1347 and Esen would be 22—not exactly youths by (TRE’s) Yuan standards.

All told, I’m inclined to go with the second reading, which more directly pinpoints Ouyang’s birth year, and lets him be a bit older, which his ancient creaky ass soul deserves.

What this means, though, is that Zhu’s judgement of Ouyang’s (and Esen’s) ages aren’t exactly accurate. The narrative really sets them up to look and act like teenagers, not adults, in that 1347 scene.

More Event-Dating Wobbliness

So how old was Ouyang when he became Esen’s eunuch slave? Obviously pre-puberty, but when exactly?

During that deeply homoerotic scene (aren’t they all) from SWBTS in which Ouyang helps Esen with his armor, he reflects that he’s served Esen for sixteen years. This is in the first month of 1355.

(But in ~thee murder scene~~, in the second month of 1356, Ouyang says “I was nearly twenty years by your side.” Just some exaggeration I guess—“seventeen years” doesn’t sound quite as satisfying or cathartic when you’re trying to psych yourself up to kill your master/best friend/eternal toxic crush.)

At any rate, let’s assume Ouyang became Esen’s slave sixteen years before 1355, in 1339. If we follow Route 2 (Ouyang born in 1327), he is 12 when he first enters the Prince’s household.

But here’s another complication!!!

Remember this scene?

If Ouyang is 12 when he first becomes a slave, there’s no time at all for the “before picture” this scene paints. No “had always been able” possible. Ouyang has to have been with Esen for at least a couple years prior to Esen turning 14 in order for this dynamic to work out.

So let’s go back to Route 1 (Ouyang born in 1329-1331) for a minute. In that scenario, Ouyang was anywhere from 8-10 when he first becomes a slave. To me this seems a lot more plausible.

A third explanation might be that that “sixteen years” figure might be inaccurate, or not the full picture. It could be that Ouyang really has been “at [Esen’s] side” for something like 20 years, but have only been his specific attendant for 16 of those years. Maybe he did other slave-duties (whatever they might have been) prior to that time. That would allow him to keep his greater age (I don’t think he deserves to start the main narrative at 23 lol) while also preserving a longer connection to Esen and a bit more tragedy.

Anyway. What can we conclude, if anything, from all this. Frankly I emerged from this process more confused than I began it.

For the sake of the childhood fic I’m currently plotting, this is how I choose to proceed: Ouyang comes to the Prince’s residence as a slave at age 8, in 1335. Esen is 10 at the time. The two rather secretly become friends, and Esen demands that Ouyang become his specific attendant slave in 1339, when Ouyang is 12 and he is 14. Thereafter, Ouyang gradually rises to become commander of his personal guard and eventually his general. Then canon events unfold as written. 🥲