Summary
My Royal Nemesis continues to get by on the strength of its acting in “A Guide to Optimizing Your Fate”, but I do have some issues already that may continue to worsen as things go.
One of the major selling points of My Royal Nemesis is that it reverses the typical direction of a transmigration gimmick. Generally, especially with an explicit time travel element involved, it’s someone from the future who wakes up in the past. Bon Appetit, Your Majesty, which isn’t technically a transmigration story for fussy reasons, but that nonetheless illustrates the point, worked in this way. It makes sense, since the contemporary character’s present-day context is what allows them to navigate the difficulties of the past. The opposite is a bit more novel. And if Episode 2, “A Guide to Optimizing Your Fate”, is anything to go by, there’s a reason most shows don’t do it this way around.
In short, I’m having a bit of trouble with how easily Dan-sim is navigating modern-day Seoul. The adaptation has been much too smooth, and the ways in which her harsher Joseon-era noblewoman personality clashes with polite society are mostly just being used to set up jokes or this episode’s plot hook, which is Dan-sim, admittedly in Seo-ri’s body to get a foot in the door, attracting the attention of Se-gye by becoming a viral star.
What that means from the audience’s point of view is that we have to put up with a lot of Dan-sim being incredibly silly in a variety of situations, mostly rendered in montage form. It’s fine if you’re into that kind of thing, but even though I’m not generally a stickler for “authenticity”, it still seems really weird to me that she isn’t more thrown by the idea of television — let alone every other modern technology and convenience — than she seems to be. Maybe I’m being too harsh.
While I’m busy nitpicking, though, I might as well mention another issue, which is that I think the show is pretty hastily backing out of having both leads be “villains” in a more daring sense. Neither seems that bad to me. It’s obvious that they’re both intended as outgrowths of their respective cultures — a cutthroat court atmosphere in Dan-sim’s case, and an equally cutthroat chaebol dynasty in Se-gye’s — who are fundamentally decent people in their own ways. If the show was going to do this, I would have preferred them to do it further down the line, since, as of now, I’m a bit less interested in both of them, given that lack of edge.
It doesn’t help that the flashback sequences are giving too much away in this regard. As predicted in my recap of the premiere, there are more Joseon-set sequences in My Royal Nemesis Episode 2, which is welcome when it comes to adding some texture and background to Dan-sim’s character. But more present-day characters are now cropping up in the past in a way that feels kind of obvious, and is revealing a lot about who they’re intended to be in the present. For instance, the king, who Dan-sim discovers was the one to have ordered her execution as part of a purge, has his face deliberately obscured in the early flashbacks, in a way that you just know is going to be used in a reveal later. And it is, when it turns out that Se-gye’s suck-up cousin, Mun-do, is the king’s reincarnation.
We’ve only just met Mun-do, who donated his liver to Se-gye’s father when he fell ill many years ago and has been the golden child ever since, but the fact that he’s a reincarnation of the king, who we know had Dan-sim killed, basically does all of his characterisation for him. It also limits who Se-gye might have been back in Joseon. The epilogue reveals it was someone who was kind to Dan-sim during her come-up as Royal Consort, again basically foreshadowing their entire upcoming relationship.
I’m not sure what this says about what’s actually going on here, either. There was that whole business with the ritual and the eclipse, but if everyone in the present day was also present at the royal court, that feels like a pretty straight-up reincarnation story to me. Perhaps Dan-sim’s acceptance of her inhabiting Seo-ri’s body as an opportunity for a rebirth and a do-over is putting the idea of her trying to find her way back to her own era to bed, but it does kind of beg the question of what happens to the actual Seo-ri at this point.
Still, Lim Ji-yeon’s performance is really good in this, and doing a lot of heavy lifting. Some of the comedy is a bit too silly and slapstick for my tastes — and I hate some of the formal flourishes around Dan-sim’s viral video campaigns — but I did find myself laughing a fair bit here and there. It’s just a mixed bag, I feel, and while I sound pretty negative in this recap, it’s mostly because I’m trying to get ahead of some of these potential issues as the show progresses. I’ll be watching either way.
