I gave this a higher review because gosh the romance was so believable, the tension palpable, and I loved the level of yearning. The premise is so amazing and had me excited. However, pretty much everything else about this series falls a bit flat for me.

There are multiple, overall pointless, conflicts in the plotline. For example, the incidence with the tiger within the first couple of episodes. This was wasted space that could have been better spent on the relationship or we could have focused on Yi San's reign. The conflicts should have helped develop the characters more or made us more invested in them.

This brings me into my next point. For a while, I couldn't tell if the writers were bad at scriptwriting by making the grandfather have unbelievable mood swings or if the grandfather was meant to be realistically temperamental. The writers later got better at writing the grandfather character and made it apparent he was meant to be temperamental, but at the beginning of the series, it was very, very poorly executed.

My biggest gripe is that Deok Im lost pretty much all of her personality and any speaking time after the Yi San becomes king (even before she is meant to lose herself to the palace). Whenever they had romantic scenes together, I would be immersed but be pulled out because it almost seems like Yi San is just talking at a thing. Deok Im rarely speaks again or has her personality shine through in other scenes. As a result, when she's supposed to lose herself to the palace after becoming a concubine, it doesn't feel as poignant because it feels like we lost the character already a while ago.