A week full of reading and watching

WEBNOVEL

Right now, I'm currently busy reading HAN Mint's novel called 악녀는 두 번 산다 or in its English title, "The Villainess Lives Twice". I only came upon this randomly late last week. I'm a sucker for nice pretty pictures so I fell in love with the cover and decided to read some chapters. I'm pleasantly surprised to discover that it's not just an awesome read, but the overall quality of writing is on another level compared to its genre mates. The story revolves around a strategist dabbling in evil arts, who wasted her whole life working to make her brother the Emperor, only to be betrayed by him. Amidst the tragic circumstances, she found hope in humanity when she was rescued by the Grand Duke who is basically The Perfect ML. Using her magic, she gave up on life and made herself a human sacrifice, only to wake up in the past, prior to becoming her brother's tool. 

Now this kind of plot may seem familiar to most of you. But the brilliance of this webnovel displays itself as our MC starts to walk down her road to revenge by lowkey hatching plots and providing traps for her potential enemies and victims to fall in. But this time around, she's doing it for the greater good. I glad to see there are a lot of new twists every few chapters and the behind-the-scenes planning is quite logical, this is a level of craftmanship that I've yet to encounter since I last read "The Rebirth of the Malicious Empress of Military Lineage", which was already a lifetime ago. Other webnovels will try to present a supposedly wise, evil villainess MC, but they always fall short on certain areas. For example, they'll became too weak, too stupid and some arcs are even shamelessly overrated and easily predicted. So far I'm confident to say "The Villainess Lives Twice" is a different flavor and is praise-worthy. I'm still in about a quarter through so this initial impression might change, but until then, I fully recommend this.

DRAMA SERIES

I'm watching two Korean dramas this week. Penthouse Season 2 and River Where the Moon Rises. The first is a recently popular modern  (an exaggerated, overdramatic soap opera) and the second is a sageuk (Korean denotes historical dramas). In its first season, 

Penthouse became viral among kdrama viewers for its melodramatic confrontations and open approach to themes like mental health, school bullying and corruption in the business and education industry, usually benefiting the ones on top of the economic pyramid. It's scandalous, funny at times, with a dose of a few murders. So me and my mother have looked forward to this second season since January, and the trailer alone, showing party guests getting shitfaced with an approaching helicopter is good enough to hype us up. I'm still in Episode 1 and so far so good, a lot of things had happened already and we already had two dead people hahahaha. That sounds morbid but you'll understand once you watch this.

River Where the Moon Rises is spearheaded by Kim So-hyun and Ji Soo. Two beautiful people. This was apparently an adaptation of a popular tale. It already had previous adaptations already but this seems to be the most serious and most expensive one among them. I'm not initially familiar with the general story but with the current 4 episodes we have right now, I say it's interesting. I looked into the tale, one version is available online. Here's an excerpt that made me giggle:

"After the princess spent the night outside his house and offered to buy him a new house, food, land and a horse with the money she earned by selling her gold ring, Ondal was soon won over by her sincerity. The princess not only brought Ondal and his mother out of poverty, but also paid for his education and gave him professional training in the martial arts."

Princess Pyeong-gang sounds like a sugar mommy. No judgement. Ondal is capable with his own talents later on anyway. lol. Think of a charming male Cinderella mixed with politics and war. That's what the drama is. 

It's been quite a busy for me and I'm too tired to eat well or sleep well back at home. I'm just filled to the brim with cheap instant coffee these days. I'm glad I was able to find new titles to spend my free time with. It's an instant type of self-care and temporary mind-cleansing amidst work stress.