Arang and the Magistrate (2012)

Excitement turned dread.

Honestly the positives mentioned below are mainly my thoughts for the first 6 episodes of this show. Once we hit episode 7 it began to lag a lot and lost most of it's charm.
It was soooo much fun at the beginning- surprisingly so. I was not expecting much to be honest, the rating on MDL is a little lower than most dramas and I haven't seen it be talked about elsewhere.
Lee Joon Gi and Shin Min Ah have fantastic chemistry, which I also wasn’t expecting. I love Shin Min Ah and am… neutral on Lee Joon Gi. I like him sometimes (My Girl, Flower of Evil), sometimes not (Scholar who walks the night)- but I think it's all on direction or the script because here his character has such personality (opposed to his usual more serious roles). He really shines here, and I believe Shin Min Ah heightens that as well due to their chemistry and ability to goof with eachother convincingly.
Yeon Woo Jin is great as always too. Had an interesting character arc overall.
Hwang Bo Ra is sooooo cute in hanbok! I had never seen her in a sageuk before but I think it really suits her.
The character Dol Soe was insanely annoying, and it would have been an improvement to have him omitted from the show entirely.
I didn't care for the heaven/hell characters, or the villains (except when Yeon Woo Jin was involved with them), so it mainly became a continued watch for the characters I did like and not the story.

The plot is initially fun, plain and simple. When your lead characters are so likeable it's easy to make a simple story like this enjoyable.
It definitely would have benefited from being the standard 16 episodes instead of 20 though. It became very drawn out. I feel like they packed all its appeal in the first chunk and then we were stuck with the rest slowly occurring.

It got to the point where I was struggling along, fighting to finish, so during episode 14 I finally decided to drop it. It's a real shame because I was having so much fun with it at first.

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So I picked up Arang and the Magistrate because so many people have recommended it and a lot of Youtube videos highly advertised how awesome it is, so I thought, why not give it a shot. Shin Min Ah and Lee Joon Gi were great in their roles and I enjoyed seeing them again. What I didn't like was how creepy/eerie the story line became starting around episode 4. On top of the unpleasant atmosphere of the drama, I also couldn't get past how slow the plot was progressing. In each episode, nothing really happened of substance and I didn't notice at first, but after pondering, I realized how much the drama dragged. The music was okay in the beginning, mostly went by unnoticed, but after we meet the *real* villain, the music becomes dramatic, loud, and overly eerie which only further deterred me. Since the drama wasn't sitting well with me, I went ahead and looked up a summary of the drama to find out the key plot points and I'm not really intrigued nor impressed with the "twist" because it was rather predictable. Even though I really wanted to like this one, this is a "drop" for me.

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Aging of a Drama

Before writing this, of course, I had to look at other reviews and what I found were a lot of the older reviews LOVED this drama, while the few more recent ones gave lower scores. It made me think back on all the older dramas I have watched and the scores I have given them, and maybe it was because maybe at the time when this came out, it was amazing, but now with all the dramas we have access to, it falls flat.

I really wanted to love this one because Shin Min Ah is one of my favorite actresses, but she does have a lot of dramas that are older. But from the dramas I have watched, she brings this young giddy charm to her characters, so I wanted to check out a historical drama with a supernatural plot. I've only seen maybe one of two supernatural dramas in the past few years, and I do like that genre and want to get into it.

Now that I have explained myself a little before, I feel confident that I can jump in.

It's been a few days since I finished this drama, and it has had a few days to digest.

I liked the premise of the drama, in all other aspects, I wasn't a fan. It didn't take me until Kim Eun Oh, the main character, or the Magistrate confessed his feeling for his character to stop acting like a jerk, and for me to actually like him. It felt very 180 and not a gradual character transition for him. He was kind of lousy up until the point he confessed, and then he was like screw everything else, I do everything for bae. Then we have a very confused and spunky Arang, who didn't go through much character development, but at some point, she just kind of started to chill out but her spirit remained. Their relationship was very cute once they were together. Before that, I honestly didn't think they were a great match. Hell. I thought Joo Wal was bae....considering....you know.

I thought that this drama was actually, not purposely, funny. We had the main villains with the Nobleman Choi and Moo Yeon, and yes, Chairman Choi was a bad person. But maybe it was just the acting for Moo Yeon, but she was acting out like a child most of the time and had the funniest facial expressions. Someone said in a previous review that it was because of plastic surgery, but I also feel like it had to do with her acting when she was distributing herself from the two characters she played. She only made funny faces as if she always smelled something rotten when she was Moo Yeon.

Finally, the ending wasn't extremely clear to me, but from what I understood from it, it made sense and was the only ending I could think of to work based on both of the mains' fates that were total twists at the end, but were explained previously and I had connected.

It was a very simple yet complicated drama. I might go back to watch one or two scenes.

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A scratch deviated end

This drama was superb as a plot, the idea of heavens and gods who see everything's and plan everything's and create everything so far as the humans will that can change facts and the idea of the enraged fairy that live by taking souls and human bodies and the death angels that haunt ghosts who may importune humans were all mastered and frivolous, thereby you can learn from this fictionality a lot of things that may benefit you.
Craving into the casts, they were all awesome, lee joon ki as always, his chemistry with shin min ah was overwhelming, the actor yeo woo jin and his character was the most attracting and pitiful and sadly i felt sorry for him, the female shaman and dol sae chemistry was fitted also.
The drama was full of enthusiasm and mysteriousity and funny moments, the conversations between those two so called gods are sneaky and entertaining, specially when they bet on things and preposterous conclusions of the human worlds, the manipulate everything like they want, i liked that
But the end messed everything, as they main story was for arang to find the cause of her death to that bell to ring, they show us that jo wal is the one who threw her from a cliff when she was unconscious after being stabbed by the magistrate mom before the fairy control totally the body and mask her soul so she died by his hands i presume and for him to atone for his misdeeds and for was deeply sorry for lee seo rim who sacrificed herself for him( she loved him when she was alive) while he didn't acknowledge who she was and didn't care that time, he took his own life... but why the hell they make it that arang caused her own death, were they playing with us? this concept deceived me and root out all the good and awesome filming of the 19 episodes.
The fact that eun oh couldn't save his mother life in the end is irritating and feel like all work was in vain. the reincarnating is fishy at the final scene and wasn't necessary also.
Those defaults in the final episode could have been managed otherwise, then this drama would be a skyrocket.

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