Hopefully, I wasn’t the only one who had trouble finding out what to do for this assignment. I was initially thinking about going to a museum but personally, I’m too lazy to go. So I naturally procrastinated, still keeping in mind that I had to do this assignment eventually.<\/p>\n

For the past few weeks, I had been watching a Korean drama with my girlfriend. It goes\u00a0by the name of “Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo” which tells a riveting\u00a0tale of a girl who inadvertently travels back in time to Goryeo, an Korean dynasty that existed between the 900s to the late 1300s. I usually don’t watch historically themed Korean dramas but like most fans, I watched for the actors (and actresses).<\/p>\n

When my girlfriend and I finished watching the finale, we let out our frustrations about how “bad” the ending was and how the main actress was so stale and yadda yadda. But then, it just hit me. I had been participating in a historical event “kinda, sorta” for about a month! Oh man, did I feel a sense of relief as I did not have to drive to a museum and walk around and read the plaques (although that doesn’t mean I don’t like doing it).<\/p>\n

Ignoring the sappiness, romance, and beauty shots, this drama did not take too much of a creative liberty when it came to portraying ancient Korea. This was the first time I researched the background of a setting for a Korean drama. It helped tremendously in understanding the context for royal politics which included marriage, incest, and political purges. Although looking up the history of the era kind of spoiled the ending (a part of the drama’s plot hung on finding out who became the next king), I learned a great deal about how the first established monarchy of\u00a0a united Korea developed itself through the interactions between the princes of the dynasty and the time-travelling intruder.<\/p>\n

In all, this “event” taught me that history can be portrayed through mainstream media and that it can be used to trigger interest into specific parts of that history. Honestly, I wouldn’t have watched this drama if it weren’t for the actors (and actresses) but I’m glad my girlfriend recommended that I watched it with her; without watching it, I wouldn’t have come to this conclusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hopefully, I wasn’t the only one who had trouble finding out what to do for this assignment. I was initially thinking about going to a museum but personally, I’m too lazy to go. So I naturally procrastinated, still keeping in mind that I had to do this assignment eventually. For the past few weeks, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=798"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":799,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798\/revisions\/799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}