Of Swords and Parasols

Set in a fictional alternate-Joseon, Scholar Who Walks the Night is about a vampire scholar, Sung Yeol, who battles the evil vampire, Gwi, who has secretly ruled Joseon through a series of puppet kings for centuries. When he was human, Sung Yeol served a prince who was trying to expose and stop Gwi. The prince wrote a book that supposedly holds the secret for how to kill Gwi, but it has since been lost, and Sung Yeol hires Yang Sun, a book merchant who is a young woman who dresses as a man, to find the missing book. There's also the CURRENT prince, Lee Yoon, who wants to avenge his father, also killed by Gwi, and who thinks Yeng Sun is a lot like his missing childhood best friend, who was a boy, as well as Hye Ryung, a young woman who was sold to Gwi as a child, and who is the spitting image of Sung Yeol's dead fiance, Myung Hee, who was a victim of Gwi's fridging spree. The rest of the cast are a bunch of court officials who are hard to keep straight aside from the king and Hye Ryung's scumbag father, and then Sung Yeol and Lee Yoon's sidekicks.

The first episode, which is Sung Yeol's origin episode, tries to kill you with the cheese, amplified by the cheesiest overly melodramatic soundtrack ever. It pretty much consists of having Sung Yeol find out that vampires exist, become a vampire, an dthen having Gwi kill off pretty much everyone Sung Yeol knows for maximum fridging effect. The cheese factor steadily decreases after that and is at an acceptable level by around episode 4 or so. Except for with Gwi. I can only assume they amped up the cheese there to try to mask the fact that Gwi is the boringest of boring fantasy sageuk things. Maybe a better actor could have made the character work, but the actor did nothing for me on any level. I struggled to pay attention during his scenes until about 2/3 through the series, when more interesting things started to happen around him because of other characters. (He also doesn't come across as remotely dangerous or scary to me, which sometimes made me wonder if Sung Yeol was just incompetent.) That said, about 80% of the tumblr tag is people loving him, so it could just be me.

Despite finding Gwi boring, I did really get into the series after a few episodes, and liked all the protagonist characters.Sung Yeol has a fair number of Jerk Vampire Boyfriend moments early on, but he gets over them and the romance ended up pretty enjoyable. Yang Sun has GREAT reactions to Angsty Vampire Exposition. Her reaction to the whole I am a vampire and you must hate me now. Let me display my powers a bit to make sure you understand how I am Very Bad Wrong For You and I'll go back to may angsty and lonely immortal existence" is "A. Why did you think this would make me stop liking you? B. I know you have a good memory so you better not have forgotten I ever existed in a few decades since you still spent some time mooning over your first girlfriend, and C. THANK GOODNESS YOU DID NOT DIE CHECK IN WITH ME WHEN IT LOOKS LIKE YOU DIED BUT YOU'RE OK, WILL YOU?" I do sideeye some of the things that didn't clue her in, since VAMPIRE WHO SECRETLY RULES THE KINGDOM is a rumor that's been going around for centuries, but I've seen worse. The final arc has Yang sun actively weaponizing popular fiction and urban myth, not to mention saving Sung Yeol and Lee Yoon with her fanfiction, which made me forgive a lot.

The show is also blessedly free of romantic triangles. After being hit by a figurative bulldozer on meeting Hye Ryung, Sung Yeol switches to mostly being weirded out by someone looking exactly like his dead girlfriend wandering around town once he realizes that she has no relation to Myung Hee, and is just kind of vaguely uncomfortable around her but there's no interest at all on either side. (There is an arc where there's a bit of gaslighting to make him think it's the whole "she was secretly turned into a vampire and must be saved" thing, but it lasts about 5 minutes.) For a bit, it looks like Lee Yoon might be falling for Yang sun, but he categorizes her as "adorable little sister" instead of "woman I cannot have" and his only reason for having an issue with the Yang Sun/Sung Yeol relationship is the fact that he's a vampire who likes to battle an evil vampire who likes to eat young women. One of Sung Yeol's sidekicks, Soo Hyang, has a jealous period, but that's more "I thought you never looked at me that way because you were Permanently In Love With the Tragically Dead Girlfriend, but you were in love with this girl after about a month so I'm kind of wondering why I never had a chance..." than anything else, and she gets over it before long.

It's not the best of the fantasy sageuks in recent years (ignoring the time travel ones-because I haven't seen most of them-I think that's still Arang and the Magistrate) but I ended up really enjoying it. I will admit that I probably would have lost interest if I'd tried watching it weekly, but it works really well for a bingewatching show. (And I don't do well with watching kdramas as they air anyway.)