Series: Wrestling with Confucianism โ How Korea’s New Generation Is Bound by Tradition, and How It Tries to Break Free
In the first piece, we watched the modern workplace drama See You At Work Tomorrow let its younger generation beat back office rumor with reason and due process โ only to watch, helplessly, as their parents’ generation settled for compromise rather than risk being seen as a stain on their children’s future, all in the name of “face.” If that piece showed how Confucian doctrine still binds people today in ways no one writes down, then turning the clock back four hundred years, to the war drama My Dearest, reveals something older and just as sharp: this rigid conviction that face matters more than the person is not a modern affliction. It’s a poison distilled centuries ago, from Confucian and Neo-Confucian doctrine, that has gone on quietly hurting people ever since.
What makes My Dearest work isn’t just its love story or its harrowing war scenes โ it’s how naturally it builds two thoroughly modern leads into a period setting. Where Confucian doctrine โ chastity, loyalty, clan law, the contempt for trade โ reduces living people to instruments of the system, the two leads answer with four defiant acts: pursuing love on their own terms, fighting to survive, using trade to save lives, and questioning blind loyalty. Together, these acts amount to a fierce confrontation between a modern sensibility and the shackles of tradition. And the cruelty at the heart of that confrontation is this: breaking the shackles is never free. The price is a vast loneliness that leaves no place to belong, inside the system or out of it.
I. Seizing Control of Love and Marriage: From Arranged Silence to a Woman’s Own Initiative
Confucian marriage ran on the authority of parents and matchmakers. Women were expected to embody “womanly virtue” โ passivity, bashfulness, obedience โ as the ideal of beauty; men treated marrying and producing heirs as the highest form of filial devotion. Yu Gil-chae (played by Ahn Eun-jin) is an outlier from the start. She knows her looks and her willingness to act are assets, and she isn’t afraid to shed a well-bred young woman’s reserve, deploying an almost modern kind of flirtation and calculation to win the attention of her first love, Yeon-jun. More striking still, over the course of the drama she completes a transformation โ from actively pursuing the man she’s drawn to, to actively proposing to the male lead herself โ seizing the reins of her own romantic life. In an age that prized women who waited passively, what she does amounts to something close to rebellion.
Set against her is Jang-hyun (played by Namgoong Min), a committed bachelor. Before he meets Gil-chae, he holds the whole logic of producing an heir in open contempt, willing to carry the stigma of never marrying rather than submit to it.
Both postures counted as transgressions in the eyes of their world. The village rewrites Gil-chae’s initiative into a cruel nickname โ “the woman with ninety-nine fox tails” โ meaning she’s the kind of woman who knows exactly how to seduce a man. Jang-hyun’s refusal to marry is generally read as unfilial. And because he travels the country trading while openly dating different women, the young people of Neunggun-ri label him a philanderer who scatters his affections wherever he goes. All of which points to something essential about that world: the moment a man or woman reached for romantic freedom, the first thing waiting for them wasn’t the law โ it was the collective moral judgment of a small, familiar community, the kind where everyone in the village knows everyone else’s face.
The sharpest foil in the show is the secondary couple, Nam Yeon-jun (played by Lee Hak-joo) and Gyeong Eun-ae (played by Lee Da-in). Betrothed and married through their families’ arrangement, they’re the textbook scholar and well-bred young lady of the Confucian order. Yeon-jun loves his family, loves his wife โ but he loves his country more. When war breaks out, he leaves his wife and family behind without hesitation, heading straight for where the king is under siege, all to serve the crown. Eun-ae, gentle and dutiful, carries her worry and her grief alone, and simply submits to his decision. Between them, they act out, almost word for word, the two commandments Confucianism prizes most: the husband leads and the wife follows, and the nation comes before the family.
II. Reclaiming the Flesh and the Living Body: Concrete Survival Against Abstract Honor and Propriety
Under the sway of Neo-Confucianism, “to starve is a small matter, to lose one’s chastity is a grave one.” A woman’s body was never really her own โ it was a vessel for her family’s honor. A woman who had merely been seen, let alone assaulted, by foreign soldiers had exactly one sanctioned way out: to die for her honor, and so preserve the family’s face. Even the grandest households ran on the same logic in reverse โ “to starve is a small matter, to fail one’s ancestors is grave” โ and so a noblewoman would sooner sell off the jewelry that could buy her family food than go without the brass ritual vessels her ancestor-worship required.
Gil-chae’s whole existence is a challenge to that logic. Amid the chaos of war, she rejects the doctrine of dying for honor outright, holding instead that staying alive โ and protecting the people around her โ outweighs any abstract notion of chastity. When she rescues Eun-ae from a near-assault, the first thing she does is ask Eun-ae to keep it quiet โ not to protect her own reputation, but because she understands exactly what will happen if word gets out: the people around Eun-ae may well pressure her into taking her own life to preserve her honor. It’s a decision made with cold reason, aimed squarely at a code of ethics that consumes the very people it claims to protect โ and it’s the earliest moment in the show to demonstrate something the whole story will keep proving: protecting a living person matters more than protecting a reputation.
Perhaps the most inventive stroke in the whole drama is how Gil-chae turns feudal thinking itself into a business. She notices that noblewomen, driven by filial duty to their ancestors, are willing to pay a premium for Korean Brass Ritual Vessels even in wartime โ so she starts buying up the copper coins that have collapsed in value on the market, hires some blacksmiths to melt them down into Korean Brass Ritual Vessels, and even breaks the taboo against women showing their faces in public to personally oversee the work at the forge. The business thrives, and it’s what keeps her family fed through the war, by her own two hands.
What’s most moving about Jang-hyun is a humanism that looks straight through what a body has suffered, to the soul underneath. Where the traditional husbands and fathers around him โ Yeon-jun’s growing estrangement from Eun-ae, Gu Won-mu’s cowardly abandonment of Gil-chae, Gil-chae’s own father turning murderous toward his daughter โ treat a wife or daughter who has “lost her chastity” as a stain to be shunned, or even killed with their own hands, Jang-hyun sees something else entirely: the fight still going on inside Gil-chae’s soul, the part of her that refuses to give up. He never once offers her comfort for her “lost chastity.” What breaks his heart is what she suffered โ a form of respect for a specific, living person that reaches straight past its own century.
When Gil-chae finally tells Jang-hyun that she was violated by foreign men, the two of them share this exchange:
Jang-hyun: “Do you still not know me? Do you still not understand my heart, even now? All I need is you. Poor Gil-chae, wealthy Gil-chae, sassy Gil-chae, gentle Gil-chae, the Gil-chae who doesn’t love me, the Gil-chae who does… whatever she is, Gil-chae is all I need.”
Gil-chae: “All right. Then… what about the Gil-chae who was violated?”
Jang-hyun: “I’d hold her. She must have suffered.”
What makes this exchange land the way it does, for so many viewers, is that it compresses the show’s entire central argument into a single gesture of an embrace. What Jang-hyun loves was never a “spotless, chaste” Gil-chae โ it’s Gil-chae herself, the whole person, suffering included.
This is where the show draws its sharpest line: a feudal order that will casually discard, or even drive to death, a living, breathing person โ that will forgo basic subsistence itself โ all to protect something as close to nothing as “honor”; and two leads with genuinely modern values, who use hands stained with blood and mud to secure something far more basic: a person’s dignity.
III. Remaking Social Value: Practical Action Against Empty, Hollow Talk
Confucianism’s four-tier hierarchy โ scholar, farmer, artisan, merchant โ prized the pen over the sword and looked down on money and trade. Politically and ideologically, a subject owed the throne absolute, unquestioning loyalty: at the level of the state, Joseon, as a vassal of Ming, was bound to hold fast to Ming and never surrender to the Later Jin, later Qing; at home, subjects were expected to fight for the royal house’s face, and never to so much as contemplate rebellion, however incompetent or paranoid the king proved to be.
Jang-hyun is the most thorough wrecker of this whole logic. He speaks fluent Manchu, stockpiles weapons before the war even starts, donates armor and arms to the scholars once it does, and makes his living off a genuinely sharp business mind โ all while seeing straight through the fact that the scholars mouthing off about righteousness understand nothing of the actual balance of power between Ming and the Later Jin. He proves, simply by existing, that vision, knowledge, and action will always outperform empty talk. He never once shouts a patriotic slogan โ instead, he quietly spends his own trading profits buying back slaves and commoners abducted by Qing and abandoned by the Joseon court, a form of humaneness that needs no banner to wave.
His refusal of blind loyalty runs through the whole show. In one scene, during an exam at the local academy, he flatly refuses to answer questions on loyalty, chastity, and filial devotion. In a later scene, he invokes the wrongful execution of the Ming general Yuan Chonghuan to openly challenge the king’s paranoia and incompetence, refusing to become a pawn sacrificed in someone else’s power game. And yet, when he decides that the safety of ordinary people matters more than the royal house’s face, he volunteers to go deep behind enemy lines himself, gathering intelligence on Hong Taiji for Crown Prince Sohyeon โ because he knows the war is already lost, and wants to win his country whatever leverage he still can at the negotiating table. Living with the crown prince in Shenyang, he even ends up coaching the prince on how to lower his guard and build something workable with the Qing. Everything he does, from beginning to end, puts ordinary people first โ never blind loyalty to the Joseon throne.
The scholars of Neunggun-ri talk endlessly about righteousness and duty, and turn out to be useless the moment they reach an actual battlefield. The crown prince means well, but is boxed in by the hierarchy of ruler and subject, powerless in the diplomacy that actually matters. Jang-hyun, meanwhile, disguises himself as a cold, mercenary, disloyal outsider โ quietly enduring the accusation of treason from his own countrymen and his own state, hunted for it in the show’s later stretch โ while going on, unnoticed, doing what’s actually good for ordinary people. He is the show’s real hero: someone who holds both humaneness and resourcefulness at once, someone who knows how to bear an unearned disgrace without breaking.
Conclusion: From a Four-Hundred-Year-Old Cage to Today’s Endless Tug-of-War Over Values
Jang-hyun looks, on the surface, like a dissolute confirmed bachelor โ but underneath, he’s a man of deep and genuine feeling: resourceful, brave, ahead of his time, refusing to fall in line with feudal Confucianism’s blind loyalty, operating in the grey zone between Qing and Joseon โ striking secret deals on both sides โ purely to protect the people he loves and cares for. Critics have praised Namgoong Min’s performance highly, for the way he brings out the character’s rough edges, his depth of feeling, his restraint, and the tragic color that never quite lifts from a man living through chaos.
Gil-chae, meanwhile, transforms from the proud “goddess of Neunggun-ri” into someone tough enough to run a household on her own. She starts out convinced every man alive is smitten with her, a little spoiled, a little full of herself; once war breaks out, she takes on the full weight of caring for her family and friends, and grows, through flight and hardship, an extraordinary vitality โ something close to a weed’s stubborn will to live. It’s an extremely difficult role to get right โ the smallest misstep and it reads as maudlin โ but Ahn Eun-jin’s layered performance lets the audience watch, in real time, the pain and the grandeur of a girl becoming a woman, and her chemistry with Namgoong Min is strong enough that it’s hard to look away.
Nam Yeon-jun and Gyeong Eun-ae, by contrast, are the show’s clearest embodiment of the traditional Confucian spirit. Yeon-jun stands for the scholar who talks endlessly of great principles and turns out powerless once chaos actually arrives; Eun-ae is the classic well-bred young woman, gentle on the surface and iron underneath. Their conservatism and their steadfastness stand in sharp relief against the leads’ willingness to adapt and rebel, and the contrast reflects a clash, in that era, between classes and ways of thinking that never really stopped.
A life outweighs one’s name. The individual outweighs the system.
Turning to this period drama set four hundred years ago, what’s striking is how far back this poison runs โ the conviction that face matters more than the person. In the show, Gu Won-mu and Gil-chae’s own father, in the name of protecting Confucian clan law’s “honor” and “face,” would sooner abandon, or even kill, the people they love most; Jang-hyun and Gil-chae, by contrast, spent four hundred years ago living out a thoroughly modern declaration with sheer force of will โ a life outweighs one’s name, and the individual outweighs the system.
From period drama to contemporary drama, the way writers and directors shape their plots and characters reflects a tug-of-war between Korea’s new generation and Confucian culture that has never really stopped. Breaking the chains once meant being branded an outsider, being abandoned, being hunted down, even paying with your life. Today, it means facing social pressure instead โ living inside a climate where divorce is still read as a stain, where the young are expected to defer almost unconditionally to their elders and subordinates to their superiors โ and carrying on, year after year, an endless tug-of-war with the values tradition left behind.
