The visuals of this drama were captivating for a sageuk. I have seen more than a handful of historical kdramas and with all due respect to the creative minds behind this project, I did not like The King’s Affection. Just like a lot of dramas, this started off promising with enrapturing sceneries, acting performances, and plot. Unfortunately, the cracks began to surface during the middle episodes and the show makers were not able to maneuver the storyline and just succumbed to be a bland and generic sageuk. Characters who were once smart and sophisticated became predictable and outright boring and mundane. Starting from episode 15, I was watching it at 1.5x speed, perhaps the series would have been better off if they conduced it to 16 episodes. The ending was disastrous, like really, didn’t the allegedly “smart” characters somehow foresaw that the antagonist had an actual army that he could use to fulfill his evil plans. Cant believe also that they used only 2 songs throughout the series, officially there might be more, but the same song was just playing over and over again from the first to the last episode. The acting of the leads were just good, the acting of the supporting characters were able to show more emotions than the leads though. Overall, I would not recommend this, there are a lot more better period kdramas than this. Only watch it if you are an avid fan of the leads.