Hae Soo’s pointlessly sadistic spirit guide

[Disclaimer: Just, major, major spoiler ahead so if you have not seen the show, stop reading now because I wouldn’t want to deprive you of the joy of discovering Scarlet Heart Ryeo for the first time.]

After my 700th viewing of Scarlet Heart Ryeo: Moon Lovers I finally realised that the show is a genric failure.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love it to death and I still think it’s one of the best written dramas out there, but if you view it as belonging to the spirit guide-transformation genre, the show makes no sense. Because the objective of such works would be for the protagonist to learn a valuable lesson while undergoing the transformation bestowed by their spirit guide and then returning as a better person. But when Go Ha Jin’s soul time slipped to Taejo Wang Geon’s Goryeo and transformed into Hae Soo, what lesson did her spirit guide want her to learn?

The show starts with Go Ha Jin, heartbroken from being cheated on and swindled by both her boyfriend and best friend, lamenting her fate to a random homeless stranger who then tells her this cryptic message:

She then apparently drowns and wakes up as Lady Hae Soo, precious cousin-in-law to the 8th prince, Wang Wook. At this point, Hae Soo is a princess in all but name, and she enjoys the life of a doted highborn lady, becoming playmates with and confidant to the numerous princes of the Goryean king, and falls in love with the ever-so-gentle Wang Wook.

Hae Soo amuses the royal siblings by replying to Wang Wook’s covert declaration of love with an emoji.

Eventually she runs into the homeless drunk who in this incarnation is Choi Ji Mong the court astronomer. He denies being Hae Soo’s spirit guide and the show suggests that he merely has had a taste of Hae Soo’s adventures, having drowned and then woken up with memories of a strange land and what sound like skyscrapers, aeroplanes, and elevators. And yet, it is hard to completely dismiss the possibility that Choi Ji Mong is her spirit guide when he does shit like this:

But what a useless spirit guide he turns out to be. Not only does he not help her except to vaguely tell her to simply leave things be, he personally arrested her when she becomes embroiled in an assassination plot. We see Ji Mong dragging his feet and coming up with so many stupid excuses to get his way during other times (e.g. when trying to stop Wang Yo from taking Wang So’s spot as Master of the Rain Ceremony), so why was he so efficient and decisive here? In fact, he’s always there at every major turning point in Hae Soo’s life: chasing him led to her initial acquaintance with Wang So; he’s the one who fetched her to marry Taejo Wang Geon; he nudged the king towards sending her to Court Lady Oh after the wedding fell through; he sent her away when she’s banished to Gyobang; he’s the one who recalled her from banishment when Taejo Wang Geon was on his deathbed, propelling her directly into the eye of the storm; ultimately, he was the one who dissuaded Hae Soo from marrying Wang So. Did he… perversely enjoy watching her suffer? If I was Hae Soo I’d have learned to walk the other way the moment I spot this guy.

Hae Soo would go on to suffer the after-effects of her torture throughout her Goryean life.

But to come back to the main point, why did Choi Ji Mong subject her through all that. Throughout the show Hae Soo is told time and time again to simply accept things that befall her, but given what happened in the present at the beginning of the show, this couldn’t really be the intended lesson, can it?

The narrative will severely punish Hae Soo for this choice so what lesson is she supposed to draw?

If the spirit guide is trying to convince Hae Soo that she’s wrong to believe this… what kind of sucky lesson is that?

Even the king advises her to stop worrying about the future and simply live in the moment.

I suppose accepting one’s lot is a lesson worth learning but I would argue that the price that Hae Soo has to pay is much too dear. Not only she soon falls from her almost-princess status to become a court maid, but her time in Goryeo, which adds up to at least 8 years, sees her undergoing torture; being forsaken by Wang Wook whom she loves and trusts completely; losing a mother figure who sacrificed herself in a desperate bid to save Hae Soo from political machinations (I will never get over Court Lady Oh’s death, by the way); falling further in status from a court maid to a slave-like water maid; becoming a pawn of the royal brothers whom she considers her close friends, unwittingly playing a role in their deaths, and witnessing those deaths first-hand; being unable to marry the 4th prince and now-king Wang So, the man who eventually wins her love, and has to settle as his unproclaimed mistress instead; having to stomach the forced betrayal of her maid and best friend; and finally, falling out with the love of her life and dying while believing that he hated her and would not forgive her.

When she covers up his scar and sets Wang So on his path to becoming Gwangjong, one of Goryeo’s bloodiest monarchs, Hae Soo is haunted by the realisation that maybe all that blood is on her hands.

Court Lady Oh’s death is a deeply traumatising lesson for Hae Soo and yet it is important to note that although she grows more mature and more careful in her actions, she never loses her kindness and optimism.

The vision vs. what really happened. First of all, why did you give her such a misleading premonition? But more importantly, what sins did Go Ha Jin commit that you punished her with such a tribulation?

Hae Soo finally learns that being selfless isn’t always a virtue. But first of all, if Hae Soo wasn’t such a strong person, this lesson would turn toxic in a millisecond – see the trajectory of Wang Wook’s character throughout the show. Second of all – seriously? I can’t get over just how batshit craycray extra the lesson that the spirit guide throws at Hae Soo just for this snippet of wisdom.

Fate grants Hae Soo peace for like two days before smashing it to smithereens again. Even someone as strong-minded as Hae Soo struggles to maintain her sanity in the face of such adversity. It’s as if she was sent on a tribulation by a deity who is intent on seeing her fail.

I mean, isn’t it enough that your spirit charge would die without bitterness and resentment given what you have dished out at her? How many times did you want to kill her?

Imagine waking up from a year-long coma to find that you have mentally and emotionally experienced 8 years’ worth of ordeal that actually drove you to death. Has her journey in time changed her in any meaningful way? Not really. She goes back to her old life and seemingly carries on as if nothing happened. For all intents and purposes, whatever lesson the spirit guide intended her to learn did not stick.

A year after waking up from her hellish astral travels, Go Ha Jin is back at her old job, struggles with how weary her soul is, and isn’t in any perceivable way better than before she met her spirit guide.

Except, she didn’t simply go back to her old life, did she? Go Ha Jin finds herself with unexplainable PTSD, breaking down at random moments. That is, until she bumps into Choi Ji Mong again, this time as a historian who specialises in Goryean history. The first issue here is of course this: is this guy the same person as the homeless alcoholic from the opening? Did he manage to turn his life around in the year that Go Ha Jin was in a coma? Perhaps. But another possibility is that yeah they’re the same guy but not mortal – he’s a spirit guide that finds Go Ha Jin in her moment of need.

This is you confessing, isn’t it, you stupid bastard, that you and the homeless drunk and Choi Ji Mong are one and the same and that you are a perverse sadist who enjoys watching the poor girl suffer.

I suppose at the beginning of the show, Go Ha Jin really needed a paradigm shift: when she first landed in Goryeo she viewed it as a second chance at life and rediscovered her will to live. But then what purpose did her brutal experiences serve? Why did her spirit guide put her through that nightmare of an experience? Surely she didn’t need to go through all that just to learn to appreciate her shitty life in the modern world?

IDK Mr. Spirit Guide, what a sadistic, roundabout way to teach her this ultimate lesson.

And if the spirit guide finds her in her moment of need, why did he have to show up now? She has no clear memories of her Goryean episode – they’re all buried in her subconscious – until he awakens them, and the recollections hit her like a freight train of heartache and regret. She’s now stuck in the present with memories of, besides everything else, a man who parted from her in anger and no way to make amends. What fricking lesson is she supposed to draw from that?

Why did you have to unlock her memory when all she could do about it is to regret life’s futility?

In short, I really enjoy Scarlet Heart Ryeo as a palace drama, but I also understand that a large part of that enjoyment is drawn from Hae Soo’s displacement. For one, it explains how she might have a unique character; for another, it heightens the sense of tragedy because every time Hae Soo goes through something heartrending I keep thinking how unfair that she has to endure that when she’s actually just good ol’ Go Ha Jin. The fact that she sometimes recalls that she’s actually Go Ha Jin and wishes she would wake up only deepens my sympathy. And yet, ultimately, I don’t understand why the spirit guide dispatched her on that journey, and for that, I will always be sorry.

I mean, if this is your advice to her, did you want to teach her a lesson or did you just want a spectator to the tumultuous history of early Goryeo?