I feel like Rebel managed to tick a lot of the boxes that I like in these sageuk dramas. Really gorgeous hanboks, great fight-scenes, scenery, and a really good soundtrack that I can add to my writing playlist. But that alone doesn’t make a good show worth the while. Often there is also a very specific atmosphere surrounding sageuks and other period shows. For me they tend to much more about heroism than modern shows, which I enjoy. But I felt like Rebel did manage to do much more than that. The drama talks a lot about the ideology of the Joseon era, about these different social classes and some have even pointed out that it was critiquing some things that are happening in politics today. But while I did appreciate and enjoy that, that wasn’t really what I took, liked the most about the drama. I was more intrigued by these character-journeys that the drama took us on. I really enjoyed how almost all of these characters got to be very layered individuals. They were not just the hero, or just the evil gisaeng, or the old lady that is just there to cause the hero some trouble. They got to be more than that. And Hong Gil Dong didn’t just wake up one day and decide to be the hero of the people. Sure, a lot of the side-characters didn’t go through much personal development and kinda just went with the flow of the story, but all of the main characters, who the story revolves around, get to have some say in the story and have some meat on their bones. Even the women, which usually get the short end of the stick in these shows, got to be ambitions and not always nice, but the drama did a very good job in explaining why they were doing the things that they did. As well as what had led to that. And they weren’t just good or just evil. Having the bad guys in these shows sort off simple really works, sometimes. Like in Marvel movies, where the story really isn’t about them. But that wasn’t the case with Rebel. Like I mentioned before; these people have ambitions and flaws, and all sorts of things, and I feel like the shows does a good job explaining that and not really shame them for it. Some of the characters show up and you think that they are rather nice, but then it turns out that they aren’t as nice as they seem. I really liked that in Six Flying Dragons, and I really liked that here. Since Rebel is a very character-driven story, it can get a bit slow at times. Since the characters are moving the story along, appose to the story moving the characters along. The first part of the story is more about Hong Gil Dong’s father and it setting up a lot of things. He was a very interesting, gray-like, character. And when the narrative shifts to the main hero, Hong Gil Dong, the show changed a bit. It became a little slow at first, before picking up the pace again. I would say that the middle part of the drama was probably the weakest part of the show, for me. I felt like it was a bit too slow. It lost me a bit, or I wasn’t as invested as I was at the beginning. But around ep. 20 (I want to say) the story really hooked me again. And looking back, I can appreciate the slow-build of the middle a lot more. There was a lot of great buildup going on there that just exploded in the most exciting way toward the end. It constantly kept me on my toes. It was great.