Review of The Heirs / 왕관을 쓰려는 자, 그 무게를 견뎌라 – 상속자들

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m watching.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

So I quit and decided to focus on this blog. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

I’ve been running a little series for a while now where I revisit old television shows and movies I’ve watched throughout the years. Even in the past, before I started this blog and began taking it more seriously, I was always jotting down what I wrote about XYZ show or movie.

Today’s blog post is one over a decade in the making. I remember very clearly when The Heirs was coming out in 2013, and I was devouring this show. It was my first Korean drama, and the beginning of a snowball that led me to pursue the study of Korean language, studying in Korea, and now I have a master’s degree where I wrote an entire thesis on colonial Korean women writers.

That was quite a bit of a snowball, but I had some other side quests and studied many other languages in the mean time. But in 2013, I was a young teenager who was finding solace in a Korean drama, and I was obsessed with this show. Because I’m running this little series, I thought it would be fun to revisit the show after so many years and see what I thought about it now.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to keep going on and on in the introduction, as I know these can get quite lengthy.

A poor high schooler finds herself thrust into a school full of Korea’s wealthy elites, and finds love.

This series is quite the rollercoaster ride, so buckle up if you’re watching along with me. There’s a lot to discuss about this series, as there are so many different rabbit holes along the way.

Our female lead in this series is Cha Eun-sang, who comes from an underprivileged background. She’s not exactly the epitome of money, but at the beginning of the series, she finds herself in the United States searching for her sister. There she has no idea what she’s really doing in that search, but she runs into a wealthy chaebol heir along the way: Kim Tan.

He’s living in the United States as an exile, as his half-brother Kim Won wants to take over the business instead of Tan. Won will do whatever it takes to consolidate his power, and we see that impact of that business and power struggle throughout the show’s remaining episodes.

But for now, Tan meets Eun-sang and starts having feelings for her. One might even call it a puppy love at the beginning of the show, but he fell for her quite quickly if we’re going to be honest. However, there’s a major problem involved with this: Kim Tan is engaged with another rich heiress back in Korea named Rachel.

Both Tan and Eun-sang make their way back to Korea separately, but their story isn’t ending here. In classic Korean drama style, Eun-sang is transferring to the school he goes to, which is an elite private high school dedicated to the upper crusts of Korean society. She sticks out like a sore thumb, especially as all of the students are very aware of status and who everyone is.

Tan’s former best friend Young-do, who now loves to mess with Tan, then begins bullying Eun-sang in order to try and get under Tan’s skin. He can read Tan pretty well, and he knows that Eun-sang is the way to get to him right now. Things get even more messy though when Young-do starts falling for Eun-sang too.

As all of this drama unravels, there’s more to come, especially considering Tan has a fiancee. The B plots in this one can be quite memorable as well, as it’s very 2013 coded, and I was living for it as someone watching this show twelve years after its initial release.

Overall Thoughts

These shows are such a throwback to return to, and I was shocked to see Kang Ha-neul and Park Hyun-sik as characters in this show too. It’s been so long, and these actors have gotten so much bigger. Back in the day I didn’t even acknowledge them much, which is wild to see where their careers have gone.

Anyways, this is such a 2013 drama, as mentioned before. It’s full of so many cliches, but I can see how this show blew up back then, and why people like me were stumbling upon these kinds of dramas for the first time.

I think this is very much worthy to return to after a decade, even if it’s just for curiosity to see how exactly the show has held up after all these years. I’m happy I went back to it, and it’s quite entertaining, even though it’s not exactly high art in the end.

So go watch it if you’re curious or feeling nostalgic!

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