There are too many different elements at play with the controversy around Joseon Exorcist, some understandable and others just nonsense of letting the jingoistic minority perform cancel culture on things that likely happened in history they simply don’t like/accept. After airing only 2 episodes, SBS has announced that it will be cancelling the remainder of the drama after first considering ways to resolve the netizen problems with it, the network is in discussion through the night and will make a final decision by the morning. I’m so disappointed, rather than individual viewers simply NOT watching, the collective mob has descended so a drama has no way to keep filming regardless of the harm to the cast and crew who worked hard on it. The problems netizens have with the drama are: King Taejong was shown slaughtering innocent people due to a hallucination which besmirches his good name in history, the food eaten at a Joseon border town to China was Chinese items mooncake and thousand year old eggs, Jung Hye Sung’s hairstyle and outfit look like C-drama period styling, and a sword used looks like Chinese style weapon.

The first issue has historians and even the descendants of the Joseon royal family upset and demanding retraction/cancellation. This could be fixed by re-airing the first two episodes and making all characters including the King fictional to Joseon history. The latter three are just stupid K-netizen pride and hatred of all Chinese things frothing at the mouth and I just can’t. But JE truly has no viable way to continue because all advertisers were pressured to and did pull their advertising and the filming sponsors (hanboks and location shoots) will not allow lend itself to the drama anymore so realistically there is no viable path forward left. I don’t think the drama can finish filming and sell itself to a streaming network like Netflix either, it has Kingdom already and probably won’t touch this touch potato lest K-netizens threaten to boycott Netflix as well. I am truly dismayed at what happened here, no wonder more and more people are genuinely aghast at this expanded “it offends ME and I think it’s wrong” cancel culture happening in developed countries.