This is a show I couldn't stop watching, so I mowed through it with 6-15 episodes/day something I very rarely do to this extent.

I love-hated it. It was insanely beautiful, very emotional, very exciting, but also like a never ending (>3000 minutes) nightmare.

Calling it a "nightmare" is highly personal of course.
The reason for why it was a bit hard to bear for me was the unusually high amount of scheming and betrayal that happens over and over again, it just doesn't stop, while there's (almost) never any kind of stable anchor for the characters you care about! Without that, the plotting feels a lot more heavy. There's very little healing in between this cascade of painful events and setups.
Be prepared for some chronic chest pain ;)

Also the one-sided, cliched portrayal of women's motivations was problematic (because there were no exceptions).
The majority of this show consists of intelligent, but highly competitive women and girls scheming, plotting against each other in the most cruel ways, creating rifts, killing, destroying friendships, families and other relationships out of jealousy, for vengeance or similar.
The rest is filled with plotting among the men, politics and struggling for power outside of the harem, abuse, some war scenes and tragic romance plots.

If you're a bit sensitive to these kind of things, you might suffer a bit while being entertained at the same time ;)
You'll want to get to the next episode to see the current terrible events resolved (but you won't have to wait long for the next incident to start).

As already mentioned, I didn't like the one-sided portrayal of women, the negative cliches involving female friendships and other areas. I can't explain in more details without spoiling anything, but besides the historical, and as such appalling, patriarchal setting, the show itself is unfortunately not free of sexism either.
For example I was disappointed about the stereotypical women's motivations depicted here.

The reason for why I was interested in this show in the first place was to see one of the most powerful female rulers in history.
Unfortunately this part is very minor, the show focuses almost exclusively on how our heroine came to power.
Besides that, there still are some empowering scenes where this strong heroine can flex her muscles, but I wish there had been more of them.

The acting is -with very few exceptions at the beginning- on an amazingly high level! Actresses/Actors are very beautiful too of course.

The costumes, as well as the make up and hair, are absolutely breathtaking! A lot of WOW moments, some of them really blew me away!

The music is very fitting and I liked it, but it gets a bit monotonous at times throughout this high number of episodes.

I liked it nonetheless, but it was painful at the same time, so I probably won't re-watch this.

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