My Only Love Song — Characters & Cast

Initially, to get back to her career and her comforts as quickly as possible. That goal survives the whole run but changes meaning: what starts as a desperate escape from a hostile past becomes a choice she can no longer make cleanly, because going home now costs her something.

She begins as a genuinely unlikable protagonist — a snooty top star whose arrogance drives the plot by driving her off the set and into the van. The early stretch of the series is built on her humiliation: no staff, no status, no one who recognizes her face. Over the twenty episodes she moves from treating Goguryeo as an inconvenience to be escaped, to treating it as a place with stakes, to treating it as a place with people she cannot leave. Her final transformation is not softening into sweetness but redirecting her considerable will outward — the same imperiousness now spent on someone other than herself.

Money, security, and the freedom that comes from owing no one. It evolves into the far riskier desire to be chosen and to choose, which is the one thing his hustling cannot arrange.

Drawn from the famous Korean legend but rewritten as a money-crazed opportunist rather than a simpleton, On Dal spends the early episodes as a comic mercenary who treats the strange woman from nowhere as an asset to be exploited. His arc is the gradual failure of that transactional worldview: the more he tries to price Soo-jung, the less the arithmetic works. By the later stretch he is acting against his own material interest, and the legend's promised destiny — his union with the princess — becomes a burden rather than a prize.

Her royal position and the destiny attached to her name, set against her own desires — the friction between what a princess is for and what she wants.

The princess of the legend, and therefore the woman the story is supposed to end with. Her presence gives the romance its structural obstacle: she is not a villain but an inevitability. Across the series she functions as the embodiment of the ordained version of events, and the drama draws its tension from watching a living, willful person occupy a role that folklore has already assigned her.

Loyalty and survival within On Dal's schemes, gradually shading into genuine attachment to the strange household the story assembles.

Part of the supporting ensemble around On Dal, Sam-yong anchors the show's broad comic register and provides the ordinary human scale against which the leads' outsized egos are measured. As the tone deepens across the run, the comic supporting figures become the connective tissue of the found community that gives Soo-jung a reason to stay.

Duty and position within the world of the kingdom, set against the disruption the time traveler introduces.

A figure from the Goguryeo world who represents the period's own codes of honor and force, standing in contrast to On Dal's transactional pragmatism. His presence complicates the romantic and political geometry and keeps the historical setting from functioning as mere backdrop.