Even though Betrothed to My Sister's Ex isn't fully released, I decided to dive in. Following in the footsteps of many other Cinderella-esque takes, Marie is the younger daughter (not stepdaughter) of an impoverished baron. Her older sister, Anastasia, is the "beautiful" blonde one while she's supposed to be the "ugly" redhead and she's relegated to cleaning and tattered rags.
On Marie's birthday, she thinks she'll get a chance to celebrate but it turns out it's just a party to promote her sister to potential marriage prospects. She flees into the gardens and has a chance encounter with a charming and rich Count who's origins are from another land (that gets generally looked down upon as they are more swarthy skinned, etc, etc. racism, hello). He is immediately smitten but not imagining that the girl he met could possibly be the birthday girl, he sends a letter of proposal for Anastasia.
Here's one thing that I think was refreshing -- the parents are absolutely horrid BUT Anastasia (the perfect, blonde older sister) is actually very nice. There's a brief scene where you see her talking about her dreams with Marie; she would really love to open a tailoring shop in the capital and she's kind to her sister.
Anyway -- Anastasia is supposedly packed off to go marry the Count...but suffers a carriage accident on the way. I am 99% sure that she's not actually dead and just ran off and staged it because she wants to follow her own dreams.
The evil parents send off Marie as a substitute, assuming the Count will just take her for "one night of comfort" and then send her back where she can be a drudge again. Seriously, they are terrible.
So, Marie arrives and the Count is in a horrible funk because he thinks the woman he fell in love with is dead...but then the Maid Mio (who is the one with all the brains in this show) immediately figures out that he basically made a grave error in assuming Marie was the older sister. So he's now overjoyed but of course poor Marie who has no self worth at all has taken all of the things her parents did to her to heart and thinks she's worthless. She can't even begin to comprehend that he actually does want to marry her.
I've watched the 4 released episodes so far and I'm enjoying it though it's not surprising at all. The two main characters are both sweetly charming. She's (very) slowly gaining some confidence. Mio is great. The two bitchy maids got sacked (courtesy Mio) and I look forward to seeing Marie's glow up. If I were a betting person, the biggest conflict is likely to be that the sister's deception is discovered and Marie will try to give up the Count because of it, but will finally realise that it's her he has loved all along. Or the horrid parents will try some ploy to gain prestige.
