I'm not Korean, and Battle of Fates got me curious about something.
The show was entertaining, but the way it frames saju felt off. Watching practitioners do 90-second cold readings of strangers felt nothing like what a real consultation apparently involves — structured analysis, luck cycles, elemental balance, a 30-60 minute session. It felt like watching a cooking competition where the judges only score plating.
What I'm genuinely curious about:
For people who've actually had a saju reading… or whose family did gunghap before a wedding, or went through jangmyeong for a child's name — did the show feel like it represented what that experience is actually like?
For younger Koreans especially… I've read that the generational divide on saju is significant. Parents who wouldn't skip gunghap, kids who see it as cultural tradition but not something they'd seek out themselves. Is that accurate, or more complicated than that?
And for skeptics… I'm curious about that perspective too. When saju comes up at family gatherings or before big life decisions, how does that actually play out when someone in the family thinks it's nonsense?
The international conversation about the show mostly treats it as "Korean psychics compete." That framing misses almost everything about why saju matters culturally. I would rather hear from people who actually grew up with it.
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Posted by sajuvoyage
10 Comments
Same as how you’d feel about horoscope
Apparently this show is being shunned, as they talked about deceased firefighter and mockingly described of their guesses on how he had died
You have to recall that this is a show made for an audience, so the rhythm it says is not the real one. I’m also kinda sure it says for the first part the readings are actually 10 minutes but you will not show the full 10 minutes of the consultation.
That being said, I agree that they could have given a cultural background.
It’s more like a harmless superstition that doesn’t really affect daily life, like avoiding a funeral before getting married. Most of the time, if you look closely at a person’s saju, it’s full of vague stuff that doesn’t really matter, and it’s not about regulating every little detail. Of course, some people take it to the extreme and mess up their lives, but you see the same with extremists in any religion, so maybe that’s just a universal phenomenon.
To be honest, I don’t mind seeing it for fun. Some women seek such fortune tellers to overcome their breakup. But people who blindly believe in fortune tellers are annoying. In the 1990s, many people opposed marriage when their children got married, if the fortune tellers were not in harmony. Usually, people who blindly believe in fortune tellers analyze their behavior according to fortune tellers, just like they analyze MBTI. Some women are obsessed with MBTI, fortune tellers, tarot cards, and shamanism. Personally, I never want to get close to them.
Never had, don’t know anyone actually cares about. But I know there are ton of shamans.
my mom really likes it, she nearly changed my name cuz a shaman told her the spirit behind the name was too strong for a wimp like me lol
It’s just another point of reference nothing more. They have hundreds of years of accumulated data. So if you remove that hocus pocus coat of paint it’s basically studies based on documentation of Koreans for hundreds of years. As long as you just think of it like that I think it’s ok. But the issue is too many people fall for the hocus pocus bullshit.
One thing to note is that there’s a saying that younger people should stay away from reading their fortunes since it can sway their fate too much. It’s very telling that even shamans themselves recommend minors and younger people (early 20s) to not get their fortunes read.
Saju readers and Shamans are two different things- saju is a study of 명리학, which is based on your birth date and birth time, while Shamans claim to communicate with souls and all the jazz.
As for saju, it’s more like eastern version of horoscope. So I guess just about how westerners feel about horoscope?
Fengshui is one that you can’t deny it’s incorrect. Also just like saju does which really happened as calculated and looked on.