North Korean studies scholar Alzo David-West writes that "Three of the alleged North Korean innovations in its national socialist realist musical theater are dynamic three-dimensional stage settings, stanzaic songs based on peasant-folk music, and panchang (an off-stage singing chorus), which in anti–Brechtian fashion constructs emotional links between character and spectator and controls the audience's interpretation of events.

Kim Il Sung claimed to have written it with his comrades in a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) guerilla unit while fighting against the Japanese in occupied Manchuria, and performed it on a makeshift stage in a recently liberated village as a form of anti-colonial propaganda.

[5] However, the veracity of this claim is disputed due to the difficulty of finding accurate information about Kim Il Sung's early life and guerilla career.

Sea of Blood was followed by the rest of the "Five Great Revolutionary Operas": The Flower Girl, Tell O' The Forest!, A True Daughter of the Party, and The Song of Mount Kumgang.

Revolutionary opera flourished in North Korea as Kim Jong Il began to take charge of many aspects of the country, particularly its arts and propaganda programs.

According to Kim, because opera combines music, dance, poetry, and theatre, it "constitutes a criterion for evaluating the level of a country".

The operas have been performed outside of North Korea, with Sea of Blood and The Flower Girl gaining widespread popularity in China.

[8] He was charged under Article 7, Paragraph 5 of the National Security Act[9] which punishes those who ‘possess or acquire’ and ‘produce, transport, or distribute’ subversive material.

In order for opera to be able to reach the maximum number of people, throughout all of North Korea and beyond, the songs must be memorable and easily repeated, "composed in such a way that anybody can understand and sing", according to Kim.

[14] Also central to North Korean revolutionary opera is the panchang, or off-stage song, describing the situation of the characters and their innermost thoughts and feelings.

According to Jeffrey Arlo Brown: North Korean revolutionary opera has some stylistic elements that make it easily recognizable.

Sets and backdrops must be realistic and three-dimensional, and are typically lavish and elaborate, eschewing abstraction for reproduction of real life elements.

However, sets must not only be a realistic approximation of the location, but also "describe the personality of the character living and working in that society", according to On the Art of Opera.

is the story of Choe Byong-hung, a revolutionary who pretends to serve the Japanese during the occupation, but suffers the anger of the people of his village, who find his deception too convincing.

According to the DPRK description, "The opera represents the transformation of the mountain area, once worthless under the Japanese oppression, into the people's paradise through the portrayal of the local girls' joyful life and the hero Hwang's personal experience".