SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!
Arthdal Chronicles Season 1
(아스달 연대기/Aseudal Yeondaegi)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10
Hi everyone! Back with a new review! With spring setting in and some changes in my personal and work life, it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster the past few weeks, but I’m glad I got to finish this one before the month ended. Luckily from next month on, I’ll get an extra day off so I’ll get to rest more and find more time and energy to invest in my love of watching all the dramas still on my list. Anyways! I finally got to watch this! I knew in advance that there will be a second season of this – I actually thought it was already out but apparently it got postponed due to the pandemic (as did so many projects). I was really curious about this series since I’ve never watched a fantasy K-Drama like this before, and I was really interested in how they would pull this off and what kind of tone this fantasy story would be set in. I was also really curious to see Song Joong Ki and Kim Ji Won acting in a drama genre I’ve never seen them in before. In hindsight, I would say that it reminded me mostly of Game of Thrones, without the sex. I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about it, but it definitely was something and it definitely made an impression on me. It’s going to be very complicated to write a review about this since there’s so much to this drama and it’s definitely not just one simple linear story, but I’ll do my best!
Arthdal Chronicles is a Netflix K-Drama of 18 episodes, with episodes of 1 hour and 20 minutes. It’s officially divided in 3 parts of 6 episodes, but I only found out about that after I’d finished it, so I wasn’t aware of that and watched it as a whole. But officially it’s divided in Part 1: The Children of the Prophecy, Part 2: The Sky Turning Inside Out, Rising Land, and Part 3: The Prelude to All Legends. It’s set in the fictional world of Arth, where there are many different lands with many different clans, with many different tribes, who worship many different gods.
In general, there are three kinds of people. The first kind is the Saram (incidentally the Korean word for ‘people’), and these are the ‘normal’ human beings with no special powers, and with red blood.
Then there’s the Neanthals, who are more feral, you could say. They have darker skin, blue eyes, lips and blood, and they possess more developed skills than the Saram. For example, they are stronger, faster, and their special eyes allow them to see clearly in the dark. The Neanthals have almost entirely been wiped out by the Saram by the time the story starts.
Thirdly, there’s the Igutus, and these are people born from one Saram and one Neanthal parent, so you could say they are like half-breeds. They carry a blue Neanthal scab on their back that eventually falls off and they have purple lips and purple blood. They also have some more powers than Saram, but not as apparent as the Neanthals. They also don’t look that distinctively different from the Saram except for their purple lips.
In developed Saram civilizations such as the Union of Arthdal, the capital city of Arth, where the majority of this series takes place, Igutus and Neanthals are seen as unnatural, beasts, monsters, whatever you want to call it. They are not welcome, in any case, and avoided as much as possible.
The series follows different characters from different parts of Arth, whose stories all get entwined with each other. What causes their fates to get entwined is the war that the Saram declare on the Neanthals.
It all started when Arthdal’s Union Leader, San Woong (played by Kim Eui Sung), attempts to strike a deal with the Neanthals, to join hands and start a nation together. Of course, this is mostly a strategy of the Saram to get their hands on The Plains of the Moon, the lands that the Neanthals officially own. The Neanthals refuse the offer, and while San Woong then spreads the word that they will send them another gift in order to persuade them, they actually start preparing a war against them.
A woman of the Asa Clan, one of Arthdal’s main clans, Asa Hon (played by Choo Ja Hyun) who is with San Woong on his mission because she can interpret for the Neanthals, is led to believe the gift story, and she is sent out to deliver fabrics and materials to the Neanthals, not aware that these fabrics are wrapped around remains of animals that died of an infectuous disease. Against Asa Hon’s knowing, this disease spreads throughout the Neanthals and on a night they all gather to celebrate the crescent moon, San Woong and his soldiers exterminate them all with fire arrows. They have nowhere to escape. The whole plan is set up by San Woong’s son Tagon (as a teenager played by Jung Jae Won), who will proceed to become the well-respected war hero of Arthdal.
Asa Hon, realizing her own tribe and union leaders have used her as a pawn to set this plan against the Neanthals in motion, decides to break ties with the Saram. She stays to take care of some Neanthal children that have lost their parents, and she even falls in love with a surviving Neanthal warrior and has two Igutu babies from him.
After the war, The Great Hunt begins, in which San Woong’s warriors’ unit, the Daekan Forces, hunt down the remaining Neanthals that managed to survive the attack and the disease. They manage to also kill the father of Asa Hon’s babies. Tagon finds one of the babies that was left in the bushes and takes it with him in secret, aware that it’s an Igutu.
Asa Hon flees with her remaining baby to Iark, a land where allegedly the gods of Arthdal can’t follow her.
The thing is, Asa Hon has dreams. Having dreams is not something that normal people can do in this world, it’s something that only people with special training or ancestry can have, and dreams seen as either hallucinations or prophetical visions. For some reason, Asa Hon has a dream about one of Arthdal’s gods, Aramun Haesulla, who appears to her in the form of a child. He tells her that her baby is cursed, that it will bring great calamity to the world, and that she has to give him her child. She refuses, and he threatens to take her life when they next meet, either that or the baby’s brother or father. Asa Hon believes that her Neanthal man’s life was taken because she didn’t give her child to the god, and decides to flee to Iark, far away, because there, allegedly, the curses of Arthdal’s gods won’t be able to reach.
It’s a long journey, and Asa Hon gets weaker and more sickly every year while her child grows up. When the child is ten years old, he manages to find a way down the Great Black Cliff so they can finally enter Iark, but when they manage to finally get there, the weakened Asa Hon collapses. When they’re found by a group of innate villagers, the Wahan tribe, in her final hallucination she suddenly sees the child from her dream in her own son and starts calling the boy out for being Aramun Haesulla and leading her to Iark on purpose. She tells him to go back once his blue scab falls off, and passes away shortly afterwards. Her child, Eun Seom, is then taken in by the Wahan tribe.
Ten years pass and in the meantime, Tagon (now played by Jang Dong Geon) is respected by the entire Daekan Forces as their leader. He has been out fighting for ten years as his father keeps finding ways to get him away from Arthdal. The baby that he took that day during the Great Hunt has been raised in secret, the only other person who knows about him is his lover Hae Taealha (played by Kim Ok Bin). She has helped him raise the Igutu boy. Her faithful servant Hae Tuak (played by Yoon Sa Bong) also knows about the boy, but not that he’s an Igutu, that fact is kept strictly secret between Tagon and Taealha.
Tagon suddenly receives a new order from his father to go to Iark, since they have finally found a way to descend the Great Black Cliff, and enslave a bunch of ‘barbarians’ living there because they need more workers. So Tagon orders his soldiers to do so. The ‘barbarians’ that become the victims here are, unfortunately, the Wahan tribe people.
In ten years time, Eun Seom (now played by Song Joong Ki) has become a member of the Wahan, although he can’t escape the fact that he wasn’t born as one. He also seems to be able to dream, and the others just find him a bit strange in general. The only person who accepts him for who he is, is Tanya (played by Kim Ji Won), a girl who’s next in line to become the clan’s Great Mother. However, Tanya is not able to dream or even memorize the Spirit Dance as she’s supposed to, so she struggles with her given fate. On the day of their festival, the Daekan Forces burst in and start destroying their village, slaughtering half of the people, including children, and they take the rest with them to the huge installation that has now been built on the Great Black Cliff to bring them up. Eun Seom goes in pursuit, determined to free his family, but this is not an easy thing to do. The brutal Daekan soldiers are not shy to keep killing the Wahan people along the way, and even though Eun Seom comes close several times, he and Tanya are still not able to meet. Tanya is able to keep the soldiers at bay with her talks of how she is the next Great Mother, and that she can put spells on people.
The final group ends up at Arthdal’s Fortress of Fire, and in an attempt to escape from there, Tanya accidentally stumbles upon Saya, the boy who was raised in secret by Tagon. To her immense surprise, he is the spitting image of Eun Seom, and she realizes very quickly that they must be twins. In Saya’s room there are many things that Eun Seom has described to her, things that he saw in his dreams. So we understand here, Eun Seom and Saya were separated as babies, but they are connected through their dreams. Since they don’t know of each other’s existence, they just interpret these visions as dreams, not aware that they are actually seeing things through each other’s eyes. Tanya is busted by Tagon, but instead of killing her (as he kills every single person that discovers Saya and/or that he’s an Igutu), he gives her to Taealha to raise as a servant. Tanya is a tough cookie though, and uses the things that Eun Seom has told her from his dreams to scare Taealha with stories she couldn’t possibly know about. For example, how Taealha once killed a servant girl Saya fell in love with and was planning to escape with. Despite her own worries, Tanya finally becomes able to dream and even hear other people’s thoughts, and she manages to climb her way up to being declared the new leader of the Asa clan – all the while following her own plan to attain ‘power’ as that is the only way to ever be reunited with Eun Seom again. Matters on Tanya’s side get a bit complicated when Saya starts developing feelings for her while also becoming more and more aware that people (who have seen Eun Seom before) start looking at him with a strange expression of recognition. In the meantime, Eun Seom starts uniting different tribes outside of Arthdal to follow his lead to eventually take revenge on Tagon.
While multiple parties, including Taealha’s father Hae Mihol (played by Jo Sung Ha) and the High Priest and Asa Clan leader Asa Ron (played by Lee Do Kyung), start plotting against Tagon’s ascension after his father dies, Tagon starts succumbing more and more to his greed of wanting to own all of Arthdal, starting with becoming the new Union Leader, being declared as the second coming of Aramun Haesulla, and then aiming to become King.
Honestly, I had a hard time getting into it in the beginning. For some reason I just couldn’t get myself to fully pay attention to all the events in the first half of the series and I just had it on in the background while I was doing something else at the same time. I think part of it had to do with the fact that, from the first minute on, you are immersed in the story before you even know what’s going on and who is who. The pace is quite fast, even in the introductory part in the first episode, and there’s immediately a lot of character and place names thrown at you. Only when I rewatched the first episode after finishing the whole series, did I fully understand what had happened between the Neanthals and the Saram and how the babies were separated etcetera. If you want to watch this series and really follow it from beginning to end, you REALLY need to pay attention to EVERY detail. Because as it happens, there’s also a lot of subtle foreshadowing in it that I just completely missed when I watched it the first time. In this sense too, it reminded me of Game of Thrones. Right off the bat you’re introduced to all these different characters from different lands and clans/tribes in Arth that all deal with their own issues, their own gods and rebellions. At some point, all the storylines will cross each other, but it takes some time to build up before that happens, and for me this took quite a long time. It wasn’t until I rewatched the first episode that I realized they were already talking about the Ago Tribe, for example, even though the Ago Tribe appears only in the final episodes and by then I didn’t even remember them being mentioned before. There are just SO many things going on.
I think it’s very fitting to call this a Chronicle series. The main story may be centered about these four main characters, but as a whole it’s about the entire fate of Arth, all its people and civilizations. In every place in this world, events are unfolding simultaneously, and I do think the writers managed to establish the links between the stories very well, even though it took someone like me a bit longer to understand all those links. And honestly, it succeeded in making that build-up up to the season finale, because I have to admit that even though I didn’t feel like I was very invested in it halfway through, and that might not even watch the second season, the way it ended just made me feel like I HAD to watch how it continues. Truly, they were very good with cliffhangers and the season finale was a perfect season finale moment. I really feel like I need to know what happens next!
Undoubtedly because of my lack of attention in the first half, I feel like I missed a lot of the initial plots being made against Tagon between figures like Mihol and Asa Ron. Since I found it a bit hard to follow in the beginning I really think I would have to rewatch the whole thing and pay really close attention to everything that’s being said to make better sense of it and not miss anything. The only thing I was aware of was that Mihol and Asa Ron kept changing strategies, then pretending to work together, then when Tagon busted them they pretended to be on his side again, while they were actually very keen on seeing him fall. Due to my lack of emotional investment at this point I couldn’t really understand what their actual motives were for this, although I can imagine that they just wanted to maintain the power they personally had and not give it away to Tagon. From Mihol’s side, since his clan used to be independent and was taken over by Tagon’s, I could understand that he had a lingering resentment against him. But the Asa Clan had been beside Tagon’s clan for years, even before the war, so I wasn’t entirely sure what Asa Ron’s deal was. I just found him a stubborn old man most of the time, so I wasn’t very invested in his story anyways. But yeah, there was definitely an ongoing game of ‘let’s try to bring Tagon down’ from multiple sides, including Tagon’s own father San Woong.
I don’t know if I can bring up the time and energy to rewatch this show, since it’s quite lengthy. But who knows, maybe when the second season comes out I’ll be able to focus on it better from the start.
Let me talk about the main characters in more detail, starting with Tagon.
Great almighty Tagon from the Saenyeok Tribe. The war hero and respected son of the Union Leader who the people of Arthdal all adore and admire so much. There’s no way he would be capable of killing his own father or showing cruelty to innocent people, right? If only it was that simple.
I’ve never seen a main character in a drama that left me with so many questions. I just couldn’t figure Tagon out. I just kept believing that he was a genuinely good person deep inside, that he was just a tragic hero figure that had been traumatized by his father. To be honest, he kept reminding me of Thorin Oakenshield from The Hobbit, with his constant melancholic expression and this vibe of being burdened by the power laid upon him. I did find him a bit mysterious as a teenager in the flashback though, the way he responded to finding that Igutu baby in the woods, how he just killed those two soldiers who witnessed it without batting an eyelid and what drove him to taking the baby with him. Why did he go through the trouble of raising it, even though he kept him locked away in a tower for all those years. As a teenager, he didn’t seem to be so troubled, he seemed to be friendly enough, so why did this trait suddenly appear? The reason, of course, has to do with one of the biggest plot twists of the series: Tagon is an Igutu himself. We don’t learn anything about his mother, he’s never known her and of course San Woong will take that secret with him to the grave. We only know that there has been a prophecy stating that Tagon will one day overpower his father, and this has made San Woong worried enough to keep sending him away on missions. But it’s not until we see Tagon’s flashbacks from when he was a child later in the series, that we see the full amount of his trauma. San Woong actually tried to kill Tagon when he was younger. He tried to ditch him in the forest and then when he still got out, he attempted to strangle him, although he couldn’t see it through. He does end up drilling it into his son’s head that he needs to kill every single person that sees his purple blood. And so it has become an automatic response to Tagon. Part of me kept feeling like he was just a victim of his upbringing, that there was still some good in him, because I really wanted to believe that. But then when he went on a rampage and all hell broke loose at the end, from that point onwards I felt like that final good part of him was lost. He kept saying that he didn’t like killing people, that he didn’t want it to come to that, but he still went on and did it. And at the end it just looked like he’d become completely numb to it all and didn’t care about it anymore as long as he could become King and have it all. So yeah, it was hard for me to sympathize much with his character, he was definitely very complicated and layered.
The same went for Taealha, actually. Taealha of the Hae Tribe, daughter of Hae Mihol, who is in charge of the Fortress of Fire and the only person who knows the secret of how to make bronze in all of Arthdal. She has been Tagon’s friend and lover ever since they were teenagers, they both loathed their fathers and bonded over that, apparently. In the beginning of the series, at the behest of her father who’s using her as a spy, she is seeing Tagon as well as San Woong. However, one night when she’s supposed to poison Tagon, she ends up revealing her father’s plan to him instead and this is the moment she decides she loves Tagon too deeply to keep the charade up. They remain a loyal and loving team for a large part of the series and they clearly care about each other deeply, but at the same time, there still isn’t a 100% trust. They still know the other is capable of betrayal, they know each other too well.
Taealha first agrees to the plan of making Tagon King because she’s willing to share power with him, but then when Tagon (with the cunning help of Saya) decides that in order to become King, he will need to know the secret of the bronze himself and Mihol is captured and tortured to spit it out, Taealha ends up helping her father take poison so that he won’t have to disclose the secret, entrusting it only to her. In this, she does betray Tagon and she only manages to keep herself safe by telling Tagon she’s pregnant with his baby. She won’t tell him the secret, but he also won’t be able to get it out of her through physical intimidation.
Their relationship was so confusing because of their weird trust system. You could see how much they loved each other and wanted to be together, even after Taealha betrayed him Tagon still told her he wanted to keep her and the baby by his side. It seemed to me as if the complicated political situation and their respective greed for obtaining power beyond Arthdal got in their way rather than that it united them. In the end, it was as if Taealha only agreed to marry Tagon because it would be a step closer to achieving her personal goal of gaining power, because now she didn’t want to share it with Tagon anymore. She is so unshaken about her intentions in the beginning, but I think that her father’s death changes her mind and that’s what makes her decide to honor him in succeeding his work for the Hae Tribe rather than just living happily ever after as Tagon’s bride. So yeah, Taealha was also a very complicated character, but having two main characters that were so hard to figure out also made it interesting in a way. You just never knew what they were going to do, they kept making unexpected choices and that really kept me on my toes.
Saya holds a whole different story in itself, as well. Of course we don’t know exactly how he was raised, because we only see a baby being taken by Tagon in the flashback, and then the next time we see him, he’s already an adult. When Tanya finds him in that room, at first it seems like he’s very timid, but after finishing it I would really not use that word to describe him. It doesn’t take long for him to show his true colors, and when he does, it becomes clear that he finds certain entertainment in messing with people’s plans and I would say that he definitely harbored some vengefulness and even a little bloodlust. For example, it turns out that he never forgave Taealha for having the girl he loved killed, even though he’s acted very meak in the years following it, pretending to be like a whipped dog. He overhears Taealha talk about how Asa Ron needs to die so Tagon won’t be forced to marry a member of the Asa Clan and how Tagon’s half-brother Danbyeok needs to live to put some other plans in motion. Saya then proceeds to sneakily switch the poisons so that Danbyeok dies and Asa Ron stays alive. He really just does that because he wants to interfere with Taealha’s plans, out of revenge, not even aware of what these plans were linked to. After that, when he’s let out of his tower and gets more responsibilities in Arthdal, he seems to really enjoy seeing Tagon (his ‘father’) develop into the cruel King he becomes. There is something wicked about Saya, that’s for sure. It hasn’t come out yet, but I feel like that will definitely happen in the second season. After all, he finally finds out about his Igutu twin brother in the final episode. The way he looked at Tanya, realizing that she’d had Eun Seom in her heart all this time and not him, was really hurtful and honestly, I’m a bit scared of what he will do next.
If the above characters are complicated, Eun Seom is definitely a breath of fresh air. There’s nothing dual about him, he is the good and just simple hero who wants nothing but to free all the slaves and have peace for everyone. Even though he has threatened to take revenge on people by killing them, even kidnapping San Woong to get the Union to free the Wahan people, he can never go through with it. Rather, this latter incident only causes him to become a fugitive because he gets accused of murdering San Woong, even though this is actually Tagon’s doing, but of course no one believes he could do such a thing. Eun Seom gets captured multiple times, but is always able to escape at some point, and throughout his rocky journey he keeps meeting people that get touched by his kindness and belief in equality. I think the great thing about Eun Seom is that he is in fact not a hero. Despite his few advantages as an Igutu, he isn’t physically strong or anything like that, and he also says this at some point. He still gets captured, he still gets treated like a slave, but the important thing is that he always finds a way out by being smart rather than strong. The ability to copy movements after seeing them once is definitely an advantage, especially when it comes to ways to defend himself, but he prefers not to get too violent if it’s not necessary. At the end of the first season he manages to unite the entire Ago Tribe by convincing them that he is the second coming of one of their gods, Inaishingi, because he survived their Judgment Ceremony (they threw him off a waterfall). Of course he never would’ve survived this, but luckily he had friends/allies who were looking for him, and they managed to save him. Every trail he leaves, either a visual trail or a mark on someone’s heart, comes back and rewards him in the end.
Something that really started jumping out to me as I continued watching with more interest, was the contrasts between Tagon and Eun Seom, and also the contrast in the situations between Arthdal and the places Eun Seom visited. I will say a bit more about this later, but for one I thought that the final shot of the last episode was a very powerful image. On the one hand we see Tagon, who just got crowned King and is already declaring war on the Ago Tribe, and on the other hand we see Eun Seom being euphorically tilted on the shoulders of the Ago Tribe people, their faces full of joy and hope for a better world. These two are definitely having an epic face-off in the second season.
Tanya is introduced to a world she would never even dare to dream about. She is very lucky to have escaped her fellow tribe people’s fates, and that she even makes it as far as the new head of the Asa Clan despite being a ‘barbarian’ from Wahan. We can see her getting more and more anxious in her situation, because even though she now has a certain power, she still cannot control the people like Tagon does, and when he keeps displaying behavior that goes against her morals, she becomes more and more concerned. She sees how her fellow tribe people are getting used to the life in Arthdal, her father is even working at the Fortress of Fire, studying about metals and materials. You can see that she longs back for their life in Iark, but she’s slowly losing the people she left with, leaving her just hoping to one day see Eun Seom again so they can figure something out together. In Tanya’s case, it’s just really obvious that she is driven into a corner. She wants to gain more power, but she doesn’t have a clear view of what power actually entails yet. Her intentions are still too kind and not as effective as Tagon’s, who will just push his way through with his army. I do think her plan of gradually getting all the lower-rank people, the poor and the oppressed on her side shows promise, because it’s also basically what Eun Seom is trying to do. He picked up somewhere that having power means having a lot of people follow you, so that’s what he’s focussing on: gathering people to follow him. In Tanya’s case though, I’m not sure if it will have an immediate effect. The scene in the final episode where she stands up for those enslaved children, where she gives them shoes and food and tells them they can be anything they want is really touching, though. I actually cried a little there.
As I mentioned briefly before, I couldn’t help but pick up on certain contrasts in this series, contrasts between its people and their way of living, and between the social/political situations in different places. In the beginning, you would think that Arthdal is THE place to be, it has the Union Leader’s equivalent to a palace, the market place, it’s the big city where wealth flows and the people all seem to be happy and safe and devoted to their gods. But then when you look at the politics and how events unfold, how many innocent people are physically punished for just being related to someone who ‘committed a crime’, and how normalized that’s become, it’s a really messed up place. The people don’t even bother thinking for themselves, they just need a leader to follow. Even if they don’t agree with that leader, they don’t rebel against them, they just keep silent.
On the other hand, the ‘barbarians’, as the Wahans are called, the people who supposedly have nothing to live for, they were living in such peace and harmony before the Daekan Forces came to destroy that. They didn’t have anything but they didn’t need anything. They lived in oblivion of all the cruelty in the world, they didn’t even know what the word ‘power’ meant, heck, they didn’t even have chairs to sit on but they were the happiest people. Happy in their freedom, in their nature, in their own primitive way of living and serving their own gods. If you ask me, life in Iark was a hundred times better than life in Arthdal.
Speaking of this world of Arth, I found some interesting theories. On some sites, the summary of this series just says that it takes place in the bronze age of a fictional world, but for example on DramaCool, it said that Arthdal is the fictional capital of ancient Joseon, and it calls the Wahan ‘Han Chinese’. I don’t know if this is just a bad translation or if there’s any truth to it, but I highly doubt that any of this is related to an actual historical period like Joseon. Arth probably refers to Earth, yes. And maybe the different tribes are based off of different ethnicities, and the different lands symbolize our continents, that’s possible. That’s also the case in Game of Thrones, after all, that just makes it historical fantasy. As far as I know it doesn’t really parallel any real ethnicities. It’s interesting to search for parallels, though. I’m not saying that I’m dismissing that the displayed discrimination against the Neanthals and Igutus and other tribes echoes messages of racism and xenophobia, it deals with real social and political issues that are still meaningful today. Every clan, every tribe has their own typical appearances, they have lighter or darker skin, their garments are different depending on where they live. The Ago Tribe clans differ a lot from each other in attire, even though they belong to the same Tribe. The clans in Arthdal all have different ambitions and intentions even though they’re all Saram. In the time period that this story takes place, ancient times, things like Tribe names and attires still matter more than the fact that they’re actually all humans.
When Eun Seom is still a child, Asa Hon tells him, ‘Whether you’re a Saram or not isn’t determined by the color of your blood. If you live among the Saram then that makes you one.’ And this proves to be true, because Eun Seom is raised by Saram as a Saram. He doesn’t even know what an Igutu is, let alone that he is one, he only discovers that when he approaches Arthdal. And even after he finds out that he is an Igutu, to him it makes no difference. He doesn’t start acting differently when he finds out about his roots. There’s a moment when he actually meets two wandering Neanthals in the woods, and because he’s only ever heard about them, instead of just jumping on other people’s prejudiced fears, he is curious about them. He makes his own judgements and he really just judges someone as he meets them and gets to know them better.
I really hope these two Neanthals will return in the second season as well, by the way. The reveal that one of them was actually one of the children from the flashback, one of the Neanthal children that Asa Hon saved in the past! And that he even recognized Eun Seom even though he’d only seen him as a wee baby! I loved that. I’m glad they survived and I hope they’ll be back. It would make sense in more than one way, because they also have that link with Noon Byul.
Which brings me to my next paragraph, in which I want to share some opinions about side stories and side characters that I found interesting.
First of all, Chae Eun and her family. Eun Seom first meets Chae Eun (played by Go Bo Kyul) when he approaches Arthdal, she helps him escape after he’s ambushed by a farmer and accidentally kills him. Here he’s still travelling with Doti (Go Na Hee), the only Wahan child who managed to survive the village attack. Chae Eun is actually the person who tells him a bit about the Neanthals and that he’s an Igutu. I found her a bit mysterious in the beginning, also because she didn’t seem to be like the other Saram; she immediately makes it clear that she is not scared by the fact that he is an Igutu, and even though she’s only heard stories about the Neanthals, she says that there were supposedly much more beautiful than Saram.
They meet again when Eun Seom arrives in Arthdal, and it turns out she lives there with her parents and younger sister. She then helps Eun Seom hide his identity (aka his purple lips) and gives him and Doti a place to stay. Doti stays with this family when Eun Seom is forced to flee after San Woong’s death.
Chae Eun is the oldest daughter of Arthdal’s best doctor, Ha Rim (played by Jo Seung Yeon) who also even treats Tagon’s wounds when necessary. Her father is a part of the Town Guild (I think that’s what it was?) and Chae Eun herself is secretly a member of the White Peak Mountain Hearts, a tribe resembling Wahan through which Tanya discovers her hidden ties to the Asa clan.
We eventually find out that Chae Eun’s younger sister Noon Byul (Elena An/Ahn Hye Won) is in fact a Neanthal. Ha Rim found her as a sick child and took her in and severed her lineages when he found out what she was so she wouldn’t appear as one. Noon Byul is still very sickly and gets exhausted easily, especially when her Neanthal lineages somehow get reactivated. But she is definitely a very interesting character that will undoubtedly become an even stronger link to the remaining Neanthals, how many there may be left. The two wandering ones I mentioned before also come to find Noon Byul at one point, asking her to join them, but she chooses to stay with her Saram family and they leave her in peace. Honestly, I don’t know what Saram have against these Neanthals because they’re really just people if you try to just talk to them.
The fate of Chae Eun’s family is one of the most devastating things to happen in this series. My heart still hurts. And on the other hand I am beyond curious to see what will become of Chae Eun and Noon Byul in the second season.
After Tagon gets really badly wounded and they need to treat him as discreetly as possible so no one will see his purple blood (after he went on that rampage), Ha Rim is summoned to treat his injuries under careful supervision of Taealha, and when he leaves he does so in a hurry. Taealha, suspecting that he noticed something, orders a few Daekan soldiers to go after him and make sure he doesn’t try to leave the city. If he does, they are to kill him and his family.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens. We don’t get to know what it is that Ha Rim may have noticed, but he is clearly panicking and as soon as he gets home he tells his family that they need to leave right away. They flee, leaving only Doti behind (thank god, in hindsight). But in the woods they are met by the Daekan soldiers and are cut down one by one while trying to run away. First the mother is shot through the throat from the back and dies almost instantly. After begging for his daughters’ lives, Ha Rim also meets his end. While the soldiers are trying to separate the two screaming sisters to end them too, Noon Byul’s Neanthal lineages are activated and she rips apart all but one of the soldiers before passing out. After managing to take refuge in a hidden cave somewhere, Chae Eun proceeds to take care of Noon Byul and attempts to sever her lineages again, but Noon Byul asks her not to do that anymore.
This scene made such a big impact on me because it was just so god awfully merciless. These soldiers just went on to kill an entire innocent family without even wondering why they had to, it didn’t matter, it was an order. These girls having to watch their mother and father die in front of them, their screams… The acting was SO good it gave me goosebumps. I just kept hoping the soldiers wouldn’t actually do it, you know, you just wish their conscience will get the better of them but then they are still merciless. The impending danger of Noon Byul’s transformation was acted out very well too. I was very impressed by it.
To tie this paragraph to my previous one, like Eun Seom Noon Byul is also an example of someone who was raised by Saram while being of another race that she herself doesn’t even fully understand. She is accepted for who she is by this Saram family, even given the lovely name Noon Byul because Chae Eun thought her eyes looked like stars, praising their beauty rather than their strangeness.
I believe Chae Eun and Noon Byul are definitely key characters who will come back to contribute to the second season.
Let me talk a bit about the Daekan soldiers, because they are of course also very important characters, at least in Tagon’s part of the story. There’s this small core of warriors that are the most loyal to Tagon, so loyal that will blindly follow any order given by him. People in Arthdal really should start thinking for themselves, in my opinion, because this definitely went out of hand a couple of times.
Before I go on to the jolly bunch of blind followers, I want to talk about Mubaek. Mubaek (played by Park Hae Joon), has clearly had his doubts about Tagon ever since he was a teenager. Ever since the boy started performing passing rites for dying soldiers while this was actually something only members of the Asa clan were allowed to do, Mubaek seems to have been slightly wary of him.
After rewatching the first episode, I realized that it actually starts off with Mubaek’s narration, he is the first voice we hear and he immediately starts describing the story with ‘how everything turned out so wrong’. This in itself already suggests that he doesn’t agree with how certain events have unfolded. I’m really interested in Mubaek’s character and when he’ll finally start to show which side he’s on and what he’s thinking, because he does keep a lot to himself, even when Tagon starts doubting him from time to time, he never gives away that his heart is not in Daekan anymore.
Moving on to the ‘jolly bunch’ as I’ll call them, there’s Mubaek’s younger brother Mugwang (played by Hwang Hee). Mugwang is one of the most active participants in the destruction of the Wahan village, and we see him intentionally shoot some fire arrows into a cave where children are hiding, causing it to explode. Ergo, not a very sympathetic guy. He definitely had ZERO issues when it came to killing innocent people, everything for Arthdal. When they capture the Wahans and drag them all the way to Arthdal, at one point Mugwang is cursed by Tanya. She tells him that his heart will be ripped out on a night with a crescent moon, and later that the last words he’ll ever hear will be ‘You’re too late.’ While the other soldiers keep teasing him about it, Mugwang remains to be crabby towards Tanya. Even when she becomes the new leader of the Asa Clan, he also refuses to acknowledge her as such. But as it happens, he is the soldier ordered by Taealha to go after Ha Rim that night, and there just happens to be a crescent moon. Karma has it that his fellow soldiers even tease him about it again, merely an hour before his heart actually gets ripped out. When they proceeded to kill the mother and then the father, it dawned on me quite quickly that it was going to be Noon Byul. Only Neanthals could rip people’s hearts out and this event was definitely more than sufficient to trigger Noon Byul’s lineages (they’d been triggered before when her family was in danger). As soon as I realized what was going to happen, a part of me was excited. I don’t know what that says about me, because despite the fact that those soldiers were definitely the bad guys here it was still horrible what she did to them, but I was glad that Noon Byul was going to be the one to do it because I just knew that the most humiliating for Mugwang, more than seeing that curse come true, would be that it would be done by a woman. And yeah, I just really did not care for him much at that moment.
I’ll keep it shorter with the rest of the crew, consisting of Gitoha (played by Lee Ho Chul), Gilsun (Park Hyung Soo), Yeonbal (Choi Young Joon), and my favorite: Yangcha (played by Ki Do Hoon).
I don’t know what it was about Yangcha, but he is just so mysterious! Not just in how he keeps his face half-covered (it does come off at one point and I was like OMG BIG REVEAL but then it wasn’t even that big of a deal? Like I thought that maybe he had a big scar on the lower half of his face or something?), but there was something off about his behavior as well. In the first episode, Gilsun tells Mubaek that once Yangcha finishes his training, he might take over Mubaek’s position as Daekan’s best warrior. I don’t know if this will come back in some way, if more will be revealed about this, but I’m here for it. At the end of the season, Yangcha is Tanya’s personal security guard, and there’s just something mild about him now? Of course Tanya still doesn’t trust him 100% because he was also very actively involved in destroying her village and killing her tribe members.
Seriously, if there’s one thing that bothered me about this series is that there were so many characters I really, desperately wanted to like but just couldn’t because of my morals. I really thought these soldier characters were nice characters, and they were such a good bunch together. Amongst each other, they always had each other’s backs, they had such a strong brotherhood with Tagon and I just wished that they could have had the mind of their own to see that Tagon too, was slowly spiralling out of control. I wished that the way they acted when they were joking around with each other would have extended to other people as well, that they would’ve at least felt some sort of reluctance when being ordered to kill innocent people. But it was just a sport to them and they really didn’t care who they had to kill if they could use the opportunity to show their loyalty. I had mixed feelings about everyone! I wanted to like everyone, because as characters they were really interesting and well-written, but they just kept on doing bad things.
In the end, although I did think Mugwang had it coming, I still felt a little bad and also for Mubaek, losing his little brother like that. The scene where he came into the room and saw him laying there and just started crying… Ouch. That hurt my heart.
Before I move on to the Wahan people (can’t forget about them!), I want to talk about some more people in Arthdal that I found interesting. I just realized I haven’t talked much about Hae Tuak yet, and I really want to say something about her.
As Taealha’s personal servant, Hae Tuak initially seems like a very goofy woman, she is a kind of comical note and she doesn’t shy away from speaking her mind around Taealha and Tagon, as she feels comfortable around them. You could say she lets her guard down a bit when she’s around people she’s comfortable with, but she never loses her respect towards those higher in rank than her. Apparently, her comical and light-hearted way of acting is linked to a certain confidence, because she’s a very good fighter and she knows it. Taealha instructs her to teach Tanya how to fight when they first take her in, but Tuak doesn’t have the patience for this. While she knows her place in regards to the higher-ups, she can be very condescending towards people below her. As she is from the Hae Tribe, her loyalties lie with Mihol, but she also fondly supports Tagon and Taealha’s relationship.
Same as with the Daekan soldiers, I had mixed feelings about her. Her character in itself was very likeable, she really was a comical note amidst all of the conspiracies between clan leaders, but still I couldn’t fully like her because she was still an Arthdal person, which means that she wasn’t against physically punishing people. She was true to Taealha, but her intentions also become ambiguous at some point. So I just didn’t really know what to think of her. Her acting also seemed to be more modern and a bit out of place than the rest, it didn’t bother me so much because it made her character more unique, but in another way she also felt a bit like the odd man out in some situations. I really didn’t like her attitude towards Tanya, she could get quite obnoxious when she felt like she was in charge.
Someone else I liked was Hae Yeo Bi (played by Park Sung Yeon). She was Mihol’s most faithful servant, but she was more of a trustee than a servant, I think. He always kept her with him and she always followed his commands. I liked her dynamic with Hua Tuak a lot, because you could see that they were not on very good terms, and they were both pretty good fighters. It could have made for more comical face-offs between the two, but I guess there wasn’t much time for that. Yeo Bi was definitely shocked by Mihol’s death, but I believe that she’s now going to follow Taealha in her new mission to fulfill what her father started, what’s left to do for the Hae clan. I hope Yeo Bi will get into some more action in the second season, I liked her character.
I have mentioned Asa Ron before, and I think I’ve already said enough about him (lol), but I do want to say something about the Asa Clan. I wish I’d learned more about how their clan became connected to Tagon’s because they were so different, yet they kept pretending like they were on the same page. So the Asa Clan is like a clan of high priests and priestesses, they’re a bit spiritual, you could say. Asa Ron is the leader until he ultimately gets killed by Tagon, whereafter Tanya replaces him, but not after she has to prove that she’s the direct descendant of Asa Shin, one of the earliest Asa Clan leaders.
The whole Asa Clan just has this Elvish vibe and I can’t describe it any other way. They all looked really elegant, with long white robes, both men and woman with long hair. They performed rituals to convey messages to the gods and stuff like that, but mostly they prided themselves on their own power within Arthdal – they kept the religion going and that was one of the most important things to the union members/subjects of Arthdal. They would always support the Asa Clan because of this, which always threw a spanner in the works for Tagon whenever he wanted to act against Asa Ron.
Asa Ron ended up being a bit pathetic, in my opinion. He barely escapes Tagon’s rampage and then gets all excited about learning Tagon’s secret of being an Igutu, because now he has a hold over him. But then he happens to come across Mungtae, of all people, who has by then decided to stick by Tagon as he’s the most powerful person, and he delivers Asa Ron right to him. It was unfortunate for the old man, but I honestly didn’t know what else he would have been able to do if they’d let him live, so I guess it had to happen. There were two Asa Clan members who were always by Asa Ron’s side, Asa Yon (played by Chang Ryul) and Asa Mot (played by Seo Eun Ah). I don’t know how they were related, how anyone in the Asa Clan was related, because besides Asa Ron everyone else seemed relatively young. Anyways, Asa Mot is at one point wedded off to Tagon to connect the Saenyeok Tribe and the Asa Clan (much to Taealha’s dismay), but you can’t really call it a marriage since the two care nothing for each other. After Asa Ron dies and the whole clan is reformed, Asa Mot is lastly seen being punished to having her feet cut off, together with every single family member of any of the people who had seen Tagon’s purple blood that one night. This was also a horrible display, by the way, how they even dragged little children along that literally had nothing to do with anything. Anyways, we don’t see what happens to Asa Mot or her other clan members after that.
The only White Mountain Tribe/Asa Clan member that is seen to be spared from immediate death is the Great Mother Elder, Asa Sakan (played by Son Sook). She is kept a prisoner and we even see Taealha visit her at the end, although we don’t get to see what she asks of her. This woman seems to know the most about the link between Tanya, Eun Seom and Saya, and I’m sure this will also come back in the second season.
Finally, one on to the Wahan people! Although at least half the tribe dies – first when they’re attacked during their festival and then some along the way, they showed the kind of connectedness that I would’ve like to see in the Daekan soldiers as well. I mentioned before that there is a big contrast between the people of Wahan and the people of Arthdal. Both the Daekan bunch and the Wahan Tribe were close, like family, but the ironic thing is that the Wahan people, while literally not concerned with any other type of people beyond themselves, still were more able to show empathy to their unknown surroundings than the Daekan soldiers ever could, despite having visited many places and dealing with many different people. The Wahan people, forcibly plucked from their homes, tortured and forced to work while being treated like animals, still never lose their kindness. Despite going through hell, Tanya’s father Yeolsan (played by Jung Seok Yong) keeps his curiosity of making things. His genuine curiosity even makes Tagon decide to let him work in the Fortress of Fire to learn more about forging methods. Despite what has been done to them, these people would still never resort to revenge, to make others experience what they’d been through.
The only person from Wahan that loses his way is Mungtae (played by Park Jin). During an earlier escape attempt at the Fortress of Fire, Eun Seom incidentally stumbles upon Buksoe and Dalsae (played by Kim Cheung Kil and Shin Joo Hwan) and manages to get them to safety. The rest isn’t so lucky, and Mungtae has carried a grudge ever since; in his eyes, they purposely left the rest of them behind to save themselves. Eun Seom wouldn’t be Eun Seom if he wasn’t already a new plan to save the rest of them as well, but Mungtae’s faith has by then already started to shatter. By the time Eun Seom actually attempts to come back and save them, Mungtae rats him out to the Daekan Forces that are holding them. Eun Seom and Dalsae (Shin Joo Hwan) are then captured again. Meanwhile, Gilsun is impressed by Mungtae’s betrayal and even helps him become a guard. So now Mungtae has got things going for himself, but the fear returns when he hears that the people he betrayed are coming back to Arthdal, because he knows they will tell on him to the other Wahan people, his family that was so glad to see him again, that he betrayed them. Mungtae is then also consumed by a blind greed for power, or at least to remain on the side of the person with the most power, and he also turns into one of Tagon’s mindless soldiers. That scene where he just suddenly starts hacking into those people who were questioning Tagon about how their tribe leaders suddenly disappeared (they belonged to the people who died at Tagon’s hand for having seen his purple blood), was terrifying. Tanya was there to witness the whole thing and you could just see the terror on her face. To see one of her brothers, one of her dear friends and tribe members that she’d grown up with as a child, suddenly behave like this, that’s exactly what I meant earlier when I said that slowly but surely, people are slipping away from her. They start to take on new roles, new lives, they adapt to their new situations and circumstances, for better or for worse.
By the way, is it just me or did Buksoe just disappear? I believe he managed to get away while Eun Seom and Dalsae were capture, but we haven’t seen him since. I wonder what happened to him and if he’ll come back one day.
After escaping the Daekan soldiers again, Eun Seom and Dalsae flee with some other slaves and eventually meet the Momo Tribe. Their leader (or Xabara), Karika (played by Karata Erika) becomes indebted to Eun Seom after he saves her and her baby from soldiers that come after her, and she is now also a friendly ally. She and her people are also the ones who save Eun Seom from that waterfall judgement trial of the Ago Tribe.
Can I just say how much I loved to see such wonderfully powerful badass women in this drama? In fantasy series like this, ones that are set in ancient times, women always tend to be the oppressed. The only women with any kind of power are from rich families, usually, they have social status, but I really liked seeing some strong female Tribe leaders.
It’s a pity that the Ago Tribe was only introduced so late in the series, I haven’t fully formed an opinion about them yet. I still don’t know if they can be fully trusted, but they are definitely going to play a big role in the second season. After all, they’re going up against Arthdal with Eun Seom as their new leader against Tagon!
I love how, even with the seemingly happy ending on Eun Seom’s side, where he is carried off on the shoulders of the Ago Tribe, there is still a snake in the grass. Tagon mentions in the last episode that he has a spy in the Ago Tribe, and at the very end we find out that that’s Suhana (played by Kim Jung Young), who was previously the right hand of the Ago Tribe’s Tae Clan leader. Earning her name as Red Claw as she sends her messages to Tagon through a hawk with red claws, I wonder what methods she’ll be using to spy on Eun Seom as well. Seriously, the ending of this season had me so hyped!
I want to talk a bit about Ipsaeng as well. Ipsaeng (played by Kim Sung Chul) is one of the other slaves that Eun Seom and Dalsae manage to escape with and he is possibly the most untrustworthy companion Eun Seom could’ve chosen. They travel together to deliver the news one of the slaves’ deaths to his wife, and in that journey alone, Ipsaeng betrays Eun Seom like five times, even leaving him to get attacked by a bear one time! And STILL Eun Seom comes back for him. I loved how Ipsaeng was like the polar opposite of Eun Seom. Their upbringings couldn’t have been more different and still they managed to bond. Their dynamic was continuously interesting to watch, because they both just wouldn’t budge to agree with the other’s way of thinking.
Ipsaeng belongs to the Tae Clan of the Ago Tribe, but initially claims that he can’t go back because he’s not recognized by his people anymore. However, it turns out that he was actually the son of the clan leader, but that his uncle killed his parents and sent him into slavery when he was a kid. Understatement to say he doesn’t really feel any familial connections with them anymore. After we meet his uncle, the one Suhana serves, we can see why (great cameo appearance of Go Chang Suk, btw). But at least Ipsaeng comes around and stays with Eun Seom as he becomes their new Inaishingi.
In-between, I also really want to give a shoutout to the amazing OST of Ailee’s ‘Poem of Destiny’ because it just fit the series’ concept SO well and it gave me goosebumps. It was similar to how I experienced Hwasa’s ‘Orbit’ for The King: Eternal Monarch. I loved it.
I want to close off this review – I think I’ve written quite enough by now, I even rewrote some parts because I felt I didn’t express things well enough the first time around – with my usual cast comments.
All in all, I really liked the cast and I also liked that there were a lot of people I didn’t know. Of course, since the actors in this drama looked very different from what they’d look like in a modern times K-Drama, chances are I may not have recognized some people that I do actually know, haha.
In my continuous remarks about how much this drama reminded me of Game of Thrones, can I just say that they did a terrific job with the casting? I wouldn’t even call it an ‘Asian version’ of GoT. As far as I could see, there were no major references to ancient Asian culture, there were no temples or other traditionally looking buildings you’d find in ancient Asia, the clothing also wasn’t typically Asian. The setting was just as fitting for an international fantasy series like GoT, and I loved how it didn’t feel off at all that the actors happened to be Asian. Everyone just fit so well with their characters, and I just wanted to express that I was really impressed with how they pulled this series off.
First of all, Jang Dong Geon. I can see on DramaWiki that he did a LOT of dramas in the 90s, but that he had a long hiatus between 2000 and 2012. I’ve personally never seen anything of him before. I mentioned earlier that he reminded me of Thorin Oakenshield and I mean that in a good way. I think he was a very good cast for this role, he just exuded that energy of Tagon, sometimes gentle and kind and just, and then suddenly he could show this intimidating and threatening streak. He showed a wide variety of expressions and emotions, which was awesome. I think Tagon must have been a very challenging role to play, but it suited him very well. I really wish to gain some more sympathy for his character and less mixed feelings!
Although I could swear I’ve seen Kim Ok Bin somewhere before – her face looks so familiar! – I haven’t seen anything of her, either! I see on DramaWiki that she’s the vocalist of a rockband and that her dance moves have earned her the name of Korean Beyoncé and now I’m intrigued, haha. Anyways, again, perfect casting fit. She had the exact energy for the meticulous Taealha, just the right fit for someone who had to keep a straight face and hide her emotions to stay in control. I think Taealha also is a very challenging role to play, and as the actress of course she had be to be exactly clear of what her character’s intentions were, even though she could never say them out loud. That meticulous part of her, the way she never revealed how she was truly feeling while you could see all those signs on her face that she was having a lot of thought, that really impressed me about her.
I’ve seen a couple of things with Song Joong Ki, like Sungkyunkwan Scandal, Descendants of the Sun and the movie Space Sweepers, but I never really connected with him for some reason.
This drama, however, changed my view of him for the better. First of all, because he plays two roles, Eun Seom and Saya. I don’t know how he did it, but they really were two completely different people. It was brilliant. At some moments I didn’t even feel like I was watching the same actor, that’s how distinctively he played them. One different glance in his eye was enough to change the whole vibe of the character and that’s such a gift. I really loved Eun Seom, he’s just one big ball of goodness. Saya scares me a bit, to be honest, but he also fascinates me. And can we just appreciate how good Song Joong Ki looks with long hair and makeup?!?! I really liked his performance here, it may be my favorite performance of him so far.
I think I’ve mentioned this in a previous review of a drama with her, but Kim Ji Won is really growing on me as an actress. I’ve seen her in To The Beautiful You, The Heirs, Descendants of the Sun, Fight For My Way, and Lovestruck in the City. The thing with Kim Ji Won is that she’s finally getting detached from the “bitchy” roles that she used to get ALL the time. There was a time when I couldn’t see her as anyone else than ‘that actress that always plays the bitchy girl’. In Arthdal Chronicles, she’s anything but that.
Tanya is a victim that’s trying to make the best of a situation that she doesn’t see a way out of. I really liked her character, mostly how smart she was. I was surprised how fast she made the connection when she discovered Saya, how she didn’t just blurt out ‘Eun Seom??’ even though she did think it was him when she first saw him in her dream, but that she immediately thought ‘Huh, this must be Eun Seom’s twin’ and made the connection with the things in his room that Eun Seom had described to her from his dream. She also managed to immediately make use of Eun Seom’s dream stories and remembered enough to make Taealha believe that she really did have some psychic abilities. She really saw what was going on, and that was really cool. Rather than just being a deer in headlights all the time, she was constantly analyzing her situation, trying to think of a solution the best way she could.
It’s possibly the meakest role I’ve seen of Kim Ji Won so far, but it just proves that she’s very versatile and she really shouldn’t just be casted as one typecast because she’s that good.
There a lot of actors that I didn’t recognize but after searching them on DramaWiki I found out I actually saw several dramas with them, so I guess it really is the power of make-up and costume? That or I just really don’t remember people, haha.
Park Hae Joon, who played Mubaek. I’m really curious to learn more about his character in the second season because it seems like his doubts about Tagon are increasing by the day. He is the only one who finds out about Tanya, Eun Seom and Saya being the three prophecied children and he seems to be determined to keep this secret and also protect Tanya. I see on DramaWiki that I’ve seen Park Hae Joon before in Doctor Stranger and My Mister, but honestly, I don’t remember. He does have a familiar face though. He was one of the characters that I found really interesting because you can just see his beliefs start to waver at some point and I’m curious how he’s eventually going to act on that.
Apparently Hwang Hee (Mugwang) was in Tomorrow With You and had a cameo in Lovestruck in the City. Honestly, I need to look at faces more properly, haha. But yeah, despite him being an incredibly cruel guy, for some reason I kept hoping he would be a better person. I was hoping that he’d have a better conscience, so I have mixed feelings about his character. I guess I really wanted to like him but my principles didn’t allow me to, lol. Anyways, he played the character very well, I can’t wait to suddenly spot him in a modern time drama and be like ‘????’ , haha.
I need to mention Son Sook here, who played the Mother Elder of the White Mountain Tribe that the Asa Clan belonged to. Seriously, Son Sook always plays the sweetests and most fragile grannies, yet in Arthdal Chronicles… I don’t think I’ve ever seen er perform a more vital role than this before! I almost didn’t recognize her, also because of the makeup, but also because up until now, the roles I’ve seen of her have all been like the ones in My Mister and Room No. 9, fragile old handicapped ladies. It was so cool to see her in such a steadfast role for a change!
I recognized Jo Sung Ha (Mihol), and I see that I’ve seen him in Sungkyunkwan Scandal and 100 Day Husband, which are both historical dramas, so maybe that’s why this look looked so familiar on him. He has the face of a cunning man, and I think that’s also what made him a very good fit for Mihol. It must have been quite a fun role to play, because he was as meticulous as his daughter (or the other way around), and although Tagon saw through him multiple times, he did manage to keep his head up and survive – until Tagon’s greed to own every piece of knowledge in Arthdal by himself. Mihol ended up dying without regrets, he didn’t give in to Tagon and Saya, and he died in the knowledge that at least his daughter was still loyal to him, after all, so that must have been a consolance. Despite his plans against Tagon you could see that he really cared about his daughter and his clan.
I just wanted to mention that I saw Park Sung Yeon in Abyss just before this, I didn’t really discuss her then because she was a fairly minor character, the sweet housekeeper in Ahn Hyo Seop’s house. But now, as Yeo Bi, she suddenly she had a completely different vibe! She was definitely not someone to joke around with either! It was so cool to see her transform from one drama to another like that. Another badass female character that I liked in this series. I want to see her get into some more action in the second season.
Yoon Sa Bong, who played Hae Tuak. I am shook because apparently I’ve seen so many dramas with her and I don’t remember her in ANY of them. She was in Shopping King Louie, Tomorrow With You, Fight For My Way, and also in a couple more I still want to watch! I gotta keep my eye open for her now. On the one hand, I liked Tuak’s light-heartedness, her jokes and exaggerated complaints when she was forced to carry out a tiresome task. She lightened up the series in the midst of all the chaos that was going on. She was refreshing and comical amongst, but I still had mixed feelings about her. I wanted to like her without any restraints, I just wanted her to be a good person in every aspect, but I suppose being from Arthdal already takes the ability away from a person. I am curious to see more action from her too though, because I feel like they still kept her true skills hidden for the most part. I did like the actress in this drama, even though I something felt like she didn’t fit in as well as the others. I’m not sure what it is about her.
I didn’t know Go Bo Kyul was in this! I’ve seen her in several things before, like Producer, Cinderella and the Four Knights, Goblin, Go Back Couple and That Man Oh Soo. I really liked Chae Eun’s character, I really hope she and her sister can come back in the second season. She was so helpful and caring, she really cared about people even though they weren’t from her clan/tribe. She cared about Eun Seom after just having met him. She initially kept ushering him to get out of Arthdal because it wasn’t safe for him, she really didn’t want him to get hurt. Her heart was in the right place and she would never harm anyone the way she was hurt, even after what happened to her parents. In my book, that’s what makes you a good person. I was really impressed by her performance here, especially the scene I talked about before. I’ve never seen her act so desperately before, it was really heartbreaking.
Of the Wahan people, I liked seeing Jung Seok Yong as Tanya’s father, he’s always a friendly face to see in K-Drama and he also didn’t look out of place because I’ve seen him in a historical drama before as well. I know him from I Miss You, Moonlight Drawn By Clouds, Tunnel, Lookout, Room No. 9 and Move to Heaven. I’ve seen Shin Joo Hwan (Dalsae) in Producer, Cheese in the Trap and Circle, apparently! He was probably my favorite of the remaining Wahan people, I hope he gets some more action in the second season too. And Go Na Hee as Doti was absolutely adorable, apparently she was also in Hidden Identity, Madame Antoine, Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, Ruler: Master of the Mask and Fight for my Way.
Lastly I just wanted to say it was cool to see Karata Erika and Tripathi Anupam in this series as well.
Karata played the badass leader of the Momo Tribe, Karika. The funny thing is that I recognized her but I couldn’t place her in any K-Drama I’d watched – and then I found out she’s Japanese and I actually knew her from some J-Drama like Koe Koi, Kizoku Tantei and Todome no Kiss! It’s not often that we see Japanese actors in K-Dramas, and I definitely didn’t expect it, but it wasn’t out of place at all, it was just very cool. It must have been a challenge to master that language!
And Tripathi Anupam was there too! Honestly, I haven’t even seen Squid Game but I know his face from all the pictures, I actually recognized him from something I haven’t even watched. He was someone in Arthdal from the town council/guild that Chae Eun’s father also belonged to, I think. He was seen quite regularly, responding to the events happening in the capital. I liked that it was normalized that the actors weren’t all just Korean, but Asian in general.
To conclude, I would just like to say some final things about the series. First and foremost, it looked absolutely stunning. I read that they filmed everything on location in Brunei, so they must have had quite the budget. All the sceneries, the sets, the locations, the nature with the waterfalls… everything looked so beautiful. I especially liked the spot in Iark where Eun Seom and Tanya practiced that dance together in the beginning, that was so pretty.
I wonder how much sets they build by themselves. I can imagine the market place and the rooms in the palace being built sets, but the birdview shots of Arthdal were probably CGI. In any case, they made everything look really beautiful. I really felt like I was in a different world, I’m still processing that these are actually existing places on our own earth!
I really loved the costumes and the makeup as well. I liked the make-up that Tanya and Eun Seom got during that festival, and that it came back with the White Peak Mountain Hearts. Taealha’s dresses were GORGEOUS. Honestly, everything seemed so well designed, so well thought out, the attention to detail to which look fit which character the best, all the way to the hairstyles. I was curious to see how they would visualize all of this. I’m not always a big fan of fantasy, and things can become overexaggerated easily in my eyes, but I can’t express enough that I think they made it look absolutely stunning.
And yes, for the last time, it really DID remind me of Game of Thrones, haha. From the characters to the amount of manslaughter, but also in the mapping of the world and, in technical terms, the opening sequence! Every episode’s opening sequence is different if you pay attention (which I did start doing at some point), it shows different places and figures/symbols that would feature in that specific episode. And I also love how they invented different languages for the series. I listened carefully, and I think I was able to pick up a few words to prove that the Neanthal language may actually just be Korean backwards, haha. But then there was also the language of the Momo Tribe, and just… so much attention to detail!
I said in the very beginning that I wasn’t really sure how I felt about the series. This was mostly the case when I still had a hard time getting into it and when I felt that this wasn’t really my kind of genre. However, I did manage to get into it eventually and then I really started appreciating this series for the gem that it is. It’s so unique in its kind and genre, and they really put in a lot of effort to make it look like it really took place in a different world.
It took a bit of time for the storylines to get where they needed to get all the characters in position to start off the real story, but from then on it only got more interesting. I kept feeling those plot twists, too! I even changed my ranking of this series halfway because suddenly it did all start to get exciting and I did manage to get invested in it. Honestly, I feel like this series could’ve easily aired internationally, it would’ve fit right into that genre of historical fantasy.
This is a series that I would definitely have to rewatch in order to not miss anything and fully grasp what is happening from the beginning. I mean, come on, the two babies are literally mentioned and shown in the first episode, so why did I still go 👁👄👁 when they actually showed the flashback of Asa Hon, her Neanthal man, and the two babies side by side? Exactly, because I hadn’t been paying attention.
Paying attention is very important with this series, because if you do, you’ll realize that the writing is actually quite genius. They are foreshadowing all kinds of stuff in the first episode that you completely forget about until it suddenly happens and you’re like WHATT. So yeah, it did keep intriguing me to the end and now I just really want Eun Seom and Tanya to be reunited so now I HAVE to watch the second season. Besides the long-awaited reunion on Eun Seom and Tanya, I’m also very much looking forward to Eun Seom and Tagon facing off against each other, and also to Eun Seom and Saya coming face to face. I wonder how they’re going to film that. I want to know more about the Neanthals and about certain characters like Mubaek. I want Chae Eun and Noon Byul to reappear. Also, I really want to know more about this prophecy of the three children, with the mirror, the bell and the sword, because I couldn’t really follow this. I just understood that Tanya, Eun Seom and Saya were connected because all three of them were born on the same night under a blue comet, but apart from some speculations this storyline hasn’t really played out yet so I’m hoping to get more clarity about that. I just have so many questions that haven’t been answered yet, the story is still wide open, anything can still happen and I’m really curious to see how the chronicles will continue.
We’ll probably have to wait until 2023 for the second season to air, so I will probably have to reread this review, at least, when it finally comes out.
Despite my lack of investment in the beginning, this series actually managed to pull me in and even change my mind about the fantasy genre. It’s still not my favorite genre, not gonna lie, but this series was really well-made, really well-written, and really well-acted. I just want to see how it ends, even if it’s just to get closure. It took me a long time to write this review, as I’ve said I even rewrote it which also took me a long time. I just kept thinking of things that I’d missed, but now I think I’ve really added everything I wanted to say about it.
It’s a series unlike any kind of K-Drama I’ve ever seen before and I’m glad I watched it. Most importantly, I have been confronted with the fact that some series really require serious undivided attention, sometimes they even require pausing the screen to make sure that what’s being said is fully understood. Rewatching the first episode cleared up so many things that I could’ve already known throughout the series if I’d just been more attentive the first time. You really got to keep your head in the game with this one, it’s definitely not just a casual story.
I’m going on to an in-between break drama special before starting on the next long awaited Netflix K-Drama, so you’ll read back from me soon, probably! Also because I have some more free days coming up! ^^ Until then, bye-bee!!
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