(no subject)

[skygiants]

A month or so ago tenillypo and I watched the first two parts (twelve episodes) of Arthdal Chronicles, a Netflix kdrama -- the final six episodes are coming out later this year, I think, an unusual model for kdrama production in my experience but I guess a thing that's becoming more common with Netflix models -- and I don't know that it was good, per se, but I'm fascinated by it for a number of reasons.

It's helpful that shati also watched the show and has recently read a lot of books about anthropology, so she was able to explain to me that, for example, when the leader of Our Heroine's utopian neolithic settlement explained its ban on Growing Things, Domesticating Things, and Climbing The Big Cliff Up To Visit The Evil Empire That Grows And Domesticates Things, the show was in fact wading enthusiastically into a long-running debate on Agriculture: Was It A Mistake? Arthdal Chronicles is ready to declare that yes, it was! I don't know whether they're presenting the world's most nuanced viewpoint here but I've never watched a television show that had such vehement anthropological opinions before and I'm very honestly charmed.

I'm also charmed by the fact that the costumers were clearly so enthused by the opportunity to design for a time period well outside of the Joseon era that they threw all sense of continuity to the winds and followed their hearts in every sense of the word.




Our heroine, a Neolithic hunter-gatherer lass! They're not allowed agriculture but they do have tools, presumably you can technically weave cloth just with stuff you ... gathered .......



You can tell how idyllic their society is because of all the face paint and flower crowns.



The deuteragonist, the scheming general of the Evil Empire up the road, tastefully rocking the trendy Ikea rugs popularized by the Night's Watch in Game of Thrones. Please note all the beautiful tiny studs on his clothing and remember it's an important plot point that bronze is a highly advanced technology controlled by a single subgroup and presumably nobody yet knows how to make iron.



This lad's in the guard, so he gets a red Ikea rug! Again: metallurgy is a highly advanced technology, here, in the world of Arthdal.



The Hae clan brought their fancy bronze technology from the land of "Remus" so this bodyguard/maid's Roman aesthetic makes perfect sense.



Taealha's slinky pseudo-Roman outfits are really ... more of a gesture .....



ROMANS CONTROL BRONZE. That's all you need to know.



These are Neanderthal! Sorry, Neanthals. You can tell because they have purple lips, purple blood, and super-strength, as everyone knows about -- ("what?", you ask?) -- AS EVERYONE KNOWS, IS A FACT, ABOUT NEANDERTHALS --



Just a standard-issue medieval lass with the most complicated braids I've ever seen in my life.



More medieval peasantry, featuring poor Song Joon-ki's most unfortunate wig of the series.



More ... medieval ........? no this is a very background character so I think they probably just raided the costume bin until they decided they had an Aesthetic.



This lad always wears a muzzle over his face and WE DON'T KNOW WHY. It's NEVER EXPLAINED. At one point he takes it off and has a conversation and his face is perfectly normal!



It's hard to get a good shot of this outfit because it's in the dark and he doesn't wear it for long, so you'll have to take my word for it that not only is it sparkly on the inside but he's also got fancy gloves and lace cuffs. He looks like an 18th-century cavalier. It's amazing. We did not realize until someone referenced a mysterious beautiful woman in the next episode that he was supposed to be cross-dressed for disguise purposes for this entire scene.



And this is how he dresses normally. You see the confusion.



I include this for a.) Song Joon-ki's Neolithic Leathers b.) I had to get the horse in here somehow, he's the best character in the show.


The plot, you ask? The plot! Song Joon-ki stars as a secret half-Neanderthal lad who grows up in an idyllic Neolithic village after the evil empire genocides the Neanderthals so as to take their land for more agriculture. Alas! soon the evil empire comes down the cliff to conquer more slaves to tend to their agriculture, and Song Joon-ki's whole village, including his best friend -- who is destined to be the next Great Mother of the clan and as such is supposed to have special magic powers -- are captured and brought to the big evil city where everyone soon gets wrapped up in labyrinthine Game of Throne-esque interclan politics involving control of religious iconography and bronze technology.

It was quite interesting for me as an American watching this; like, if I saw an American-made fantasy TV show that grounded itself so much in the imagery of a technologically superior but morally suspect society marching on an idyllic hunter-gatherer society to commit conquest and genocide, I'd feel pretty sure I was looking at a very specific metaphor. But this isn't an American show, so I kept having to pull myself back from jumping to what would, in other contexts, be for me obvious conclusions. And I'm sure that there are quite obvious conclusions to be drawn, I just don't have the correct cultural referents for them.

Comments

[umanothing]

i love your captions for the costume pics xD
i've been meaning to watch it but the Netflix model threw me off, so i'll wait until the last episode is released...

[skygiants]

I think I've only seen one kdrama before that was released on a 'season' model and I don't think the second season was originally planned (and also, I still haven't actually seen it.) A strange experience! Anyway, I think the rest are coming out soon, though it's probably going to be a little while before we finish it because my watching buddy and I just started another 50-episode show...

[umanothing]

was that unintentionally seasonal kdrama Age of Youth? <33 i found the second season very enjoyable too, but i watched it quite a while after i saw the first season; i liked that the first season could stand on its own (of course that's because the second season wasn't planned).

i do hope it's soon. i'm watching When the Devil Calls Your Name and it's excruciating because it's currently airing, and i'm used to marathon-watching. and i need something else to watch between episode releases.

[sovay]

you must be vey confused now.

It's true, the costumes are very 2019 and otherwise inexplicable.

You can tell because they have purple lips, purple blood, and super-strength, as everyone knows about -- ("what?", you ask?) -- AS EVERYONE KNOWS, IS A FACT, ABOUT NEANDERTHALS --

So I don't really want to re-read The Clan of the Cave Bear and Shiva: An Adventure of the Ice Age and The Inheritors and then watch this show, but I hope someone is tracking Neanderthal representation in fiction, because wow.

[skygiants]

I've seen people call the costumes out for being similar to Game of Thrones, and for sure you can tell there's inspiration, but honestly I really do think a part of it is just the joy of a costume design team who has realized they are not required to even vaguely match up to any real historical time period and can do whatever the hell they want. What do you mean, 'have they invented lace yet, here in this Bronze Age kingdom?' WHO KNOWS. WHO CARES. Someone out there somewhere probably has!

I also hope someone is tracking Neanderthal representation in fiction and I'd especially be curious about other representations of Neanderthals in non-English-language fiction.

[sovay]

I also hope someone is tracking Neanderthal representation in fiction and I'd especially be curious about other representations of Neanderthals in non-English-language fiction.

Agreed; that I know almost nothing about.

[minutia_r]

I was just actually reading or listening to someone talk about the theory that wool cloth predated the domestication of sheep, and that the first wool fibers were spun from wool that was, in fact, gathered from bushes or wherever the wild sheep's shed wool was getting caught.

So there's that, I guess.

[skygiants]

It's true! And Wikipedia suggests that linen woven from flax predated the domestication of flax as well. They seem to have a lot of linen, for people who are morally opposed to agriculture, but who am I to say how much flax a determined trendsetting hunter-gatherer could produce if she felt like it?

[sheliak]

That's one way qiviut (musk ox down) is gathered. So it's possible!

[skygiants]

Granted, I fully believe that musk ox who wander through a brambly area leave behind a lot of down.

[starlady]

A Mistake in the sense of We Invented It By Accident or a Mistake in the sense of Here Is Humanity's Original Sin and It's All Downhill From Here?

[skygiants]

The latter! The argument is that evidence shows hunter-gatherer societies generally have more leisure time and are healthier and more equitable overall, whereas agriculture --> not only hard work and dependence on starchy crops but also class stratification, property ownership, wars of conquest, etc.

[china_shop]

OMG, the costumes! AWESOME!!

We didn't make it past episode 1, but mostly just because the episodes were so loooong.

[skygiants]

Oh man, they're SO long. We normally settle down for an evening's binge of about four episodes every week, but we could not keep up that routine with Arthdal Chronicles at all (though the pacing of the show itself does pick up by the time one hits the fourth or fifth episode.)

[movingfinger]

They could have gone for string skirts!

[skygiants]

Honestly I'm amazed they missed the opportunity to have someone in a string skirt hanging out casually in the same scene next to someone wearing an outfit entirely made of tatted lace.

[alias_sqbr]

This is amazing and inspiring (to be more historically inaccurate)

[skygiants]

If you're ever looking in your closet, and you see something you want to wear, and then you're like "but I don't know if that's appropriate for this context" - that's the time to think of Arthdal.

[genarti]

Everything I hear about this show only makes it more hilariously baffling and surreal to me. Thank you so much for this enlightening (???) gem of a picspam!

[skygiants]

It was extremely funny watching in real time, because it did start out like "ok, Neolithic linens and leathers, here's the aesthetic choice they're making, we can roll with it" and then roundabout the second or third episode when the big city politics stuff hit ALL SARTORIAL CAUTION WAS THROWN TO THE WINDS.

[vass]

the show was in fact wading enthusiastically into a long-running debate on Agriculture: Was It A Mistake?

Oooh. Thank you for that nugget. I've been seeing bits of that debate play out in discussions I've read about farming or sustainability, and didn't have enough context to know it was coming out of anthropology. Now I can go looking for further context. (The versions I read were indeed more nuanced than that, and did not object to all forms of plant cultivation.)

These are Neanderthal! Sorry, Neanthals. You can tell because they have purple lips, purple blood, and super-strength, as everyone knows about -- ("what?", you ask?) -- AS EVERYONE KNOWS, IS A FACT, ABOUT NEANDERTHALS --

"What," I do indeed ask.

Just a standard-issue medieval lass with the most complicated braids I've ever seen in my life.

Behold: the bog mummy hairdo, an even more complicated braided hairstyle from 280BC.

This lad always wears a muzzle over his face and WE DON'T KNOW WHY. It's NEVER EXPLAINED. At one point he takes it off and has a conversation and his face is perfectly normal!

They're very comfortable. In the future I think everyone will be wearing them. /ObPrincessBrideQuotation.

[skygiants]

All of my knowledge comes from shati and I'm so grateful that her deep dive into amateur anthropology came in time for this, or I would have been significantly more confused about what the show was trying to do. (I think the initiator of the agriculture discourse may have been Guns, Germs, and Steel, and certainly this show in particular is pulling on a lot of the ideas in that book.)

The thing about the bog mummy hairdo is that it is indeed a complicated braided hairstyle but the look it generates is so smooth and practical -- I've actually thought about trying it because it looks fun and comfortable! The braids on the character in Arthdal, on the other hand, look normal from a distance but the closer you get the more convoluted the whole thing becomes. I think those are two separate nine-strand braids she's rocking? Or possibly twelve-strand. A LOT OF STRANDS.

You know what, I would not be surprised if the final act of the show involved Muzzle Man fighting a Rodent of Unusual Size.

[shati]

FWIW, what I've seen has been mostly from archaeologists, I probably just said anthropology to skygiants as a lazy shorthand for the subject as a whole. Mostly focused on shorter average lifespans after sedentary agriculture, and why they were shorter/what that means for people, and then some meta-discussion of the discourse.

(I know there's also a genre? of anthropology writing about present day hunter-gatherer people from a "hunter-gathering is a better life than you'd think, actually!" perspective, but I remember that from an intro-level community college class years ago, so at this point I wonder if there's some kind of counter-backlash of "hunter-gathering is less fun than you now currently think, actually." Same for the archaeology version, now that I'm thinking about it.)

[hokuton_punch]

Oh man, this sounds like an amazingly fun time.

[skygiants]

We enjoyed it very much overall -- there's a lot of interesting lead women doing interesting things, especially! -- but fair warning that sometimes it does get quite grim during the conquest-and-genocide parts....

[brigdh]

So, it's the Neolithic and the Bronze Age and there are Neanderthals? Wow. Okay. Wow. (And horses! Which actually weren't domesticated till quite late!)

I'm impressed that they're taking on the Agriculture: Friend or Foe? debate, though! I've seen a few other fictional depictions of "peaceful hunter-gatherers vs evil technologically-advanced city-dwellers" (the first that leaps to mind is 2008's 10,000 BC, which was SUPER terrible), but even in those, agriculture itself is usually depicted as an uncomplicated good.

Anyway, this sounds amazing and I'm very tempted to watch it.

[skygiants]

I was about to set up an impassioned protest that there's only one horse and it's a big plot point that Our Hero came up with the wild idea of trying to domesticate him, but then I remembered the evil empire actually has tons of horses, it's just that our hero's horse, the Divine Lord of Horses, keeps being like "YO GET OVER HERE" and those horses immediately ditch their owners and go galloping off to follow the hero's horse instead.

Yeah, "peaceful hunter-gatherers vs. evil city-dwellers" is not a new notion for sure, but the direct line of "CULTIVATING PLANTS AND ANIMALS WILL LEAD YOU INTO A VICIOUS CYCLE OF CONQUEST" is pretty clearly drawn in this one! We've already gotten the reveal that the god/priestess of the city fled the city long ago to start a new, benignly agriculture-less civilization...

Anyway we spent a lot of time trying to puzzle out the maths around "we need more people to cultivate our farms! ... so we'll spend ten years and divert thousands of people into building a giant pulley to get us down the Big Cliff of Doom so we can subsequently capture more people to cultivate our farms!" But my favorite Improbable Technological Advancement is the scene where they enter a building with stained windows. 😂

[larryhammer]

my favorite Improbable Technological Advancement is the scene where they enter a building with stained windows

... woah ... that ... wow ...

[chestnut_pod]

All I have to say is, "Wow." Also, I have been truly empowered by the mere thought of that costume department's head honcho just, throwing all caution to the wind.

[skygiants]

The thing I really can't get over is the lace. I was able to roll with almost everything until then, and the lace cuffs just sincerely and truly launched my appreciation of the costume designer's total lack of fucks into the stratosphere.