Kdrama 2021
KINGDOM Ashin of the North (Kdrama Review & Summary)
Kingdom, Ashin of the North
- Genre: Horror, Zombies, Action Historical Costume Drama fiction
- Release Date: 23 July 2021
- Origin: South Korea, Netflix Original
- Kdrama: 1
Cast
- Jun Ji Hyun as Ashin
- Park Byung Eun as Min Chi Rok
- Kim Shi Ah as Young Ashin
- Koo Kyo Hwan as
I have just finished watching this film drama.
I like it. It is interesting, very gritty but rather slow in parts.
It is dark in so many ways.
The script is dark, The atmosphere is dark, the cinematography is mostly dark and even the beautiful flawless Jun Ji Hyun was unkempt and unwashed with a dark muddied face most of the time.
It explains who the mysterious woman was at the end of Kingdom Season 2. It also answers the origin of the living dead in connection with the resurrection flower.
It started with a cute deer who nibbled some blue flowers in the thick of the forest. It then died and then came alive but with white eyes and had a fight with an enormous tiger who bit into the deer. it promptly turned into a zombie tiger.
Ju Ji Hyun plays Ashin.
Ashin is a very independent and resourceful girl and tends to wander in the forest where it was forbidden to enter.
Anyway, she found a wall with ancient graffiti showing a flower and a script which warned that the flower can bring the dead back to life but they had to pay a price.
Ashin was from the Jurchen tribe of Manchurian Chinese descent. They had been living inside and along the border of Joseon and yet they are still treated as foreigners and who are to be feared.
The Joseon military is worrying that the Japanese might join forces with the Jurchen and that would be the end of Joseon.
So they were thinking of ways to prevent this when news spread that some Pajeowi Jurchen who went to the forbidden Pyesa-gun forest to gather wild ginseng ended up all dead.
The military found bodies of the wild ginseng gatherers. They let it be known that they were attacked and killed by a tiger.
All sorts of rumours were spreading including doubt about the Pajeowi Jurchen ending up all dead as attacked by a tiger. It was widely known that Pajeowi Jurchen were good fighters because they train in martial arts from an early age.
To pacify the people, the military went to hunt for the tiger. Many of the soldiers were felled by the tiger.
The best fighters of Pajeowi Jurchen also joined the hunt and they did finally cornered and killed the tiger.
One of the Jurchen cut opened the stomach of the tiger and was shocked to know that the tiger had been dead for a while.
Ashin was coming home from one of her sojourns to the mountains when she saw her village burnt down and all her clans had been massacred seemingly by the Pajeowi Jurchen tribe.
She traveled on foot to Joseon and begged Min Chi Rok to get justice for her father who had been so loyal to Joseon.
She told him that he need not do it immediately. He can take his time but just get revenge for her father. In return she will do anything, she will spy for them and do the butchering, anything and everything.
She was allowed to stay at the military camp. She worked as a slave, washing clothes by the river even at the dead of winter.
In her precious free time, she practised archery.
She was often sent to cross the river to spy on the Pajeowi Jurchen.
She grew up very able but a Josean man took a fancy to her. He threatened her that if she hurt him, she will be expelled from the camp or executed because he was a Joseon. So she became his unwilling sex slave because she knew what he said was true and she did not work as a slave all these years without getting revenge for her father.
She continued to spy for the Joseon military.
She sneaked into the Jurchen camp and found her bedraggled father treated like an animal in chains which a wooden collar proclaiming that he was a traitor to his own tribe.
He whispered to Ashin to kill him. With a breaking heart, she killed him.
She then found that Joseon and the Pajeowi Jurchen had been working together all along.
Not having anything else to live for, she plotted her revenge to kill all Joseon and Jurchen.
When her rapist came to see her, she killed him and then fed him one of the blue pretty flowers.
Then she waited by the rooftop with her arsenal of arrows and bow.
The rapist zombie bit one which turned into a zombie. The biting fest was turning everyone into the undead and for those who seemed to get away, Ashin used her arrows to kill them.
Then, there was just one man left alive. Ashin overpowered him and put him in a sack and dragged him all the way to where she used to live with her parents.
She remembered her family; they were happy, unassuming, and kind. Her mother, sisters, aunts and uncles. She opened a door to a warehouse and there her family were tethered in chains.
(Previously, when she found them dead, she slit open their foreheads and inserted the blue flowers to make them alive again)
She told her family that she knew they don’t really like peasants, deers or boars.
She continued that from then on they don’t have to make do because she will bring them a feast that they really like as she propelled the sack containing the screaming man to her zombie family.
This was the beginning of the Kingdom Season 1 & 2 also available in Netflix.
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