#mononoke spoilers

[oneciro]

His new look is soooo cool (〃ω〃)

[mirror-and-mind]

Guys. Guys. I think I've been looking at this elemental alignment thing all wrong.

Were we ever actually told that the Medicine Sellers themselves were Ri or Kun aligned? I don't think we were. I think we were specifically told that the Medicine Sellers' swords were Ri and Kun.

We don't really see those elemental alignments until the swords are drawn. Hyper invokes fire; the first Kusu really doesn't. If anything, he looks more water-aligned.

And Shingi invokes earth: he looks far more earthly than Hyper, more human, as a few people have mentioned (albeit still pretty nonhuman). By contrast, the second Kusu looks very ethereal - less human than the first Kusu, as has also been pointed out.

I'm not so sure the Medicine Sellers' main forms are meant to align with the elements of their swords. More than anything, they seem to align with balance.

First, their outward natures appear to counterbalance the alignments of their swords: fire/water and earth/heaven. These are opposite Trigrams in the I Ching:

Second (and I know I've said this ad nauseum), they're embodiments of yin and yang. They're masculine and feminine, human and beast-like, ancient and youthful (someone even said on here a while ago that the Medicine Seller's Japanese speech makes him sound like an old man).

They're also associated with Buddhist images of clear perception: the mirrors they both carry, the designs of their eyes which both invoke the Buddha eyes.

This kind of clear perception requires seeing yin-yang: being present in the now between past and present, releasing identities such as "self" and "other." It requires seeing the true nature of the world, the connections between apparent opposites.

Most obviously, both main forms use balancing scales to detect mononoke.

I think the function of the Medicine Sellers' main forms is not only to use the power of the Trigrams, but to use the power of balance and perception to bridge the gap between the heavenly Trigrams and the human world. These are the forms that communicate with the humans, the ones who come to understand their troubles, the ones who can sympathize with their feelings and even risk getting sucked into them. They're neither purely human nor purely divine.

The perceptions and understandings of these forms link the human world back to the elemental alignments: to Ri, Fire, in the series, and to Kun, Earth, in the movie. The main forms show these heavenly natures exactly how they need to be used to correct the earthly overbalances that created the mononoke.

[mistspinner]

brain has been going brr for several hours about how the Medicine Seller apologizes to Kitagawa/Karakasa after exorcising her (and seems chill with Asa including the totally-not-haunted doll in the ceremony and generally treating it as a friend)

[sablegear0]

Brief Thoughts on Mononoke: Karakasa

Finally caved to my curiosity and watched Mononoke: Karakasa / Phantom in the Rain. I really enjoyed it! It has the same incredibly dense visual style as the series, and continues to use that so effectively.

Karakasa and the original series do a fantastic job of creating and escalating tension, particularly by varying the length of shots. The mood can become so tense during an otherwise normal-seeming conversation by how quick the cuts get and how strange the framing becomes. It's really fantastic, unsettling stuff. Despite the fantastical style, the Mononoke series really is horror media.

The surreal visual style is used to communicate so much without dialogue, the world and characters warping and changing, visually representing their internal state. Especially the use of the blank spiral-face motif for the denizens of the Ooku - people sinking single-mindedly into their prescribed role, surrendering to a collective purpose. Characters pop in and out of this state as they fight or surrender to that mentality, it's spooky!

Another very cool visual trick is the symbolic storytelling in all the lavishly-decorated rooms, with the murals and painted screens showing creatures or images representative of the characters "shot" against them, or of the mood of the scenes set in that room. I'm going to have to go back and watch the main series to spot more of these but the Ayakashi: Bakeneko episodes do it and Karakasa definitely does as well. The two sparrows on the ceiling in Kame and Asa's room imply so much about its inhabitants. Two free spirits meeting by chance, relying on one another for guidance - but the mere fact it's a painting, and only one small one on the ceiling, also implies a static state, a cage for these two tiny birds.

My favourite use of this is in the the main office where the Ooku manager and her scribes and advisors meet. The walls are decorated with images of a "kitsune no yomeiri", a foxes' wedding procession. This symbol alone has so much to pick apart. Not only are the Ooku staff being compared to cunning kitsune as they debate and scheme in this room, but the depiction of a wedding procession reflects the Ooku's purpose of housing the Emperor's concubines (not necessarily married to him, but ladies with official ties to him - becoming a concubine is an honour and a joyous occasion!).

And "kitsune no yomeiri" has another meaning! It's the colloquial term for a sun-shower in Japanese, the phenomenon when rain falls from a clear sky. The phrasing itself foreshadows the presence of the Karakasa and its ability to dissolve its victims into rainwater - a mononoke born of the schemes hatched in this selfsame room decorated with marching foxes.

There are tons of other cool visual choices I could ramble on about but a small one I liked was the visual representation of smells. The smell of fresh cooking is represented with these solid, brightly-coloured, almost floral little icons. In contrast, the stink of the rancid well-water is represented by hollow, desaturated shapes. Similar at a glance but distinctly different.

Other people have done deeper dives on the Medicine Seller in Karakasa so I probably don't need to go into that. But I appreciate how the writing and direction in both the series and the movie let the Medicine Sellers have some humour about them. They like to tease people, they use irony and sarcasm, they get to be weird little guys when they're not in fight-mode. The smug way Kon dangled his hall-pass in front of the visiting samurai got a genuine laugh out of me. I also liked how unfazed Kon seemed by the passage of time being on the outside. He really was just camping out in front of the Ooku gates, pestering Sakashita for like three days straight, wasn't he? No wonder Sakashita snapped at him later on, he'd probably been dealing with Kon's nonsense non-stop until he broke in!

[mosslingg]

i was planning to post a fully rendered version on valentines day but i like the sketch a lot and im impatient so here

[lychi-kinesis]

*SPOILERS FOR THE TOTK DRAGON QUEST*

I drew this as an excuse to draw Zelda in her new dress and then that never happened. ALSO THANK YOU @katydoodles FOR DOING THE BACKGROUNDS <3

[cheeseeatinggoblin]

that one scene in princess mononoke but it's the archivist and his boyfriend and i'm totally not crying over it or anything

[ananayellow]

Literally

[anyataylorjoys]

PRINCESS MONONOKE (1997) YELLOWJACKETS | 3.02 'Dislocation' (2021—)

[riotrenegade]

i need a gif of the split second scene where kusuriuri strokes his sword and i need it for entirely heterosexual and normal reasons <-Lying

[valtsv]

i wasn't sure how to feel about this when i read it yesterday, because of how loaded a term "forgiveness" can be, but the more i think about it the more i love how it really demonstrates the sheer kindness of the silt verses' definition of forgiveness. it's not "you have to forgive to become a better person" - VAL herself says in the scene that this is referring to that she is not going to get better - but "you always have the choice to be kind, and that is what can set you free".

[mirror-and-mind]

Been sitting on this one for a while, but it canonically makes sense now, sooo... 🤷‍♀️

[khoracat]

[ruiniel]

you're so pretty when you fall

[slowthypiglordblr]

The Ghibli Squad

They about to crash Julia's (Brea and Boscha's kid) costume party, but Azura brought along a mysterious potion only referred to as "Insta-Drake.

New Hexsquad au by @aweirdlatina

by @watermelonsand7

[maqiisan]

zelink x princess mononoke