WMG / Princess Mononoke

Story takes place in the same universe as Mushishi

Possibly some time in the future, after Princess Mononoke story ends, some other idiot decides to take Forest God's head. Only this time the whole thing ends in a success. But whoops! Most of kami are dead, lots of forests are burned, the land is defiled, Forest God is dead... So enter the Forbidden Mushi who wrecked havoc upon whatever was left afterwords.

Everyone will die

It's made clear that the kami, which are very much physical beings in this world, are dying, either directly or indirectly due to human activity. Amaterasu is the kami of the sun. Do the math.

Moro's mate...

• is Fenris, from Norse Mythology. Because they are both giant wolves!
  • Might as well argue her husband is the Luison, since they're both wolves as well.

The pelt that San wears is a wolf pelt.

Before Moro attacks the humans for "defiling the forest", they had found her puppies and killed one of them. Then the humans sacrifice their baby so they can escape. (Whether they actually escape or not is unclear.) So Moro decides to raise San as her own to replace the pup that she lost. The pelt is from the dead puppy so San could stay warm.

• The ears and mask put on it were so that San could hid her human features which she detested. She grew up with a warped sense of beauty, never considering herself to be so. This is why it shocked her so much when Ashitaka said that she was beautiful.

Princess Mononoke and Valley of the Wind take place in the same universe.

Princess Mononoke being the past and Valley of the Wind being the distant future. Nausicaa is a descendant of San and Ashitaka. She inherited her love of nature from San, her desire for peace from Ashitaka, and her fighting ability from both of them.

• Who's to say Valley of the Wind didn't happen first, in an even more distant past?
  • Because they specifically say that Ashitaka is an Emishi, an indigenous group from northeastern Honshu. They're basically extinct today (and even their successor ethnic groups are at risk of dying out), so they would be wiped out by time Nausicaa takes place. Princess Mononoke takes place in feudal Japan.
  • Also, compare the spirit forest to the petrified forest under Nausicaa's toxic jungle.

The Forest Spirit...

Set all of this in motion, resulting a huge Batman Gambit to lure Ashitaka there in order to bring peace to the forest and the humans.

• More like a Thanatos Gambit, since the events led to his death.
  • He can't really die, remember? He's the Anthropomorphic Personification of the natural cycle of life and death, after all.
    • It seems like his physical form is gone for good, though.
    • He assumed physical form in the first place as part of the gambit.

the movie takes place in the same universe of Avatar...

• Cold Sniper and Knife skills, sheer badassery, sense of responsibility for the troops...Lady Eboshi is probably an ancestor of Colonel Quarich.
• the Forest Spirit could be a manifestation of the forest's Hive Mind, an ancient yet gone terran equivalent of Eywa.
  • Can't be - There's too much Gray-and-Grey Morality out there. Avatar was as Black and white as a Rorschach test.
    • In which case it takes place in the same universe as an altogether different Avatar.... who can airbend.

Lady Eboshi is either an ex-brothel girl herself, or was abused by a man at some point.

• that's why she goes out of her way to get brothel girls to work for her— giving them work and mobility they'd never have otherwise— arm the women— so they can never be hurt. My guess is that she was in a bad marriage and escaped, if her upper class accent is anything to go by.
  • Word of God says that she was a slave on a ship who successfully mutinied and freed the others.

Moro's mate is the Party God

.

• Because a severed wolf's head can still bite. This particular wolf deity head survived (whereas his mate dies). Years later he would give up the whole protect nature shebang (probably after the Murshroom Wars) and dedicate his life to partying.

Gods becoming demons

• Being shot doesn't turn the animal gods into demons. It essentially allows a pathway for evil spirits to take hold on their bodies. Notice how Nago shakes off the corruption at one point at the beginning of the film. He himself hasn't become a demon but he has been possessed by one.
  • I was always under the impression that the possession was only "shaken off" because Nago entered direct sunlight, even if it only repelled the demon worm things for a few seconds, more like a cockroach being scared off by a light turning on, but being much more persistent in this case. Or perhaps the demonic evidence right then really WAS killed, only to be replaced by new ones from within Nago's body which can resist sunlight. Notice that we also only see Okkoto's possession at night, and under the heavy canopy of the forest to boot. Though this troper agrees that the injuries caused by firearms aren't ACTUALLY what turns gods into demons, but rather it FACILITATES their transformations.
  • AFAIK they became demons due to an immense hatred. Hatred allows for evil spirits to take hold. I'm thinking that the cursed wormlike substance on Nago had flown from him in such a fashion as a threat display. Nago smelled humans, and decided then and there to alert them to his presence with a threat display. He probably wanted to see the humans before him grow fearful and try to escape. As is one of the themes in the movie, hatred and fear breed more of the same, which causes exactly the kind of thing going on with Nago. With Okkoto, it looked like his hope to be healed by the Forest Spirit may have caused his transformation to include less of a destructive, wild rage than Nago's. In addition, he believed his warriors had come back from the dead, which would be adding more positive feelings to slow his transformation. TL;DR Hatred causes the transformation; Nago and Okkoto acted differently in their transformations because Okkoto had some positive emotions within him at the time of his transformation.
  • Or possibly the substance is a kind of cancer, which forms from inside the body but eats it away from the inside; possibly an Anvilicious metaphor for feelings of hatred.
  • This Troper wonders if it's a stealth reference to Celtic Mythology—Miyazaki was inspired by The Great Boar of Bel Gulben, an Irish folktale, and many European fairies are noted to be weak to Cold Iron. The animal-spirits are called gods, but they act MUCH closer to The Fair Folk due to their Shinto nature. Cold Iron weakens European fairies because it's a symbol of human civilization, so once a Shinto forest-spirit gets shot, it poisons them because they've got a literal piece of civilization stuck in their flesh and they can't get it out. San may have tried to suck the poison out from Moro's wound because she mistook the magical "poisoning" for literal poison, but Moro wouldn't have known to correct her because it's the same thing to a god.

Jigo only seems to have gotten a Karma Houdini.

• Think about it. How do you figure the Emperor will react when he finds out that he's never getting the head of the Forest Spirit?

San and Ashitaka do in fact have a child.....

But, this comes from a one night stand at some point. Ashitaka may never know.....Note for unlikely event of a sequel.

Eboshi is San's birth mother

• When she's talking to Ashitaka about her, she seems to talk in a somewhat melancholy tone, almost... regretful.
  • This would be tragic whether she knows or not—if she knows San's heritage and regrets both defiling Moro's forest and leaving her infant daughter as wolf-food, what happened to her husband? Moro mentions that both parents were there when they threw San at her in a panic. And if she doesn't know about San, then she's unknowingly trying to kill/subjugate her own daughter.

There are two sets of languages spoken in the movie; those of humans and animal spirit language

• In almost every interaction between the humans and nature spirits, we never see or heard them converse with each other only making remarks. While this could attributed to both sides viewing the other as destructive and chaotic, another explanation could be found in a language barrier that literally prevents each side from understanding each other. The first time we see a human and spirit talk to each other is in the beginning when Nago the demonic boar dies from Ashitaka's arrow and the wise woman from the village apoligies and prays for the boar's peace. Nago doesnt react to this apology except to curse the humans while the villagers seem unfazed by the boar's words. In this case, Nago may not have realized what the wise elder was saying and may have taken it as mockery.
  • Notably the only two humans who converse with the spirits are Ashitaka and San both of whom would a reason to understand the spirits; San because she was raised in the forest and would have learned their language and Ashitaka due to being marked by the angry spirit Nago which could have granted him the ability to hear the voice of the spirits along with his superstrength and other abilities.

Ashitaka is still going to die.

• They just didn't show it because they wanted to avoid the obvious sad ending that would end the film on. There's no real indication that he will live. The Forest God healed his bullet wound, but did not heal his wound from Nago; it left that alone either on purpose for some reason, or did not have the power to heal it. Perhaps because the wound was caused by the hatred of man, it could not be healed by a nature spirit at all. The wise woman said he could never change that fate. This would also explain why he decided to part ways with San instead of pursuing a closer relationship with her (living in the forest with her and whatnot). He wants to spare her the pain of having to get close to him only to see him die. All he's hoping for is like Okkoto and Moro got - a painless death. He's just hoping that the curse ends with him.
  • The curse left a scar, but there's no implication that the Forest Spirit didn't heal him; if the blood of a God (like Moro) could do it, there's no reason the FS couldn't have as well. It's possible the scar was left to remind him.

Ashitaka & San will live in the forest eventually

• San refuses to live with humans because of how they treat nature, and Ashitaka feels like he can't abandon the (mostly) decent people of Irontown. But after it's rebuilt, there's nothing to stop him from joining San permanently; his people lived near a forest, and he's obviously experienced enough to traverse the deep woods easily.