He is the kind of person who wants to be with thorns. I chose thorns and Asam, so I think Asidaka is the representative of humanity in the 21st century. He never said: "Oh, I can't do anything." If Asidaka said: "I will become a profound ecologist," things will be easier, but it is not the case. In our daily life, human beings are limited in what they can do to protect nature... He can only struggle to survive—struggling to survive like thorns in conflict—this is the only way for mankind from now on .
—— Hayao Miyazaki
The name of "Princess Mononoke" at the beginning was called "The Legend of Asidaka". This is one of the few movies in which Hayao Miyazaki features a male protagonist. This young man who came from a long way from the place where the sun rises, has light brown skin, hair like crow feathers, sword eyebrows and stars, strong and agile, proficient in the art of archery, kind-hearted, and courageous, for the reconciliation of nature and human forces. And running around, no matter from which point of view, he meets the conditions of being a hero, who deserves to win glory and beauty, and then become a ruler.
But he gave me the impression that he was a rather marginalized character, a real stranger.
At the beginning of the movie, Asidaka, as the young patriarch of the Ezo tribe, attacked the wild boars who turned into evil spirits in order to protect the village from attack. He was cursed by the evil spirits and left terrible scars on his arms.
"Ashitaka was cursed for a ridiculous reason. Although he did something that he shouldn't have done-he killed the wild boar god. But from a human point of view, he shouldn't be punished for it at all. However, he did suffer for this. Evil curse. I think this is very similar to the fate of human beings in real life. Maybe bad luck itself is part of life."
On the night when he was cursed, the village elders held a secret meeting, and the goddess gave Asidaka a suggestion to let Asidaka follow the trail of the evil god and travel to the west to find a way to relieve the curse. On the surface it looks like Asidaka listened to the advice and left voluntarily, but in fact he was an expelled person. Although he defended the village, he caused the evil god to die on this land, which was an ominous omen for the village, and the curse lurking in Asidaka could strike the village at any time. Humans cannot attack gods, even evil and ignorant gods, not to mention that this evil god was once the lord of a mountain, and the Ezos depended on the forest for their existence. This action is even more arrogant. At the moment when he attacked the evil god, Ashidaka had already become a cursed and ominous person.
At the end of the meeting, Asidaka cut off the bun on the top of his head and placed it in front of the ancestral tablet, and quietly left the village in the dark. Any farewell behavior was not allowed. At the moment his hair was cut, he was no longer a living person in the eyes of the villagers. He lost his identity in the social group and became a ghost in the crowd.
He should have never left his homeland before, and once in contact with the outside world, he became at a loss as to what to do. When he bought rice with gold sand, the woman who sold the rice didn't think it was money at all, and he himself didn't know the actual value of gold sand in the outside world. In the face of this dilemma, he would not even speak out. Along the way, many people looked at this stranger in strange costumes and riding a deer mask with surprise, fear or disgust—they didn't regard him as a member of the normal human community. The inhabitants of the iron-smelting city of Dadara are composed of marginalized people from the bottom of the society. Asidaka still seems out of place among them, that is to say, he is not on the margins of this society, but is not in this society at all. He is a complete outsider.
Miyazaki once said that the biggest feature of Asidaka is that he is not expected. If he is completely swayed by the ideas of the Daddala, then he will stay there, otherwise there will be nowhere to stay. During his journey, he saved those trapped in the struggle, but no one thanked him. He is almost always in combat but no one pays attention-he can only fight alone. When he told the men who followed Magic Ji to hunt and kill the deer gods about the danger of Dardala city being besieged by the samurai, the people who were told didn't even have a word of thanks, because they didn't know how he fought fiercely. He also couldn't really understand Lord Black Hat. He could see through the devil-like obsession in the black hat, but he could not see where the firm will to support and feed the devil came from and where it was going.
As for the forest side, Asidaka is also a different kind. He did not have the firm and simple stand of Asang, the wolf's daughter, but tried to reconcile the relationship between the forest and humans, which was unacceptable by the forest power. Assan didn't seem to hate Asidaka, but she still left something to imply that he left immediately. The wolf god Mona also warned him to "leave the mountain." First of all, he is a human being both physically and psychologically, and, after all, he once grew up in a human village. His actions allowed him to win the trust of the wolf clan and wild boar clan to a certain extent, but this was not enough to make the beasts of the Deer God Forest completely accept him.
He fought hard for both Daddara and the forest, not because he belonged to one of them, but because he always had an established survival mode that belonged to the Ezo ancestors and ancestors in his heart. In that mode, Nature and humans can live in harmony, but this model obviously belongs only to the "barbarians" who believe in forests and are low-productive. He can't really go back to this mode anymore. Can he return to his hometown? I'm afraid it will be difficult. Not to mention whether he is willing and able to go back, even if he goes back, it is not the original hometown. That piece of pure land has been stained with the filthy blood of the evil god. Since Nagok can come here, other humans from the outside world can also come here. The bullet taken out of Nagok's body is just a lot of bullets and muskets. A sign of coming. Historically, the four major islands of Japan were originally inhabited by Ezo people. For centuries, they have been persecuted by the Yamato people and moved north to live in a small area. The original aborigines were regarded as barbaric peoples full of mystery. They eventually lost their forests and rivers and shrank in a small piece of "grant land" designated by the Japanese government. After centuries of discrimination, exclusion, Under assimilation, it is now on the verge of extinction.
Asidaka is homeless.
Everything except him is telling him: "You are a good person, but you are not ours." So, is this "good person" a person?
His exile journey was extremely long and difficult. In the movie, we only saw how handsome he ran towards the unknown through a few shots—an alien boy wearing a quilt riding a red deer with long horns galloping across the ground, the wind blowing across the wilderness, the layers of grass and waves are like The shadow of Asuka-but he couldn't see the real passage when he reached the place where the story took place.
The Ezo people live in Hokkaido in the northeastern corner of today, while the Deer Forest is located on Yakushima Island at the top of the southwest corner of Japan. In other words, the journey of Asidaka in the film traverses the whole of Japan, and even crosses the vast sea between Yakushima and Kyushu, and finally reaches the forest of deer gods. Just as the war lasted nine years and ten months before the "Iliad" story officially took place, it took him how many years to reach the battlefield before the "Mononoke Hime" story began.
The prototype of that era, I guess, was a certain period from the Muromachi era to the early Warring States period. Perhaps it had already experienced the Onin Rebellion. Coming this way, Asidaka must have seen too many tragedies in the world. He helped the civilians who had been killed, but found that he could not save many people at all, and the rescue was still in the brutal way of killing the samurai.
His sympathy finally turned into a certain kind of compassion and helplessness, and his powerlessness also reached its peak in the battle of the Deer God Forest. He could not prevent God from being killed, nor could he save Daddala, he tried his best but was powerless in this fierce conflict. Fate sent him to this turning point in history, but only to allow him to be a witness and a bystander. He is like the author himself, seeing all the sad things in the world with a pair of clear eyes. It becomes less important to lift the curse. His only and real task is the sentence on the movie poster: "Live."
Only by living, can there be change. Only by living, his testimony will be meaningful.
Reprinted my own small public account Mu Seji muse370520
Hope everyone likes what I wrote∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿
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