Ri Kusuriuri - Blog Posts

Mononoke Theory: the hexagrams= the types of Mononoke each medicine seller is tasked with exorcising.

I was doing some looking into Bagua, specifically the meanings of the Ri and Kon trigrams, for obvious reasons. And I found something quite interesting concerning the Attributes each trigram holds.

At first, I was hoping that they’d relate in some way to the personality or symbolism surrounding the medicine sellers themselves. But that didn’t seem to entirely be the case. Ri has the attributes “light-giving, humane, dependence”. The first two make sense, as he DOES bring metaphorical light (truth and understanding) by exorcising Mononoke, and he has been shown to express kindness towards the spirits that end up in these pitiable situations. But dependence? That makes…less sense.

Until I realized that Dependence is (in one way or another) a factor in the stories of all the Mononoke he’s exorcised.

Children aborted against the wishes of their mothers, the aftermath of a codependent incestuous affair, a battered woman who’s too afraid to leave the family she despises, an evil spirit desperate for the love of others, and a dead woman trying in any way she can to get the truth of her death brought to light….all of these Mononoke are spirits who were dependent on others, whether that’s their victims or the ones who wronged them. And all of them were exorcised by the wielder of the Ri sword—the sword of the dependence attribute.

Conversely, Kon’s attributes are “devoted/yielding.” Though we’ve only seen him exorcise one Mononoke so far, it was the spirit of a woman who was so devoted to her work it destroyed everything else inside of her. And since the other two movies in his trilogy also seem to be taking place in the Ooku, it seems like they will also deal with the consequences of letting your devotion to a cause destroy your personhood.

TL;DR: both Ri and Kon seem to specialize in spirits that have attributes of their respective trigram. Also, both their trigrams have associations with women: Ri is associated with the second daughter and Kon is associated with the mother.

I feel like i haven’t drawn in forever and have a new guy(s) I wanna shake in tupperware so hello Mononoke fandom

The entire time drawing this my hand and brain were like “how do i make shapes and colors” lol and i wanted to practice drawing Ri’s face a bit