Talk:Princess Mononoke

Wiki Education assignment: Writing Workshop

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 23 January 2024 and 3 May 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Johanande, MeeseeksEverywhere (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Daniel Yu (talk) 19:09, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

About the unreliable sources tag

Dani Cavallaro's publications have been designated as generally unreliable sources in this discussion at the reliable sources noticeboard. Citations to her work can be replaced with more high-quality ones or removed, and the tag can be taken off once complete. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 20:04, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Japanese souvenir program

The souvenir program I bought at a Japanese theater when the movie was released in 1997 contains a lot of information that is not well known outside of Japan. So, using it as a source, I have added some information from my area of interest. According to an interview with Hayao Miyazaki, He created the story assuming that Lord Asano was a venerable samurai (bushi) of kanrei status. He explains that this is evident from the fact that Asano is referred to in the play with the honorific title "Kubō". Miyazaki clearly states that the samurai under Asano are jizamurai. He explained how iron making with iron sand destroys the environment of the lower reaches of the river. He also explained that in a time when the distinction between samurai and farmers was blurred, it was natural that if an Iron Town was built in the mountains, there would be a conflict between the Iron Town and the farmers living downstream, and the jizamurai would invade the Iron Town. In the character introduction section on page 6, "Samurai" is listed, showing a scene of several mounted warriors chasing Ashitaka on a burned mountain ridge. They are described as "Unlike the nobushi, these men are fully armed and launch a well-organized attack." This means that the "Samurai" are different characters from the jizamurai and the nobushi. The nobushi are not specified where they appear in the movie. However, given the historical fact that the nobushi were armed peasants, I believe they are the marauders who appear in the scene where Ashitaka first demonstrates his supernatural archery ability through the power of a curse.--SLIMHANNYA (talk) 14:21, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

About recent additions

@Camsteerie: Thanks for taking the time to contribute to this article. I disagree with several of the changes you've made today, some of which I've listed below. Let's talk about them. The changes are visible within this collective diff.

• You added broken links to the article animal worship on phrases such as "boar god" and "wolf goddess". Per the linking guideline, part of the Manual of Style, links should be introduced when they have "relevant connections to the subject of another article that will help readers understand the article more fully". Considering this is an article about a work of fiction, I don't see how a reader would benefit from links to further reading about wolves in real-life mythology from unrelated cultures, which is what the animal worship article covers.
• Also, the sheer number of links you're adding cuts against the grain of MOS:OVERLINK. More links are not always a good thing. For example, some rather everyday terms that don't need links include princess and industrialization.
• You assert in your edit summary that "the film is about animism". That may or may not be the case, but you need to verify that claim with a citation to a reliable source.
• You added a link to the elemental article, which is also unsourced and, again, feels irrelevant when that article discusses a rather different concept from a different culture.
• The claim that the film depicts yōkai needs a citation to a reliable source, as I don't believe the film ever mentions the term, and the body of the article doesn't discuss it either.

Let me know if you have any questions. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 05:07, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

The title of the film is Princess Mononoke (or Mononoke-hime) but this is not the character's name as it is often misconstrued. It may be better to say, "Lady Spirit of Vengeance" as a descriptor for the girl San. It should be noted that the 'hime' in the title can either be 'princess' or 'lady' - it is certainly no Disney character. This too should be made clear.

You should note that I did not insert the terms boar good or wolf goddess - they were already there - I just provided a link so other readers can understand that supernatural spirit would be a better term, but it is not as pithy a term as god.

This is a film about which most of the Western world has little direct understanding - animism in Japanese folklore - in which spirits of the otherworld are seen as animals in this world. If we go back to pre-Christian European, we have the concept of the Green Man and woodwose and other humanoid creatures, which carried forward to a degree, but animism as such is very remote indeed. So explanation for this is help, hence some links are needed. It is blatantly about animism as the non-human characters are animistic spirits.

San, though she is human, is being called a mononnoke - or a vengeful yokai spirit - in an equivalence with the other yokai that look like as animals or animal-like creatures that appear in the film. These points had not been made clear. Read the article on Yōkai which has the linked mononoke as one of the two forms in which they appear - it will clear up much for you.

The film was composed as an environmentalist rebuke to the over-industrialisation of society and the pollution of its waste as can be seen in the ending with the rebuilding of Iron Town in a more sympathetic way to nature rather than fighting against it as it had been previously. As this is a core part of the film's message, then a link to industrialisation is needed.

The forest spirit is an elemental - Japan and China culturally consider wood to be a basic element as much as earth wind and fire - again western and eastern interpretations do not conform easily with one another. Links help people clarify their own thoughts if they choose to follow them.

Let me know if you have any questions.

ASC Camsteerie (talk) 06:01, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

Also, on the subject of over-linked, the fact that all the names in the second sentence of the article is a case of this. Each actor is credited with a link in the side list to the right and in the Voice Cast table, again each actor with a webpage is linked. The is not a need for each and every one of them to be linked again in that 2nd sentence. Take those links out if there's too much blue for you…

ASC Camsteerie (talk) 06:07, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

I appreciate that you want to introduce links to potentially ambiguous concepts in order to aid the reader's understanding of those concepts, but the execution is not completely in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. You make several claims in your message which are not (yet) supported by sources in the article. If you believe a concept such as animism needs further elaboration, introduce sourced prose in the article that serves that purpose instead of creating easter egg links. If the claims you're adding to the article don't have a source and are based on your own inferences or opinions, they are not permitted under the no original research and verifiability policies. I suppose that's the fundamental issue I have with your additions, so we need to address that before getting into the weeds with the links. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 18:21, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

@TechnoSquirrel69

At its core, Wikipedia runs on links, but excessive use is counter-productive if used on every word. Everyday words are left as is, but where novel terms are introduced, a link should be obligatory and a brief description, so long as it does not detract from the statement being made. Otherwise articles end up with endless digressions.

What you propose will lead to an article full of digressions and no links. Do you want this?

You state you do not like links for some reason - I suggest a way of ridding many superfluous ones in the opening paragraph where there is obvious excessive linking.

I make no claims, these points are self-evident in the viewing of the film, that the film brings in numerous aspects of Japanese folklore and religion of supernatural spirits of creatures and places - this is animism - that is an integral part of Shintoism and its predecessor religions, as of the Ainu people for example.

The film is not really aimed at young children, but it still is a family film in being and as adults we typically know many terms used. In the West though, animation is typically considered to be targeting children, especially young ones. So if we consider that children may well be seeking Wikipedia to provide an understanding of what the film is about and what it relates to, then there will be a number of issues that will be novel to them and so will need a link to uncover more, but it would make the film article over-long to include these points in the article itself. So we need to have links on the subjects addressed.

So animism, if you want, can be explained in the article as belief in supernatural spirits tied to places, creatures, plants, and other objects, but to go beyond this detracts from the article addressing the film. Thus the optimal way of giving people an in-depth explanation if needed, is to have a link.

The point of that 'Mononoke' is not a name really does really need to be made clear - it is a title and descriptor - but too often it is misconstrued because of the Disney factor and so there needs to be clarification to ensure that the misconception is not perpetuated.

Search for 'mononoke' and it leads directly to a subset of Yokai spirits and so this needs a link but a full-blown description of beyond supernatural spirit or creature is not needed. These are novel terms, so need a link. To exclude links runs counter to the principle of Wikipedia.

[These explanations – comparing Oriental and European mythology - here and above, I am putting to you directly, but I do not suggest that these go into the article unexpurgated.]

ASC Camsteerie (talk) 01:09, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

Please don't link concepts like "industrialization" and :animal deity#wolf". No, Wikipedia does not at its core "run" on links"--it is based, at its core, on reliable secondary sources. That the movie "uses folklore and Yōkai spirits with the balance of nature being disturbed by human industrialization to deal with the themes of Shinto and environmentalism" is not based on secondary sources at all, for instance. Drmies (talk) 01:21, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

It's not that I don't link links, but they should be used appropriately to support the subject and content present in the article. My knee-jerk reaction to your changes was to comment on the links, but the main issue is related to the lack of sourcing, as Drmies also mentions. It's important to remember that the assumed audience of a Wikipedia article (and, of course, any encyclopedic article) are readers with no knowledge of the subject. While it may be obvious to you that animism is an element of Shintoism or the beliefs of the Ainu people, for example, we should not assume readers are even aware of those terms. When the concepts are that important to the article's subject, prose added to the article citing reliable sources is the way to solve that problem, not links. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 02:41, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

You just said it yourself - you made a 'knee-jerk reaction' - and so, beyond commenting, you undid what I had just done without thinking about it and considering why I may have thought these additional links important. Instead of reacting, may be sitting and considering the changes would have been better?

May be an alternative approach would be, after some consideration, adaptation & restructuring of the new input to make it more coherent and how it addresses the wider scope?

Anyway, forget the animism bit, etc. for a mo. Again, you point out that the assumption for articles is that the readers have no knowledge of the subject. So if a branch subject is mentioned, in the first occurrence, the term always should have a link to the relevant webpage so that the reader can follow through if so desired for further in-depth information.

In this article, the concept of environmentalism linked, so it directly follows that the concept industrialization should be linked - why it should not baffles me - as the one is a reaction to the other.

I beg to differ with Drmies about the point of web-links. Wikipedia is a child of the Internet and both employ at their cores the inter-connectedness of everything and hence we have we-links to take a reader from one webpage / website to another - it is their raison d'etre.

Back to animism and animal worship, in Europe and the western world there has been nigh two millennia of programmatic obliteration of these concepts by monotheistic religions that see paganism as an existential threat. They are now poorly understood and little known of in the west, whereas in the orient they are not. Therefore in obvious links to these subjects are needed to make the subject abundantly clear to the novice reader.

This film is littered with concepts of animism with kami and yokai supernatural spirits. They need explanation, but diatribes in the article of the film on these concepts would be counter-productive.

Yes, I have not cited any references / sourced my text yet, but external critiques on mid-1990s films, especially on-line are not common. Checking many of the current references to this article leads to old websites, not updated or expired links to no longer existent sites.

In essence though, I was not adding new information, but bringing out inferences already in the text to enable a clearer understanding and enabling people new to the subject, to find further information about the concepts already stated from within Wikipedia itself.

ASC Camsteerie (talk) 03:40, 3 August 2024 (UTC)