Lady Eboshi

Lady Eboshi (エボシ御前, Eboshi Gozen) is one of the antagonists of Princess Mononoke.

Personality
Eboshi is a tough and arrogant woman who wants to positively influence the world. As the leader of Irontown, the townspeople love her, giving her the highest influence as she was the one who freed them from their oppressive environments by bringing them all to Irontown. Her two most notable acts of empowering others is buying the contacts of women forced to work in brothels and taking in lepers, whom are cleaned and fed well; the women run the forge, while the lepers craft the guns. However, she looks at spirits as foolish creatures. Overall being a grey character.

In pressing situations, she's shown as calm and collected, attributing to her status as a leader. She has a definite authoritative air about her, which Ashitaka inevitably sees and provokes. She's also a very strong female who understands the injustice of a woman's position in society. Despite her ambitious agenda, in the end when Irontown is destroyed, she is shown to be remorseful.

Physical Appearance
She has black hair that she ties up in some sort of traditional style, finishing off with a pink ribbon. She's the only female in the film who wears lipstick. She wears Hakama, a dark red male kimono, and a huge cloak that she hangs on her shoulders. This outfit is reminiscent of 'Shirabyoushi', which hints at her backstory. And it is her unexplained difficult past, which provokes her high opinion of herself, and her low opinion of others problems. When she's in her 'battle attire' she wears a shorter cloak and a red 'eboshi cap' which gave her name.

Past
She was once a shirabyōshi, then became a hostage to pirates. Later on, she became the wife of the pirate leader. Gonza was one of crews of the pirate, but he was infatuated with Eboshi. Then Eboshi conspired with Gonza to rebel, and she murdered her husband, freeing the pirate with Gonza. Soon she saw Ishibiya, the Chinese guns, and imported them from China and upgraded them. She used them to conquer the area of the Cedar Forest.

Plot
Lady Eboshi is first seen when she is with her army transporting rice to Irontown where they are attacked by San and the wolves but survive. When Ashitaka comes to Irontown he meets Eboshi. Ashitaka learns that Eboshi is the one responsible for turning Nago into a demon. Then San comes to Irontown to fight her. Later she cuts off the head of the Forest Spirit and has her right arm bitten off by Moro. After the land is healed, she promises to rebuild a better town and leave the forest alone.

Quotes
"Watch closely everyone. I'm going to show you how to kill a god. A god of life and death.
 * —Eboshi, preparing to kill the Forest Spirit."

Controversies
According to Hayao Miyazaki, Lady Eboshi is shrouded in controversies, and noted that it was a karma for Eboshi and Irontown to be attacked by samurais; being consistent with Ashitaka's word that she "triggers new hatreds and grudges".


 * She easily abandons her subordinates such as when Moro and her clan ambushed cattlemen. Later, she even used subordinates as baits to lure boars, knowing that they will all die, and dropped bombs on them and activated bombs hidden underground, committing a mass murder. These deceased subordinates didn't know the real intents behind this.
 * Irontown annually operated types of works which were usually conducted only in winter not to damage agricultures, thus many civilians (such as farmers, fishermen, merchants, and eventually majority of adjacent societies) suffered due to Irontown's unprincipled operations.
 * According to the official movie pamphlet, many civilians of adjacent areas and along the river down held grudges against Eboshi and Irontown because of environmental destructions, and many of samurais that attacked Irontown were actually farmers who suffered because of Irontown, and Asano, while having his own political interest and aimed concessions on irons, also received such petitions from civilians and thus used this opportunity and approached Irontown.
 * Yet Eboshi and Irontown refused to negotiate and fought off them with their guns, further triggering hatreds.
 * The deserted village in which Ashitaka and Jikobo took a rest in, was described to be destroyed by floods, and in the next scene, a muddy stream of a river in Cedar Forest was shown. This indicates that floods were caused by deforestations by Irontown, and this village was one of victims.
 * While she cares leprosy patients, she herself causes further environmental pollutions and slaughters animals and people with poisonous guns.
 * Eboshi, while she cares slaves, also hides the fact that the irons forged by the female workers of Irontown were later sold to samurai to create weapons which later results in raids by samurais (such as when Ashitaka saved Jikobo) and "slave hunts", creating more slaves in the result. And some of these slaves are later sold to Irontown.

Eboshi was aware of these controversies herself, and knew that this would eventually collapse the order of Irontown, and one of her "secrets" which she told Ashitaka was that she orders vulnerable people (women, slaves, and leprosy patients) to create her guns and let women to forge irons (Tatara was actually a Nyonin Kinsei) and let women to fire the weapons against samurais to weaken powers of samurais and destroys the system where irons were used by samurai, and eventually changes biased wealth distribution, and these are all parts of her Kunikuzushi (国崩し, lit. "nation collapsing"), and the battles against animals are only a part of her greater plan.
 * The term Kunikuzushi used by Eboshi is a reference to the Kunikuzushi which represents; 1. breech-loading swivel gun which was the first cannon in the history of Japan imported from Portugal, 2. villains in Kabuki who aims subversions of nations and control the nations, somewhat consistent with, one of her inspiration sources.

Trivia

 * She was partially based on, a female thief or a female demon.
 * Irony: Eboshi offered to cut off Ashitaka's arm to be rid if his curse, and Moro later bit her arm off.
 * She wished to use the blood of the Forest Spirit to cure her lepers, due to the life granting power it has; this ultimately does come to pass.
 * Her name Gozen is likely in reference to the various women in Japanese history and myth, many of which were famous and noteworthy in one manner or the next such as being a female samurai warrior/general or in one case being the mother of a conqueror.

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Eboshi もののけ姫