I'm dying

So, the drug dealers or medicine sellers (that's the official name) are the main characters of the Mononoke franchise.

They wander around Japan, disguised as medicine sellers. But they're actually looking for strange activity, mostly sudden unexplained deaths, because that means there's a Mononoke. (They are basically exorcists)

A Mononoke is a spirit that came from a person's (or of multiple people's) grudge. They haunt the place that holds significance to the person or people.

To exorcise a Mononoke, the medicine seller needs the shape (their Identity), the truth (the reality of the situation) and the reason (the emotional burden of the person) of the Mononoke. The shape is quite easy to get, because the Mononoke eventually start showing up. But the truth and especially the reason require some time, because the people who know these things don't want to say them. So it takes the medicine seller a while to get those.

When they finally have all of the three requirements, they can unsheath the Sword of Exorcism (a special sword they carry around). In these swords exist these spirits, that help the medicine seller slay the Mononoke. When the sword is unsheathed, they merge with the medicine seller and gain a form and they both control one body (I know that there was a post better explaining this, but I couldn't find it. If I do, I will tag you in it).

Now, at the start I said medicine sellers, which means there's multiple. And there is. Even though we currently know about only three (Ri, Kon and Inui), there are 64 Swords of Exorcism and thus 64 medicine sellers. This is because the swords correspond to the 64 hexagrams that are mentioned in the Book of Changes. Among these 64 hexagrams are eight trigrams, which are considered to be the strongest. From these eight trigrams, we have the medicine sellers we currently know about. (This also means that you can make a medicine seller oc and correspond it to one of the hexagrams).

Ri and Kon

Inui

Ri's ans Kon's second forms

Now, the franchise itself.

The medicine seller Ri first appeared in the 2006 anime Ayakashi samurai ghost stories in the last three episodes. A year later, he got his own anime simply titled Mononoke. The anime is divided into multiple plots that take up two or three episodes and the anime has 12 episodes in total.

Then, about two years ago, we got the first Mononoke movie, where Kon was first featured, titled Mononoke : Phantom in the rain. A year later we got the second movie, Mononoke: The ashes of rage. And this year we got the third and last movie, Mononoke: The curse of the serpent.

This year (actually like a few weeks ago), a new project was also announced. This project will be featuring the third medicine seller Inui (and I'm super excited for it!!!!).