Hi aria — how is your Japanese? All of the sources I used for this post are Japanese books. And most of the connections are tenuous at best; storytellers hundreds of years ago trying to make connections with other stories hundreds of years old just to give their own versions more credence. For me, that is the charm of folklore, but it is a double edged sword, because everything you say about folklore can be contradicted by another version of the tale.

I think that’s a more modern view of her, as for most of history she was viewed as a creature of pure evil. But again, who’s to say that it is wrong or right to view her one way or another? I think there is definitely something sympathetic with her. At the end of her life, she appears in a dream to her hunters and begs them to spare her life. It’s sad, even a bit pathetic. But maybe it was just another one of her tricks, too. Who knows? The best part about folklore is that it is up to interpretation! 🙂

On somewhat unrelated matters, it may fall outside this purview, but I have seen a few modern media (games specifically) with a more sympathetic representation of Tamamo-no-Mae, maybe as somebody that was tricked, or at least that is currently repenting. This may fall in the trope of having more “nuanced” versions of usually demonized historical/mythological characters rather than being something particular about Tamamo-no-Mae, though.