For me, it’s Goblin all the way, and to some extent, it’s Tale of the Nine Tailed most of the way.
Reincarnation is not a feature of my belief system (though a Welsh writer, Charles Williams wrote a novel making animal reincarnation a plausible possibility).
I love reincarnation as a theme in Asian dramas because it underscores what is for me a foundational reality. Love worth the name lasts, transcends, and renews. That’s never a bad message to embed in a drama.
Plus it gives the creators of whatever dramas an opportunity to explore the evolution of human history and culture. And Asian dramas are always super educational about music of different eras, food, clothing, lives of the well-off versus lives of the poor, politics, medicine, whatever.
One thing I have never seen in an Asian drama, however, is something that I think must have existed in some form.
A couple of weeks ago, I went shopping at my local Price-Rite, part of a grocery store chain headquartered in New Jersey. I was looking for cat food and passed by a display of cinnamon brooms. Brooms made from bundles of branches of . . . whatever bush or tree cinnamon bark comes from. They smelled wonderful!
They were not labeled as being decorations. They were brooms for sweeping, made in the USA, possibly by Amish folks.
My particular neighborhood is so very “Asianese” that, in the past ten years, “my” Price-Rite has become very focused on food and household items for that population.
A lot of those items are also very natural and organic. My assumption is that Price-Rite is currently in some kind of battle for “Asianese” customers with other grocery store chains such as Wegmans, Aldi, and Tops.
Reincarnation-themed dramas give both creators and audience members wonderful opportunities to explore, learn, cry buckets, and of course do . . .
UMBRELLA SPOTTING!!!
(Literatures and Movies)
If any Asian culture had cinnamon brooms, obviously those would have been reserved for really wealthy people. It would be fun to find out, via a reincarnation-themed drama, if that kind of tchotchke existed.