shadowjackery

[shadowjackery]

Hold Me Until It Hurts

My contribution for Touhou Crack Month 2025 (@touhoucrackmonth): a little Kaguya/Enoko, straight from the sketchpad to you, with love.

Full version under the cut, due to cartoonish blood splatter.

[shadowjackery]

Responding to tags on A Private Picnic:

It was indeed WW2, and they were Italian partigiani on the march to prepare an ambush, when suddenly la Diavola Scarlatta herself drops out of the sky to ask how they've been doing lately against the damned crucchi. (Remilia has never forgiven that horrid and tasteless little Austrian for closing her favorite Berlin clubs. Among other sins.) This triggers a lot of frantic signs of the cross and muttered prayers, even from the socialists.

Remi keeps teasing them, enjoying the effect she's produced, until Patchy starts henpecking her to give it up so they can go home already. At this point a younger partisan whispers, "The devil has a wife?" An old-timer hisses at him to shut up before she hears him, but too late: Remilia's blush could almost be used as a night vision lamp.

Remi flits off, still stammering denials, Patch behind her, a faint smile on her lips. She nods politely at the soldiers before flying away.

There many tales of the Scarlet Devil in that part of the Alps, but no one ever believed that one.

[shadowjackery]

[shadowjackery]

Cute, funny, and absolutely delightful! I love it. The height difference and facial expressions just bring it. Thank you very much, and Happy Christmas to you, too!

Aya/Shiki literally came to me in a dream, and I was amazed that upon waking it sort of made sense. A judge and a reporter both seek to uncover the truth, albeit in very different ways. They'd drive each other nuts.

(I could almost imagine them as stars of a celestial mystery novel, sort of a Touhou mash-up of Nero Wolfe & Archie Goodwin, Master Li & Number Ten Ox, Judge Dee, and the stageplay The Front Page.)

Happy holidays, @shadowjackery! I’m pleased to reveal I’m your Touhou Yuri Secret Santa! Eiki/Aya (though I guess I drew it a bit more like Aya/Eiki) is such a unique and interesting pairing idea - I was immediately taken by the thought. The pinnacle of justice and the noted stretcher of the truth is a really fun dynamic. I’m into it!

I wanted to draw them both wearing silly Christmas sweaters (I even had designs in mind for them!) but I realized you wouldn’t get a good look at them in this pose and also Christmas doesn’t particularly exist in Gensokyo, so! lol! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I hope you enjoy! Maybe more later??? 👀 And of course, many thanks to @amemenojaku for hosting this exchange!

[shadowjackery]

A Private Picnic

Touhou Yuri Secret Santa gift: A bit of Remi/Patchy for @hadalzonee. Happiest felicitations, and may we all be safe and healthy through the coming year.

I have myself done rainy day reading picnics like this, although -- alas! -- not with a vampire girlfriend. Still, even alone it can be enjoyable. (Avoid wind.)

[shadowjackery]

Four Suits, Four Seasons

My piece for @gensokyozine this year. I hope you enjoy.

[shadowjackery]

And it's out! I plan to upload my full piece to this blog tomorrow. For today, enjoy the zine with everyone! This was a lot of fun to work on, a lot of creative people involved, and I hope you all enjoy it.

IT'S HERE!!

We're excited to present ☀️ Seasons of Gensokyo ❄️, a Touhou Project fanzine with over 100 contributors and over 200 pages of incredible content! It's all free to download, too!

⬇️ https://gensokyozine.itch.io/gensokyoseasons

[shadowjackery]

I am again participating in Gensokyo Zine, this year's zine titled Seasons of Gensokyo. An uncolored sample from my little comic:

The stakes of the game are the seasons themselves! Final version will be colored. The collaboration is scheduled to release on 28 July 2024. Looking forward to it!

[shadowjackery]

Still being stubbornly insistent, etc. :p

Just being stubbornly insistent that my reblogging happens on the reblogging blog and my art/writing/stuff happens on the my art/writing/stuff blog after I accidentally switched to the wrong one.

[shadowjackery]

Just being stubbornly insistent that my reblogging happens on the reblogging blog and my art/writing/stuff happens on the my art/writing/stuff blog after I accidentally switched to the wrong one.

[shadowjackery]

I like to think that, ocassionally, Windows Reimu asks Genjii to fly her wherever while she lay on his back. There's no reason to bring Genjii, since she already knows how to fly herself. She just has him fly so she can have the space to vent her frustrations away.

Despite her seeming lack of respect toward him, Reimu does trust Genjii.

[shadowjackery]

"Okay, Miss Oni," said Mima, spilling sake everywhere, "I'll level with you. I was never actually invited to be a Sage of Gensokyo, I was never officially made a Sage of Gensokyo, I never even really wanted to be a Sage of Gensokyo, I just showed up to a meeting or two and everyone else assumed I belonged there."

Yukari peeked out of a gap behind her shoulder. "What makes that different from any of the other Sages?"

Mima tossed her drink over her shoulder and missed.

"There's got to be more to it than just showing up," objected Kasen, as she refilled Mima's cup.

Mima chuckled. "That and swag." She tipped her hat jauntily. "Didn't you crash parties back in the day, you and the other three? Rules of Power, baby: If they don't throw you out, you're in."

From a new gap, Yukari leaned, supporting her weight on Kasen's sturdy head. "You've gotten so boring, my dear." Kasen's arm twitched.

the mima sage theory

it's a stretch but i think it's Funnie.

she's a serial Hakurei Tormentor, as all sages are

she has some association with the shrine due to having been apparently sealed in a minor shrine on or near its grounds prior to HRtP

despite purportedly being a vengeful spirit, she seems to take a pretty strong interest in the parts of humanity that interest her, for her own reasons, and doesn't seem to be the kind of destructive seen with later vengeful spirits - a similar theme of the apparent rejection of their own nature in the immediate day to day but rebuilding it in their own way at the macroscale that all the sages do (assuming Yukaribel, anyway)

Mima's primary colours - yellow, green, and blue - are the ones that ZUN "skipped" when creating the Yakumo household

in Mima's MS route Shinki talks about not giving the human world (Gensokyo, in any translation to modern continuity) proper notice about the demon tourists. There's plenty of ways to interpret this; "Mima has some actual legitimate claim to being one of the people she should have notified" is one of them.

she doesn't have the tabard but Yukari has gone out of uniform to shenanigise before. and she'd look good in one

[shadowjackery]

(Though as Yukari her knowledge of physics is greatly improved, at least to the level of making irritating physics-based wordplay when others want to talk about alcohol.)

Yes, it's great to have it all in one place like this. Thanks again.

The Yukaribel Theory

Perhaps you've heard of it. Most Touhou fans who have read the stories of ZUN's Music CDs are aware of it— the "theory" that Maerieberie Hearn (Merry) and Yukari Yakumo are the same person in some way. But why do people believe this? What is the evidence for it? And how much of a leap is really being made in interpreting the base text?

For these purposes, I have compiled an exhaustive document collecting all the evidence in favor of the theory that I could find (that was of suitable quality) into one place. Sections are dated in chronological order of the evidentiary works' release dates.

If the idea of this theory has been bothering you for years, or if you believe in it but you're not familiar with exactly how much evidence there is to support it, or if you're somewhere in between these two extremes, please take a look at it. It's my belief that if you enter with an open mind, you will leave with at least the understanding of how someone could view this to be not just theory, but the obvious and intended way for the text to be read.

[shadowjackery]

Aha! There it is, found it. Missed that point, yes, sorry: that Merry wrote a note and dropped it. Thanks for clearing that up!

The Yukaribel Theory

Perhaps you've heard of it. Most Touhou fans who have read the stories of ZUN's Music CDs are aware of it— the "theory" that Maerieberie Hearn (Merry) and Yukari Yakumo are the same person in some way. But why do people believe this? What is the evidence for it? And how much of a leap is really being made in interpreting the base text?

For these purposes, I have compiled an exhaustive document collecting all the evidence in favor of the theory that I could find (that was of suitable quality) into one place. Sections are dated in chronological order of the evidentiary works' release dates.

If the idea of this theory has been bothering you for years, or if you believe in it but you're not familiar with exactly how much evidence there is to support it, or if you're somewhere in between these two extremes, please take a look at it. It's my belief that if you enter with an open mind, you will leave with at least the understanding of how someone could view this to be not just theory, but the obvious and intended way for the text to be read.

[shadowjackery]

Excellent summation, thank you!

One trivial nitpick:

In Changeability of Strange Dream, Merry merely speculates she time travelled. I don't think she knows for certain. Gensokyo, being largely rural and pre-industrial, has very little light pollution blocking the stars, so even if it were the same hour and day as in the outside world, it would still seem to an outsider like times long past. Maybe she did time jump, maybe not.

The Yukaribel Theory

Perhaps you've heard of it. Most Touhou fans who have read the stories of ZUN's Music CDs are aware of it— the "theory" that Maerieberie Hearn (Merry) and Yukari Yakumo are the same person in some way. But why do people believe this? What is the evidence for it? And how much of a leap is really being made in interpreting the base text?

For these purposes, I have compiled an exhaustive document collecting all the evidence in favor of the theory that I could find (that was of suitable quality) into one place. Sections are dated in chronological order of the evidentiary works' release dates.

If the idea of this theory has been bothering you for years, or if you believe in it but you're not familiar with exactly how much evidence there is to support it, or if you're somewhere in between these two extremes, please take a look at it. It's my belief that if you enter with an open mind, you will leave with at least the understanding of how someone could view this to be not just theory, but the obvious and intended way for the text to be read.

[shadowjackery]

I myself have been mildly obsessing over this question for years, too, and I guess I'm doing a quick write-up today when I should be doing something else. Alas, my notes are a mess, so I have no solid demographic references to cite, sorry. Take all this with a hefty pile of salt.

(I agree that the real answer, of course, is that the Human Village is as big or as small as a writer needs it to be, but anyway...)

tl;dr: Let's say 5,000 in town, 50,000 total, but you could easily talk me into twice that.

I agree that "village" is probably not the best translation here for "Ningen-no-Sato". This is not a small farming settlement of a couple of hundred people. This is a full-size market town! The market is open every day and long into the night. There is at least one tall and sturdy wall with at least one gate. There are well-maintained roads, bridges, and at least one navigable canal. There are specialists and luxury goods: florists, printers, cobblers, lacemakers. There are restaurants and bars and probably hotels. There are some large and wealthy households, some of them merchants. I seem to recall I've seen beggars in one of the official comics. There are thousands of people living in this settlement, and many more outside of it and regularly passing through.

Pre-industrial urban populations tended to be small by our expectations; 5,000 could be a fair-sized town, 10,000 noteworthy. Big cities were tremendous political entities in their own right; feeding a metropolis like Rome, Beijing, or Tenochtitlan virtually required an empire.

Ningen-no-Sato isn't THAT big, but it feels like it gets larger rather than smaller with every new book and game; for now, let's say 5,000 souls to make easy napkin-back math. This number includes the usual handful of town-dwelling psychics, halfbreeds, werebeasts, and other closeted youkai, but doesn't count household spirits, fairies, and random bits of furniture on the verge of self-awareness.

The urban population is only a fraction of the total human population, usually 5-10%. Everyone else is rural, growing food and fiber, herding beasts, fishing, making charcoal, and all the other myriad basic production tasks that support a civilization. So if the town is 5,000, that suggests an overall human population of 45,000 to 100,000. Again, 50,000 gives us easy math, but you could talk me higher.

Yes, some of the people in the town are farming the land immediately around the town, but that's not enough to support the town population! They need to import food and fuel and the rest from the surrounding countryside, by boat and by cart, mostly by boat.

(If there were really were only 5,000 humans total, only living in the town proper, with Yukari gapping in rice: 1 koku of rice, what was considered enough for one person for one year, is 180 liters in volume. Some quick math suggests Yukari would need to steal between a dozen and fifteen ISO 40-foot cargo containers of rice every year, assuming no weight limit... but a town needs many other supplies as well. Yukari would need to install a railyard, I think, and bring in a container every week, at least. Having the locals do their own farming and production is probably more efficient, and certainly less work for her.)

The best sources I could get on pre-industrial population density seem to range from 30 people per square mile for poor, hardscrabble terrain, up to 120+ for some of those legendary fertile river valleys. Gensokyo's productivity might be lower than historical; dried ocean fish was an important fertilizer in Japan, and there's no ocean in Gensokyo. On the other hand, productivity might be higher; the local harvest goddess literally lives right down the road. Also, taxes will be lower than historically, because they aren't supporting an imperial military! (The roads and canals would be supported by corvée labor -- that's a required contribution of a certain number of days of work -- and the town itself probably levies a gate tax or market tax.)

Again, for the sake of easy math, let's say this is idyllic Miyazaki-movie-esque countryside supporting 100 people per square mile. That gives us about 500 square miles of territory, which is almost certainly not a geometrically perfect square or circle. Let's imagine a blob of territory stretching up and down the branches of a river valley, maybe 15-20 miles across at its narrowest, 30-40 miles across at its longest, nestled between forested mountains. Upriver are the lakes and foothills of the Youkai Mountains, beyond them waterfalls and greater peaks, and finally the highest distant peak, that the tengu call Yatsugatake, shining white with snowpack. There might even be a small glacier. Downriver, the water flows away beside a nearly-forgotten road to disappear beyond the Barrier.

Within this settled area are a few hundred villages (mura), most of them with a hundred or two farmfolk each, each village a mile or two apart. There are some larger villages at interesting points, and then the big town itself roughly in the center, on the river. Most people live in the longest-settled parts in the middle of this district, close to the main watercourses. Weirdos like Marisa and Rinnosuke live on the fringes. This whole zone is filled with little paths and irrigation canals, fields and paddies and ponds and orchards, well-tended hedges and stands of trees, beehives, barns, and storage sheds, and assorted tiny shrines. There might be a decent road or two -- probably at least one along the canal -- with rest-stops along the way. (Japan at the time of the Barrier had long been used to a fair level of background tourist traffic, though Gensokyo seems to have been in a quiet backwater.) The woodlands within and just surrounding this area are almost as well-tended as the croplands; foraging rights are carefully divided up, for firewood, wild plants and mushrooms, hunting and trapping and fishing. You'll see people in the woods and meadows every day.

Then beyond that is the REAL unclaimed wilderness. Unclaimed by humans, that is. Folks who live near the bounds shutter their doors at night and hang up prayer strips.

Lots of people live within a day's walk, ride, or row of the main town. For the rest, going into town for business can take you a few days: hike in, stay one or two nights, then go back home. Hiking from one end of the Human Settlement to the other and back might take a week if you're taking your time about it, but a post rider or magical flyer can do the journey in a day or less. Marisa or Alice can pop into town on broom-back for a day trip, easy-peasy, but you can see why it can take days for Marisa and Reimu to track down an incident.

In a car, on a modern highway, you'd drive past all this in less than an hour and never notice it was there. Our industrialized world collapses scale.

With this many humans around, Mystia's business plan makes a little more sense. If there's only one tiny center of habitation, huddled nervously behind their palisade at night, she does no business. But with this many paths and villages, there are often people on the roads in the evening, hustling home from business with their neighbors or an over-late stay in town, and willing to take a chance on an unfamiliar food stall.

With this many humans around, Sekibanki makes sense. If there were only a few hundred humans, everyone is related to everyone and there are no strangers. But with tens of teaming thousands, Banki-chan can just start renting a room in town with the vague explanation that she came from, "uh… up north? Lookin' for work, you know," and that's enough.

I'm personally of the opinion that youkai-eating-humans is far less common than either side would have you believe -- it's not unheard of, we've seen killings in the manga in both directions, but it's not a regular occurrence. I do not think that the Three Fairies of Light are dragging children into their cute little treehouse to suck the marrow from their bones. We don't need to calculate predation statistics on the human population. Roll that number into the regular (human-on-human) murder rate, whatever it is, and move on.

I also don't think we need to calculate the youkai burden on Gensokyo's farmers. A lot of youkai don't exactly eat per se: Yuuka Kazami gardens for her own whims, not for survival; gods can live off offerings; Kogasa can feed off of surprise; and so on. And a lot of youkai eat like wild beasts and live in holes, only switching to human form when they feel like it. Meanwhile, the more organized youkai have their own lands, away from prying human eyes: the tengu would have their herds and fields and mines up in the foothills of their mountains, and the secretive rabbit-folk of the Bamboo Forest of the Lost would farm their own rice to pound their own mochi to tithe to the manor at Eientei. Finally, fairies raiding your berry bushes and apple orchards for snacks probably evens out with other fairies helping the sun shine, the rains fall, and your crops grow; it's all just the circle of life in Gensokyo.

(Side note: I think it's funny that Nitori and her cronies were so proudly secretive about their "new invention" of a greenhouse for cucumbers. It shows how little the kappa or yamawaro use agriculture in their daily lives. The Romans were experimenting with solar greenhouses for cucumbers two thousand years ago; Korea had climate-controlled greenhouses for orange trees in the 15th century. This is not a new technology! I wonder what the kappa think human farmers even do all day, if perhaps they imagine that our fields just grow like that naturally and we just happen to hang out there.)

Since the physical requirements of many youkai are low, whatever valuables they do acquire, they're quite happy to spend. Kogasa mentions in one manga that a few blacksmith gigs give her enough money to play for the rest of the year. Farmers often have a side gig for outside trade, something to do in the off-season that brings in a little extra cash. I imagine there's quite a steady market among the danmaku girls for new combat boots and lacey ribbons, not to mention moonshine.

Anyway, I'd argue for "the Human Settlement" or "the Human Villages" (plural) or "the Human District" for the overall region. Once upon a time, the town itself might have been Gensou-machi or Gensou-to or something like that, but I like the idea of the locals calling the biggest town they've ever seen "The Village" as a nickname that started as a joke and eventually stuck, and now no one but Akyuu remembers the original name.

the population of the human village

… is a topic I’ve been unnecessarily thinking about for a long time, and I’m half-asleep and bored, so let’s talk about it. Right now. Right now. Nobody is going to care about this and nobody should care about this, but sometimes I think about dumb stuff.

We don’t get many good looks at the human village. There are a few high-level views of it in the manga. The best one I can think of is in FS 31:

I mean, I don’t think an illustration in the manga is a strictly authoritative source, but I’d say it’s roughly accurate. More importantly, I guess, it’s bigger than I see a lot of fanworks suggest. That’s definitely bigger than anything we’d call a ‘village’ around where I grew up, really. (Note: I grew up in the middle of nowhere, so we had no standards.)

Here are some businesses/etc that we know are in the village:

One school (Keine’s school)

One specialty book store (Suzunaan)

A master diviner who has multiple students (from FS 25)

Multiple pubs (FS 22)

A guy who made his money off selling salt and got rich (well, there was. Dead now. FS 36)

Quite a few restaurants (WaHH 7)

A florist (Yuuka’s PMiSS article)

… which all make me place a pretty high minimum on the village’s size. Apart from Akyuu’s books, Suzunaan doesn’t seem particularly in demand, so it doesn’t seem like the kinda place that would pop up in a settlement of a few hundred people. Kinda the same for the diviners. There are actually statistics for number of bars per capita; it’s hard to find actually good ones with a quick search, but apparently modern Tokyo has about 1 bar per 900 residents, so let’s use that as a general order of magnitude kinda thing. (Ironically, I had far less luck finding stats on the number of schools per capita. Japan’s historic situation is kinda unique there, too, so let’s just give up on estimating it.)

On top of the above: It’s pretty obvious that the village is large enough that everybody doesn’t know each other. Pretty much any time stuff in the village becomes important, it’s always “that one shop downtown” or “a guy who runs an udon place.” There are a few chapters dealing with outsiders showing up, too, and nobody ever seems too surprised to see a new face around or, say, sees a new kid showing up to their classes and questions the fact that they don’t know their parents.

Comparing it with historic Japanese cities… well, Hakodate had about 10,000 people in 1850 (which is probably about the best historic point to use as reference,) and by that point it also had multiple temples and pretty active trade. Probably too high. Population data seems pretty hazy and unreliable that far back, so comparisons for anything smaller are hard to find, if they’re out there. But hey, let’s say 10,000 is significantly more than the village.

Combining all that, I guess I’d put the population somewhere in the low/mid thousands? Three to five thousand, maybe. Big enough that people definitely won’t know each other, small enough to have some reference for most other people, even if it’s only ‘yeah, he runs a shop over that way, married to the old tailor’s daughter.’ Also just big enough to support some weird specialty shops and probably have a few indistinct districts. (At least, specialty shops that aren’t frilly hat outlets, which is presumably one of the most reliable industries in Gensokyo.) Probably big enough to start approaching the viable threshold for industrial development and stuff, which I guess could make an interesting plot hook.

… actually, probably enough that they significantly outnumber the non-fairy youkai, with the numbers I’ve always felt like canon hints at. (if there are significantly more than, like, 100 kappa, I will be shocked.) Huh.

[shadowjackery]

I’m glad so many of you enjoyed the comic. (And in case you missed it over the weekend, here’s the link again: https://www.tumblr.com/shadowjackery/721059908254121985/the-gladdest-thing-under-the-sun?source=share)

My favorite tags so far:

You. You get it.

[Descriptive text:

Yuuka Kazami stands triumphant, surrounded by flames and darkness, the sharpened point of her parasol held like a rapier to the throat of fallen Yumeko, whose useless swords are scattered about. Shinki stands nearby, smiling furiously, emitting beams of energy like wings.

To the side is a text box, that reads:

“Peer-Reviewed Tags:

#it truly captures the inhuman nature of Yuuka #also OP you made her Really Hot

#damn! she’s fucked in the head!”

Yuuka says, “Darling, genocide is just a game!” A heart floats in her words.

Shinki says, “Are you making light of Makai? I’ll have you know I made everything here.”

Yuuka says, “Well, compared to ME...”]