#Zounose

[silvaruslupus]

Man, say what you guys will about Zounose's stories/themes/intrests (I don't mind the darker stuff, we have enough fluff) but they're really fuckin' good at taking a stage 1 boss I didn't care about and making her creepy as hell

[firecodex]

Official version of the title artwork featuring Rika & Clodsire and Poppy & Tinkaton shared by poke_times Twitter/X account

Art by Zounose (Twitter/X: zounose)

[ Game-ripped version ]

[sannyo-appreciation-posts]

The Dichotomy of Sannyo

(Illustrated by Zounose)

Yakuza:

Angel:

[evilisk]

Okay, no this LW-Zounose tie-in comic is legit great. I love how the mini-comic takes the concept seriously and to its natural conclusion, despite how silly the initial concept is.

I also have to admire the fact that Zounose did not at all tone down the Zounose-ness of their comic meant to promote Lost Word. Like, this comic where youkai talk about wanting to get a 6-Star Drop so they can eat a whole person is just in Lost Word now:

[z-moves]

Official artwork released on White Day featuring characters from Pokémon Sword & Pokémon Shield who won a Valentine's Day poll

Art by Zounose (Twitter: zounose)

[sukimas]

Zounose's work is fun because as a naive new fan you'll be like oh nobody in Touhou is that casual about that are they. It's just exaggerated for comedy.

And then maybe if you're lucky you'll read AFiEU and you'll go oh ok.

[occasionaltouhou]

i do sometimes contemplate the value of engaging with a work like touhou - one which has been a core of doujin culture for decades, one whose value is as much in everything that has been inspired by it as by the original thing itself - and stubbornly engaging only with the "canon" material, but. i mean, i enjoy it. so who's to say

[waffliesinyoface]

zounose is hit or miss with a lot of people but i feel like this panel will resonate with the ayaposters of this hellsite

[eleemosynecdoche]

clownpiece??

Look. Clownpiece is a very hard one for this. I adore this little shit. Hirasaka Makoto, god damn that man, made her a darling little angel who lives in a chuuni world of dissociation from the ceaseless libertarian violence of Hell but also doesn't understand she can ignore babysitter/camp counselor Reimu until the Three Fairies of Light explain this concept to her.

I think her biggest flaw as a person is that, unlike most fairies, she seems to vastly underestimate her own strength and powers and this seems like it probably kills people. She might be a stone-cold killer just from waving that torch around casually when Youmu is within 50 yards. Good god, is Clownpiece a Murciélago character in disguise? Is there a frequent clown-child-enabled Cuisinart able to cut 400 yojanas in a single blow stalking the forests of Gensokyo? Does Zounose have a submission line for doujin ideas? I think this needs one of our silliest little guys on the case.

It's hard to get really critical with fairies because they're basically kids and will stay kids forever, unless they spontaneously become a Kazami-like object. Clownpiece is even well-behaved for fairy hellfiend children. This isn't thousands of words, but there's only so much you can say about a snot-nosed hell brat.

[touhoulostword-journal]

Great Suwa War | Artist: Zounose

Story coming soon! I'll update this when it's released!

[yoshizora]

Thoughts on Tsukasa x Sanae also known as Oil Fire? (If unfamiliar, search the Oil Fire tag)

it's not really my thing!

(longer thoughts under the cut if you want a full explanation)

i like tsukasa as a character just fine but i don't really jive with the way she's been designated as the fandom's "sex fox"/sex object and consequently gets characterized as such, so most of her fanon content doesn't click with me. i realize this may be hypocritical of me to say since i characterize megumu as a giant manwhore more often than not and i always joke about her having a million gfs, but it really just boils down to my own personal preferences and how different megumu and tsukasa are as their own individual characters.

tangentially related— translations are still being updated, and i've been getting mixed info about whether or not tsukasa is actually STAYING at the shrine or she just wandered over and starting using it as a base without the moriya folks' knowledge. because i really would like to know what the hell kanako and suwako were doing during 19 when tsukasa popped up and told sanae she'd be using their shrine (tho suwako/tsukasa would be great a la zounose style, now that i think about it). yeah but anyway tsukasa/sanae is just one of those ships that doesn't ping me, shrugs.

i'll be thinking more about suwako/tsukasa now tho, thank u

[anueutsuhos-touhou-profiles]

Hata no Kokoro:

Bottom left art by Zounose, bottom right art by Rihito

Hata no Kokoro is a unique kind of tsukumogami known as a menreiki: 66 different masks all coming to life with a single, shared identity.

These masks each represent a single emotion, and are all essential for her identity to function. If even one is damaged or missing, she'll go insane. To make matters worse, you can hypothetically change her mentally by adding different "masks" as substitutes.

Her face never changes from that stoic expression, but it's not that she's emotionless. Her masks and her body language communicate this well enough. Her personality also comes through with these masks: while she looks cold and stoic on the outside, she's very innocent and childish, and actually very perky. Though she does tend to announce how she feels, which kinda gives away how inhuman she is.

She's initially the main antagonist of Touhou 13.5: Hopeless Masquerade. It seems all the Human Villagers have lost all hope due to all the incidents happening beyond their control. However, it turns out it was really because Kokoro had lost her Mask of Hope, and subconsciously compensated by absorbing the hope from the surrounding area. All three major religions in Gensokyo: Shinto, as represented by Reimu (and only her, the Moriya Shrine sits this one out), Buddhism, as represented by the Myouren Temple, and Taoism, as represented by the Divine Spirit Mausoleum, all tried to take advantage of this hopelessness to expand their followers. Even Nitori invented her own Kappaism religion in order to pander to this!

At least Miko tried to solve the incident, however, by making a new Mask of Hope for Kokoro... that looks like Miko's own face. Truly a humble woman. Kokoro actually rejected this mask, though, worried that it would kill her, returning her to a set of inanimate masks.

Eventually, Kokoro learned to control her emotions outside of her masks, with a big help from Mamizou, and confronted the religious leaders on exploiting her issues. At once. She fought Reimu, Byakuren, and Miko all at the same time and won! She celebrated her victory by creating a play with Mamizou about the events of the game, called Shinkirou. Afterwards, it turned out nobody was really sincerely converted to any religion because of the incident: people were just interested in watching these women beating the crap out of each other and placing bets on who would win.

Kokoro later appeared in the manga Forbidden Scrollery, where the hopelessness incident was revealed to have affected Kosuzu back then. She also appeared in Hopeless Masquerade's sequels, 14.5: Urban Legend in Limbo and 15.5: Antinomy of Common Flowers.

In Urban Legend in Limbo, one of her masks is cracked, causing her to believe she's the Kuchisake-onna, a girl from urban legend wearing a facemask who goes around asking people if she's pretty, only to kill them regardless of their answer after taking off the mask and revealing a horrifying mass of eel-like teeth underneath. She tries to get it fixed, but everyone who could is too busy, and she eventually falls into the role completely, besides realizing the question is redundant and so just assaults people on sight. This is, of course, fixed offscreen between games, however.

She's usually seen around Gensokyo, performing Noh theater. Noh, if you're wondering, is a Japanese theater art from the 14th century. She sometimes even does it at the Hakurei Shrine, giving Reimu some much needed donations for once.

She has something of an arch-rivalry with Koishi Komeiji, which makes sense, since it turns out Koishi stole her Mask of Hope in the first place! They act as foils to each other: Kokoro may look emotionless, but she's actually full of emotion, she just communicates it differently than most. Koishi may look perpetually cheerful, but she's really dead on the inside.

In battle, Kokoro uses a surprisingly wide range of attacks, almost all of which involve her masks or the ghostly blue fire surrounding them. Usually she has three masks orbiting around her at a time, each representing happy, sad, and angry. She can propel her masks at her opponents, or cause them to grow in size at the screen like a jumpscare. Each of her masks have laser eyes with different colored beams depending on the emotion: green for happy, blue for sad, and red for angry. She's able to breath (regular-colored) fire out of a big chinese lion mask, she can spit webbing out of a spider mask, and she can bite people with a wolf mask. She also uses a blue laser naginata. She even has fans she uses for weaponized fan dances! And of course she can shoot large waves of that blue fire around her.

Since she had to slowly learn to control her emotions, she's become incredibly good at reading the emotions of others, to borderline psychic levels. It even extends to being able to control other people's emotions through her masks!

Her name means "Kokoro of the Hata clan". The name "Kokoro" means "heart and mind". Hata is the family name of Hata no Kawakatsu, a legendary theatre performer from the Asuka period who had 66 masks made for him by Shoutoku Taishi. He actually predated Noh theater by a long time, the theater he practiced was Kagura.

That's right! Miko made the masks that would become Kokoro!

Hopeless Masquerade is the last game in this "chain of events", and the end of Windows Generation 2. After this, the new antagonists are no longer created or enabled by the previous one. Except a few, but it's no longer a single unbroken chain.

[sannyo-appreciation-posts]

Translated Zounose Unconnected Marketeers doujin on Danbooru

This one only seems to be translated on Danbooru

[evilisk]

"Lost Word collaborated with Zounose? I wonder what that's all about-"

"Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what I expected"

[z-moves]

Official wallpaper of Pokémon Legends: Arceus featuring Basculegion and Hisuian Braviary, shared to celebrate the game's release. A hanging scroll of this artwork was given to 30 people through a lottery.

Art by Zounose (Twitter: zounose)

[sukimas]

fuck this gay earth. i'm reading last supper by zounose to cleanse my mind after this conversation. and you should too. it has metaphysics.