#a little kanako reference... as a treat

[ubercharge]

former overworked office worker is isekai'd and stumbles into assassin work because she has a real talent for using magic blades. unfortunately being surrounded by magic hasn't fixed her insomnia, but work is a lot more fulfilling now

also i wanted a sexy assassin with eyebags who breasts boobily because i'm a creature of simple tastes

[raerambling]

Yo hey more Bounty hunter Kanako! I’ve honestly kinda fell in love with this whole au, accidentally created my own hyperfixation within a hyperfixation. So I’m going to go ramble on more about my favorite traumatized fox child.

I actually got a question from @kanorune about Kanako’s relationship with the feisty five, which also got me thinking about her relationships with everyone else, so imma start with that. To answer your question on what she thinks of Moray, her hatred towards Martlet is much more her being apart of the Royal Guard than her familiar appearence. In fact, foxes are red-green colorblind like dogs, so she wouldn’t even know that Martlet and Undyne look similar. But the similarities between Undyne and Moray are a lot more noticeable, to the point Undertale yellow even mentions the similarities, so Kanako for sure notices. The thing is, the Feisty Five are family to her, she’s an honorary member of the team and is treated as such. So when it comes to Moray, there’s conflicting feelings. She’s known him her entire childhood, he’s her partner just like the rest of the posse, but she can’t stop seeing her in him no matter what she does. So Kanako keeps her distance from Moray more then the others, which definitely upsets the poor guy, those he never says it. He does his best to reach out and be supportive, but there’s moments where he can feel her eyes burn in the back of his neck, and he knows there’s little holding her back from ripping it open. As for the other four, Kanako will never admit it, but she loves being carried around by Ed. Her and Mooch like to do crime together, Kanako distracts while Mooch does Mooch things. Ace finds Kanako to be a worthy card game opponent with a poker face that can rival his own, whenever Kanako finds herself bored while Starlo’s out drinking you’ll probably find her playing rummy with him. Also fun fact, Ace is the one that modified her hat to have the ear holes and bell rope around it!

A dynamic I’ve been really interested in is hers with Dalv. Kanako’s his first and only friend, the one that gave him corn every day under the door. In Undertale yellow, the reason it stopped one day is because she fell down. Here, she simply can’t bring herself to return. The way I’ve enturpreted the blue soul’s treck through the underground, she attacked Kanako which is why Chujin sent Axis after them; partially to protect his family, but mostly for revenge (it seems it runs in the family.) I saw someone propose the idea that the reason Dalv was attacked is that he was protecting Kanako, and I fell in love with it. In my mind, this is cannon, no one can tell me otherwise. Kanako saw him as her best friend, Dalv found her to be an inspiration, and while their bond was sparse and weak, but it was valuable. After both her parents literally bite the dust, their relationship became a reminder to her of her grief and guilt. Dalv almost died and is traumatized because of her, and now her family is dead because of her. She was scared to loose anyone else in her life, so in a desperate attempt to get back control, she cut the ties herself before Dalv had the chance. The farther she was, the safer he’ll be. That’s what a good friend would do, keep their friends safe, right..?

Also, finally came up with a name for Kanako’s bounty hunter persona; Fox Fire! It has a lot of basis and research behind it, so excuse me as I ramble about it for a bit too long.

The name comes from two words, the finish word revontulet, and the Japanese word Kitsunebi, both translating into English as fire fox. A kitsunebi, as the word suggests, has a close connection to kitsunes, the type of monster Ceroba and Kanako are meant to reference. There’s many folktales about kitsunes and kitsuebis. Some stories say a kitsunebi is a flame created when a kitsune rubs its tails together, others say they’re torchlights used when foxes get married, and many festivals have come forth from kitsunebi. Kitsunebi also has a close connection to the Japanese god of foxes, Inari, and the shrine dedicated to her, Oji Inari. Meanwhile in Finland, revontulet is what they call the northern lights, meaning fox fire in English. It comes from a folk tale stating that the Aurora borealis are the tails of arctic foxes running across the sky. Aurora borealises can only form in the north and south poles, thus making it common for the northern lights and the star Polaris, more commonly referred to as the North Star, close together. Not only does the name Fox Fire give Kanako a connection to her family and their liniage as kitsunes, but also gives her a connection to Starlo and his title as North Star as the two astrological sighting happen together. There’s also a simple view of the name too, as Kanako is a fox monster that has fire magic, this Fox Fire, very simple. But actually the fox part of fox fire doesn’t come from the animal, but actually from the word faux, which means false. I nice nod to the fact that Fire Fox isn’t her actual name, and is instead a facade she put on as a form of escapism. Also, something I didn’t plan for, while doing research I found an old Western movie called Foxfire Light, so this name is literally perfect for her in every single way possible. IM A GENIUS!

Ok, enough rambling, I also made Kanako an official design too! A bit different from the headshot I showed before, it was more proof of concept than anything. Had a lot of fun drawing her, love the design, she’s such a sassy lass. I wanted to draw her with a pistol, but because I am an academic student in the thick of the American south, I am very triggered by guns. While I can handle most unrealistic depictions, like in games or drawings, it makes getting references and accurately drawing one very difficult for me. So I went with the much less ptsd enduring much more Busexual approach of ✨finger guns✨ 👉👉👉👉👉👉

I can’t get her hat to look right AAAAAAAAAHHHHH! I’ll make an official ref of her someday, but I’m just done with drawing cowboy hats for today. That’ll be a post for another day. Goodbye for now :P

[aardvark-123]

Conversing with Kanako

Kanako was sitting in the garden behind Hitomi's House of Sashimi, elegantly sipping a pint of pale beer. She looked up when she heard dapper shoes on the gravel and smiled. "Ah, Miss Usami! How lovely to see you."

"Hi, Kanako!" Sumireko trotted over to the table, a glass of ramune and a melonpan in hand. She sat down and deposited her snacks. "It's windy today."

[Opening greetings such as these represent an easy, standardised way of easing into a conversation; a ritual of sorts. It is plain to see that Kanako uses a formal register while Sumireko uses casual speech ('hi'). She pays no attention to their relative stations in society, where a goddess may be said to "outrank" a human, and treats her as a peer.]

"Yes, plenty of wind." Kanako leaned forwards. "Tell me, is it true that you're looking for part-time work?"

[Some brief discussion of an inconsequential topic- the weather, in this case- is known as phatic communication, and is an important part of the opening greetings. Kanako sets a topic for the conversation immediately afterwards.]

"Found some, actually! I'm an appraiser for Rinnosuke now," Sumireko said proudly. "I tell him what his Outside World things are for and whether they might be worth anything."

[The correct grammatical structure would be 'I found some, actually!', but Sumireko leaves out the 'I' at the start. This is known as elision or elipsis.]

"Ah, I see," said Kanako. "And does that pay well?"

"Sort of. He pays me in old goods. Goods that can't sell for much here in Gensokyo, maybe, but could fetch a bit more in the Outside World," explained Sumireko.

[Although it may seem basic, turn-taking is a vital aspect of a conversation. The question-and-response arrangement, where Kanako asks a question and Sumireko responds to it, is known as an adjacency pair.]

Kanako smiled knowingly. "Well, good for you! And do you make a lot of money that way, my little opportunity? I- I mean opportunist?"

[Here, Kanako says a word in error and then corrects it to what she meant to say. This is a common practice; people can easily say the wrong thing, since there are no scripts or rehearsals in real life. Correcting your own speech this way is known as repairing. The initial erroneous utterance is referred to as a false start.]

"Er," Sumireko cleared her throat, "sometimes! I have to be careful, though. Don't want my parents to think I'm moving goods for the Yakuza, do I?"

['Er' is what linguists call a voiced pause, a non-fluency feature where Sumireko takes a moment to consider her response. These are seen as friendlier than just staying silent. The 'do I?' at the end is a tag question, which can be a friendlier-sounding end to a statement or an opening for response.]

"And we wouldn't want that, of course." Kanako took a deep breath. "Right. What's the state of Shinto in the Outside World, Sumireko? I know faith in the gods has been declining recently; it was what forced Suwako and myself to move here."

['Right' is a discourse marker, a word which indicates a break or a switch in the topic.]

Sumireko blinked. "Er, well..."

[Here, Sumireko uses a hedge; vague language which normally softens a point. Kanako comes in again before she gets the chance to say more.]

"I'm sure there are still some faithful in the Outside World," Kanako went on. "And while it wouldn't be much, I don't like missing out on their faith. Suwako and I are looking into a way to collect prayers and transport them to another location. Once we have that under control, all we'll need is a woman on the outside to deliver our faith." She smiled ever-so-slightly dangerously. "What do you say, Miss Usami?"

[Kanako has been holding the conversational floor for the last couple of paragraphs. This fancy-sounding concept just means she's been the main speaker. At the end, she hands the floor to Sumireko by inviting her to speak.]

Sumireko's eyes widened. "Your... woman on the outside? Well, I could... Maybe." She cleared her throat and made herself sound confident. "What would I have to do? IF I agreed?"

[Sumireko repeats part of what Kanako said as a way of covering while she thinks of her response. She uses what's known as modal language, 'maybe' and 'could', a common strategy to defuse a potential conflict or avoid comitting to anything. She then asserts herself more firmly, reminding Kanako indirectly that she hasn't yet agreed to work for her.]

"Nothing dangerous! All you'd need to do is bring us the faith every week, once it's built up. Given how often you visit Gensokyo, it should be easy," Kanako explained. "You'll have to take it along when you go to sleep, as you did with that fish last year."

[Discourse with a specific purpose, to get things done or talk about the process, is known as transactional language.]

Sumireko gulped down her ramune. "I think I left the oven on," she declared, moving quite rapidly out of her chair. "I'll talk to you later! 'Bye!"

[Sumireko uses stock conversation ending phrases. Usually these mark a polite cessation of wordification, but here they are used to run away with grace.]

Kanako sighed. "Don't be a stranger!" she yelled, helping herself to Sumireko's melonpan. "Mmm, very sweet. I'd be quite satisfied if she just brought me one of these every week."

[uncheckedtomfoolery]

Thoughts on Aki Minoriko/Aki Sisters, since they're often considered as one?

Sure! This might get a bit long (edit: It absolutely did, you’ve been warned), so I’m putting it below the cut.

‘Often considered as one’ is both spot on and a little off the mark for how I view them. One of the new books (I can’t cite a page or anything, I don’t have the book) mentions that the Akis used to be one goddess, I believe. It gave me some ideas to layer onto what I already had. The Aki sisters are an excellent example of a few things: Namely, the way both gods and youkai are beholden to, and then constrained in most aspects of how they are, by the legends that shape them. It’s hard not to think of this post I made about kappa trying to separate themselves from their origins to a degree.

(IMPORTANT UPDATE: I have been corrected on the point in the above paragraph.)

I see the original… let’s say Aki Prime becoming two goddesses as a consequence of people generally disliking shades of grey (though mythology does have examples aplenty of that too!) and loving categories. You have the goddess of Good Autumn Things (harvest, general bounty re: food), and the goddess of Bad Autumn Things (death, decay, the coming cold). They couldn’t possibly be the same person, right? And then, just like that, they aren’t. I don’t (again, I haven’t read the new stuff about them in full, I just overheard bits and pieces) treat them as being aware of their past as one person. I do think, like basically any deity, they’re quire aware that worship pigeonholes them.

So the question is, what does this do to them? Let’s go over what each one of them is like, and then their place in Gensokyo.

Minoriko is a goddess with an entirely positive aspect, and is deeply affected by it. She is generous and kind almost by definition, and greatly approves of hard work (which she puts in herself; she keeps a garden/field and built their little mountain cottage even though she could miracle it all up); a goddess of the harvest is necessarily one of rewarding effort, after all. She is still a goddess, and that’s going to affect how she thinks of her relation towards the world, how people ought to interact with her and so on to a degree. See my post on Yukari and Okina, albeit less extreme; she’s fairly humble as divinities go, though not as much as Hina, who pretty much doesn’t count for these purposes.

It also affects her outlook in other ways; not being a goddess, but the specific kind she was shaped into. Minoriko is the goddess of the nicer side of things. Minoriko and Shizuha are basically a sensible, natural duality forcibly split in two, and it shows. Minoriko is not just optimistic; she pretty much always finds cause to be cheerful and see the good in everyone and everything, even if this isn’t particularly making good sense in the eyes of others. She doesn’t see anything strange about it because, of course, it’s what she is.

Contrast Shizuha, an exercise in trying to break away from the archetype. Partly because being a goddess of negative things, but not so much that you require worship to placate you, is basically a death sentence in this business. She’s probably propped up entirely by faith Minoriko brings in. For her own satisfaction as much as anything else, she’s turned to other fields.

Yes, Shizuha is the goddess of the dying autumn, essentially: Plants wither, the air turns cold, and animals retreat to their burrows until spring, at best. There’s one plus to all this: Japan’s fixation on coloured leaves. I don’t actually know the English term for this off the top of my head, but in Japanese it’s 紅葉 (Kouyou, lit. crimson leaves), and despite the name it refers to basically any shade of orange, yellow and red that trees take on en masse in autumn. Maple is the most famous but by no means even the only big entry on the list.

And this gives her an out: Shizuha takes on a secondary theme of beauty and art (painting the leaves, and all that). It helps that in traditional Japanese art, finding beauty in more subtle things, in decay, and the passing of transient things is a big running theme. Right up until they try to continue claiming this while adoring enormous, garish explosions of bright pink flowers in spring, I mean.

Thus, Shizuha is the goddess of endings, if she were to put it a bit more tactfully, and of the little things you can still find in darker moments. It’s not much, it sure won’t bring in worship, but it’s a bit more satisfying. It also rescues her from solely just being the sad goddess who sees the worst of everything. Her viewpoint goes from “everything is awful” to “everything is awful, but at least…” and that counts for a lot. She’s no Parsee, no, but she does tend a little gloomy and pessimistic, which probably helps her act as the walking reality check to Minoriko.

I also take the view that she’s not actually older than Minoriko. I mean, yeah, originally one person anyway, but I believe she was assigned the role just by being the one who is explicitly associated with the passage of time. I also don’t believe she resents being the less popular one, per se. It’s probably a bit unfortunate, and sure she wishes things went differently, but it can’t be helped and she’s not about to hold it against her sister.

Lastly, I’d like to suggest that for all their relatively humble attitude, minor presence in the stories and so on, the Akis are actually a pretty huge deal, especially to ordinary humans in Gensokyo. I mean, think about it. There’s some competition from the harvest-related aspects of Kanako nowadays, sure, but otherwise? It’s just Minoriko, who is the goddess of having enough food to survive the next year. That’s kind of important in a small, marginal agrarian society, though perhaps less so to youkai. I suspect that no effort is spared in making sure they’re in her good books. I would not hesitate to even call Minoriko (less so Luigi Shizuha) one of the most popular deities in Gensokyo; even if you don’t own a farm because you’re a youkai or something, she’s just generally pleasant.

Given the worship=power dynamic with most deities in the setting, this might seem to clash with their fairly minor presence. I would contend that this isn’t terribly out of place, because of their fairly benign, harmless portfolios. Shizuha with sufficient clout might get a bit scary; Minoriko, on the other hand, just brings even better harvests.

That’s about all I’ve got for Happy Potato and Sad Leaf. Goodness, that went on longer than I expected.