#youkai reimu

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

good ending: Marisa becomes a youkai.

bad ending: Marisa has Reimu exorcize her or whatever, thus allowing ZUN to delay any resolution to this plot point indefinitely.

true ending: Not enough humans are actually afraid of Marisa, and in fact they hold her in a certain amount of awe. Thus, while Marisa losing her humanity is inevitable, she instead becomes a god. However, she's pretty dogshit at actually getting faith, but not bad enough that she stops being a god, so she's basically just like Minoriko (blesses your crops by working in the field and curses them by trampling it) and Shizuha (goes out and physically paints the leaves), and the majority of her power comes from the magic she knew as a human, it's just a bit easier to use now. Reimu's the one who becomes a youkai.

[monikatouhou]

A new god in Gensoukyou

[peduin]

[solrin]

reimu's so fucking cute help

[oneweekwitch]

[sukimas]

if yukari's dialogue was translated with even half the smug superiority it has in japanese i think all of you would want to hit her over the head just as much as reimu does

[laplaces-lovecraftian-dick]

the true power of the yin yang orbs is being reimu's airpods. naturally, this was the first spell marisa ever copied

[mkoookm]

[communist-ojou-sama]

See while I can and do conceptualize Yukari and Reimu's relationship as a species of yuri I can't imagine them being like... Lovers in a romantic relationship. I like instead to imagine Yukari having a tangled and immensely confused web of feelings toward Reimu, of nostalgia, of longing, of a certain kind of motherhood, of the pains of human feelıng scarred into her by a love she lost so long ago, and the knowledge of how unbelievably fragile and temporary her existence is, and I like to imagine Reimu being bewildered and mostly bemused but silently grateful for Yukari's (to her) inexplicable preoccupation with her.

For her part Yukari never opens up to Reimu I don’t think, I think that she’s content to hassle her, to covet her, to treasure her, while enjoying her bemused confusion at it all

[wretchedbirdthing]

i have friends (who don't know i use tumblr so they don't Know) sending me screencaps of the aya posts here cause they know i like touhou. how did it get this bad.

do they know??

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

Youkai Reimu: Hm. Maybe I should get a shikigami to help me around the house and stuff.

God Marisa, cheerfully: Hm, maybe!

Youkai Reimu: Also maybe it'll help with making humans afraid of me, that's also a bunch of work and I'd prefer to just have a peaceful life regardless.

Youkai Reimu, not really paying attention to what she's saying and lost in the "am a youkai" sauce: Wait, I know! I could turn a human into a shikigami! The human's original spirit could still be in their body, so it's still a human and they're conscious and terrified the whole time, but their shikigami programming would just override what they're doing!

Youkai Reimu: ... wait no, that's not how shikigami work. Or "still a human".

God Marisa, whom we now see is boggling at her with her jaw dropped: Reimu, what the entire shit.

[monikatouhou]

[freshlybakedspiderbread]

gensokyo is a big place but i think i think about the human village more often than most locations. It’s been a fun setting for the manga and i’ve for a long time wanted to write a story that’s just a big excuse to dig into my feelings about it but who knows if that’ll ever happen since I haven’t typed up any kind of fic draft in months. 🖊❔

anyhow So Gensokyo is place where youkai from all sorts of old tales can continue to exist, but those tales need to have human characters for the youkai to antagonise, thus the human village exists to provide a consistent supply of that, humans to be fearful of the youkai. That’s like the basic gist in canon.

personally i think what some people don’t realise (or maybe this is just my own perspective...) is that the ‘normal’ humans of Gensokyo aren’t comparable to normal people like us. Much like how youkai can’t exist in the outside world because nobody believes in them, the humans of gensokyo couldn’t exist in the outside world because youkai aren’t real. Does that sentence make ANY sense to anybody other than me? 😗 Their lifestylies are just as reliant on the status quo of the village as any youkai, is what im getting at...

Of course even if Yukari/the sages only intended the village to serve this pragmatic purpose for the sake of the ant(youkai) farm that is Gensokyo, the state of the village has definitely evolved. Even though most humans are consciously aware that youkai are scary, and even though all youkai are aware that humans are their ‘prey’, these days its hardly that clear cut. There are youkai like Sekibanki who live comfortably among humans simply out of preference. Everyone’s aware of the school teacher who is half-hakutaku. The occasional youkai just walking through the village in broad daylight isn’t usually something to bat your eye at (especially if its Kogasa). Humans and youkai, beyond the protagonists, can and do just kinda mingle while still always being aware of their ‘roles’ in Gensokyo, and it works out fine.

But you know there’s that famous rule that was established in forbidden scrollery, about how the village’s humans cant ever *become* youkai, lest the balance of Gensokyo collapse upon itself. A lot of people have intepreted this in different ways and explored it in all sorts of directions, but my take on it has always been that it means humans (or youkai even) shouldn’t ever go beyond the role they play in Gensokyo.

In my mind, a human becoming a youkai isn’t just a matter of growing wings or something. You need a specific mindset where you no longer think like a human or see yourself as one of them. That’s probably what happened to someone like Ichirin (who came to realise she only related to Unzan and none of her ‘fellow humans’) and nearly happened to Kosuzu (maybe because she didn’t realise being a weirdo wasn’t exclusive to youkai?). And in my opinion, I don’t think Marisa could ever become a youkai because at the end of the day, her perspective is purely that of a human who rises to be an equal to the youkai, beings whom she will always see as something inherently different from herself.

because to boil down gensokyo even further, the role of youkai (and gods) is to be something larger than humans, and the humans role is to see youkai and gods as something other. You a human of the village can fear them or admire them or even love them, as long as you never forget what makes them special, or as long as you don’t start thinking of yourself as something ‘different’ from human.

[gensokyogarden]

Other Reimu writers: Oh no my Reimu would never not pay Kogasa

Me: Youkai on youkai danmaku

[occasionaltouhou]

singyoku is hakurei ritsuyo (mother of reimu) and a weird youkai who managed to evade her murderous intent for long enough to start having a weird gay thing with her. after the spell card rules got introduced they left bc murder was off the table and retired to somewhere weird

[sukimas]

though youkai aren't quite invulnerable and reimu's divine protection doesn't save her from that much- just look at the ibaraki-douji fight. everyone is toning things down on purpose to some degree.

well the youkai are anyway. "no youkai may kill a human even in the event of their victory." reimu and marisa can go as ham as they want however