#im assuming its the same with touhou

[freshlybakedspiderbread]

ive always wanted to talk a bit about how i feel about the connection between Yukari and Merry because i love the endless parallels and thematic connections (like everyone else on the planet 😁), but wondering if it was ever 'worth' it since i may just be spouting a lot of what is already considered 'common knowledge' among hifuu aficionados. Not to mention i think my thoughts on it are somehow both really messy but also crystal clear. 😐 Well whatever! Its my own head anyway so i'll try not to worry and am gonna attempt to elaborate even if just a little on this post, which may not be entirely coherent due to sleepy, post-medicine fatigue.

i feel like over the years i may have started to become reflexively more 'against' yukari = merry fandom, although 'against' is probably too strong and its much more complicated than just "i dont subscribe to that theory" because thats not even entirely accurate!

it is of course a classic and really cool idea of the Merry one day becoming Yukari has been and continues to be thoroughly explored by many many fans for moving, tragic, bittersweet, or thought provoking work. I love Absolute One-Way Street, and also Dream and Reality among many other works like it 📖

but i also think its a little stiffling to think of that as the one and only story to tell about them? Now its possible that the sentiment im about to express isn't actually common and im actually just making up a person to respond to, but i think taking the teasing connections between Yukari and Merry and treating the idea of them being the same individual as the absolute obvious truth is a bit of a limiting perspective.

Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinions and headcanons! but i want to make a case that when it comes to touhou and especially hifuu in particular, there's also a richer (and possibly deliberate on the author? who knows!) point to treat it more abstractly.

Maybe they are the same person. Maybe one day Merry becomes Yukari, or Yukari becomes Merry. Maybe they're different people. Maybe they come from the same lineage. Or maybe one is a clone of the other grown in a lab or made with a magic spell.

None of that is as important to me as the the roles they serve in their stories. touhou has always had themes about the gap and the bridge between fantasy and reality by taking place in a world where fantasy seeks refuge from reality, and hifuu goes much further in that theme by taking place in a reality that has completely left behind fantasy. That parallel is really cool to me and its embodied perfectly by both stories having a purple-clad blonde girl with the means to poking their toes into the boundary between fantasy and reality.

In the fantastical world of touhou, one serves as gensokyo's powerful (if frustrating, shady, annoying, disagreeable) protector with allies that she watches over (and sometimes manipulates) with her great power, all to preserve their little wonderworld. And I think its sooo compelling how zun introduced hifuu in the music cds and designed a very similar-looking character, who lives in a stifled reality lacking in imagination, mostly spends her day chasing after even the smallest traces of dreams with a partner whose own small logical world expanded with infinite possiblities upon their meeting...

In the last few cds, Merry's powers may be growing stronger and i get why feeds the implication she's becoming something other than human. But my take on that has always been its more of a sign that she and Renko are already outliers in their world simply for daring to believe there is more to the world beyond facts and logic. I dont expect their story (assuming zun ever brings them back. we havent heard what theyre up to since 2016....) to ever end with both or either of them becoming a youkai or vanishing to gensokyo, because frankly that wouldn't serve any purpose for the themes hifuu has been about, which is embracing fantasy while living in a world that has abandoned it.

trying to remember what my point with this post is.... Oh right its that I think all these themes about the nature of gensokyo or the state of reality in hifuu are only made richer when you think about how they contrast with one another. And by extension, I think Yukari and Merry are both richer if you think of them as conceptual and thematic counterparts in two different stories on the opposite end of a similar spectrum, before thinking about what literal or objective connection they might have. Subjectivity definitely means more than objectivity in this case!

[ikunagae]

im gonna get into it about my touhou music cd headcanons (yukari themed) tonight

1.

the text on the DiPP Reincarnation remix is not about fucking mima and marisa just because its mimas theme. its about Yukari. this isn't a stretch because it's pretty obvious the text on that version of Lovely Mound of Cherry Blossoms is about yuyuko despite being yuuka's theme:

so having another piece of text be about yukari who debuted in the same game? not so far fetched. also, we know yukari lives in the woods on the edge of gensokyo, at least as of PCB canon. then, we can also probably assume the "girl who looks like she did when she was young" is maribel. my reasoning for this is not as ironclad, but i think it's unreasonable to assume ZUN was just like. unable to do foreshadowing back then, plus they were only released about a year apart. and obviously maribel looks conspicuously like yukari. this might also have relation to the girl who looks like neither a human nor a youkai mentioned in the text of Dichromatic Lotus Butterfly up above it:

2. folks yukari basically Quotes the lyrics to kids festival ~ innocent treasures in IaMP. why is no one talking about this. this is not a coincidence, these two things were released at the same event!!! they came out on the same day!!!!!! clearly that was intentional. we are meant to find parallels here.

[raisethe-velvet]

how playable is touhou without the english translation patch? im not particularly interested in the story and just wanna play the game, and cant be bothered downloading a whole separate thing for translations 

[shidiand]

Touhou Characters and Fans: A Comprehensive Analysis

In this article, I will be presenting my in-depth research on the characters of Team Shanghai Alice's Touhou Project in relation to their fans. The conclusions I have reached after conducting extensive minutes of research through bing.com are not based on any individuals, and especially not you in particular.

Reimu Reimu fans are among the most difficult to categorize, since Reimu is generally regarded by everyone as a good character. at this point I don't really know what to say. Everyones drawn Reimu at some point. Picasso drew reimu. campbell soups dude probably drew reimu.but with soups. yall like... uh......anime

marisa now i know i just gave this excuse with reimu but come ON if you've ever read anything marisa says in the games you can't NOT like her. actually its more interesting to look at "fans who like marisa more than reimu" than "marisa fans": they like wearing pretty, showy outfits but they won't hesitate to burrow themselves under layers of comfort clothing if theyre in that sort of mood. most of them are short. all of them think her hair is wonderful golden-blonde and fluffy and would probably like longer hair themselves. they would like to blow a smug raspberry in the face of someone they don't like at least once in their life. they would probably like to do so to someone they like, too, on multiple occasions. affectionate people.

rumia i have no idea why rumia is so popular. at first i assumed it was the work of the vore boys but it really isnt. the list of characters the vore boys are interested in is basically the same as the list of touhou girls mom someday

another theory i have for rumia's unusually high popularity is that the rumia fans enjoy "artistic cannibalism". personally i think this sounds like a lot like something else also, my sources have told me that rumia is, (this is a quote) "cute".

the inroads to vore are ever so treacherous.

daiyousei i dont know any daiyousei fans so according to these rules i made up for myself i dont have to write a fthing

cirno ANDY WARHOL THAT'S HIS NAME they have a positive world view, really likes that slight bit of uncertain girliness that some characters have

meiling personally, meiling terrifies me. not only does this woman enjoy exercise, regularly, she'll even encourage others to join in, too. incredibly intimidating. i can only imagine the RAW GAINS meiling fans boast as they shred t-shirt upon t-shirt with their meaty ab flexes, breaching doors using their pectorals, supplying first-stage propulsion for russian aerospace during squats, etc

frankly there are far cooler characters than meiling; those who do love her are very sweet people, enjoy hugging others or being hugged by taller people. easily the nicest person who appears in eosd and her fans reflect that

koakuma very business-looking character. i am led to assume, in combination with the common succubus fanon, that her fans want to be stepped on by someone wearing heels

patchouli either hentai god or depression

sakuya you love girls SO MUCH

remilia remilia fans do not experience self-doubt* (*this can be seen by the fact that they are remilia fans), have strong opinions, a desire to find objective right-ness, and, wielding the divine mandate of Heaven, enjoy being looked up to by others as a figure of sole, exclusive authority. they are happiest in the presence of great religious influence, public executions, the Holy Roman Empire, and Constantinople, but can be expelled from your lands with peasant uprising, the Magna Carta, coalitions of wealthy nobles, the Gauls, and/or trebuchets. Furthermore, it can be said that the development of the three-field system marked a turning point within the domestic agriculture of Europe; indeed, Landon and Mercedes[3] posit that the rapid spread of crop rotation across central Europe by serfs of the tenement created an economic climate where towns and trade routes could arise and flouri

flandre pick a different character

letty(?) pretty sure the only people who enjoy winter are the ones who have never actually touched snow in their life so that rules out everyone i know

HOLY SHIT, I FORGOT PC98 if you know pc98 characters then youre already doing better than me. i respect that a lot but unfortunately i personally dont know a thing so ur gonna have to go jack it to Complete Darkness or something cause i cant help you here

uhhh chen

fffffffuck this im skipping chen

alice somewhat distant people with a bad sense of time, few but very deep interests

yukari ALL OF YOU ARE THIRSTY HOES delighted by the chance to surprise others. very "ride or die" people. you used to be able to piss them off easily by calling Yukari nasty but i think they're over that now

and thats every single character in touhou project Source: my twitter timeline fanfiction.net facebook.com if youd like to submit some touhou oc's for me to consider (e.g. "Benben Tsukumo", "Iku Nagae") please dont