#touhou writing

[paradise-in-k4]

Kirisame Print Shop Journal - The Ten Elixir Tavern, Scene A

Continuing from here

Marisa - The guy with the hood by that grill, you say? He looks like their main cook, but maybe he’s multi-tasking just like how Mystia does it, ze. Wonder what he uses such a huge axe for anyway…

As you look again towards the hooded figure in front of the grill, you notice the double-sided axe he was using to chop firewood for the furnace before going back to work. He looks like he’s having a good time cooking food for the place.

Alice - You know it’s rude to make assumptions like that.

Aya - Pipe down, he’s noticed us! Act natural, but not naturally stupid.

Nitori - Why not?

Ran - Listen to the tengu. One wrong move could land us all on the local paper, and that could possibly jeopardize our whole investigation.

Head Cook - A large party comin’ in, eh? Get yourselves settled in at a table and I’ll be right over to take your orders!

Following the head chef’s instructions, you and the rest of your group find a large table to get seated. About 15 minutes passed since then, giving everyone time to figure out what to order. True to his word, he eventually came around to your table.

Head Cook - Sorry ‘bout the wait. *Ahem* Welcome to the Ten Elixir Tavern. My name’s Jackson and I’ll be your server and chef tonight. Can I start you off with some drinks?

Reimu - Green tea with a slice of lemon.

Marisa - I’ll take a round of that Legendary Elixir Special.

Alice - I’ll have some black tea with lemon and sugar cubes.

Youmu - I will have the same thing.

Rei - I’d like the lime soda.

Nitori - Can I get some water with cucumbers?

Aya - I’ll take the Multi Inferno Tower, extra sake.

Daiyousei - Just ice water for me. Can I also have a lemon slice with it please?

Renko - I’ll order the Lumberjack’s Smoothie.

Maribel - Make that two!

Ran - Lemonade, not too much ice.

The server and chef stares towards you.

[beveragenightmare]

Getting back into the drawing mood with some more nonsense

[noxshade]

A wonderful little piece that I commissioned from @setzeri, about my ongoing fanfic Gensokyo, Tokyo. Reimu, Marisa and Izumi are inspecting these odd red shogi tiles... where did Marisa get them? I wonder...

If you like urban fantasy and slice of life, with mysteries building in the background, you might want to give it a read!

[d6b-onion]

I am not normal about these two

they are so gay and wonderful and cool and komachi's scythe is so badass and god they should kiss and make out and-

THEY ARE SO COOL why are scythes this cool and homoerotic i love these two so much azeqlf,d;koxqzenioi,zfj;dowf,kezn

[lewddumbie]

"Well if you misbehave, you're sleeping alone, but...

If you're a good boy"

Her fingers straighten, jiggling the weighted breast with the back of her palm.

"I may reward you"

[ariane-ashen]

"C'mon! Get out of bed, Ms. Yakumo!" Yukari was flung from her cool abode into the warm Summer air. How long had it been? Did she even wake during last year's August? She could no longer recall. In times where the thousand painful thoughts and memories in her mind boom at once, all she can do is sleep.

A surprised Ran and Chen could be seen peeking from behind a door, but they didn't feel like they had stop the ice fairy. Yukari's smiling shikigami faded into the distance as an unusually powerful Cirno took the tired mistress by her arm. "What is...?" Yukari couldn't find the strength to offer much resistance, feeling particularly shocked by the energy of the joyful girl in front of her. Cirno simply giggled in excitement.

"Hoy! Didn't you know there's a festival today? The lady with all those doors even let me gain all those powers like before! She said it's been too long since you had some good food and fun! Maybe you'll even watch me beat Ms. Hakurei with all this power~" Yukari couldn't help but be swept up in the emotions of Cirno's sparkling voice, and smiled as she gripped her palm. "Matara...Fufu, what a piece of work you are."

[tsubameyado]

例大祭21のスケブ

遅ればせながら、例大祭21ありがとうございました！お天気もとても良くて、大盛況でしたね。 今回描かせていただいたスケブのご紹介です。

・お燐 お燐といえば猫のポーズ、とい��感じで描いてしまいましたがあまりにも定番すぎて以前描いた絵ともし被ってしまっていたらすみません！ 地霊殿が出たばかりの頃はお燐のもみあげを描かないことにこだわっていたのですが、もみあげ(横髪？)を描いた方が絵として上手くまとまることが多いので最近は描いていることが多い…… という裏話です。(もみあげを描かない方が、原作らしさは出ると思います。)

・射命丸(天狗装束) 天狗装束版の射命丸は普段の射命丸より、よりクールでしっとりした方向で描きたくなりますね。 金と黒のコントラストが楽しいです。

・豫母都日狭美 ほとんど初めて描いたので、まだこんな感じです！ 日狭美は見る人によって、性格もビジュアルも見え方がかなり変わるキャラだと思いますので、是非ディテールを自分なりに突き詰めて描きたいキャラです。

・蓮子 最後に、蓮子です。特に指定はなかったのですが、なんとなく七夕坂バージョンにしてみました(襟・袖のラインと開襟くらいしか特徴がないですが……) CDジャケットでは勢いで吹き飛んでいる帽子を、手でギュッと抑えているイメージです。

お陰様で無事に新作秘封CDは入手できたのですが、ゴールデンウイークの後片付けなどがまだ残っていて聴けていません……戦利品もまだ読めておらず…… 久しぶりの秘封CD、音楽とブックレットに意識を集中させて大事に静謐に聴きます☺

そんな感じの、例大祭21のスケブでした。 売り子をしながら描いているシーンも多いので、あまり数が多くなくてすみません！

[moonsidesong]

Some of my 2023 favorites !!!! <3 I drew a lot of my favorite sillies this year... next year I will draw even more sillies....

[cookiethebirdthing]

Worlds Apart

A story about Maribel Hearn being unwell below the break. Check the trigger warnings before deciding if you want to read.

She was being questioned again. It happened so many times before. Renko would question her. Would question her experiences. Why? Why did she seek to hurt her?

Maribel closed the video stream. She couldn’t do this right now. She wanted to say something. She wanted to let her friend know how much she hurt. She wanted to shout at her, belittle her, ruin her. It was always the same. No one ever believed her. Could she not speak for her own thoughts? Apparently not.

How could she know what she thought and felt? She didn’t know any more who she was than a passerby on the street who caught mere glimpses of her. Perhaps even then, they could trust their own subjective experiences. What a luxury they took for granted. To be able to trust their own world. That everything around them was solid— real. That no matter what, there were objective truths in this world that remained constant.

How fucking lucky they were. When one can trust neither their external world nor their internal one, what do they have to turn to? What is reality to such a being?

She wanted to cry. To punch a wall. To punch Renko. To truly, irrevocably, and unforgivably hurt her. For now, she blocked her. She didn’t block her. She couldn’t. She needed Renko to see. To talk to her, to apologize to her. For trying to take away what little she had. For trying to destroy her reality.

She muted the notifications in the messaging app. She didn’t want to hear a single thing from that piece of shit’s mouth. It’s not like she cared anyway. Fighting her tensing muscles, she placed it down gently on the floor. Maybe had she the money…

When all the things that make one human are stripped away, what is left? She felt human. Did she? Was she? Were she to ask someone what made one a human, the only response she would get is a stab to the heart. How could she even mistake herself for one? If all but her could claim the title of human, then clearly it was no title to hold dear at all.

And yet, it was those differences that brought her to this same place again and again. Across the shimmering, moonlit ocean she stared. What was out there? What was left? Should she plunge into the abyss? Would she ever resurface? It wasn’t for her. Not yet. Not until the last of the world was blanketed in the uncaring sea.

She turned back—back to the glimmering city she called home. All the marvels of the current day packed into a pretty little box of unending exploitation. There she sat on the floor in the center of it all, the closet door locked tight and the dim lights above her struggling to illuminate her own hands.

The darkness around her twisted and snarled, enveloping her. That was fine. It didn’t matter, not when there was nothing left to feel. It was all so distant. At some point, the light had turned off. She had been the one to do it. Like a turbulent sea, the world buffeted against her. The thin pane of reality she was left on buckled under her weight. Her vision wavered, maybe. There was no stillness to be had in such a place.

It was doubled, she realized. Everything. Another dimension maybe. She wiped her glasses, but it didn’t help at all. She could see it. The lines and shadows fell apart before her eyes. She could— 

A high-pitched noise cut through her world, shattering it into place. She blinked. It was all still there, but… normal again. Maribel frowned, looking down at the tablet whence the noise originated. She picked it up and unlocked the screen. Renko had messaged her. She had messaged her a lot. She guessed from the timestamps that about an hour had passed.

hey are you okay ,, merry ? Merry i m.sorry if I said the wrong thing please respond when you see this i understand if your mad i just wanted t o say im sorry only message back if u feel up 2 it <3

Maribel tapped the text area, causing a keyboard to pop up.

Hey, I’m fine. Don’t

She held the backspace button until the draft message was cleared. Then she held it a few moments longer. She stared at the blinking cursor for a while.

💜

She pressed enter before turning off the tablet.

[spear-gsun]

A Mizuchi that i totally didnt just mean to use as an icon for an RP profile (that i might never use) but carried away with making

[sukimas]

this is incidentally what most Touhou but Fucked Up!! works get wrong. touhou IS fucked up, naturally, but not in the way you think. living in gensokyo isn't a constant battle, your neighbors aren't having to always ward their houses in fear of being violently dragged away in the night. the old gensokyo was like that, for certain, but it is not now. you might hear about one person disappearing a month. you're very, very rarely going to find a body.

you know that the youkai don't come to the human village. you have no idea why not- the shrine maiden isn't very good at getting rid of them (nor is her friend, nor is the other one on the mountain). you can't just ask them, that would be inconceivable. but there are whispers that the village's safety was created by the youkai even youkai know nothing about. what could she possibly want with it? what are her plans for the humans?

there's a reporter girl handing out newspapers. the newspapers are written in an odd script. you can understand it, but it's unfamiliar nonetheless. the newsgirl's got a normal haircut and wears usual, if fashionable, clothing, but she's got bright red eyes. it could just be the magic in the air- there's that kid from the motoori family with the bright orange ones, for example- but it makes you worry. the articles all have a suspiciously pro-youkai bent, except for the ones about tanuki.

you and your neighbors go down to the pub. you've heard it's a good one, but you can't remember going there, even though your wife tells you you went by a week ago. there's a loudmouthed little girl with a big hat back in the kitchen drinking. that can't be healthy for her, can it? if she's human. if not, does the bartender know?

your neighbors start chatting. one of them talks about leaving gensokyo, waves a newspaper about the outside world around. you nod hesitantly. you've considered doing that yourself, but your wife doesn't want to go; the books she's been borrowing have been talking about great fire and poisonous dust in a land whose name you can't pronounce. it sounds western. she says that it might be nearby, past the barrier. you can't really know, since weather is the only thing that crosses it naturally. you've dismissed her concerns, but she keeps talking about earthquakes and tidal waves. you'd like to at least take a peek, though, yourself.

your other neighbor loudly shoots down the idea. he's been to the barrier himself, he says. or so he thinks. he walked past the hakurei shrine one day, during a festival, and beyond the pond in the back with that big old turtle. there was a path leading into the woods, and he started walking down it. he walked for a long time, but he noticed eventually that the scenery wasn't changing, that the trees all looked the same. he turned around and he was back at the pond again.

a third neighbor pipes up, quietly. he says that he's actually met an outsider before. not the teenager who flies, but a normal one. he's a metalworker, you see, so he's often on the lookout for new sources of scrap. he takes his guard dog with him along the river sometimes, past the miasma-filled forest and to the hill that's covered with spider lilies in the spring. he finds metal there, and glass. there's a third material that a lot of the things he finds are made of, moldable like metal, but when he tries to put it in a crucible it burns away, so he's stopped collecting it. he always feels like he's being watched, but he never sees any youkai.

the outsider he met had told him he didn't have any "reception", so the map he had didn't work. the outsider had shown your neighbor a small rectangle of glass and metal, illuminated in the center, with a blank grid shown on it. there were some words at the top and bottom of the grid, but they didn't seem to be helping him. the outsider had asked your neighbor for a map, but your neighbor had said- truthfully- that no one knows their way around gensokyo, and had offered to guide him back to the village. the outsider had hemmed and hawed for a bit, and asked what the village was like; when he heard, he refused, and said he'd find his own way back. your neighbor had entreated him and warned him about youkai in the area, but he'd laughed it off, and the neighbor had gone on, collecting metal, after they went their separate ways.

when the neighbor was on his way back to the village, he saw some torn-up grass and the small rectangle lying on the ground, but no blood or any other signs of a struggle. his dog had growled at the rectangle, but he had picked it up and brought it home. he pulls it out of his haori. the glass is cracked, and it won't light up, he says. you stare at it for a bit, then ask how the outsider got there, anyway. the first neighbor chimes in again, telling you that the area over there is full of outside objects- the barrier must be thin there. that's where he plans to make his way out.

the second neighbor snorts incredulously. the bartender pours you another drink. she has an adorable smile, but she seems so nervous, and you feel a little bad for her. it would be lovely if girls like her didn't have to live in fear of what lives outside the village walls.

you wake up the next day with no memory of the night before. you wrap an ofuda your wife got from the moriya shrine to your fishing rod and head out to work. that night, your wife tells you that one of your neighbors didn't come back from work. you hope someone finds him soon.

THAT is how Touhou is Touhou but Fucked Up.

[ajamnova]

“Chillin’ in the Trees”

[Originally posted 2/5/2024]

Today I have an illustration of Son Biten! Fun fact, last January I wrote on tumblr how ZUN should add a character based on Sun Wukong to Touhou. And what do you know, it actually happened!! Thanks Apollo 🤣

[noxshade]

Sanae, Kanako and Suwako, commissioned from @bace-jeleren

Sanae Kochiya is a engineering student from a mountain town in Nagano who's just moved to Tokyo to attend college, and it seems she brought something else to the city down from Suwa. Two somethings, to be precise...

This image was commissioned for Gensokyo, Tokyo

[d6b-onion]

headcanons

i don't really have headcanons in general (hah, baited), because i think that runs against one of the biggest reasons why i enjoy Touhou. I enjoy Touhou in part because it's a giant sandbox of cool characters (with cool designs), dynamics and ideas; "dynamics" includes yuri, naturally. It's a big fantasy world, but constraining the stories it tells too hard is stifling to me.

So for that reason, there is no "true version" of the world of touhou beyond/adjacent to canon inside my mind. What does exist, however, is a big assortment of ideas and themes for characters and relationships that I find cool or interesting or sweet and that I like to explore. I may find some much more interesting or fun than others, but there is no ""true"" one to me.

They may disagree with canon, or with one another. Generally I'm more comfortable staying close to canon because I enjoy the stories ZUN tells. And sometimes other people imagine something different that I find interesting, and so I go along.

For example take ReiMari. I don't have an opinion on whether the ship is ""real"" or not. Canon says they have a very strong platonic bond, and that they're probably not romance-repulsed, and that's about it. IMO you can reasonably imagine Reimu to be aroace. And that's the wonderful thing! You can take this so many different ways, and there are so many interesting stories to tell even when the paths diverge!

They can be hopelessly pining for one another. They can be a married couple. They can be madly in love with each other. They can be star-crossed, with their love never meant to be. They can have a purely platonic relationship; I imagine many aro folks would enjoy it not just being a stepping stone towards romance. They can be complete freaks. Personally, I find them interesting as a way to explore the blurry line between deep friendship and romance.

Whether something is ""real"" doesn't matter, what story do you want to tell?

[crookedcrow5]

Familiarity was a terrible curse to have. It often prevented even the simplest of accomplishments.

From the metal traps sparking a deep rooted fear to an old face preventing a full investigation, Ran Yakumo was not unfamiliar to the taste of old memories. It was something her master had worked hard on to keep leashed, and something she prided herself in.

She was not just some stray fox anymore. She was the shikigami of one of the most influential yokai in Gensokyo. Even if she had her glitches, even if Yukari didn't trust her with everything, she was undoubtedly a fox that didn't need to hide her tails.

No matter what small-fry said, that fact simply displayed how above it all she was. So, pardon her pride, but Ran wasn't looking for Tsukasa when she arrived at Moriya Shrine. She had assumed the kuda-gitsune would have been run off.

She was surprised to find the her there, then, side-by-side with the shrine maiden.

Not revealing herself right away, she gathered as much information she could about the situation. And what she learned was...

Familiar.

The shrine maiden, Sanae, didn't seem too bothered by the fox's attempts to be slick and get something out of her. In fact, she almost seemed happy to let the kuda-gitsune stay.

And Tsukasa... just... kept trying. Kept pushing for attention, kept trying to get on the upper-hand when she was clearly failing.

Ran's eyes narrowed at the energetic tail behind the kuda-gitsune, noting its new shine.

Fighting off a heavy sigh, she rubbed her eyes.

A fox tamed so easily with the promise of care. How quaint.

Watching the two banter for a moment longer, she tried to process her own reaction. After all, it wasn't like her to fail completely at such a task. Hell, gathering the information necessary would be easier with Tsukasa there.

However.

Seeing her with Sanae...

... Why did the shikigami envy her?

She was stronger than Tsukasa, smarter too. She was in a better, long-standing position and wasn't treading a line of uncertainty. She was a fox that could show her tails proudly.

Yet... She felt a strange emptyness.

Ran was... nostalgic.

But for what? For the friend she fought? For the distant master? She hadn't needed attention, she didn't need attention. She was fine to be left on her own.

She was Ran Yakumo.

And somehow, she never felt emptier.

[saccharinescorpion]

i found these tweets the other day and they made me really (frantically nodding my head) so i wanted to share them (with a few little tweaks to the translation to make it more readable lol)

if you would allow me to indulge in the self-humbling act of rambling about being touched by a Pokemon game... lol...

i think reading these made me realize exactly why i liked all the Arven stuff in Scarlet and Violet so much. every once in a while i've seen people say that the last scene of the Area Zero plot was way too abrupt and cheerful after the final confrontation with the professor, but i never really agreed with that. i guess that i didn't think that the hopeful tone of the ending overshadowed the sadder parts- they just kind of coexisted

and i believe the epilogue really proved that-- as the Twitter user said, "there's no way anything can be done in a short amount of time," causing him to still have issues like jealousy and possessiveness in spite of his "happy ending." it's true that the epilogue plays it mostly for comedy, but i don't think that changes the fact that Arven's anxiety over the protagonist having a new friend was extremely realistic, and made a ton of sense considering his backstory- again, "sincerity about the seriousness of the problem"

there's still a lot of sorrow there, but it doesn't mean Arven can never find happiness. i think that's a pretty sweet message, and an especially important one to impart to children (who are, yes, still the target audience of Pokemon lol)