#well i say reimu but i think the card name is shrine maiden or just Maiden

[unendingphantasm]

i have literally no proof except for the truth that lives in my heart :) to back this up but this is a video of me playing graffiti kingdom that my dad posted from 2009. i remember so vividly why i made the character like that. it was the lucky star graffiti kingdom videos that inspired her. i still remember our ‘tv’ being an AOC monitor on a hanging shelf drilled to the wall. with the ps2 right under it on another shelf. idk what happened to the ps2. i think it was given to family? i dont remember. deep lore

[toho-literature]

The Grimoire of Marisa: Pages 10-17 - Reimu Hakurei’s Spell Cards

Dream Sign “Evil-Sealing Circle”

User: Reimu Hakurei

Notes: Often seen, movement stress type

Reference Level: ★★

A Spell Card where your movement is restricted by amulets. You're bound in place by the amulets and slowly strangled to death.

The fast charms aren't aiming for you, so it's not as difficult as it looks. Why doesn't she just aim them straight at you?

Bit of a tangent, but the amulets that Reimu uses for evil-sealing are booby-trapped. They look like gift envelopes with "full house" written on them, which makes you want to grab 'em, but there's nothing especially interesting in there. It's just a trap.

Dream Sign “Duplex Barrier”

User: Reimu Hakurei

Notes: Confirmed during the Eternal Night Incident, theatrical type

Reference Level: ★★★

A Spell Card with a mysterious power that turns space inside-out. I'm jealous.

If I had an area enclosed in that barrier, my magic's range would also widen.

I indirectly asked Reimu about it, but it was pointless. Apparently, a barrier is a boundary line between things, and having two barriers on top of each other is equivalent to a world with no boundaries. If you can find the gaps in space that are hiding just about everywhere, you'll be able to set up a duplex barrier.

In other words, she's bad at explaining things.

Boundary “Duplex Danmaku Barrier”

User: Reimu Hakurei

Notes: Confirmed during the Eternal Night Incident, theatrical type

Blowhard Level: ★★★★

A large-scale version of Duplex Barrier. This time I'm trapped in the inside part of the barrier too.

Honestly, the regular Duplex Barrier is stronger and more scary. This is the kind of thing people mean by 'a tactician getting caught up in his own schemes'.

Untitled “Flying Mysterious Shrine Maiden”

User: Reimu Hakurei

Notes: Rare, theatrical type

Reference Level: ★

A desperation Spell Card that Reimu whips out while in an unconscious state. Hardly ever seen.

She never looks at you while the spell card is in effect, so you're limited to retreating.

Her attack is omnidirectional danmaku with no blind spots, just sprayed everywhere at random. She's not looking, so I guess that's bound to happen.

Y'know, I always think this, but I don't see the benefit of not looking at your opponent during a battle. Feels like it'd just be a disadvantage, but...

Divine Spirit “Fantasy Seal -Blink-”

User: Reimu Hakurei

Notes: Long distance marathon

Reference Level: Only Reimu can do it, so it’s no good as a reference

Reimu herself only moves in a straight line, but somehow she completely surrounds you. Just as you think she passed behind you, she pops out from in front.

The tengu and Sakuya do something similar, but for the tengu, it's just speed, and for Sakuya, it's just teleportation. Reimu's technique isn't something cheap like that. You probably don't get what I'm talking about, but I don't really get it myself.

Reimu says that "you can't normally see the boundary that this barrier encloses, so it looks like there's countless copies of the enemy." Is it like a small world that loops around on itself? Or maybe it's something like two mirrors facing each other?

Reimu has lots of Spell Cards like this. They don't aim directly at you, so it's like being made fun of.

Divine Spirit “Fantasy Seal”

User: Reimu Hakurei

Notes: Often seen

Reference Level: ★★★★

A Spell Card that forcibly seals you with bullets of light that ignore the laws of physics.

It can supposedly exterminate any and all youkai, no questions asked.

Apparently, it's a wonderful light that youkai hate more than anything, but even for humans it still kinda hurts.

But what is "sealing," anyway? Putting stuff in a rice jar?

Holy Relic “Yin-Yang Kishin Orb”

User: Reimu Hakurei

Notes: Mainly used as a trick at parties

Size: ★★★★★

A Spell Card where she throws a giant yin-yang orb that was tucked away who-the-heck-knows-where. Unusually heavy lifting for Reimu.

Getting hit by the yin-yang orb hurts. Like, physically. 'Cause it's a plain old, hard, heavy ball.

The orb she uses in this spell card is particularly hot and heavy, but a human who gets hit with it won't get squashed flat or anything.

Divine Arts “Omnidirectional Oni-Binding Circle”

User: Reimu Hakurei

Notes: Often used when angry

Fun-to-Watch Level: ★★★★

A Spell Card in which mysterious powers take away your freedom of movement. Apparently it's for binding demons, but it binds humans just as well.

Once this technique begins, all freedom will be lost until Reimu stops it. But because Reimu can't move too, capturing this spell card is easy. All you gotta do is watch from a distance.

But do I have the self-restraint to stay still and do nothing while Reimu's sitting there like an idiot? That's the biggest problem.

“Fantasy Nature”

User: Reimu Hakurei

Notes: Rare, theatrical type

36th Stratagem Level: ★★★★★★★

Reimu becomes completely impossible to touch. She enters a visible "invisible man" state.

It's her ultimate secret technique, apparently, but it looks like she just closes her eyes while the danmaku fires itself towards the enemy automatically.

By the way, this wasn't even a Spell Card at first, but I gameified it by giving it a proper Spell Card name. Otherwise, there'd be no way to win.

This is the one single Spell Card that can only be used via the innate ability Reimu was born with. Hence the name "tensei”.

[clarste]

I am now the proud owner of three copies of this book. Maybe I should reevaluate my priorities in life. I’ll probably get the digital version for future volumes though.

Anyway, as promised I plan to do some side-by-side translation comparisons, along with some general commentary on the series. I’ll do this chapter-by-chapter, so for now we’re just doing chapter 1. Please excuse the fact that I’m taking pictures of the book with my phone.

First of all just a general impression of the book itself: both English and Japanese books are about the same in terms of paper quality and whatnot. The main difference is that the Japanese book has a book jacket surrounding a classier/blander actual cover:

I’m mostly fine with that, but the English book is missing the brief self-introductions by the authors, including Harukawa’s habit of using photos of her cats as her portrait.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the translation is credited to ZephyrRZ, but according to his/her own twitter, s/he was not the translator and Yen Press made some kind of mistake that will be corrected for future printings. So the translator for Yen Press is currently unknown. Moving on:

It should be pretty obvious, but the the browner/yellower image is the Yen Press translation, while the cleaner BW is my own. Blame the lighting at my house. Anyway, remember how I said a little while ago that kanji (Chinese characters) have unlimited possible pronunciations? Well, on this page there was a cute trick used: Marisa says Akyu/Akyuu’s name in kanji, but the furigana next to it say it’s meant to be pronounced ‘anta’, a rather informal way of saying ‘you’. So she means Akyu, but is only saying ‘you’ out loud. These days I’d probably go with exactly what Yen Press did, but back then I just removed all reference to her name. In context, Akyu gets kind of annoyed that everyone’s calling her ‘you’ all the time instead of using her name; this is somewhat rude in Japanese. Incidentally, almost everyone in Touhou is rude.

Okay, several things are going on here. First, I don’t know why I deleted the fancy divider line in Kosusu’s title card: those are in every title card in the series, and I kept most of them. But not here. Weird. Second, I used ‘just’ Akyuu because I was trying to convey a dismissive attitude that Akyuu would be offended by. It’s a subtle difference, but writing is hard. Not sure which is better; maybe Akyuu’s offense stands on its own?

Third, Akyu versus Akyuu. It’s technically more correct to leave in the long vowel sound, since the short Akyu would actually be pronounced differently in Japanese, but strictly speaking it should be Akyū anyway. The double ‘u’ is a weird artifact of fan translations based on a more literal reading of Japanese alphabet. Anyway, I have no problem with Akyu because I personally switched to Akyu halfway through the series and no one even noticed. If anything, I think the double ‘u’ sounds are just confusing to English readers, and so are macrons. For example, anyone who’s pronounced Touhou as Toohoo. Akyu is the easiest to understand and close enough to correct, for an English speaker. That said, some other names would be much harder to change without upsetting people. Look forward to meeting Yomu and Moko (they're never named in FS, iirc).

Fourth, Kosuzu’s actual title. Honestly I’m surprised that they’re so similar. The only difference is singular versus plural, which I don’t think is all that important. For the record, Japanese doesn’t use plurals unless it’s being particularly emphasized, you can just kinda tell by context. I mean, obviously she has two eyes so I thought it should be plural, but the concept is abstract enough that I think singular is fine too. “You have a good eye” etc. Incidentally, in Japanese she was described as a ‘Bibliophilia’, but that didn’t make much sense so both translators corrected it.

No, I’m not going to talk about Hiedano. Well, I’ll say that they probably should have included a translation note, at least.

Once again, we have a pluralization issue with the books. I kind of figured from the picture that Akyu was returning multiple books at once, but I suppose maybe those were already on the table? Sometimes you just have to go with your gut. Translation is ultimately all about being bold, and affirming that your interpretation is the correct one.

The main thing that stand out to me here is Kosuzu saying “Thank you, friend.” Which seems really really weird to me. Do people say that? Maybe I just don’t speak teenage girl though.

“Utterly Normal Magician.” Eh, close enough. It means the same thing. One thing to note though is that ZUN is using English words in every single FS character title. We’ve already seen Bibliophilia/Bibliophile and Savant, so now we have Magician. Every day of my life I am absolutely flabbergasted that ZUN happened to choose the same English word that the fandom already used to describe Marisa. Instead of like Mage or Witch or Magus Night. This is the true miracle.

Other Touhou works also have themed character titles. For example, in WaHH each character title contains a four character idiom, which I’ve found basically impossible to translate and rarely bother.

As I mentioned just now, all the titles here were originally partly in English. So ‘shaman’ isn’t Yen Press’s translation of shrine maiden, it’s ZUN’s translation of shrine maiden. For what it’s worth, that seems fairly common? For example, Fire Emblem uses it for certain light-element mages like Micaiah in Radiant Dawn. Her final class in Japanese is written as 巫女 (shrine maiden) but pronounced as Shaman. This is the same class as Julia and Deirdre from Genealogy of the Holy Way. Anyway, I’ve seen it in other fantasy works too, after I started noticing it. Maybe it’s the first translation listed in some popular J-E dictionary? For what it’s worth, shrine maiden do in fact meet the anthropological definition of shamanism, so it’s not incorrect to call her a shaman. It just sounds a bit weird to us.

I have a much bigger problem with the use of the word ‘beautiful’ in her title. The Japanese word used there is 素敵  (suteki) which has meanings like “wow, amazing, cool, wonderful.” You can use suteki to compliment someone’s looks, but in my opinion that’s mostly in the same sense you can say someone “looks amazing” in English. And in the context of Touhou, I simply can’t imagine ZUN choosing to describe Reimu as beautiful. That’s just not a part of her character, nor is it something ZUN seems like he’d particularly care about.

Ah yes, the infamous footnote. For the record, the footnote was there in Japanese too, i just deleted it because it seemed pointless, at least in English. In Japanese she uses the word 稀覯本 (kikounbon) which I can only assume is relatively technical and obscure. Sadly I’m not well-versed enough in Japanese to tell the difference between an obscure word and one I just happen to not know, but there seem to be plenty of other shorter words for rare books, so I’d imagine this is meant to show off Marisa’s collector mania. But... there’s no good way to put that into English so the footnote becomes redundant. I now fully expect someone to come forward with some obscure word for rare books that I don’t know in English either.

For the record, I also like how they put Reimu’s dialog here better than how I did it.

Oh. My. God. Honorifics! Our oldest of friends, and greatest of enemies. Honestly, -san is so ubiquitous and generic that you can ignore it 90% of the time, but in Touhou it’s different. In Touhou, everyone is a rude bastard who rarely even uses someone else’s name, so Kosuzu using -san with these two shows that she treats them with a basic level of respect that’s somewhat unusual for this series. I chose to go with Miss because it kinda makes sense to me that you’d call someone slightly older than you Miss with their first name, but I can also totally understand the feelings of the translator who just throws their hands up in the air and says “C’mon, our target audience already understands this stuff, so do we really need to bother?!”

Thank the gods that we’re not dealing with -sama.

The term tsukumo-book (tsukumobon) does in fact show up exactly this once.

Also, I think Yen Press did a better job with the rest of the line. I know I was going back and forth on “phenomena” but ultimately decided to go for vague.

Yen Press definitely had a better voice for the book. I respect that. But mostly I just thought it was funny how they used Blood Needlegrass when I used Bloodneedle Grass. I’ll give the point to Yen Press on this one because needlegrass is a real thing.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” Great minds think alike. And/or we both love our cliches a bit too much.

On another note, I haven’t mentioned this until now, but they’ve been “translating” all these sound effects while leaving the Japanese ones in place. All I have to say about that is that I would totally do that too (more often anyway) except for the fact that this one person once praised me for replacing all the sound effects and I feel like I’d disappoint that person. I hate sound effects though. Especially non-sounds like “carefree”. What’s the sound of someone being carefree in English? Seriously, I need to know.

And... that’s that for chapter 1. Sorry if anyone wanted me to go over every single line, but I tried to stick to the ones that I found most interesting. If any of you have any particular line you’d like to ask about, feel free. You can expect chapter 2 sometime before the next volume comes out, but no guarantees.