Dodge the barrage, defeat enemies, and brave the Scarlet Mist incident.The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil returns with fresh music and graphics
An official remaster of the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil was announced today, releasing this September. The first time a Touhou game has gotten this treatment, and notably the first time EoSD is available digitally at all (I think). Featuring art and music redone by ZUN, updated gameplay, and notably, inbuilt translations for 10 languages!
Happy to admit that I'm part of the English translation team. Notably the process is still ongoing and the trailer and Steam page use different versions of some text. There's not much else I can say about it at this point, but look forward to it!
I see a lot of Arknights posts and comments talking about how the Seaborn can't create art because they lack individuality or whatever. And this is just textually untrue? First of all, early on in Stultifera Navis we have Alty, a musician, tell us that the death of a Seaborn is just as beautiful as a song, and that it's a shame humans can't perceive that. Which already tells us that they have their own kind of aesthetics and "art" that are simply in a form completely alien to us.
Second, they literally get taught how to sing and dance in one of the IS3 endings? Skadi was playing a harp for them and they sang along. It's kind of the point of them that they can't do something until they can. They couldn't talk until they decided they needed a way to communicate with humans, so they grew vocal cords and learned to talk. That's why there was one called The First To Talk. There must also therefore be a First To Sing and a First To Paint. A First To Feel Emotions. Like, they literally promised to learn to feel emotions; that was on their to-do list. They learn to coexist with humanity in another IS3 ending. There's one playing weiqi in IS6. Even Arturia in her latest module admits that she was wrong about the Seaborn, and hopes to go back and study their music.
Also, they do have individuality? Like, they literally do? Each one we've met (who could talk) has had its own thoughts and feelings. When one wants to share what they've learned with the many, they have to swim back and actually do that physically somehow. Like, stopping them from doing so has been a major goal in both Stultifera Navis and Path of Life. They do not "share a mind" in any sense at all. They just communicate with each other, whether that be chemically, psychically, genetically, or whatever. Maybe they dance like bees. At best you could describe them as hyper-altruistic, since they seem to prioritize the survival of others over themselves. Not even like, the survival of the hive overall: the survival of even a single other individual is enough for them to sacrifice themselves.
The most important Kal'tsit corrections in this book however are whenever Eriksons doesn't give enough weight to social issues so she goes out of her way to ratio him
It's even more nuanced that not giving enough weight though. From Erikson's perspective, a Feline from Victoria that has held a university position in Leithanien, this probably seems overall true. Most of the conflicts in the modern day are between nations, with only a scant few (such as between the Aslan and the Draco) existing outside of that.
The one big exception are the Sarkaz, but this is essentially where Kal'tsit is checking Erikson here.
"In fact, discrimination against those infected with Oripathy far exceeds any lingering animosity between the races."
It's really, REALLY easy to look at the history of Sarkaz oppression amongst almost all of Terra and view it as discrimination based on Oripathy. The Sarkaz do tend to be more vulnerable to Oripathy, after all. Erikson whether he realizes it or not is biased here and downplaying a racial struggle before one based on Oripathy.
His biases continue to show in the next paragraph, which honestly read like they're from a Victorian. People just like community! It's a trend towards homogeneity! It's only natural Victoria is ruled by Felines. There's a sense here, from my own reading, that Erikson absolutely takes parts of his world completely for granted. Sections of his book like this do not take to task the paradigms of society, but rather, serve to bolster them.
Erikson doesn't live in a world anymore where Leithanien nobles hunt Kazdel for sport, for fame and glory and for no other reason. That world has moved on, replaced by a "scientific" instrument of Oripathy as a continued vector for their oppression.
But Kal'tsit remembers, and the Sarkaz remembers, and she's reminding Erikson he should remember too.
It's especially striking because Erikson clearly believes in Rhodes Island's ideals and everything, he's not an actively malicious person and is in fact a lot more open than what you'd expect from the vast majority of people from the core nations, and yet he's *still* not immune to developing such biases. It's a lot stronger than simply having a racist caricature write these things.
Yeah this is why its such a history sickos book. A lorebook in the style of a history book is a cool idea and the formatting of such a book in that way automatically lends a lot of credibility to the information. We all read textbooks and generally trust them. We don't expect textbooks to have misinformation or present ideas in a biased way.
What I love is that with Kal'tsit's corrections, that is being peeled back. Erikson is probably a pretty good person, but he's one person writing an entire history book, and we write what we know. Every one of us is an unreliable narrator of history. Even Kal'tsit remarks pretty early on if I remember correctly that her own understanding of her memories is imperfect, and that she can't necessarily be leaned upon in that way.
The fact this lorebook is encouraging you to think about the author behind it and think about what his own biases might be and how the information he's presenting may not be true is frankly incredible. What parts of the text might he be otherwise wrong about that Kal'tsit doesn't note!?
And what if some of the parts that Kal'tsit notes are also biased? I think about sometimes how the timeline of Terran history has the year Amiya was born on it, but not the year that Theresa and Theresis were. Maybe, I think you could argue, that Kal'tsit doesn't know for sure. But maybe that's just a little of Kal's own biases coming through there.
the thing with touhou fangames is that you need a really good aesthetic, really good gameplay, or a really good story, because there are just so many touhou fangames out there.
in terms of difficulty to implement, aesthetic < gameplay < story. aesthetic is self-explanatory, but you may be saying "but making a good video game is so hard!" and well. it is! it's extremely hard to make a good video game.
buuuuuuuut the problem is that the bar for making a good fanfiction story rises based on how good the original story you're basing it off of is. and touhou (collective works of Team Shanghai Alice) is extremely good, while touhou (collective works of the fans of Team Shanghai Alice) is the average output of a large crowd of highly dedicated otaku. which usually has a lot of passion about something but passion does not generally translate to skill. so in practice if you want to create an interesting story you probably should just hew as closely to the source material as possible in terms of characterization and theme as you can, otherwise something scary might happen to you.
anyway fantasy maiden wars somehow manages to sail blissfully at a totally oblique trajectory to touhou (collective works of Team Shanghai Alice) but manages to tell an enjoyable super robot wars story anyway. while also maintaining both of the other two sufficient qualities (really good super robot wars game, really aesthetically charming.) you should go play it right now
Command a legion of more than 70 beloved Touhou Project heroines on an expansive quest to uncover the cause of mysterious incidents blossomi
Why use "Host & Client" for the Perfect Possession Incident revival when every translation AoCF, official or otherwise, uses "Master & Slave"?
Good question!
Ultimately it came down to a few different things.
A personal preference to localize the reference that the Japanese original Master & Slave is making in the first place: computer terms that have in many cases been phased out in English and replaced with alternatives like Host & Client (and many others). Masutaa and Sureebu are more obviously foreign jargon words when used in Japanese, but in English, they may not register as such at all if you don't already know that is the reference being made. You might think it just means master and slave literally.
A personal belief that the use of Master & Slave makes the actual dynamic of Perfect Possession extremely unintuitive and difficult to wrap your head around. One can disagree on whether Host & Client does any better in that regard, but it at least makes sentences like "a 'client' enters inside a different person referred to as a 'host', taking them over" not read as completely backwards, and ultimately works better with the limited amount of text that the book devotes to explaining the whole thing. As a secondary, probably more wonky argument, I personally like that this use of Host & Client, while still a forced computer reference, sounds slightly more like something that Gensokyans besides Yukari could've at least theoretically come up with in this context (whereas in my eyes, Master & Slave only works with the computer reference in mind).
A personal assumption, consider me woke, that many groups playing the Touhou RPG would probably be more comfortable calling their characters Host & Client a thousand times a session than Master & Slave.
So just three different subjective reasons, really. If I had worked on an AoCF translation in a vacuum and had complete editorial control, I probably would've considered doing it there too, but am not looking to start changing the standard anywhere outside of this book. Here I do have control, though!
I gotta say, while I understand the motivations here, I strongly disagree with this translation choice. I don't think the use of "スレイブ" and "マスター" was intended as purely opaque jargon in the original Japanese. They were playing on the ordinary English use of "master" and "slave" as well. You can see this in the AoCF dialogue, when e.g. Futo and Ichirin are squabbling about who gets to be Master in a way that doesn't make sense if they're just squabbling about who gets to be host. Or Reimu's victory dialogue vs. Reisen, where she says that her servile personality means she doesn't know how to make use of a Slave. She actually uses the Japanese word for slave, 奴隷, to describe her personality, clearly drawing a parallel with the word スレイブ. This isn't just computer terminology.
And also, at some point a translation gets established in the community, and that's just what the translation is. You know this, because you romanize 幻想郷 as "Gensokyo". The more standard modern romanization would be "Gensoukyou", but of course you can't use that because everyone expects "Gensokyo". It's already well-established and you have to keep in concordance with that. Similarly, anyone who has played AoCF knows how Perfect Possession works in terms of Masters and Slaves. It confuses more than it clarifies for the AoCF reference in Narratograph to use different terminology, even if your translation were better in a vacuum.
I appreciate your work on translations for the Touhou community. I know translating a whole TTRPG rulebook is a massive undertaking, and I'm certainly not saying your hard work is invalid because of this one issue. But you did kind of blow it on this one issue.
Thanks for the respectful response. I don't really want a long debate, but I decided to at least give my take on the points here.
The other discussions of Master/Slave in AoCF are definitely a good reason that I probably would've struggled if I had to translate that game, and might've ended up going with Master/Slave because of them whether I liked it or not. But, while this might sound like semantics, I'd say those conversations are only there because, after, the writers already picked Master/Slave for computer reasons. In fact, they're completely nonsensical in context, and almost seem like the characters themselves are only talking about masters and slaves because they're confused by (or maybe making puns about) the word choice! In Perfect Possession, the Master doesn't actually have any sort of power over the Slave, who even has to be the one to initiate the possession and can do so by force (if it's not consensual). I'll admit that I always feel like my own understanding of PP is pretty shaky, partly because it's explained in such vague and contradictory terms, but it seems like the Slave is the only one with power in the relationship, and there's no indication of what the Master "using" them even means with all this in mind, beyond maybe coordinating when the Slave should tag in. For every such brief mention in AoCF, there's ten where the Master complains about being forcefully possessed and bodyswitched by a Slave they can't get rid of. (Examples like the game's very first one with Koishi & Marisa show that not only the initial possession but even the bodyswitch can be done at the Slave's initiative without the Master's consent, but not vice versa.)
As you say, the writers were obviously aware of the English meaning of Master and Slave, and made jokes about them in the text. However, in my opinion that doesn't change the fact that they were chosen as, and only make sense as, a computer reference.
Of course, the text of the game being as sprawling as it is, it's also possible there's something deeper in there than those throw-away Slave jokes that blows this argument wide open.
*I say "writers" for completeness' sake because AoCF actually credits ZUN as "Scenario / Director" and Unаbara Iruka as "Script Writer". I don't explicitly mean it as an argument to delegitimize the writing, though. That's a different can(on) of worms.
Narratograph further muddies the waters by either misunderstanding or simply choosing to adapt the way Perfect Possession works: in Narratograph, the positions of Master and Slave in the pair aren't set, but instead the Master is whoever's currently out and visible, and the titles switch every time the other appears. Granted, I guess you could definitely argue that this would actually make the Master & Slave terms more logical than they are in AoCF, if you wanted to? However, in the translation process, it just added to the pile of reasons the whole thing was kind of a jumble that I decided I had to approach as its own thing.
It definitely turns into a kind of fugue state where the original points are half-forgotten by the end of debating it in your head, but I think there was even something in there about Host & Client working for me because in context it sounds like the Client is just kind of chilling while the Host is the one doing the work? However, I won't even try to lean on any "clever" bits like that as an argument, both because they quickly end up contradictory and because they don't really count for much against the main arguments anyway.
I do get the importance of precedent and established translation, yeah. I mean, I'm a "Fantasy Seal" grognard among other things. However, I don't think it works as a blanket argument for never changing anything.
Something like Gensokyo I tend to keep because 1.) it's so common to come up, 2.) it's very central to the series as a whole, so even changes to it that don't really change anything come with more baggage, 3.) the only thing gained by fixing it is spelling standardization, with no difference in meaning or sound or anything. Someone who weighs those three factors differently, such as caring more about the spelling standardization and less about the other two, may well decide to change it.
Something like Fantasy Seal I tend to keep rather than call it Dream Seal because 1.) it's a very iconic name on par with e.g. Master Spark, 2.) it does have a difference in sound and feeling, 3.) the arguments about the other meaning being more accurate are ultimately pretty marginal compared to the other two points in my mind - especially because it exists primarily as a cool attack name, rather than a practical term.
At the same time, for most other spellcards I generally just use the established translations without even thinking about whether I like them or not, because they're not all that important in my/people's minds. That said, that's also an argument you can take both ways: if they're obscure and unimportant, either you shouldn't change them so that people can at least recognize them from the games, or you should feel more free to tweak them to make the thing you're working on better.
For Master & Slave, while AoCF does establish a clear precedent for... all the times they've ever come up, true, it's not a very big or "iconic" thing in my eyes that should get the full protection of being treated as tradition if there are other priorities. Maybe I poked at the wrong thing by saying I might've also translated AoCF differently, but contained within Narratograph, the scale ended up tipping this way. I think any confusion on familiar people's side is probably pretty slight and quickly fixed, and when playing they can easily slot in the other terms if they prefer, compared to what I saw as a practical benefit for the game and for the people (including a good chunk of Touhou fans, not just some hypothetical newcomer I'm translating this for) who don't have a thorough understanding of the topic. I'd also just rather give people an easier time reading the already very convoluted rules.
(Hopefully I didn't accidentally trip on a different unrelated wire by bringing the Fantasy Seal example into this. That's not the point.)
Because it's a couple pages of optional rules in a fan translation of an expansion book of an unofficial licensed game, I have to avoid the reflex to defensively imply that makes it not matter, because it obviously does matter to me and I did put thought into it, even if you can reasonably disagree with that thought. However, it being a specific and limited context like that was a factor in me deciding to take that liberty; even though conversely, one could also argue that being such a limited context means it wouldn't have mattered too much if I'd just let it be.
I'm sorry to hear I "blew it". But whether it pleases you or frustrates you to know that I at least had thought-out reasons that make sense to me, there you go.
Gensou Narratograph Expansion Book - translation now available!
The Expansion Book includes a chunk of new options to add to your game:
30 new playable characters, most of them from the newer games not included in the core book
Rules for Original Character creation
Rules for leveling up your character with upgraded ability skills, new spellcards and Special Bonds
Incident Revival, six new rulesets to replicate various mechanics from the games, with the most detailed being Danmaku Photography, Perfect Possession and Ability Cards
6 new spots added to the map (with lore by ZUN)
5 new prewritten scenarios for GMs to run, including stories by Aya Azuma, Makoto Hirasaka and Iori Miyazawa (author of Otherside Picnic). The first one is PvP!
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To go with this, I've uploaded a new version of the Core Rulebook. This version includes tweaks to the translation, new errata, and notably a piece of text that was missing under the Time Limit rules on p. 203 (my bad).
It's recommended that you redownload the full rar file to get the latest versions of everything, including the books, sheets, maps and character tokens!
Full rar file: Download here!
Standalone files: Core Rulebook, Expansion Book
Not included in zip, spoiler warning: Anniversary Scenario
(Urls are same as before, old links should work.)
The Tabletop Simulator mod will be updated soon!
Full collection of links: Here
Please report any problems or apparent mistakes, through my askbox if nowhere else.
I hear FMW has a great story later on, but I have a very low tolerance for PC-98 wank. How bad does it get in the later games?
Mima exists as an important part of Marisa's backstory, and Shinki is added to Byakuren's story as part of Makai (and Alice's backstory). If you can't tolerate their existence at all then that's that, but as someone who usually ignores PC-98 myself I didn't find them too offensive.
Personally, I believe the Touhou Gods/goddesses are technically supposed to be manifestations of primal concepts that have always existed. But it's also implied that they themselves only became actual, sentient living beings over a few thousand years ago thanks to abundant faith, through religion and mythology. So they're basically like Tulpas.
Suwako is likely 2,400 years old at most. With most of the ancient gods around the 1,500 to 3,000 mark (Okina over 1,300), Eirin at 2,500~3,000; then Junko and Hecatia being the oldest at over 3,500 to 4,000 IMO (some of them might even be over 5,000 years old lol). But it's very possible there could be other, far greater deities that transcend faith/reality altogether and are magnitudes more ancient, though we still don't know for sure just yet.
Thoughts?
My thoughts are that the Merry and Renko story Izanagi Object implies that the god Izanagi is 25 million years old, because that's the only way the creation myth of Japan can line up with the modern understanding of geological processes. Izanagi Objects also come up in Unconnected Marketeers where it's made explicit that they are artifacts dating from the age of the gods, found deep underground in strata that far predate humanity. So at the very least, whatever pre-human concept of Izanagi existed around 25 million years ago.
Omoikane, ie: Eirin, is also supposedly older than Izanagi, going by the myths (at least some of them). So her concept would also be millions of years old. Which frankly was already implied back in Imperishable Night when she told Remilia that the ratio of their histories approximates zero. 500 divided by 3000 is only 1/6, which is clearly not even close to zero, so Eirin at least considers herself far older than that. For the record, 500 divided by 25 million is 0.00002, which is certainly a lot closer to zero, but I don't know if I'd call that mathematically approaching zero. Banter is just banter, of course.
That said, the existence of Izanagi Objects also kind of implies that these things were more than just "concepts" even way back then? Perhaps they were given their modern forms and personalities by human worship, similar to how youkai are said to be shaped in Symposium of Post-mysticism, but they were, like, actual beings making physical objects.
Either that, or the past itself has been rewritten to make them retroactively exist. I wouldn't rule that out.
As for whether there are "undiscovered" gods who have never been given names by humanity, that's certainly an interesting idea, and definitely falls in line with the Shinto concept of the Yaoyorozu no Kami (and Touhou's interpretation of that), but I'd be far more skeptical of any of them being "greater" gods of any sort. Like, literally the greatest of all possible gods was given a name and defined as such in various religions (Christian theology gets kind of weird), so it's hard to see how there's room for anything greater.
Also, as just like a thematic, narrative thing, the setting of Touhou is defined as one where the gods and other supernatural beings are dying out as the light of science drives them into increasingly smaller shadowy corner. The idea of there being a "super god" who is immune to that strikes me as thematically antithetical to everything Touhou is about. It renders all the philosophizing about the nature of belief kind of meaningless? Like it's just a cool fact about an obscure form of life, like some kind of undersea animal living next to volcanic vents or something, and not a statement on the human condition.
Honestly, I can't interpret this in a way that isn't just the Christian "all your other gods are actually just demons in disguise! Ours is the only true god, heathens!" That's just how it comes across to me, sorry.
The unofficial Touhou farm sim! Play as harvest god Minoriko Aki and grow your popularity with your home-grown produce and specialty sweet p
for those of you that have been following me from the start, thank you. game will be available in about an hour.
for those that haven't, I'm making a farm sim starring Minoriko! it's in early access though, so READ THIS to make sure the game is in a state that you're interested in before jumping in!
Some thoughts/research on the Stage 4 boss of Touhou 20, whose mythological basis is pretty hard to google in English.
No general summary of the game's plot, so look that up yourself.
This was written while trying to make sense of the matter myself, so expect me to have missed or gotten something backwards.
Yuiman Asama is directly based on an individual mythological character. However, that character is a pretty obscure deep pull, and there is very little to her/about her, so most of Touhou's Yuiman is still made up or adapted by ZUN and fits into existing Touhou lore in pretty complicated ways.
A couple things out of the way:
First, her name is spelled ユイマン・浅間 with that ・ in the middle. "Yuiman" being in katakana here doesn't explain it, and the ・ isn't there in e.g. Watari Nina (渡里 ニナ). Normally that dot serves to separate first names and surnames when both are foreign, like "Alice・Margatroid" for instance, but here the closest point of comparison would actually be "Reisen・Udongein・Inaba", in which all names are Japanese yet the ・ is still used. It generally means the name oughta be read in the same order even when name orders are otherwise being messed with, i.e. she should be called Yuiman Asama in both Japanese and English.
Implicitly, in most of these situations, Yuiman would be her first name. It's also the name e.g. Iwanaga's profile and everyone else calls her by.
Given that the ・ comes after "Yuiman" spelled in katakana, it's probably meant to emphasize that while a Japanese spelling for her name does exist (維縵), it's actually a foreign word from the ancient, non-Japanese language of her people, unlike Asama (浅間) which is a name given to her by the Japanese.
Secondly - and I don't know if anyone thought this anyway - while Yuiman Asama appears together with Iwanaga Ariya here, she's probably not meant to be Iwanagahime's younger sister Sakuyahime, in spite of the fact that Sengen/Asama (both spelled 浅間) is also a byname for Sakuyahime, as mentioned in CiLR:
This is mostly because a.) living at two very different mountains, not the same mountain, is kind of central to Iwanagahime and Sakuyahime's whole deal, and b.) it just gets weird trying to connect Yuiman with what we know about Sakuyahime, in Touhou or otherwise.
The reason that they're both called Sengen/Asama is, indeed, because it means "volcano". Most "Sengen shrines" around Japan are dedicated to the volcano Mt. Fuji, which Sakuyahime is a god of, but Yuiman is supposed to be Asama Myoujin, a god of Mt. Asama. However, despite this, it's also obvious that this whole Sengen/Asama connection is a big part of what inspired ZUN to associate this very obscure god with Iwanagahime at all.
Now to ramble about the myth Yuiman comes from.
The character Yuimanhime (維縵姫) appears in the story of Kōga Saburō. I'm not an expert on this or anything else here - most of this is "first page of Japanese Google" stuff - but supposedly the myth of Koga is a relatively late invention from the 14th century, meant to become an alternative origin story for Suwa Myoujin (yes, that one) after the old stories about Takeminakata (i.e. Kanako in Touhou's case) became politically undesirable for a while. The Koga story ignores the Suwa clan and sidelines the animist Shinto elements in favor of being very in-your-face Buddhist, though I'm not gonna linger on that latter aspect here.
There's different versions, but I'm going by the oldest literary one from the 14th century. That doesn't make it "the most accurate", because that's not how folklore works, but the most obvious choice to use as a baseline. Also note that I'm dependent on modernized summaries from weird internet sources such as the above. Given all these limitations, the exact details of the version here are going to be somewhat arbitrary and debatable.
To summarize the parts we care about, Koga was a young nobleman who got married to one Kasugahime. However, she got abducted by a youkai while he was out hunting, and he went searching mountain by mountain to find her. He eventually found her stuck in a deep cave at Mt. Tateshina near Suwa and helped her up, only to reenter to go pick up her bronze mirror which she'd dropped somewhere. His traitorous brother, wanting to take Kasugahime for himself, cut the rope that Koga had used to climb into the cave and thus left him to die.
Koga traveled across 72 underground realms to finally end up in the land of Yuiman, whose king welcomed him and allowed him to marry his 300-year-old youngest daughter Yuimanhime. Koga then lived happily in Yuiman, engaging in his favorite hobby of deer hunting, until years later he had a dream that reminded him of Kasugahime and made him want to return home. Yuimanhime accepted this, but swore to follow after him and be his concubine in secret.
Yuimanhime helped Koga leave, and he resurfaced at Mt. Asama (a volcano about 50 km from Yatsugatake a.k.a. Youkai Mountain, as well as Suwa). But upon returning home, only by the terrified reaction of others did he realize he'd been transformed into a giant snake. To become human again, he had to take off the clothes he'd received in Yuiman, bathe in a pond, pray a lot to the Bodhisattvas and so on. He succeeded, but did leave behind the molted skin of his snake form.
Reunited with his first wife, Koga would go on to be worshiped as Suwa Myoujin (otherwise commonly known as Takeminakata) while Kasugahime would become the god of the Lower Shrine at Suwa (otherwise commonly known as Yasakatome). Later, when Yuimanhime followed after him, she was deified as Asama Myoujin, a god of Mt. Asama. That's the last we hear of her, really.
In Touhou, we are told that Yuiman Asama was a princess of Yuiman (i.e. Yuimanhime from the story) until "the gods who came from Takamagahara" (a.k.a. the amatsukami, the Lunarians, the ruling lineages of Japan) took her away from her deer-hunting lifestyle, brainwashed her and turned her into one of them (in whatever order) to make use of her ability. In terms of ZUN's inspiration, her ability to "make things be reborn by feeding them to her snake" is probably a reference to Koga being turned into snake and possibly him molting his skin, as well as the whole "journey to the underworld" story being a typical allegory for death and rebirth. The rebirth angle does connect her to Sakuyahime somewhat. To me, the white snake also acts as a visual reference to the Moriya, which makes sense as it seems that Koga's whole hunting hobby and giant snake transformation were included in the story because hunting and snakes were important to the Suwa Myoujin mythology.
With the Koga myth as context, her backstory as written in her profile would seem pretty self-contained. The messy parts have to do with the other gods involved.
The story of Koga Saburo exists as a mutually exclusive replacement to both the official story of the Suwa Grand Shrine and the "secret" version we see in Touhou with Kanako and Suwako. There's a few different ways you could answer that problem:
Both mutually exclusive stories can inexplicably be "true" at the same time because of how gods and faith work
The Koga Saburo stuff never happened and only the parts about Yuiman attested in Touhou's own text are true
The Koga Saburo story is mostly true, excluding the part where he and Kasugahime become the Suwa gods; possibly they hung out at the shrine in some other capacity
Koga Saburo did do all that, and was somehow integrated into Kanako (who is already an amalgamation of different people)
Someone else, like Kanako or something, did all or some of that.
ZUN couldn't just leave it there, but had to include in the endings that Kanako considers Yuiman an "old friend". After hearing about her pyramid predicament from Reimu, she explains that she's a god from the same region as her (presumably meaning Nagano Prefecture, where both Suwa and Mt. Asama are) and makes it clear that she knew her before this whole brainwashing thing, when she was still her old self. Having now learned of the situation for the first time, she wants to help Yuiman, and sends Sanae to check on her (but she can't get past Nareko). As Suwako is a native god and the ones Kanako is based on are kunitsukami (earthly gods who got invaded by the Lunarians), it makes sense that they'd be on Yuiman's "side". Still, given that Yuimanhime's whole mythological role is to be the second wife of that story's Suwa Myoujin, there's obviously some interesting fuel there if you can dig it out from under this snarl of a narrative.
I'd think that there seems to be a colonialism/forced assimilation angle to the way Yuiman's backstory is presented and her name spelling emphasizes her non-Japaneseness. But that narrative gets a bit less linear if she was still her old self when Kanako knew her in Nagano, and Iwanaga's profile confirms that not only were she and Yuiman already enshrined in the pyramid before the Lunarian takeover happened, even the pyramid came after she was originally enshrined at Mt. Asama.
Was there simply a surprisingly long time between her deification and the brainwashing part, during which she lived relatively happily on the surface? That's my guess for now. But her backstory kind of seems to blame her leaving her homeland, her elevation to godhood and her brainwashing equally on the Lunarians in one straightforward sentence, which kind of muddles that.
Finally, I haven't found any direct connection between Iwanagahime and Yuiman for now, beyond Yuiman coincidentally sharing a byname with Sakuyahime and all three being volcano gods. On that note, I found myself flipping back and forth on whether Iwanaga Ariya was actually Iwanagahime or simply named and themed after her. At this point, I think there's plenty of evidence/hints "for", while the only thing "against" is her being worshiped together with Yuiman at this random shrine. Since gods can be enshrined at multiple places, that shouldn't actually be a very meaningful argument, and Occam's Razor certainly leans "for". I just wanted to include that because apparently I feel iffy on it, and the stuff about her having been sealed up underground with the pyramid somehow feels like it undermines the idea of it being just one of many she's enshrined at.
I suspect I'll understand more once I learn where the "Ariya" name comes from.
Fun side note on that, though: the Pixiv wiki notes that the three time-stoppers Sakuya, Kaguya and Ariya all have the same ya 夜 ("night") in their name.
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