Okay, that took a bit, because the last time I talked about it extensively was in some late-2015 chat logs, which I dug up for reference material. Whoops. Let’s get this show on the road. This is a followup to the post here. The same disclaimers apply, and more. Specifically, this interpretation is partly born out of a few self-imposed challenges.
1: Trying to reconcile the PC-98 and Windows personalities she has. Yes, this does mean acknowledging the existence of PC-98, and I apologise in advance to anyone who is bothered by this.
2: Avoid the gleefully psychotic Yuuka of fanon, but also, don’t totally whitewash her.
3: I live to stir up sympathy for awful, awful people. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has read Green Eyes.
With that said, more below the cut!
It’s a question of origins, more or less, that starts all this off. Where did Yuuka come from? What is she, exactly? Strap yourselves in, because this is more speculative and ‘but at least it’s interesting, right?’ than even my usual stuff. If I sound like I’m presenting opinion as fact, let me say in advance that it’s only because it sounds better than prefacing every sentence with “I think that...”
I subscribe to the view that Yuuka is kind of a big deal, no one to be trifled with, but not “can beat up five Yukaris with both arms tied behind her back” like some seem to think. The obvious question is how she got there. She’s a youkai of flowers, yes?
Well, flowers and growth. It makes sense to me that a youkai who embodies growth would become more formidable over time. This is a distinction from the approximately static status of many youkai (as far as I can tell). With that preamble out of the way, onto things that don’t add up.
I’d add, as a sidenote before I forget, that I consider Yuuka to be dangerous not because she can do horrible things to someone - many youkai can - but because she actually might. The difference between, to use a local example, pit vipers, and the who-knows-what-they’re-called-in-English that are a whole lot more venomous but would rather slink away or play dead than pick fights.
So, discrepancies. In PC-98, she’s neck-deep in gleeful butchery and playful atrocities. Contrasting this, in PoFV, she’s basically pleasant and it’s hard to tell where her reputation comes from. In the print material she basically gets “she really is dangerous, you have to take my word for it”. Which is really her, and how did she come by this reputation? For that matter, why would she be like this? To the first question, my answer is: Both, sort of.
Let’s begin by examining the corollary to the ‘Yuuka’s power grows over time’ theory. She’s old as dirt. Once upon a time, she was probably a total nobody. Not total small fry like Rumia, not enough to escape notice, but not a big enough deal to be untouchable. Exactly enough to attract attention and all the trouble it brings to her door, and back then, Gensokyo was a much nastier place for both humans and youkai. In those unkind days, she would draw a lot of wary youkai hunters to her, and even actual youkai who don’t appreciate competition.
So, her early life went through a few phases, sometimes simultaneously or flipping back and forth. Hide desperately and try not to die. Run. Turn around and be horrifyingly vicious and brutal, making examples at every turn and, basically, acting like the worst youkai on the block. Why? Because that cautious, defensive attitude in her head - every part of her that she switched off in order to survive - and her own reputation make up the only defenses she has.
Or to put it more fancifully, when you have only your life and your name, you dedicate your life to making a fortress out of your name.
She has an image that she has to maintain. Forever. A good set of honed instincts, too, at the end of it all. You know the infamous ‘Genocide is just a game’ quote? Well, I can wrangle it into making sense if I want to, which I do. It is, in fact, more than that: Part of the much larger, lifelong game of maintaining her reputation.
I’d like to acknowledge for a moment, though, that the obvious extra-diegetic explanation here (or in more familiar terms, the meta explanation) is that PC-98 predates giving characters or plot a lot of thought. Having admitted it, I’ll move on now.
She can dial all this back a bit, sometimes. Be a pleasant, civil person. That’s her making a serious effort. Behind everything she does is, though she might not even realise it, someone who never actually stopped being scared. Or to use a more... youkai food chain-y metaphor, she somehow wound up an apex predator with what amounts to prey instincts. The fact that her panic reaction is turning someone into a puddle of gore rather than flinching away does not change this.
She’s a bit locked into it now, too. She made her choice about how the world will see her and who she will become. Now that her environment requires neither of those defenses... well, it’s still a bit too late to change all that.
This got absurdly long, so the next post will have a lot of more general tidbits and pieces about how she acts, how she lives etc. Consider this the overview.
