#general disc.

[chireikiden]

The only power ranking we need for Touhou, which would represent the things that actually matter, is based on How Much Trouble They Have Caused For Reimu Specifically.

3rd place is Yukari, but surprisingly enough, mostly off a constant flow of second-hand trouble, being the one indirectly to blame for most things.

2nd place is Marisa, mostly off-screen.

1st place is Reimu.

[chireikiden]

Fossilized Wonders Interview with ZUN

Somebody got around to transcribing it, so I got around to translating it!

I feel like it's still kind of rough, but some of ZUN's rambling is eccentric enough that I think I can't really improve it simply by staring at it right now, without editorializing too much and forcing it to make sense with wild guesses about what he's actually trying to say.

[chireikiden]

How do you feel about ZUN's handling of Touhou's power creep? Newer characters like Hecatia, Okina, and Yuuma are much bigger deals than Yukari or Kanako. Even a Watatsuki sister is a stage 5 boss now.

That's not how it works / I don't caaare.

That's not how it works: Toyohime is a stage 5 boss because that's her spot to appear in the plot, not to indicate that she's halfway between Yuiman and Ariya on some power level ladder. Just like Yuyuko wasn't demoted to weaker than Kyouko, Yuugi vs. Nitori is probably not an even match, and Reimu & Marisa probably aren't between Keine and Reisen. While I wouldn't deny that stage placement, especially in the later stages, seems to broadly correlate with some sort of power level, it doesn't work as actual evidence of relative power (either within or between games) when there's any other points to consider.

I don't caaare: Any supposed power creep hasn't had a practical effect on either my opinions of characters, the events occurring within Touhou stories or the identity of the series as a whole. It would be one thing if Touhou, say, originally had an identity of starring especially weak characters and then escalated from there, or conversely if specific characters being the top dogs had been really central to the series somehow. But neither of those is true, and even when the status quo within Gensokyo has changed, it's never because someone more powerful than Yukari (the usual power level hobby horse) showed up, it's because somebody likes meddling.

The likes of Kanako, Mamizou, Nitori, Aya, even Miko and Byakuren or freaking Chimata have done far more to steer Touhou stories because they like to cause problems within Gensokyo, and even Okina's points of relevance haven't been about her being particularly strong. Meanwhile, the likes of Hecatia, Keiki, the animals and Zanmu (so far) have had very little impact on things. They certainly would/should have an impact if they were in Gensokyo, but they aren't, and I do think ZUN also feels that gives him a bit of leeway in making them more powerful bigshots than if he had to fit them in the Gensokyo ecosystem.

I guess that's the closest I come to an answer on how I feel about ZUN's "handling of it": all the supposed power creep characters are pretty well insulated from actually being a problem. Or often relevant, which I find a shame.

But to begin with, power levels only matter when I think being strong makes a character cooler, and stage placement only matters when I want an excuse to think a character I like is strong.

On a side note, I have no idea why Okina is on that list. Or Kanako, on the other team. Least powerfeaty 2010s boss meets least powerfeaty 2000s boss.

[chireikiden]

Y'know. In the margins between Junko's dynamic with Hecatia and Clownpiece (canon or fanon), the Lunarians being generally easy and fun to hate on, and the universal cultural reification of maternal grief, I feel like it does get a bit lost sometimes how her grudge against Chang'e and the Lunarians is explicitly misguided and pointless from the get-go, and that existing for thousands of years as the purified avatar of grief that she maybe should've just gotten over at some point if it weren't for that purification (sorry not sorry) isn't exclusively tragic but also a fair bit absurd.

Though just to be clear, this opinion that her whole deal probably isn't that admirable very much coexists in my head with the acknowledgment that A.) her hating the Lunarians just for the love of the game at this point is also really fun, B.) Hecatia + Piece helping her move on from this undesirable state is generally presented as the cornerstone of their relationship, so said grief isn't really straight-forwardly idealized or anything.

[chireikiden]

I've heard that ZUN won't focus on Abrahamic religions because it would make the eastern religions seem bad compared to the true good western one. Doesn't Nirvana in Buddhism though require everything else to be fake and not real?

I've actually talked about the Abrahamic question before, myself.

Definitely never heard it put like "the Eastern religions seeming bad compared to the true good Western one", so that's either poor phrasing or you've been given the wrong idea. Might as well copy the relevant part from the SCoOW interview (every second line is the interviewer):

If you just mean how Buddhism as a religion and philosophy posits that all other pursuits are ultimately meaningless and the goal of one's existence should be its cessation and all that, yeah, that checks out. In that sense, Buddhism claims to be the "true, good" religion.

However, the essential difference is that putting aside philosophical discussions of what is "real", Buddhism is highly syncretic. It can easily not just share space with but actually integrate other religions, either fully acknowledging or coming up with its own interpretations of their deities and whatnot. It just then adds the idea that what you should be doing, amongst all these supernatural distractions, is pursuing Nirvana. Some of those deities may be willing to help you. This is especially pronounced in Japan, where Shinto-Buddhist syncretism was the religion for over a thousand years and remains in many forms to this day. The Abrahamic faiths only ever syncretize other faiths' gods in a rather, uh, let's say more "assimilationist" manner. It's a complex topic but the difference is clear.

It's just kind of a fact that practically all religions consider themselves "the true one". How monotheistic religions differ is that even on the most surface and everyday level, they're very difficult to square with other, polytheistic faiths in a way that isn't inherently adversarial (besides just agreeing to disagree, obviously, but that doesn't work so well when the gods are tangibly present in the story). Obviously all religions have e.g. mutually exclusive world creation myths and stuff like that, but especially the ones prominent in Touhou have a long history of sharing space and are easy enough to mash together into one fictional setting, at least at the level of detail and seriousness that they're usually discussed in Touhou.

The Abrahamic faiths aren't simply hard to fit in because they claim to be the bestest. They're hard to include, in practical terms, without either overshadowing the others or just seeming objectively wrong about the things most central to them, as I discussed in the older ask. And that's besides the other challenges that ZUN associates with using Abrahamic faiths in games.

[chireikiden]

Are that Watatsuki sisters considered kami? Could Yorihime summon her sister out of the blue?

In terms of family trees and mythologically recognizable characters, the likes of Eirin, Sagume, and indeed the Watatsukis are pretty unambiguously kami/gods. (By extension, we have to assume Kaguya is too; although the original Kaguya-hime is a fairytale character with no specific religious status, it isn't much of a leap to call her one even within that story.)

Beyond that, SSiB and CiLR make it explicit that both Reimu and Yorihime are also summoning Lunarian gods when they do their thing. With Yorihime being able to summon the likes of Amaterasu, I have to assume she could summon Toyohime too, yeah. Putting aside any unknowable questions about whether she'd be allowed to do so without "the proper measures" or "permission" (CiLR ch. 6).

It's specified (most explicitly in SSiB ch. 6) that gods, including those with physical bodies, are simply cloned when summoned into a new location. This would also apply to Toyohime. I guess that's a good reason not to.

-----------------------

That said, as a tangent: although their summonability seems to be one of the least ambiguous things about them, there's a lot about the Lunarians' exact nature that gets into the territory of what I'd call "dubious by omission". Stuff that isn't directly contradictory per se, but has been left ambiguous and starts to get more and more dubious the longer it goes without being mentioned or clarified in any way even when the Lunarians otherwise come up. It's really hard to see them running on very similar rules as the Moriya or Aki gods, but they may have simply outgrown such concerns when they moved to the Moon and chose a new form of immortality. And of course, the ones we're most familiar with, Eirin and Kaguya, also have the elixir as an added complication.

I think a lot of the lore around the Moon exists in a kind of confusing state partly because Imperishable Night was very early Touhou from the era when the setting was still pretty unformed, yet SSiB+CiLR ended up discussing it at quite some length and then more games kept on coming back to the subject. But the boundaries around the status of kami being very fuzzy is appropriate for both Touhou and Shinto as a whole, anyway.

[chireikiden]

It really is impressive how all Touhou gacha peaked in March 2020, only a few months into the very first one's lifespan, with the introduction of Her.

And then Touhou Cannonball, an overall mediocre game with some very charming presentation and great music, was shut down as deeply unprofitable after only a year and no other successor ever topped it. The end.

[chireikiden]

It used to be that Ran Yakumo (the shikigami) was entirely separate from Ran Yakumo (the fox), with the fox part essentially being a PC case to the actual PC part shikigami. However, with Touhou 19, it seems that's not entirely the case anymore, with them kind of being the same (?). Was that more of a retcon on ZUN's part or a misunderstanding on what Ran's whole case was

I won't pretend to know what's going on with Ran. It does become a matter of trying to reconcile seemingly contradictory information, which you certainly can do and explain why it actually isn't contradictory at all, but it's honestly a sort of canon scholasticism and there isn't a specific version that I'd give as "my" or "the" explanation.

To be fair, the theory vs. presentation of how shikigami work in Touhou has been at least somewhat shaky since the start, which is probably part of the reason that very few fan writers in these decades have actually followed the supposed canon to the letter to begin with (besides Ran and Chen also just having a lot of time to go through general fandom mutation, of course).