#renkari

[autisticcatnip]

A beautiful renkari sketch by the wonderful @riotbreaker

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

I do want to point out that the Hifuu Club isn't doomed yuri! There's absolutely nothing stopping Yukaribel from immediately returning to Renko once her past self is out of the way. :)

[junhecas]

Do you think she feels it?

The first time Renko ate the flesh of her own, of course, was gentle. Yukari seemed to know how to make it seem like something other than it was, perhaps an extent of her power or perhaps a skill learned the hard way, during all the miserable time spent away from each other. But over time, she felt something shift in her mind. Not only had she become okay with it, that had happened long ago, but now...she started to want it. A carnivorous desire that had never gripped her before, wanting to sink her teeth into something real. All she had known for her whole life was fake, compared to this even the best meal she had before Yukari found her feels like cardboard in her memory.

Do you think she feels it, when her body begins to betray its origin? When her bones ache and warp, eyes and teeth just underneath her skin, aching to break free, to feel the light of the moon? Because, certainly, there was no room under the sun for her anymore. She is pale, and thin, eyes wider than they had ever held themselves, but she is alive!

Her mind no longer has room to care if she's found. When she's told another unfortunate soul had wandered past the boundary of artifice and organic, her feet hit the ground as soon as she leaves the conversation. She's running through the trees, laughing and out of breath all at once, almost on all fours as she propels herself faster and faster by grabbing the trunks of trees and pushing herself forward. As soon as her handclaws grace warm flesh, it's over.

Do you think she feels it? When her hands are betwixt the ribs of a man she does not even register the face of? When she hears a soft crunch of detritus and snaps her head back up, blood flying from the corners of her mouth, only to be met with the saccharine smile of her beloved? The woman she had chased to the end of the known world, into that which is truly unknown. Do the new eyes protruding from her skin see different wavelengths; ultraviolet, gamma, infrared? Do her sharper teeth form a different smile, after a short exhale of relief, of happiness?

I hope she does. Feeling is the act of living, after all. This is what she wanted.

[winged-void]

Renkari lasts all of a few hours because yukari romanticized the shit out of it for the past few thousand years and then had to experience the real life hell of actually talking to renko usami for ten straight minutes.

They still fuck though

[rlyehtaxidermist]

renmerry/renkari noir AU

because I apparently can’t stop getting ideas for these

Renko is a down-on-her-luck private investigator slash aspiring Great Detective, in her thirties or so. She has a reputation for being good at her job but also a bit arrogant and troublesome to work with.

Maribel was her childhood friend but disappeared ~10 years ago; Renko finds out this is because Merry’s family were in trouble with some Seriously Nasty People and has a bit of a guilt complex about not being able to figure this out sooner and help her.

Merry escaped with the help of Ran, a family friend, who takes her in as her daughter “Yakumo Yukari”. Ran encourages “Yukari” to be more aggressive and, rather than just hide out, work on eliminating her family’s old enemies.

Renko eventually discovers that Yukari’s organisation intersects a lot with her Maribel investigation, and begins to try and track down Yukari actively (to the point that some of Yukari’s people nearly make an attempt on her life, before Yukari stops them).

Yukari tries to avoid Renko, and when she can’t, she tries to keep Renko so off-balance during their meetings that Renko never has the chance to ask her outright who she is. (She’s worried about how she’d answer.)

The “boundary of reality and fantasy” theme from Touhou proper translates neatly to “boundary of society and the underworld”, with Merry being dragged off by forces beyond her control and forced to adapt to a much more hostile environment by becoming hostile herself; Renko is a hardboiled detective rather than an aspiring paranormal investigator, but in both cases she’s someone from one side driven into the other by curiosity and occupation.

[monidoll]

"Don’t look. Don’t come. Don’t know. Don’t cross over."

Inspired by "Absolute One-Way Street ~ Unreachable Message" by Diao ye zong

[junhecas]

"I don't like the idea of renko/yukari because of the insane power imbalance" you don't understand it even a little. not even a little bit

[junhecas]

Thesis: if Renko were to inevitably become a youkai (I don't think any universe where she reconvenes with yukari could end with anything but her death or transgression of humanity) she would be a doumeki because the always-watching eyes go great with a Laplace's Demon aesthetic

Antithesis: if Renko became a youkai she would become a crow bird of some description because merry/yukari are obviously some sort of cat, symbolism with toxic love in the form of cat saliva being toxic to birds so one small bite would be all it takes

Synthesis: bird girl with the wings being mottled black on white, spots looking eerily like eyes. And, of course, eyes in abnormal places too, she just also has fake eyes on her wings. She can cover the real extra eyes with clothes. It's fine. Being able to see more than the human mind was meant to comprehend all the time is fine actually she's not having any problems