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Review: The Moon and the Hourai Doll by Iron Temple

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You know, when I saw the title, I thought that The Moon and the Hourai Doll by Iron Temple would be about Alice, since, y'know, she has a Hourai doll. But no, it's about Mokou (who also has references to "Hourai doll"), famed for her own personal little Vicious Cycle Of Revenge against Kaguya, who in canon acts about as aggressive as the nearest rabbit.1 And it romantically pairs Mokou with Keine, natch.

For my own sanity, rather than actually make an entire review, I'm just going to supercondense it, in a way which will tell you EXACTLY what I think about it. Yes, it's going to have spoilers.


Poem: And that's how Mt. Fuji came to be, and why it is on fire.

Mokou: I'm Wolverine, bitches, and I'm gonna get gruesomely murdered on page 1 just to show that you can't actually kill me!

Ex-Keine: Gasp! A girl with mortal wounds!

Mokou: Gasp! A girl with horns! Zzzzzz ....

The next day!

Mokou: I HUNGER!

Keine: WTF healing factor.

Interlude #1: (yes, they're numbered in the doujin itself)

Kaguya: The moon looks very pretty, Eirin, and do you know why? Because I'm completely freaking psycho.

Meanwhile!

Keine: Have some exposition about Gensokyo, which any actual Touhou fan would know about.

Mokou: That's okay, feel free to actually ignore canon, everyone else does.

Interlude #2:

Keine's Journal: The assembled masses will cry "Save us!" and I'll whisper "No." ... uh, I mean, I have to keep an eye on Mokou.

Meanwhile!

Villagers: Keine is a nice hakutaku!

Mokou: Hmm ... Hey, Keine, can I live here forever?

Keine: Um ... sure.

Mokou: YAAAAAY! Hey, look! I can do fieldwork!

Interlude #3:

Keine's Journal: So, Mokou has an unusual power, and she doesn't want to go back to the outside world. Gee, I wonder if the two facts could be connected somehow.

Meanwhile!

Mokou: I smell ... KAGUYA! Must ... destroy ...

Keine: Hey, where'd she go?

Bamboo Spears: Stab.

Mokou: Ow.

Mokou's Flashback: So, yeah, Kaguya rejected my dad's hand in marriage, and now I want to kill her. I suppose the reason Iron Temple made her a complete psycho in this doujin was to show me in a relatively positive light.

Ex-Keine: Nuuuu! Mokou! I was too late! I failed to protect you!

Mokou: I'm not quite dead! And now that I know where Kaguya lives, I'll just be able to wait here and kill kill KILL KILL MWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Mokou's Flashback: ... um, never mind that "positive light" bit.

Interlude #4:

Wall Of Text: Wall Of Text!

Kaguya: Yay, killing time!

Narration: Punishment to crime! Poison to evil! The imperishable night lay! I need scissors! Sixty-one!!

Meanwhile!

Ex-Keine: Here, have a hair-ribbon.

Mokou: Here, have a horn-ribbon.

Narration: And now for something completely different.

One Imperishable Night extra-stage later ...

Ex-Keine: Gasp! You got killed again!

Mokou: LOL, they beat me.

Ex-Keine: Stop laughing! You're allowed to cry, you know!

Me: Oh you did NOT just tell her she should angst instead of laughing.


So, yeah. If I'd physically had this doujin in front of me, that last bit would have had me physically picking it up and throwing it across the room (Warning, link leads to TVTropes. Muffin will not be held responsible for hours of time lost as a result of following it.But see also this disclaimer). I'm putting Iron Temple on my "circles to avoid" list, unless they also manage to create something phenomenally good.

Also, I had to read this over again in order to refresh my memory. YOU ALL OWE ME FOR THIS!! :x

1Unfortunately, the nearest rabbit is Tewi.

9 Comments (auto-closed) (rss feed)

sRc

their Prismrivers doujin was pretty amusing, but otherwise the things by Iron Temple are pretty meh

the Moukou/Keine reminds me tho of another doujin by someone else. cant remember who did it, was a short with just the two talking about the world having ended, and the moon splitting apart. it almost looked to me as if it was following the breakup of the moon from the 2002 Time Machine movie

Solarn

At least when Chado makes everyone in Gensokyo completely psycho, he makes it entertaining. This is just sad.

CapedLuigisYoshi

This review sounds somewhat like a mix between an Abridged Series and a Bum Review. I likey. :D

Duran

>"That's okay, feel free to actually ignore canon, everyone else does."

Mainly secondaries; there's a difference between playing fast and loose with canon, and taking a big steaming... all over it.

Dizzy H. Slightly Voided

What do you even mean by "secondaries"?

-ED

Based on context, I think "secondaries" is meant to be a disparaging term for late adopters.

Brought to you by the "It's popular, now it sucks" crowd.

Considering I first learned of Touhou from a video of Ronald McDonald falling off a park bench to an catchy tune, I'm certainly not one to hold airs of "superiority". Yeah, there's a lot of doujins and fan vids out there that are crap. A lot of it is stuff I don't like. But I don't go around bleating about how those authors aren't "true" fans (whatever the hell that means). I. just. don't. read. what I don't like. Simple.

Ah jeez, now I went off and wrote a mini-rant.

-ED

Let me add on to that- since I'm up way too late and am not properly reading what I'm writing...

I'm not criticizing you, Muffin, on the contrary I found this review highly amusing. It's the people who complain about shows they don't like that bother me. Making fun of shows you don't like, well that's totally kosher.

Dizzy H. Slightly Voided

Somehow I think that's kind of mixed up. But thanks!

Duran

Actually I mean fans who got into Touhou purely by fan materials and never bothers playing the games. If you tried to at least played the games, congrats, you're better than most. And secondary doujin/fic writers often end up making big steaming dumps on canon to the point where certain fanon depictions are mistaken for real things. Unpleasant NEET Kaguya anyone? Or the whole infamous Marisa/Alice dyanamic they love so much (That Kimiko hates)?

If not for the damage they cause to the overall perception of Touhou and its characters, I couldn't care less about secondaries. Secondaries are the reason we get things like this and Sound Holic's animated movie.

And to be honest it was actually the game in action that hooked me to Touhou after hearing a remix in a video. But it was seeing the game in action that hooked me, all the other fan stuff before that point made me think "generic anime stuff" CANON>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>FANON.

To this end, I've gone about reading as many translated pieces of canon as possible (including the Endings Wikia while it was up; the endings have surprising large amounts of stuff in them)