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Touhou Nekokayou: Scarlet Weather Archive in Japanese Red #59

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Characters: Marisa Kirisame, Reimu Hakurei, Alice Margatroid, Shanghai, Suika Ibuki, Ruukoto

I can't decide what's more awesome: the clever way I depicted Marisa stroking Alice (it's a trick of hiding Marisa's arm behind Alice's head), or Suika wobbling around in the corner there. In any event, it makes sense that Ruukoto would be able to have a built-in internet connection, doesn't it?

KirbyM's up to Sakuya in the create.swf updates, whee. I'm still gonna use the original bluish color for Reimu's hair, though — for consistency's sake, first of all, and it also just seems more right somehow than the brownish shade in the more recent updates.

Of course, unless you subscribe to the theory that ZUN is drinking buddies with Yukari and/or going out with Aya, the Touhou Project series doesn't exist in the Touhou 'verse. This has had several effects in the Outside World of Touhou Nekokayou:

  • The Yukkuri shiteitte ne! meme began with Lucky Star, when someone posted atrocious Shift-JIS art of Konata and Tsukasa. (I mean, come on, with their art-style they already look halfway like yukkuris, don't they?)
  • ZUN is instead known for "Seihou Project", which ended up being slightly less-popular than Touhou is in our world, but which followed much the same pattern: five PC-98 games, then a plethora of Windows games; Erich has taken Rinnosuke's place as "the one guy, who doesn't appear in any of the games and is treated as a fundoshi-wearing pervert by some fans," and some other fans won't shut up about the return of Marie in "the next game" whenever one of them comes out. Some of the games and other elements have similar names, e.g. the equivalent of Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red is called Bohemian Archive on a 99GB Diskette, and Scarlet Weather Rhapsody's counterpart is Spectral World Rhapsody. A lot of the music is the same, however ...
  • Danmaku games which take a "rip off the more popular game" philosophy in this universe chiefly star robot-girls, maids, and robot-girl maids; and they are set in scifi settings (or scifi-with-magic) instead of fantasy.
  • Some people are vaguely aware that magic exists, particularly among the Seihou fans. Those who actually use magic usually pretend it's a joke when they talk about it with normal people. ("I'm totally gonna practice danmaku now, uh-huh, sure").
  • The Suwa Grand Shrine, better known locally as the Moriya Shrine, became abandoned — in fact, almost overnight, it came to look as though it hadn't been maintained for decades — when its caretaker, the young Sanae Kotiya, disappeared under mysterious circumstances ...
  • The character of Dio Brando from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is rumored to have been based on a real world knife-wielding time-stopping silver-haired youkai-slayer known only as Huntress; these rumors are silent on where the steamroller comes from, however. In any event, she went to hunt a vampire known as the Scarlet Devil at around 1997, and neither of them have been heard from since.
  • Many stories which in our universe were devoid of any elements of the supernatural, have at least a hint thereof here; this ranged from a passing reference to a wizard in Cold Comfort Farm; to Sherlock Holmes believing in the supernatural, and one or two of his stories had at least a hint of Maybe Magic Maybe Mundane (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) in the solutions (he even implies a few times that he's dealt directly with it when Watson wasn't around); to the Ghost in the Shell franchise being a good one-third delving into magic, and the number of ways technology affects actual souls.
  • There's a Japanese saying which translates to "A small child can knock down a big soldier" and has approximately the connotations of "The bigger they are, the harder they fall." It is in fact a corruption of an older saying which translates to "Even a little girl can push one of the Emperor's soldiers off a cliff" with a subtext of "if he isn't careful." This, however, is also a corruption of an even older saying, which has the name of Tsuki no Iwakasa (from The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter) in place of "one of the Emperor's soldiers." The original original saying is virtually unknown outside of Gensokyo, and it is best known in the Bamboo Forest.
  • Speaking of which, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter is precisely the same in every detail, except that some versions of the story say that Tsuki no Iwakasa and his men never returned from Mt. Fuji, either for unknown reasons or because of the mountain's eruption; presumably, this is usually omitted because it raises more questions when it doesn't explain it, and doesn't add anything to the story either way. Nobody alive today knows where the "little girl knocking Iwakasa off a cliff" bit came from, though. Well ... almost nobody.
  • The number of UFO-sightings is up slightly. Ironically (if you happen to know a bit about the history of such things), this can be attributed to witchcraft and demons.
  • Some people in the magical underground actually refer to normal, unaware people as "muggles," simply because this is an easy one-word description that most people will understand. The Harry Potter books were worth a good laugh, anyway; they get precious little of those.
  • The Outside World isn't very nice, at least for those in the magical underground. My reasoning is: consider that Gensokyo is (a) a land of illusion, where things can exist if there is sufficient active disbelief in it in the Outside World, and (b) a paradise where ultimately nothing bad ever happens. Can you say Crapsack World (Warning, link leads to TVTropes. Previous disclaimer appliesBut see also this disclaimer)? And even if this isn't literally the case, magical living is much more difficult these days. Just ask Kanako ...
  • Not many people actually believe that Gensokyo exists, apart from misguided goofballs with only half a clue between them, such as Renko and Maribel. Some think that it never existed; some think it merely ceased to exist some time ago; some think that the name is, in fact, synonymous with the old, youkai-dominated Japan of several thousand years ago, since that's what the youkai called it. Just about everyone alive who had actually been to Gensokyo before the Border went up are currently in Gensokyo.
  • Gensokyo isn't the only sealed-away magical world. Ever since the nineteenth century, there's been a slow mass exodus to such realms; science and magic don't get along.
  • For the magic-users and youkai who remain, the world is one of controlled anarchy. There have been a few attempts at organizing people and forming small governments, but there's nothing bigger than a small village because there's too much risk of getting noticed otherwise. The only universal hard and fast rule is, don't break the Masquerade (Warning, link leads to TVTropes. Previous disclaimer appliesBut see also this disclaimer). The reasoning goes like this: ignorance is bliss. People will sleep better, entirely ignorant of the fact that at any given night there's at least ten battles between monsters and monster-hunters — battles, in fact, which are fought precisely so that muggles can sleep at night, unmolested by monsters. (From the perspective of the monsters themselves, it's a lot easier to hunt prey that doesn't believe in predators.) All the knowledge would do is make people afraid. In particular, there are no defensive spells against bullets and explosives, and especially not against nuclear weapons. If people became stupid and afraid enough to declare an indiscriminate war on monsters, everyone would get hurt. In any event, there are sort of semi-rules of politeness about what you can and can't do to someone who doesn't know anything about the existence of real magic, and they'd no longer apply if everyone did know.
  • A fifteenth-century voivode of Wallachia called Vlad the Impaler was turned into a vampire upon his alleged death. He and his countrymen, who view him as a hero in modern times, are mildly irritated that exaggerations of what was common for his contemporaries, as well as propaganda from his enemies, have largely made him out to be a villain in the rest of the world. Of particular irritation is the treatment of his more widely-known nickname, Dracula. He likes theatrics as much as anyone else, though, and doesn't mind occasionally imitating Bela Lugosi's performance. Or Scott McCulloch's.
  • There are commercial tours to the moon in the advanced planning stages, as well as plans for a manned mission to Mars which have unfortunately fallen through. The moon tours are much too expensive for, say, a pair of jobless college students to go on at a whim. The Lunarians are not amused, but their war is mostly with the United States, and by all indications, the Japanese corporations running these Moon Tours are entirely unaware of the presence of the Lunar Capital to begin with. Er, wait, this is just an extrapolation of canon, not a "how our world is different with the presence of magic instead of Touhou" bit ...
  • My webcomic is a Seihou fancomic called Seihou Nekokayou: Spectral World Archive on a 99GB Diskette, in which I romantically paired VIVIT and Hirano because I'd gotten sick and tired of fans doing the tsundere-thing at them, and that's when they aren't making Hirano SO RONERY with nobody caring about her. Also, in a "future" timeline with Hirano getting older, I created original characters as their android "daughters," Liss (a miko) and Kyrie (nominally a fighting-robot but without any real sort of uniform).

Transcript

  1. (Marisa, Alice (and Shanghai), Suika, and Reimu are sitting at the steps of the Hakurei Shrine.)
    Marisa: (patting Alice's head) So, I've been spendin' a buncha time on the internet ...
    Reimu: Oh right ... Kanako and all the kappa have been working on bringing in technology from the Outside World, haven't they?
  2. Marisa: Well, more reverse-engineerin' it, mostly. But it's too bad Yukari won't let me post on message boards, I totally wanna troll some /b/-tards ...
    Reimu: (skeptically) Is she, uh, physically preventing you somehow? Because I know you've been downloading all those MP3s ... (aside) And those "Seihou Project" games ...
    Alice: Yeah, she set up this ... proxy ... firewall ... something that stops people in Gensokyo from *sending* information.
  3. (Suika begins crazily wobbling.)
    Marisa: (slyly) Welllll, ya know. Nitori's figurin' out how to get around that kinda stuff. I wanna play Team Fortress 2 with Chiyuri!
    Reimu: Well, okay, but be careful. These "computers" are hard to come by and expensive, and I've heard there's bad sides to the internet.
  4. Marisa: Hey, what's the worst thing that could happen?
    (Ruukoto flies into the panel backwards and upside-down. Alice looks up at Marisa in annoyance.)
    Ruukoto: Help! Orin accidentally installed malware on me!
    Suika SFX: Whut?

All Touhou characters are © Team Shanghai Alice and/or ZUN; create.swf is ⑨ KirbyM with help from Thefre. "Sakura petals" brush in main/4koma logo was made by Kisara Girl. "Falling leaves" brush in 60-Years logo came with Photoshop.

38 Comments (rss feed)

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sRc

haha, oh wow. I think you've set a new record with that one, KM.

now lets all go donate to charities and relief efforts to make Gensokyo worse!

enlong

@sRc

Wait, so taking it easy possibly damages Gensokyo...

Wait, but that would mean...

The Yukkuris. They're trying to destroy Gensokyo by spreading their meme and getting people to take it easy!

CapedLuigisYoshi

Except that Yukkuris only exist in Gensokyo (and even then only in some continuities), and it has to be disbelief in the Outside World.

Dizzy H. Slightly Voided

But technically, according to the above, Yukkuris are actually from Lucky Star. So, they neither "actually-exist" nor would they be in Gensokyo.

CapedLuigisYoshi

That's why I said "only in some continuities". Some have Yukkuris, others (including yours and the official canon) don't.

Enlong

On a less "The world runs on pessimism!" tangent, I have a question:

If the Seihou Project exists in the world without the Touhou games, how do you reconcile the fact that the first Seihou game has Marisa and Reimu as an Ex-Bosses?

Dizzy H. Slightly Voided

Easy: in the Touhouverse, the Seihou games aren't the same as they are here; they follow the format and gameplay of the Touhou games, and the first Seihou game is basically Highly Responsive to Prayers except with Seihou characters and settings, titled Highly Sensitive to Signal, and they all had similar names to their Touhou counterparts. The third one is still called Phantasmagoria of Dim.Dream, though, and Ellen from Hatarakimono is still in it.

Joe4evr

If Marisa would talk things over with Yukari, maybe she'll allow saging

Zemyla

The third one is still called Phantasmagoria of Dim.Dream, though, and Ellen from Hatarakimono is still in it.

Is this why Ellen doesn't exist in your Touhou?

Thatsonnn Dedeguy

On the note, I think the idea that "because Gensokyo is cool the outside world must suck" is a bit jumping to conclusions... That's saying that everything in Gensokyo is caused by disbelief, and that's a bit hard to swallow - trees, lakes, crows, animals, etc - if that principle applied then people wouldn't believe in any of them, and that's why they're in Gensokyo. Yeeeeah.

Beta-Maxis

Man you thought long and hard about this, and you made me think long and hard. Both are RARE on the internet these days.

Dizzy H. Slightly Voided

*finally notices comment* Thanks. ;3

Also I've adjusted the "Crapsack World" comments so that they apply more to people living in the Magical Undergroud, who are ... well, as I said, just ask Kanako. ;)

FlashOfSonic

Personally, I subscribe to the "ZUN and Yukari are drinking buddies" theory.

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