Miscellaneous Questions Thread 2 (Please look here before anywhere else)

[Drake]

Even though it's confirmed that she's taken the elixir, there's still one thing that doesn't seem right...  The Hourai Elixir makes you immune to sicknesses if you take it two times.  If Eirin is truly immortal, then she must've taken it three times, and that would make her sick-proof too.  However, in the Inaba manga, she is shown to be able to fall sick, unless one argues that the manga shouldn't be taken seriously...

If I recall, ZUN doesn't actually write the Inaba manga, despite the "writer" title on the wiki. He just let Arata use the characters and setting and gives him reign for comedic benefit [citation needed]. He just fixes something if it's glaringly wrong, and Eirin getting sick in a gag manga is something easily overlooked. Yes, I would actually argue it shouldn't be taken seriously.

Even if that was totally wrong and Eirin didn't drink the elixir, she would be a Lunarian that has far outlived their lifespan on Earth (Eirin joined Kaguya 1000~1300 years ago). Either she has taken other medicine to extend her lifespan, or she isn't human (lunarians are essentially human). If you assume she is a god and that's why she's lived so long, it doesn't make sense for her to get sick anyways. To begin with, she's goddamn Eirin, an ultra-genius pharmacist that helped build the Lunar Capital and has lived for hundreds of millions of years. Her getting sick at any point in canon for any reason at all is almost completely unfathomable.


Hinacle: 信じた結果がこれだよ！嘘なんて絶対許早苗
This is what you get for having faith! (in the group, probably) If this is a joke I'll never forgive you! (common pun on yurusanai + sanae)

[game2011]

Thanks for the info!

[cuc]

Help me find the source on another detail.

From the wiki's Great Hakurei Border: Yuyuko says the Border is better than Yukari can make. Where is the source of this? I don't have time to look it up. Thanks in advance!

[Drake]

Reimu B's ending, so you wouldn't have found it on the wiki anyways. Youmu comments that the barrier at the Shrine is very strong, Yuyuko notes that "not even SHE can make a barrier this strong", and talks about Yukari.

[Araceli Caralyz]

I was going over the Spellcard rules and read that "characters abilities must not be used to the fullest extent"

Thinking it over, that would solve a lot of gridlock.
Like Flandre just popping someone's head off.
Or Yukari just dodging EVERYTHING.
That would means no tiers can possibly exist since Cirno has a chance to win just as much as she would against Flandre...
(A rather odd thought)
Or would someone else has a explanation to this?

[AnonymousPondScum]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that for example Utsuho could just spontaneously cause the nuclear force between a person's cells to go utterly haywire and basically turn people into A-bombs on the spot. Of course, that would require Utsuho to be capable of being that devious and therefore not bird-brained. :V

On a similar note someone at another forum that if she wanted to Cirno could cause the heat death of the universe at will. Cirno is not exactly quite intelligent enough to understand a concept as complicated as the heat death of the universe, though. :V

That much said, I suspect Remilia's ability over fate is a lot more useful in the long game than in a stand-up fight, Sanae's ability over miracles is basically either a lottery or an ability that only activates when it is timely to do so, Yuugi doesn't show herself to enough of the surface world for anyone to know WHAT she can do, I'm not imaginative enough to figure out what Kaguya's ability over eternity could do in a fight besides make ultra-persistent bullets, and according to the wiki Tewi can specifically confer luck to humans and doesn't say anything about youkai so she couldn't give it to herself.

Conversely, Yuyuko doesn't want to use her ability at all, and Youmu most certainly makes use of her being Gensokyo's premier swordswoman without par.

[ふねん1]

Or how about the biggest equalizer, youkai being able to safely challenge Reimu a) who would otherwise be invincible given her ability to "float away from reality", and b) whose death would mean the end of Gensokyo and of said youkai as well.

Yeah, the Spellcard Rules, in-universe anyway, are meant specifically to balance things out among everyone.

That would means no tiers can possibly exist since Cirno has a chance to win just as much as she would against Flandre...

The only way there can be no "danmaku tiers" is if all the patterns were exactly the same, which they obviously aren't. Never mind that a character's relative intelligence would most likely affect what kind of patterns they'd come up with in the first place.

[Drake]

...Well yes. That is literally the entire point of the Spell Card Rules. Generally, the character's raw strength or how easily they could destroy someone else has nothing to do with anything. However, their abilities, knowledge and general competency obviously still come into play. Most of the time a character's ability naturally turns up in their danmaku, first of all. They can still use their abilities. Yukari could gap out of the way of something, but dodging everything is forbidden and is reserved for leisure (see: Reimu). However, Yukari being unfathomably knowledgeable would contribute to a fight, since she could easily determine where all of your danmaku is going in a fraction of a second. Cirno however, thinks like a child and isn't actually that great at danmaku, dodging or firing. Flandre is probably capable of firing lots of danmaku from her raw magical ability, and would probably easily overwhelm Cirno. So to say everyone literally has an even playing field is incorrect, but the point of the Spell Card Rules is rather to make it possible for humans to win against youkai, to keep combat nonlethal and thus to also allow the youkai to win against the shrine maiden, to be used as a deal between the two participants, and to be as beautiful as possible. It solves a ridiculously huge amount of problems.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that for example Utsuho could just spontaneously cause the nuclear force between a person's cells to go utterly haywire and basically turn people into A-bombs on the spot. Of course, that would require Utsuho to be capable of being that devious and therefore not bird-brained. :V

Why would she need to if she could blow up anything else like she was sort of originally planning to do?

On a similar note someone at another forum that if she wanted to Cirno could cause the heat death of the universe at will. Cirno is not exactly quite intelligent enough to understand a concept as complicated as the heat death of the universe, though. :V

i have to keep reminding people to stop throwing complex physics concepts into gensokyo and going "look this applies"
thinking like that is an ultra-extrapolation of a character's abilities that have never ever been shown to do anything remotely the same
and even then, someone like yukari who you could propose could do anything, also has limits to her ability despite how incredible it is

[AnonymousPondScum]

Why would she need to if she could blow up anything else like she was sort of originally planning to do?

I was just talking about in a 1v1 duel without the spellcard rules in place and no other goals or circumstances in mind. :V

i have to keep reminding people to stop throwing complex physics concepts into gensokyo and going "look this applies"
thinking like that is an ultra-extrapolation of a character's abilities that have never ever been shown to do anything remotely the same
and even then, someone like yukari who you could propose could do anything, also has limits to her ability despite how incredible it is

Okay, fine, fine, it's just that there isn't much documentation OF the exact limits of a character's abilities in the lore as it were.

What *are* the limits on Yukari's abilities, anyway?

[Araceli Caralyz]

Em, I sorta feel we went off topic.
I was just thinking that there abilities would have more to do with their danmaku than the person they are fighting in a Spellcard battle. Like instead of Flandre directly popping people's heads off, she breaks her danmaku into bits. Or Cirno freezing her bullets  instead of the person. These "handicaps" seem to exist only in Spellcard battles as we see Flandre easily crush a meteor "off-duty" in BAiJR This makes sense that the Youkai are still as fearsome, just that when in a Spellcard duel, things are more evened out. Although you got me if you ask how this works in the fighting games...

[Drake]

Yukari's limits aren't clearly defined (mostly because it would be impossible to define an actual limit because of the scope of her ability), but you can make speculations and good guesses based on observations.

-As said above, she likely would not be able to create a barrier as strong (or as complex) as the Great Hakurei Barrier (by herself). Of course that's pretty ambiguous though, so all it says is that Yukari has limits and wouldn't be able to create/remove the whole barrier on her own.

-Yukari was not able to break the barrier surrounding the Lunar Capital for a while because the barrier was very complex. This implies that the complexity of the boundary affects how feasible and timely it is to manipulate, or possibly how long it takes to figure out.

-The only time Yukari can create a gap to the Moon is during a full moon, through its reflection on a large body of water (or something similar). This is because the boundary between the Earth and the Moon then comes into existence, through the reflection. Likewise, to get back from the Moon she could go through the reflected Earth on the Moon's ocean. The "Lunarian sage's" trap on the Moon demonstrates that the boundary is constantly being affected by the period of the Moon, and can close itself. This says many things, including that some boundaries can only be manipulated when they actually exist in some manner and are connected by something, that the situation can affect the existence of such boundaries, and that she can't just gap whereever she wants.

-The sage's trap also reveals that Yukari is not immune to foiling; she can't just manipulate boundaries to sync up the Moon to 30 days and things like that just because she wants to. Additionally this reveals that if there's ever anything that Yukari cannot do, it shows many more limitations than the deed itself, since she also isn't able to manipulate the boundaries necessary to circumvent the problem. Again, this implies that boundaries take more effort than others.

-This also implies that manipulating one boundary can affect another, which is supported by Reimu's Phantasm dialogue when Yukari points out the Reimu undermines how many barriers she would need to fix. Manipulating a natural law must mean that she also must manipulate a natural law related to the first, and so on.  As such, Yukari's ability is likely extremely strenuous to uphold. Manipulating complex boundaries probably takes an enormous amount of energy. This is speculated to be the reason why she sleeps so often and requires shikigami to do a lot of work for her when possible.

Although, Yukari's intelligence and status pretty much makes up for these limits. There are probably others but I don't want to go search for any more.

[AnonymousPondScum]

Ahhhh, okay. So anything that requires manipulating a boundary to manipulate ANOTHER boundary gets increasingly harder.

And remembering that the Hakurei Barrier is more of a weird phenomenon that gently redirects people elsewhere really reliably rather than an actual physical wall/force field puts things in context better. I keep on forgetting that the Barrier is probably made of a variety of component parts. :derp:

[cuc]

I was going over the Spellcard rules and read that "characters abilities must not be used to the fullest extent"

完全な実力主義を否定する。 A literal translation would be "pure determination-by-true-strength(/merit/competency) is denied". In other words, having greater power doesn't guarantee victory. The current translation gets at the spirit of the rule from another angle, but...

The way I see it, this "rule draft" is only laying down what principles the duels should follow, and we don't get to see the actual detailed game rules made up by Reimu, such as how all spell cards should have time limits, etc.

On a similar note someone at another forum that if she wanted to Cirno could cause the heat death of the universe at will. Cirno is not exactly quite intelligent enough to understand a concept as complicated as the heat death of the universe, though. :V

This misses the point on what the fairies are: anthromorphized natural phenomenon. Cirno is an avatar of ordinary ice that naturally occurs on earth, not something as extreme as say, the 3K background temperature of space. She can't even freeze the surface layer of the entire lake.

[Reimu's] death would mean the end of Gensokyo and of said youkai as well.

I'm now having doubts about this generally accepted idea. In SSiB, when Reimu hadn't returned from the moon, Aya's reaction was, "we may need to choose another shrine maiden". Either Aya, a tengu more than 1000 years old somehow doesn't know how the Hakurei shrine maiden functions (which isn't inconceivable), or there is in fact no Hakurei bloodline (the canon never said there is one), and all shrine maidens are adopted and can be replaced.

[Buu]

I hope this question is okay in here, I figured opening a new thread would be unnecessary seeing as this is already here.

Where would I be able to purchase Doujinshi music CDs, e.g. the ones from Halozy and ZUN's remixes (Trojan Green Asteroid etc.)?

I suppose these are more niche as the main Touhou games can be easily bought off of websites like amazon.co.jp, but I can't find these CDs anywhere for purchase. Is there a shop specializing on these things or am I pretty much out of luck? It would be interesting to know where one would go about getting these less popular things.

Thanks in advance!

[Desu_Cake]

http://www.toranoana.jp
http://www.paletweb.com
You can wander over to N-Forza's thread as well to see if he can order stuff for you more directly.

[cuc]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that for example Utsuho could just spontaneously cause the nuclear force between a person's cells to go utterly haywire and basically turn people into A-bombs on the spot. Of course, that would require Utsuho to be capable of being that devious and therefore not bird-brained. :V

I was reading the Marisa C ending of SA, and happened to find this:

Utsuho could control nuclear fusion, but to use it in practical
applications she had to get certain atoms from the mountain god.

So Utsuho's power is strictly controlling fusion. She can't just make any random atoms go fusion, and has to rely on Kanako giving her certain atoms (hydrogen isotypes? fission materials?).

[AnonymousPondScum]

This misses the point on what the fairies are: anthromorphized natural phenomenon. Cirno is an avatar of ordinary ice that naturally occurs on earth, not something as extreme as say, the 3K background temperature of space. She can't even freeze the surface layer of the entire lake.

Ooooh, okay, so she can only freeze/chill things that can be frozen/chilled normally. I gotcha.

So Utsuho's power is strictly controlling fusion. She can't just make any random atoms go fusion, and has to rely on Kanako giving her certain atoms (hydrogen isotypes? fission materials?).

Sooo same principle here then. She might be able to control how our sun burns and generate energy or even mini-suns but she can't just turn any two atoms into a hydrogen bomb at will?

[Zil]

Ooooh, okay, so she can only freeze/chill things that can be frozen/chilled normally. I gotcha.

She freezes fire in Fairy Wars, as well as whatever most bullets are made of.

[AnonymousPondScum]

I'm trying to apply too much common sense to Gensokyo, aren't I?  :getdown:

[Starxsword]

I'm now having doubts about this generally accepted idea. In SSiB, when Reimu hadn't returned from the moon, Aya's reaction was, "we may need to choose another shrine maiden". Either Aya, a tengu more than 1000 years old somehow doesn't know how the Hakurei shrine maiden functions (which isn't inconceivable), or there is in fact no Hakurei bloodline (the canon never said there is one), and all shrine maidens are adopted and can be replaced.

I don't see why you should doubt this idea. Here is what is written in Perfect Momento in Strict Sense:

As it would be dangerous for any youkai to defeat the Hakurei shrine maiden, many youkai felt that their existences had become meaningless.
And so the spell card rules were introduced.

It is very clear that defeating the Hakurei Shrine maiden is not something that youkai should be doing.
So, while it may possible that shrine maidens could possibly be replaced, it must be extremely difficult to do so.

I disagree with the assumption that because canon never said there is a Hakurei bloodline, it does not exist. Until there is reasonable belief on its non-existence, you cannot assume either way. This is akin to saying that because canon does not state Bura-Bura (paper latern) youkai to exist, they do not exist. For this example, you would generally assume these types of youkai do exist in Gensokyo, as well as various other types of youkai.

[Tengukami]

I disagree with the assumption that because canon never said there is a Hakurei bloodline, it does not exist. Until there is reasonable belief on its non-existence, you cannot assume either way. This is akin to saying that because canon does not state Bura-Bura (paper latern) youkai to exist, they do not exist. For this example, you would generally assume these types of youkai do exist in Gensokyo, as well as various other types of youkai.

This is a bit like telling someone to prove God doesn't exist, though. Without any empirical evidence (i.e. canon), there is nothing that backs up the existence of a thing, therefore assuming that it does exist isn't really supported by reality. Otherwise, any possible thing a person can imagine exists in Gensokyo unless it's specifically said not to in canon. Canon is rather used to show that a thing exists ... by being stated canonically that it does.

[Desu_Cake]

Except it is. That's what the entire plot of SoEW was about. Even though that was Pc-98, there's nothing in canon that goes against it, so it can be regarded as semi-canon at least.

[cuc]

Sorry, I should have mentioned SoEW first. Indeed, the entire plot of SoEW is centred around blood of the Hakurei family.

Then, Aya's lines in SSiB offer a good case that the PC-98 canon has been overridden.

I don't have the raws for SSiB Chapter 20 on hand now, so I'll be mixing the English and Chinese scanlations.

I know she went up to the moon with that vampire, but...
For some reason, she's the only one who didn't come back.
So... I suppose it'll be time to find another shrine maiden before long.
How many times has it been already?
It would be fine if it's someone who'll make lots of news for my paper, though.

So she's saying when one Hakurei is gone, someone will be responsible for finding another shrine maiden, and she has seen it happen many times. Still very ambiguous, but if the shrine maiden is passed down in a family, it'd be impossible for Aya to not know, since she has been watching the shrine maidens for so many years.

[Tengukami]

That could simply mean Reimu is the last of the bloodline, too.

[cuc]

That could simply mean Reimu is the last of the bloodline, too.

Hey, this violates Occam's razor :colbert:

If there has only ever been one Hakurei bloodline, and now the shrine maiden is missing, that's a crisis far more serious than "I wonder if she would be a good source of news".

If there has been several Hakurei lineages over the history, or if any human in Gensokyo carries the Hakurei blood, so that a replacement can always be found, is it any different from having no Hakurei bloodline at all?

The old PC-98 idea is that there is only one Hakurei clan that can take the responsibility, The idea, originally a reflection of pre-modern society's emphasis on blood relationship, is now just another trope to make the protagonist special. "We can always find another; it has happened many times" undermines this particular trope.

[Tengukami]

Hey, this violates Occam's razor :colbert:

The simplest explanation is not necessarily the most likely one per se, but what I'm offering here is a different interpretation for why Aya would say they need to find a new shrine maiden. It could very well be that there is a Hakurei bloodline - as SoEW stated - but Reimu's the last one, and has no heir, and well, a non-Hakurei shrine maiden is better than none at all - sort of like how when members of esteemed royal families have passed away without heirs, their subjects scramble to find anyone even remotely qualified for the task, as this is supposedly better than having no regent at all.

This makes up for the "inconsistency" of SoEW's story when paired with Aya's statement in SSiB. And it makes more sense than "oh, disregard the story line of this entire game, because this one character in this manga uttered this sentence".

[Desu_Cake]

Hey, this violates Occam's razor :colbert:

If there has only ever been one Hakurei bloodline, and now the shrine maiden is missing, that's a crisis far more serious than "I wonder if she would be a good source of news".

If there has been several Hakurei lineages over the history, or if any human in Gensokyo carries the Hakurei blood, so that a replacement can always be found, is it any different from having no Hakurei bloodline at all?

The old PC-98 idea is that there is only one Hakurei clan that can take the responsibility, The idea, originally a reflection of pre-modern society's emphasis on blood relationship, is now just another trope to make the protagonist special. "We can always find another; it has happened many times" undermines this particular trope.

SoEW states that the Hakurei bloodline is special. It doesn't say exactly what that means. It especially doesn't say that the continued existance of Gensokyo relies on it.
The power of the Hakurei lineage and Reimu's shrine-maidenly duties may not be inter-dependant.
And you're also assuming that Aya both knows all the facts of the situation, and isn't performing any "creative embellishment" on them.

<Tengukami> Learn to love the Quote button!

Sorry ;_;

[PhantasmStardust]

What's Miko's and Byakuren's relationship with like?

As in, do they hate each other to the point of being enemies or is it something else?

[Kaze_Senshi]

Why the bosses are bigger than the girls that you are playing. For example in this pic her head is almost Reimu's body size. Is she flying higher than you or soon we'll see some game like "Touhou 16: Mystical Flying Giants"?

[Drake]

Why the bosses are bigger than the girls that you are playing. For example in this pic her head is almost Reimu's body size. Is she flying higher than you or soon we'll see some game like "Touhou 16: Mystical Flying Giants"?

because that's the way it is

i think it's definitely awkward but really it's just an aesthetic screwup, think nothing of it