Lunar Capital is run by AI?

[andykhang]

"My thinking was that impurity comes from death so they don't want to die, but a world without death is also a world without life. A world with neither life nor death. That thought gave birth to a creepy setting. It's no different from a world ruled by artificial intelligence."

ZUN - Strange Creators of Outer World/Let's Look Back At Early Trilogy

So... what if the Lunar Capital's resident isn't a biological being? What if, in the progress of technology, they decided to throw out their own body,in doing so remove "life", in favor of augumented, artificial body that could never age?

...The explanation is so possible, it's scary. Imagine an entire city, where people live on in peace and harmony, for eternity and forever. They are the same people that have chosen (or worse,force to chose) to abandon their flesh-and-blood body to transform into synthetic, lifeless one since birth? Would they even born with a flesh-and-blood body at all, and instead just born out of nothing, like the being they despise (youkai)?If so, Is their's soul even real? (in a sense that they're naturally come)

...In anycase, Eirin need some heavy explaining to do.

[Shizzo]

As far as I'm aware they reject the principles of life and death , which is both why they are eternal and why they consider things such as fairies and inhabitants of Gensokyo impure. 

It's an interesting theory, but this is more of a religious sense of immortality rather than biological.  Has a lot to do with Purity.

[Clarste]

They clearly aren't born at all, if they're rejecting both life and death. I'd imagine they have roughly the same population they arrived with.

[andykhang]

Some of the resident are clearly younger than other though, so there's some birth here... Most likely the lunar rabbit. The thought concerning them is only frightening thing, from cyborg,cloning, memories transfering and other hidden, bloody experiment...

[Clarste]

Lunar rabbits aren't Lunarians though. You really shouldn' consider them the same thing at all. They're just an enslaved native population.

[andykhang]

Lunar rabbits aren't Lunarians though. You really shouldn' consider them the same thing at all. They're just an enslaved native population.

I said Lunar Capital's resident though, not Lunarian. And the fact that they're slave make it just that much possible. ZUN sure have his credits when he said that place is a dystopia

[Tiamat]

Lunar Rabbits die, as it's explicitly stated in Cage in Lunatic Runagate that only a few old ones are still left from the time of the first Genso Lunar War.   So they're definately not the same as Lunarians in that regard.  The current ones don't have any memories of past lives so there's definately no rebirth memory transfer for them either.

It's also explicitly stated by one of the Watsahime sisters that the Lunarians aren't 100% free of impurity and will die some day, too (although at this rate that "some day" is probably so far off that Warhammer 30k will probably roll around and kill everyone first).

[andykhang]

^Who know though, maybe useless one like pawn won't be transfered, while the like of Reisen would (like, how often did you find an insanity-induced rabbit that could be placed in the middle of the battlefield and completely change the tide).

I don't know though, the Lunarian is pretty haxxed to die that easily.

[AlgaeNymph]

So... what if the Lunar Capital's resident isn't a biological being? What if, in the progress of technology, they decided to throw out their own body,in doing so remove "life", in favor of augumented, artificial body that could never age?

That would make sense, and would therefore be rejected by the Lunarians.  These are a group of people who rejected the very elixir that would make the reason they fear impurity irrelevant.

[Hello Purvis]

Guys guys guys...what if the moon rabbits are the AI?! O_O!

[andykhang]

That would make sense, and would therefore be rejected by the Lunarians.  These are a group of people who rejected the very elixir that would make the reason they fear impurity irrelevant.

...True that. That's really make how little the people care about living forever, even by the top. It's as if the entire lunar project is being made by a narrow-minded douche that drag everyone in...

That, or they fear this heretic drug isn't "pure" enough for them.

[Hello Purvis]

I'm thinking you don't get how Shinto works, with regards to this.

Purity is the whole point of a higher level existence like that. An absence of death is just the side effect. Read through some shinto folklore and you'll find all kinds of stories to that effect; great figures dirtying themselves in one way or another, and being drug down from their exalted state and rendered vulnerable to monsters and such, and remain that way until they are able to cleanse themselves.

Immortality is a side effect of seeking and maintaining a higher spiritual state, not the point of it. It's just like how people donate to charity without expecting a personal reward, you do it for the promise of making the world better.

[AlgaeNymph]

I'm thinking you don't get how Shinto works, with regards to this.

You're right, we don't get it, along with just about every Eastern concept that needs to be carefully explained to us.  There's a reason Silent Sinner in Blue had a lot of footnotes.  Western Touhou fans, I feel, barely read the wiki, much less Shinto folklore.

In the case of Lunarians, I wouldn't compare purity to charity if what Reisen said about their genocidal inclinations (in one of the more recent issues of Forbidden Scrollery, I believe) is true.  Purity for its own sake may as well be power for its own sake.

[Drake]

Eliminating all humans would get rid of a significant source of kegare and so would precisely be making the world better, in that respect.

[the old guy]

Eliminating all humans would get rid of a significant source of kegare and so would precisely be making the world better, in that respect.

Plz don't justify genocide.

[Drake]

Eliminating all humans would get rid of a significant source of greenhouse gases and so would precisely be making the world better, in that respect.

[andykhang]

Making their version of the world better you mean. That would be no different from America exceptionalism, or any religious-based ethics cleansing the human does. Which show that no matter how "pure" they tried to achieve, in the end they really are the same as their founder :Selfish. 

[PK]

Making their version of the world better you mean. That would be no different from America exceptionalism, or any religious-based ethics cleansing the human does. Which show that no matter how "pure" they tried to achieve, in the end they really are the same as their founder :Selfish.

No, because the lunarian concept of impurity isn't just an ideal, but something that has visible physical effects on everything on Earth.
It's more like not wanting people that have deadly and incurable contagious diseases running around in your house, and coughing on your face and spitting on your tableware.

If they wanted to wipe away all life on Earth, they would have already done it. It is what would have happened if Sagume actually tried in LoLK.

[Drake]

this is entirely why i framed it using greenhouse gases as comparison

[andykhang]

No, because the lunarian concept of impurity isn't just an ideal, but something that has visible physical effects on everything on Earth.
It's more like not wanting people that have deadly and incurable contagious diseases running around in your house, and coughing on your face and spitting on your tableware.

If they wanted to wipe away all life on Earth, they would have already done it. It is what would have happened if Sagume actually tried in LoLK.

Yeah, the same way the Wild West America is proud of kicking the savage native out of the promise land, or the Crusade mission to kick out the Jewish people: It achieve the purity they want. The different is just between "color" and "basically all life on Earth".  The fact is that the Lunarian is drive by their ideology of being the special little snowflake, a higher being that's enlightened (in a literal sense) that's not deserve to live like the unclean below. And the fact that it work or they managed to achieve great progress doesn't change the fact how shitty they are.

Edit: And about the destroying earth thing: 1. Think of the logistic about taking over the Entire planet with only the population of Gensokyo, as best. 2. That's another point they're the same as the Exceptionalism: They want to leave the dirty, corrupted Earth in search for the "new land" free of impurity. Even if they have enough technology, they wouldn't do that because they're afraid of stepping into that place again and become being of lesser worth (A.K.A exactly the same as before). In fact Sagume didn't even tried to aim as Earth, but Gensokyo because they're not Earth and is partially fitting for their goal.

[Sophilia]

From the Lunarian perspective, Gensokyo is even worse in that respect than Earth.  Not only is the place full of life and death, but it's also crawling with youkai, which are pretty much embodiments of impurity!   The reason they targeted Gensokyo is because like the capital, it is a place created by dream and imagination.

Another thing to remember is that not only are our standards not relevant at all to Touhou, even the laws our world runs on are completely different.  Most importantly, Gensokyo and its attached realms run on a rule where if it is believed within, it becomes reality.
So when we're talking about a basic tenet of the Shinto religion, it is a fact of life in Gensokyo, much the same as gravity is a fact of life for us.  The superiority of the spiritually pure isn't an opinion or a discrimination there.  It is core to their very reality.  To change that, you'd pretty much need to destroy the entire balance and metaphysics that the Touhou universe exists upon.
And while purity is a great boon and an entirely different spiritual level, it comes at an absolutely massive price.  To ascend beyond death is to ascend beyond life as well.  The segregation they have is as much a sentence of exile from living as it is a paradise of the undying.  (That is, until life came to kick the door down in the form of astronauts, vampires, and hordes of fairies.)

 The first few chapters of CiLR, from the immortals' points of view, set out the dichotomies of purity and immortality a lot better than I can.  Definitely read those.

[Drake]

You guys are getting ridiculous. You began by claiming that the Lunarians are dumb because they rejected the Hourai Elixir even though it made them immortal, thinking that the only point of eliminating kegare was to live forever, which it isn't. Purvis points this out and relates it to charity because a total lack of kegare is the goal and staying clean yourself and cleansing other things works towards that goal. You say it doesn't compare because they talk of eliminating humans to do so (which they wouldn't actually do anyways), but that doesn't matter at all. The mindset isn't about "saving humans", it's "keeping the world free of kegare". Of course when you come from the perspective of "eliminating humans is bad", eliminating humans is bad, but that doesn't matter because that's the wrong perspective to begin with. Nothing about your arguments here have come from a proper understanding of the material you're trying to criticize.

Again, this is why I started talking about greenhouse gases, because it should be something you can grasp more easily. Surplus of greenhouse gases causes drastic changes in the planet's climate over time, and hey we need to reduce emissions to save the planet. But if human lives themselves generated the greenhouse gas, obviously one solution is to just get rid of humans altogether, even if that's a drastic measure. Kegare, by comparison, is what causes everything to "degrade" over time and die, invites disease, depression, misfortune, etc. It isn't arbitrary at all, unlike how you seem to be portraying it. If it was as arbitrary and human-specific as something like skin color it wouldn't be meaningful or interesting. Nobody is actually defending the elimination of all humans, but you need to step outside your box and at least recognize that from this perspective, the reasoning makes total sense and isn't particularly problematic.

If you don't understand that they're absolutely correct from the point of eliminating kegare, the whole dynamic is thrown out the window and nothing about Lunarians makes any sense. The whole point is thinking that the Lunarian perspective is warped and recognizing the Capital is a dystopia, and the works themselves do a fantastic job of illustrating that in many ways. So much of the criticism surrounding Lunarians is from people not understanding one of the core foundations about them and reducing them to a one-dimensional "lol we're better than you because reasons" land of strawmen.

[andykhang]

I see... kinda know that already. Wonder why I keep saying that point though? Maybe because even if it's right, it's still look like they're germaphobic assholes in our perceptive. Weirdly that now I could understand where the Youkai came from.

[Leon゠Helsing]

Probably because we humans are selfish by nature. Anything that's not within our best interests is automatically bad.

[Hello Purvis]

To build up on what Drake and I were saying, once you understand the the whole goal of the Lunarian concept is to maintain purity, the reason why Kaguya was banished becomes very clear and understandable.

She turned her back on the whole system and took an elixir to make herself perfectly immortal, regardless of purity. That should not be necessary at all, Lunarians are already immortal. So what she is doing is very brazenly stating that the Lunarian system cannot work forever, and that she cares less about adhering to the ideals of purity than actually living. It's akin to a Christian declaring the ten commandments optional and then making themselves physically immortal rather than have faith they would ascend to heaven after death. Thus, she is banished.

[andykhang]

Probably because we humans are selfish by nature. Anything that's not within our best interests is automatically bad.

They pretty much are the same though. Never forget how objectively shitty they're. They're reason Tvtropes call them Space Elf.

[Toushiro Scarlet]

Humans will know it soon enough, when they develop technology that can unmask the light interferrence on the moon that hide the Lunarians (Which pretty much lets humans to see the Lunarians)

[Sophilia]

The barrier that conceals the Lunar Capital is not a light filter, though.  It's a lot more like the Great Hakurei Border.  So even if you were standing where the Capital is, it'd still be the barren moon, unless you can manipulate the border of fantasy and reality like a certain someone.