Yeah, MSN, that seems to be everyone's reaction. That's one of the ways UD is
awesome. He gets you like that.
And yet ... a part of me is on the fence, and thinks that, um ... Well, to cut to the chase, UD's stories are about as different from canon as
Blade Runner is from
Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? They're
awesome, but they take just about every detail of Touhou canon, short of the characters' personalities (except in Reimu's case) and appearance, and run the other way with them; they end up bing "retellings" of the originals the same way a broken clock is right twice a day. I know some people who've been driven away by the poetic license UD's taken.
And when UD isn't being epic-awesome, some bits really fall flat. I facedesked when Suika referred to her gourd as having "immaterial and missing power" in as many words, and not in a good way. The fact that everyone speaks English and refers to Japanese as "the old tongue" is somewhat awkward -- I'm somewhat morbidly curious as to
why UD did it like this. Yes, I know the in-character explanation, which is buried somewhere in Nitori's Notes, I want to know why the author decided to do it. Also awkward is the way the stories tend to get rather violent,
and at the same time try to fit a "Power of love!" philosophy, two elements which don't go well together.
Plus, there's a bit of Moral Dissonance -- in
Reinterpretation of Scarlet Devil,
Remixed Cherry Blossom doesn't have that kind of problem, since Sakuya's
supposed to be morally ambiguous, but Ran's explanation about the purpose of love in
Recovery of Beloved Matriarch is either a rather shrewd look into the mind of an immortal, or
seriously messed up. Or both.
I've also noticed the formula of
which makes me feel kinda "meh" about being surprised by whatever the ending is, and ... I'm gonna be generous and say that about three-eighths of, um, Retellishable Night
wasn't completely telegraphed by RoIP.
It's just a vague "do not know if want" which I'm able to rationalize, I guess. I still mostly think they're awesome, but Retellishable Night is going to need a pretty darn snazzy twist to make up for the fact that we basically know most of the story (the bit about Sakuya included). However, I believe that this is something which, on the whole, UD is going to be able to do.
(I also realized: "oh, god, what's going to happen to Mystia, given how unmerciful UD tends to be?" and I thought I came up with an idea for how Koishi would be behind the events of ... Subrevision Aminism, but I forget what it was.)
I also make no value judgments on the fact that, in just about every story, at least one character ends up naked (or depicted naked like in RaIP) at least once.