~Hakurei Shrine~ > Touhou Addict Recovery Center

Characters, music, personalities.

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Fightest: So then, Imperishable Night. I feel sometimes that ZUN doesn't really realise the incredible dickishness of some of the characters he creates. Cases in point - Maiden's Capriccio and Reach for the Moon, Immortal Smoke. The former is elegant, mysterious, unpredictable. Reimu is none of these (canonically). She's lazy and violent, well-grounded in the "might makes right" attitude. UFO adds bigoted and intolerant to that. Give her a theme to match Sakuya's - brutal and obvious. She doesn't deserve Maiden's Capriccio. Don't get me wrong, I really like Reimu as a character, who's a curious deconstructionist (possibly unintentionally) take on the typical "hero" type one might get in action games. But ZUN shouldn't forget that Reimu is a jerkass, and that's why I love her, so he shouldn't hide it. The latter is melancholic with a bitter smile on it. "But Fightest," you might say, "Mokou totally is that, 'cause she's the canonical Touhou loner, with a tragic backstory and conflicted emotions." No she's not. She's a psychopath to rival Flandre. Her single pastime in life that gets her any feeling of satisfaction is murder. Gensokyo is lucky that Kaguya is immortal, otherwise Mokou's flamboyant attitude towards killing might spread beyond the Bamboo Forest of the Lost. Much like Reimu, Mokou is one of my most favourite characters, just because I hate her so much as a person - she's the villain one loves to hate, as it were, to me. Unfortunately, Immortal Smoke does not really show what I see in her. End rant. I'll try to be objective in the actual analysis. Which will come later, as RL troubles are being a bit too frustrating for me to keep a clear head at the moment. [edit] Oh and Mokou's trousers. I love those trousers.

Polaris: --- Quote from: Fightest on September 09, 2009, 11:46:16 AM ---She's a psychopath to rival Flandre. Her single pastime in life that gets her any feeling of satisfaction is murder. Gensokyo is lucky that Kaguya is immortal, otherwise Mokou's flamboyant attitude towards killing might spread beyond the Bamboo Forest of the Lost. --- End quote --- This description is way too far off from the Mokou I've seen in canon. For one, she hardly seems psychopathic in the Imperishable Night Extra Stage translations I've been reading, and she didn't even seem like she was going to fight at all until the heroines mention Kaguya (except for Youmu & Yuyuko, who didn't mention Kaguya until after Mokou was defeated). Furthermore, she escorts villagers through the Bamboo Forest, and even (apparently) runs a yakitori stand. Of course, she's shown to be threatening Aya during her interview in Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red, but Aya was probably irritating her (or that's how I came to understand it). But still, I don't think Mokou is any of the things you described, and instead she's "the canonical Touhou loner, with a tragic backstory and conflicted emotions," in a way.

Hieda no Aya: Yeah, outside of her bizarre messed-up thing with Kaguya, Mokou seems to be a pretty decent person. I always took the yakitori stand thing as a lie, but she does love rescuing people; she says in CiLR that their thanks are something she lives for now. She seems regretful over killing Iwakasa all those years ago, and she thinks Kaguya would be lonely without her... She's strange, hard and jaded and worn down from a thousand years of miserable life that she stayed sane through by focusing on hatred, but doing much better now than she was. She's complex. Likewise, I've always disliked that idea of Reimu as some awful uptight jerkass bitch. She's not Jesus, and I'm not sure "elegant, mysterious and unpredictable" are the words I'd use for her either, but resolving incidents and hunting youkai are her job, the job she was born to. And a job which she gets annoyed by, and which she approaches in an extremely simple way. Still, she's always been very laid-back and mellow when duty isn't riding her. Still lazy, though. ...Anyway, I feel bad that my first post in this thread is quibbling -- sorry about that -- because I've been reading it for a while and it's super interesting. I've honestly just been reluctant to comment because of the way any and all music terminology sails right over my head, sadly; I've never been good for much beyond "it sounds good" and "it sounds happy." (Well, and weirder versions of that. I always thought Necrofantasia sounds like if you stumbled into a big festival of youkai, cheerful but also unmistakably dangerous, and ended up being bewitched and forced to party and dance with them to your exhaustion. Which is a very strange and overly specific response to a song. Then again, I always have trouble thinking of Necrofantasia as a remix of Necro-Fantasy and not the other way around, since Ran's the servant after all. And Necro-Fantasy always felt like it was holding back. And I don't even know what I'm blathering about now.) Er, but your analyses are really neat, and do keep going.

Fightest: --- Quote from: Hieda no Aya on September 10, 2009, 06:17:27 AM ---Yeah, outside of her bizarre messed-up thing with Kaguya, Mokou seems to be a pretty decent person. I always took the yakitori stand thing as a lie, but she does love rescuing people; she says in CiLR that their thanks are something she lives for now. She seems regretful over killing Iwakasa all those years ago, and she thinks Kaguya would be lonely without her... She's strange, hard and jaded and worn down from a thousand years of miserable life that she stayed sane through by focusing on hatred, but doing much better now than she was. She's complex. --- End quote --- Okay, but the things about her in Lunatic Renegade can be taken in a far more unpleasant light. Admittedly, it's just my interpretation, which means it can be off-target, but bear with me for a second. The only source, canonically, that says Mokou is sane is Mokou herself. We have none of Keine's comments on Mokou (at least, I don't remember any - I'd love to read Keine's comments on Mokou). The bit about her living for the thanks of people she guides out of the Bamboo Forest can be taken as that she has nothing else to live for. That and murder - her thinking that Kaguya would be lonely without her could be either a subconscious justification of Mokou's harassment of Kaguya, or otherwise the fact that Mokou would be lonely without Kaguya (to murder) filtered through Mokou's twisted perception of life. How's that for grimdark? Fortunately there are two final counterarguments on this view that I'll accept: firstly, Gensokyo and Touhou in general is a positive setting - there is no permadeath, Defeat Means Friendship runs rampant and nobody is so much of a dick as to actually not play by the rules (h4x Sign excluded  :V Gensokyo's a bunch of cheating jerks after all). The second counterargument is the just-as-canonical Inaba of the Moon and Inaba of the Earth which has a Mokou that's entirely sane, stable and actually able to be around Kaguya without exploding into murder. So sane and stable as to actually be able to participate in wacky hijinks. --- Quote ---Likewise, I've always disliked that idea of Reimu as some awful uptight jerkass bitch. She's not Jesus, and I'm not sure "elegant, mysterious and unpredictable" are the words I'd use for her either, but resolving incidents and hunting youkai are her job, the job she was born to. And a job which she gets annoyed by, and which she approaches in an extremely simple way. Still, she's always been very laid-back and mellow when duty isn't riding her. Still lazy, though. --- End quote --- I'll go with that... except for the youkai-hunting job - from what I understand, her job is to maintain the Shrine so as the border doesn't wear down, and she youkai-hunts for the hell of it. Regardless, I'd completely agree with you... just her dialogue with Byakuren in UFO portrays her as a horrible person. To be fair, there're as many arguments for Reimu's side as there are for Byakuren's - I've made some satisfying cases for both sides to myself, and the ending does, as I had seriously hoped, resolve both her attitude and perception of Byakuren so I'll back down and hope she learns her lesson. --- Quote ---...Anyway, I feel bad that my first post in this thread is quibbling -- sorry about that -- because I've been reading it for a while and it's super interesting. I've honestly just been reluctant to comment because of the way any and all music terminology sails right over my head, sadly; I've never been good for much beyond "it sounds good" and "it sounds happy." (Well, and weirder versions of that. I always thought Necrofantasia sounds like if you stumbled into a big festival of youkai, cheerful but also unmistakably dangerous, and ended up being bewitched and forced to party and dance with them to your exhaustion. Which is a very strange and overly specific response to a song. Then again, I always have trouble thinking of Necrofantasia as a remix of Necro-Fantasy and not the other way around, since Ran's the servant after all. And Necro-Fantasy always felt like it was holding back. And I don't even know what I'm blathering about now.) Er, but your analyses are really neat, and do keep going. --- End quote --- Hey, don't worry about it - I'm honestly interested in other people's opinions, both about the characters and their themes, and your comment on Necrofantasia is entirely appropriate - it's completely uninhibited, has plenty of variation to suggest the whirling colours one might see in a song-and-dance festival, and it just doesn't stop going. I also, actually, had a lot of trouble accepting Necrofantasia as the remix - I listened to it before Illusionary Funeral, so it was the original, as it were, to me for a long time. That said: Imperishable Night. Nothing much to say in the preamble, there's plenty of thematic variation in all the boss themes, lots of very characteristic tunes and some interesting things done in the music of the themes towards the end of the game. Oh, please read my meta-commentary on my Mystia analysis before making any judgments. Wriggle Nightbug - Stirring an Autumn Moon ~ Mooned Insect Wriggle's not much to look at, really - she's a first boss, after all, and rarely does a first boss carry with her earth-shattering complications. Unfortunately, I'm not really familiar with Wriggle beyond the rather outlandish doujins, so I might not do her character justice. The introduction keeps stuttering, not sure where, or when, to start. That little motif is plenty to get going, so it's less a lack of preparation, but more of a rookie inexperience, a first-time nervousness kind of thing, where Wriggle has to take a few deep breaths before rushing onto the stage. There's a reasonable amount of instrumentation in the rather simple melody (8 bars) that doesn't develop into anything else, and it does switch around from piano to trumpet and back to piano - a solid first-time performance with honest attention to detail - as much detail as Wriggle can handle, anyway. A bit forgettable, perhaps, without many quirks - all I can pick up are the little bits of ornamentation in the high-pitched piano melody to give it that bit of a twinkle - Wriggle's a firefly, after all. That's plenty for me to describe Wriggle - refreshingly quirk-light, someone to give an honest first effort even when inexperienced, mayhap a bit self-conscious, but rarely letting that stop her from performing. Imagine that one beginner in a crowd of experienced performers (of some sort) who goes out on stage and does their thing - it's not as good as that of the pros, but you clap anyway because it's got an honest effort behind it, and you reckon that beginner could well go far with practice. As I said - if someone has a more thorough view on Wriggle, do speak up. Mystia Lorelei - Deaf to all but the Song. Right then. I had a bit of a rant going about Mystia, but realised it was just taking up precious space. To summarise - I disagree with the moe-fication of Mystia. Hopefully my analysis will explain why. Deaf to all but the Song is cruel. That introduction confuses and scares - the repeating cadences are in minor, but that's no gentle A minor - that's the forceful E minor (I think, I don't have perfect pitch, but I like to think my relative pitch is decent) that means they're there to be inflicted. Moving an octave lower moves the chords into a menacing growl right at the listener's ear before spreading all around to envelop the listener, leaving him no escape. The melody is fairly innocuous, much like I suppose Mystia is, visually (the usual 8 bars, repeated with a difference at the end). The trumpet comes in soon enough to show the actual unique feature of Mystia - that high-pitched birdsong that slowly, but inevitably, becomes part of the melody, before becoming the melody itself... And the listener suddenly loses sight of Mystia, and all he sees or hears are the encroaching darkness in the repeating cadences from the beginning, with the bird song of the trumpet far above, laughing, taunting, finally exploding in an ecstatic shout of triumph. Mystia is a cruel hunter who enjoys playing with her prey. She does not play fair, she will use trickery and deceit to hunt and she will revel in the kill. There is no mercy in her, no regret for her actions - she is not crazy, she's just evil. I wrote the bit about Mystia before I talked about Gensokyo as a positive setting, so I'll be willing to amend the "kill" bit - modern Gensokyo is apparently a place where no youkai eats humans any more, according to Word of God, so I'd recharacterise Mystia not as a sadistic killer, but as a sadistic prankster. Not evil but immoral.

Tengukami: I wouldn't say Reimu came across as a "horrible person" in UFO; just a battle-weary, jaded person with little belief in the possibility of human/youkai peace. Sanae, on the other hand, comes across as a racist psycho.

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