~Hakurei Shrine~ > Touhou Addict Recovery Center
Miscellaneous Questions 7 - To Misc or not to Misc
PK:
Does anyone know anything about nine-tailed foxes starting to lose tails until they have four, and then become a "Tenko"?
That's what is written in Ran's wiki article, but wherever i look i only see stuff about nine-tailed foxes becoming golden/white when they are 1000 years old, getting some weird powers like omniscience, and being called Tenko. Nothing about losing tails.
Drake:
There's a bit of a problem in that there are a bunch of different mythologies surrounding foxes. In one you'll see around, there's a ranking of 野狐 (yako, common foxes)・気狐 (kiko)・空狐 (kuuko)・天狐 (tenko) where tenko have 9 tails and that's just it, and there isn't necessarily any other tail-specific stuff. In another you have where after 1000 years one becomes a tenko, with 9 tails, but after 3000 years they become a kuuko with 4 tails (i.e. kuuko higher than tenko instead), and if they became a god they wouldn't have any. Then in some cases it's tenko with 4 tails and kuuko with none. And then of course there's no real reason to adhere to any of these.
Honestly I think I'll remove this from the wiki page entirely because there's absolutely no basis to this within the series on top of the mythology being so varied. In fact, Akyuu sort of implies in Ran's PMiSS article that there wouldn't be anything beyond.
the old guy:
This one isn't really a question about Canon. But I felt like asking it for an fanfic I hope to write someday.
Is there any way the idea of Impurity causing a Lunarian to die from old age could make sense? Obviously, simple exposer impurity wouldn't cause it, since Eirin and Kaguya seem to be doing just fine living on earth. But perhaps, if it was being built up over a long period of time, without the victim knowing ahead of time and doing nothing to dispel it, it could somehow cause them to die of natural causes? Is this even possible?
For the record, my idea is an ancient Lunarian noble dies from old age (or possibly in their sleep), and Yorihime has to figure out why it happened since their death could mean the moon is being tainted by impurity at a rate not ever seen before in its history. Will she solve it in time? I don't know yet.
PK:
Eirin and Kaguya are doing fine on Earth because they are Hourai immortals.
The Watatsuki and Sagume had no problems dealing with youkai and coming to Gensokyo though, so maybe brief exposure doesn't do much. Yorihime has a power to purify stuff too.
I'm also sure it was stated somewhere, probably in CiLR, that impurity is outright what makes everything age and die, and that Lunarians themselves don't actually have infinite lifespans because they aren't 100% pure, so the idea of a lunarian dying because of that isn't impossible. However, the Lunar Capital has those neat udonge plants that detect impurity, so it would be weird if they didn't notice an increase in impurity.
Lt Colonel Summers:
I remember it is mentioned elsewhere that there are some "Pure Lands" on Earth where there's little to no Impurities, so Lunarians can stroll around in them without contamination. Eientei seems to reside on top of one such "Pure Land".
Also, brief minimal exposure to Impurities probably won't affect Lunarians in any way, like how brief exposure to minute amounts of radiation won't harm us humans (if not, then the radiation our gadgets emit would've killed us all already).