As a romance story, this was brilliant, and though I wondered why it needed to be specifically Touhou, I think the emotional attachment I had to the characters as well as my general knowledge of their personalities really elevated this story to a different level. Though I'm not exactly a fan of removing characters from the worlds that have shaped so much of their personalities, this story takes the surface traits of complex characters and places them within different contexts- Sakuya's themes of devotion and loyalty without a clear revelation of her feelings translates wonderfully into an inability to tell whether she's in love, and Alice's fragile, sadly smiling, always-reaching-but-never-connecting persona does convey some parallels to the lonely puppeteer who was once human. This story doesn't have the benefit of Gensokyo to enhance it, but there are also no distractions- quite simply, the author distills these characters to their cores and weaves a tale between them in a neutral location suitably representative of uncertainty in adolescence. Fundamentally, it's the essence of the highschool AU, removing characters from their home setting and using the disconnection felt both by the audiences and the characters as an openly-acknowledged theme and conflict in-story.
Also, the art is brilliant and features Komachi in a suit, automatically making this one of the all-time-greats of doujinshi.
last edited at Dec 25, 2020 10:26AM