Loved by "people"

What a foolish concept

-"A letter"

-*Pulls out Smash invitation*

last edited at Oct 18, 2020 5:16PM

This was great. Always fun to see works where Sakuya drops the perfect maid act and gets emotional, and even more so to see Remilia act mature and supportive. Gensokyo is a paradise for found families, it seems.

^I never thought about it in particular but you are right- there are many groups who are basically 'families' even though they are mostly not related. It IS a very heartwarming element of Touhou.

Its kinda strange when you think about it that the main 3 characters are notable exceptions. Well, Alice has her dolls if they count but mostly its just shanghai so probably not..

I guess Alice, Marisa & Reimu, more than all the others, flit around visiting each other and all the other 'families' so they might lack distinct families themselves but have more friends and aquaintances than everyone else.

last edited at Oct 19, 2020 3:47AM

I guess Alice, Marisa & Reimu, more than all the others, flit around visiting each other and all the other 'families' so they might lack distinct families themselves but have more friends and aquaintances than everyone else.

Yeah, the protagonists need to be fundamentally aloof in order to justify the video game structure of 'one person flies out and takes on a group of enemies', since Reimu getting a Bat-family would simultaneously make her stronger in terms of available allies, as well as more vulnerable in terms of personal connections that could be exploited by cunning enemies for hostage situations. ZUN also seems to use individual characters as per their function in a story instead of just having them show up in big groups, which is why he prefers to use Aya, Mamizou, Komachi and Akyuu much more than, say Byakuren or Miko, at least in the official manga (the fighting games have the opposite rationale, for gameplay reasons).

Interestingly, there's also personal, character-driven reasons for their lack of families- Reimu's identity is based around the fact that she's absolutely neutral and equally alien to both yokai and humans, with ZUN explicitly stating that she's always alone in her heart (much like how someone like Philip Marlowe or Sherlock Holmes would be equidistant from the police and the criminal underground). Marisa is much more social on the surface, but HSiFS implies that she's afraid to abandon her current lifestyle, which, combined with the other flightly, erratic aspects of her personality, seems to hint that she has commitment issues and doesn't like people getting too close (how often have we seen anyone invited to Marisa's house?)

This does seem to be changing with the entry of Kasen as Reimu's effective foster Mom, and of Aunn as her effective pet, but seeing as the most recent manga also just relegate them to cameos, I don't think ZUN's gonna stop having our heroes operate solo anytime soon. I do feel like this is for the best, though, since it keeps the amount of fixed characters in the cast of any given story to a minimum and allows ZUN to cycle through Touhou's ever-growing galaxy of characters instead of relegating them to ancient history like three-star special event characters in a gacha game.

^Reimu doesn't have to be neutral ALL the time in all things- only when it comes to issues touching her real role and we almost NEVER see Reimu in serious mode outside of an incident.

She could live with others as a defacto family without effecting that- we already see she likes and gets on with various people more than others. Kansen and Marisa visit very regularly and Auun and Suika have spent a lot of time at the shrine too- so it wouldnt be much different or effect how she resolves incidents when she has to get serious.

Im not sure if Maria has commitment issues but yeah it's hard to see her becoming part of a group- she only seems to work well paired with Alice to me..I could see them living together,,

Whereas Alice also works as part of the SDM family very well, as we see in many doujins like the millet soup series- so I could easily buy that if they went that way in canon.

Also, we have had playable chrs in the games before who WERE part of the various family groups, like Remi, Sakuya, Patchy, Youmu, Reisen etc- so I dont think its something required for the MC to set out alone- the MC being a loner just makes it easier to implement without needing to explain anything extra.

p.s Im surprised you get any kind of mother vibe off Kansen- I've never felt that- she seems like an older wiser friend who gives some guidance. So Reimu does seem to value her advice and consider her wise- at least quite often- but it seemed more teacher / friendly like than motherly to me.

Its also interesting that both Marisa and Alice actually have actual family out there- but they have left them and rarely ever or never see them. Alice is one of the very few characters who we've met a parent of. Marisa has family in the village but never sees them right? Or is that just speculation? As for Reimu, I dont think we know a thing about how she came to the shrine or her family right?

Actually there are also quite a few sisters out there in the various groups- that seems to be a real family connection Touhou likes rather than parental- I guess because they will be a similar age and can appear in a new story together and both fight etc, whereas a parent would be a wierd dynamic for the games? But you could certainly introduce them in canon manga if they wanted to, but I guess zun doesnt want that?

last edited at Oct 19, 2020 8:54PM

Its also interesting that both Marisa and Alice actually have actual family out there- but they have left them and rarely ever or never see them. Alice is one of the very few characters who we've met a parent of. Marisa has family in the village but never sees them right? Or is that just speculation? As for Reimu, I dont think we know a thing about how she came to the shrine or her family right?

Marisa seems to have bad blood with her folks, but CoLA states that she doesn't talk much about them because she considers it a 'private matter'. I suppose a standard family in the human village raised to follow norms and fear yokai would be pretty angry if their kid randomly decided to start living in a dangerous forest, though at least she had Rinnosuke to look out for her. As for Reimu, Marisa explicitly calls her an orphan in CoLA, and the fact that she knows jack shit about the god she's supposed to serve suggests that she lost her family pretty early, and was presumably educated by anonymous priests or maybe even someone like Yukari (though this seems like one of those things ZUN will be content to leave up in the air till the end of time, since he doesn't feel a compulsive need to explain every character's past when he just plop them into stories and give them a basic motive, with the fans being free to invent the rest).

Actually there are also quite a few sisters out there in the various groups- that seems to be a real family connection Touhou likes rather than parental- I guess because they will be a similar age and can appear in a new story together and both fight etc, whereas a parent would be a wierd dynamic for the games? But you could certainly introduce them in canon manga if they wanted to, but I guess zun doesnt want that?

There's characters who have pseudo-parents, like Sanae with Kanako and Suwako, or arguably even Kaguya with Eirin, but ZUN by and large doesn't use family stereotypes to define his relationships- characters that stick together do so either because of official positions (Youmu as the the Hakugyokurou gardener, Ran as Yukari's shikigami), or due to shared locations and occupations (Okuu and Orin serving Satori), or because of literal, mind-bending subordination (Satono and Mai with Okina, Yoshika with Seiga). However, the Watatsuki sisters are also married, and we hear absolutely nothing about their husbands or relations and are simply told that they're relative social outcasts on the moon and spend much of their time at a military base, family be damned. So it's more like ZUN gets a character idea, throws in any and all details that he thinks are interesting, and at the end of his planning process, sorts the characters into your standard seven-boss hierarchy. If he thinks two characters will have interesting interactions, he'll put them together in a story, but considerations of tropes like, "Reimu, I am your father," definitely don't apply. Hence, the prevalence of 'found families'- ZUN just puts characters in relationships based on situations and ideas, and the fans come up with labels for them to reduce the ambiguity.

This story... was so lovely. It's exactly how I imagine Remilia and Sakuya to be. So many great lines, especially the ones regarding which name she would choose. I've got nothing else to say really except that I loved every page.

Seeing Sakuya so expressive like this feels so refreshing

Sakuya Izayoi, I totally feel your pain! Do your best to have a great life on your own way. Because the world can be so cruel sometimes.