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Touhou Ibunshu is a completed Fan Fiction series by Tyler "usuallydead" Lovell. It is, as the name suggests, an adaptation of the Touhou Project series (exclusively the Windows era), covering The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, Perfect Cherry Blossom, Immaterial and Missing Power, and Imperishable Night, with several side-stories covering the intervening periods, as well as two flashbacks. Each of the main stories (except the Immaterial and Missing Power adaptation, oddly enough) follow the general plot of the respective game, including the main threat, the characters that embark upon a quest to stop it, and the characters they encounter in a certain order, however the resemblance to the original plots mostly ends there.

The series is heavily Alternate Universe, with some of the more drastic changes being the removal of universal flight, danmaku reduced to single-use spellcards, Reimu and Marisa having their Power Levels dropped to bottom tier (Reimu has to borrow spellcards from Marisa), and the fact that everyone is speaking English In-Universe. Furthermore, many things are far darker than normal, with youkai whose cannibalism go beyond threats, what little combat there is being swift and brutal, and characters entirely willing to use any power they have to their full extent. Regardless, getting a happy ending is never impossible.

For a time, the website the held Ibunshu was down, due to Usually Dead having left the Touhou fandom and choosing to neglect paying the bill to keep it up. On December 2020, though, the website was reinstated. This came with Ibunshu finally being continued after so long, with an adaptation of Subterranean Animism. As of August 2022, the new website features revamped versions of the first four stories and the latest one, though all the other stories can be found in the link below.

Archive copy: Google drive folder.

Retelling of Oriental Stories

  • The Reinterpretation of Scarlet Devil
    Retelling of the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil
  • Redemption of Precarious Puppeteer
  • Requiem Bibliophilic
  • Resolute and Ghostly Gardener
  • Remixed Cherry Blossom
    Retelling of Perfect Cherry Blossom
  • Recovery of Beloved Matriarch
  • Repose and Inclusive Power
    Retelling of Immaterial and Missing Power
  • Remorse in Secession's Nobility
  • Recalled Lunar Romance
  • Recount and Full Moon Predecessor
  • Reenactable Night
    Retelling of Imperishable Night
  • Rebirth by Subterranean Anima
    Retelling of Subterranean Animism

Other Touhou Writings

  • Erroneous Paradisiacal Inception
    Retelling of Mountain of Faith
  • Sakurei


Tropes for Touhou Ibunshu include:

  • Alternate Universe Fic: The entire series, but Erroneous Paradisiacal Inception really stands out since instead of the story focusing on Reimu and Marisa as they solve the latest incident, it's about Sanae and the struggles of Suwako and Kanako as they vie for her.
  • Amazonian Beauty: Ran is described here as very tall, very muscular, and very beautiful.
  • Anatomy of the Soul: Of all people, Meiling is revealed to be splintered in half, the Dumb Muscle, Blood Knight half, and her spiritual, disciplined half (who is much more serene).
  • The Atoner: Yukari, after the disastrous events of Remixed Cherry Blossom and a vicious fight with Ran and Chen in Recovery of Beloved Matriarch, pledges herself to become a positive force for Gensokyo, helping the harvest following the extremely long winter and later helping in the quest to restore the moon in Reenactable Night. Mokou mocks her for this, saying she'll just become the same suicidal mess she was in a few centuries' time.
  • Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Cirno's Gunky, a towering snowman formed from the excess snow of the endless winter.
  • Author Tract: One of the common criticisms against the story, though it's only really bad in a handful of places.
  • Back from the Dead: Reimu, Marisa, Sakuya, and Yuyuko in Remixed Cherry Blossom. Remilia and Flandre are likewise killed in Reinterpretation of Scarlet Devil and come back, but remain undead.
  • Badass Adorable: Chen. She's willing to go against Yukari of all people when the latter is poised to kill Ran.
  • Beware the Silly Ones: Reimu realizes Suika's theft of the Mugen Shubin was a bit more serious than she thought. It isn't just a sake jug - it's an artifact of war.
  • Book Dumb: Reisen acknowledging she should have paid more attention to her classes is a Running Gag.
  • Break the Haughty: Redemption of Precarious Puppeteer has Alice introduce herself as "Gensokyo's number one girl"; the "prettiest, smartest, strongest, classiest lady in all the land". When Reimu visits her in a dream sequence in Repose and Inclusive Power, she finds that her and Marisa's (temporary) deaths in Remixed Cherry Blossom have not only forced her to realize how much she truly cares for them, but left her in an existential crisis, making her deeply afraid of her eventual demise. Worse still, being a youkai, she would simply dissolve into nothingness, with no afterlife to look forward to and no corpse to leave behind.note 
    Alice: It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter if it’s today or next month or in a hundred years. We’re all going to die. So what does it matter? Why should we try? Why even care?
    Reimu: Because there’s another life after this one. Take my word for it. I’ve seen it.
    Alice: There’s another life for you. But you told me that no youkai go to the cherry blossom place. Only humans. So what’ll happen to me?
    Reimu, after hesitating a bit: I don't know.
    Alice: You see? My life will end eventually, Reimu. I’ll be alone and old and weak, sitting in my big beautiful house with a century’s worth of excellently crafted dolls. None of them will help me. They’ll all sit back and sneer, watch the life flow out of me, and the very thing I poured all my time and talent into will be a curse on my grave. But I won’t have a grave. There’ll be nothing left of me, and with my dolls alone having witnessed my death, they might as well have been the ones to kill me.
  • Butt-Monkey: Chi- er, Hong Meiling, who can't seem to last a single scene without suffering grievous bodily harm of some sort. Definitely of the Iron Butt Monkey sub-trope.
  • Cabin Fever: The main source of Yukari's psychological problems. It's not that Gensokyo is tiny by any stretch of the imagination, but being acutely aware of the barrier and being unable to ever cross it due to her very nature being a part of it played a big part in her descent to madness.
  • Cessation of Existence: In this universe, youkai are formed from ambient magical energy that has condensed into a living being. When they die, that energy disperses back into the atmosphere, leaving them to dissolve into sparks that disappear.
  • Cliffhanger: Rebirth by Subterranean Anima ends in several. As the crisis passes, Yukari reveals Utsuho escaped and her attention has been drawn to the Moriya Shrine, Nue fled the Underground for the mountains, and Remilia reveals Sakuya has disappeared.
  • Creepy Child: Flandre and Remilia initially. They get better.
  • Companion Cube: President Strangebird, a little bird golem Yukari gifts Youmu, who initially uses it as part of Yukari's spring-stealing plan, but keeps it and manages to briefly use it against Mokou's Kashoyo.
  • Compassionate Critic: The Phoenix. After being released from Mokou, he spends a few minutes giving advice to everyone before leaving.
  • Curse Escape Clause: Eirin bases the spell holding Eientei hidden on the Impossible Request items, each associated with an impossible task. Naturally, the heroines approaching blow the ritual and the items to pieces, having each having completed each task through Character Development earlier in the storylines:
    • The Swallow's Shell requires one to defeat your greatest love. Ran accomplished this by confronting a suicidal Yukari and through the rules of shikigami force her to see the consequences of her actions, commencing her healing journey and her Heel–Face Turn.
    • The Dragon's Necklace requires one to overcome entropy. Yukari accomplished this when she stopped demanding a reason to live and resolving to become that reason herself, becoming The Atoner and becoming a true guardian for Gensokyo.
    • The Fire Rat's Skin requires one to cleanse the self's impurities. Alice accomplished this by acknowledging her feelings towards Marisa and stopping holding them back, after seeing her dead body in Mayohiga and the result of Wriggle's attack earlier.
    • The Jeweled Branch requires one to surpass all value. Youmu accomplished this by loving and trusting Yuyuko, and respecting her wishes by following Reimu.
    • Buddha's Stone Bowl requires one to rise from death. Reimu, Marisa and Sakuya all died in Remixed Cherry Blossom, and were revived in the same. Remilia, too, died when Reimu stabbed her with her broken gohei in Reinterpretation of Scarlet Devil, killing the mad beast she'd been. All were changed by the experience and sought to become better people after it.
  • Dark Fic: They do manage to earn a happy ending for each of the games, and almost every villain is eventually redeemed by the Power of Friendship, but this Gensokyo is a far more dangerous and less pleasant place than canon Gensokyo, and there's implications that most of the low-to-medium level youkai are just monsters and we happen to be looking at the ones who aren't. The main characters are also powered way down so as to make the adventures legitimately dangerous.
  • Daughter of a Whore: Mokou. However, she does get taken in and raised by the father.
  • Deadly Prank: Tewi nearly causes the destruction of Eientei and the death of Reisen through a prank she pulls on her.
  • Death Seeker: Reisen, after confirming Eirin has her gun and knows how to use it, quietly asks the sage to kill her. Yukari (until Recovery of Beloved Matriarch) and Mokou. A lesser example is Letty Whiterock, who's exhausted by the endless winter and just wants to fade away into spring.
  • Deliberately Cute Child: Both Rumia and Remilia in Reinterpretation of Scarlet Devil.
  • Despair Event Horizon: When Sakuya meets Reimu in Hakugyokuro, the latter has crossed the horizon and in the process embraced the worst aspects of her personality. Later on Meiling's splintered half recognizes Reimu was left heartbroken by the experience, leading to a massive depression she only began to climb out of with the help of everyone she'd met so far.
  • Determinator: Sakuya goes through figurative hell over the course of Remixed Cherry Blossom, including trudging through miles and miles of snow with an untreated leg wound, dying in battle against Youmu, and facing down a monstrously corrupted Reimu. And after all that, she gets to meet Yukari.
  • Dream Land: Reimu travels to several of her friends' dreams; their minds are rendered as different places. Marisa's a gigantic puzzle, Alice's is the Forest of Magic, Meiling's a mountaintop, and so on. The most alien of these worlds is Yukari's, which is the outside world.
  • Driven to Suicide: Youmu and Reisen. Fortunately, they are saved by Yuyuko and Tewi, respectively.
    • Also, shockingly, Yukari, leading to the events of Remixed Cherry Blossom.
  • Easily Forgiven: Played with. Forgiveness is a key concept of the series, and antagonists are forgiven from murder to attempted destruction of Gensokyo... but at least part of that includes honest contrition and willingness to atone for past misdeeds.
    • Remilia's scarlet mist in Reinterpretation of Scarlet Devil and Eirin's hiding of the moon in Reenactable Night were closer to crossings of the Godzilla Threshold than deliberately evil acts - the former wanted to disperse the explosive energy Flandre was collecting in her dungeon, the latter to deprive Mokou of the catalyst she needed to energize her Kashoyo army.
    • Remilia in particular, being a massive ham and jerk to everyone, realizes how her poor treatment and understanding of her sister nearly ended in catastrophe. While the debacle ends with no deaths, Flandre ends an amnesiac, leaving a contrite Remilia to pick the pieces. Later on, she's likewise forced to acknowledge what a toxic influence she was to Sakuya from moment one and how her unwitting abuse has twisted her. It takes her a lot of effort to actually find how to be forgiven for it.
    • Sakuya successfully murders both Reimu and Marisa... but she's also key to their resurrection and confronted Yukari afterwards. Reimu still doesn't fully forgive her until Sakuya shows she's genuinely trying to fight her darker impulses and tremendously ashamed of her past actions.
    • Yukari is by far the most malevolent foe to be forgiven, having manipulated Youmu into stealing spring, grievously abusing her friendship with Yuyuko, and, well, trying to kill Gensokyo in a mad stab at freedom/suicide. After her breakdown, she starts by confessing her many misdeeds and repairing the damage wrought by the winter, fully aware that it's step one at best, with no illusions as to how long earning everyone's forgiveness may take. She also picks on Reimu's depression and loneliness and sends Suika in an honest attempt at easing it.
  • Easter Egg: Remorse in Secession's Nobility's acronym, Reisen.
  • Enemy Within: Sakuya meets hers in Repose and Inclusive Power. At the time, she's still trying to process her own horrifying acts against Marisa and Reimu, her feelings towards Remilia and the Mansion itself, and a serious identity crisis. The double manifests as a sickly, repulsive Sakuya focused on killing Reimu; as Sakuya is unable to defeat the entity, with a heavy heart, she decides to accept it, fusing with it. While this stops its rampage, every single emotion she's been trying to bottle up rushes at her, leaving her helplessly sobbing at the realization of who she really is.
  • "Eureka!" Moment: Alice, in Redemption, after consulting a book Marisa gifts her, realizes she has the means to create actual sentient life rather than mindless puppets.
  • The Fair Folk: Most fairies are like this.
  • Fanservice: With the exceptions of Redemption of Precarious Puppeteer and Recalled Lunar Romance, someone ends up getting naked somehow. And even they had some brief moments of fanservice. Briefly lampshaded in the latter after a kiss scene.
    "The patterns of romantic stories might expect our encounter that night to reach a romantic climax. Taking all our clothes off, feeling skin on skin, making sweet love on the lounge furniture. While that kind of scene happened many times afterwards, we got no further than a kiss this night."
  • Fantastic Racism: Far more obvious than the original, and far more justified. Much of Recount and Full Moon Predecessor is about this, Keine fearing that if she were to reveal her half-hakutaku nature she would be driven away from her home. She is thus quite astonished when no one particularly cares (mostly because people know her well enough that they fully trust her to make every effort to support humanity).
  • Field Power Effect: During Reenactable Night, Eirin detects Yukari's use of gaps. Not knowing who it is or her intentions, Mokou's warning leaves her with little choice but to follow the battleplan she'd worked out, and she modifies Eientei's barrier to prevent her from using her gaps. However, once they manage to sort stuff out, Eirin drops the field to allow Yukari to bring in more allies.
  • Funetik Aksent: Marisa is given a thick redneck accent and her occasional "ze" is rendered as an additional "s" at the end of words.
  • Godzilla Threshold: The Scarlet Mist and the Imperishable Night are construed as desperate gambles that ultimately only served as delaying measures allowing the heroines to step in and solve the underlying issues.
  • Gondor Calls for Aid: When defending Eientei, Yukari uses her gaps to pull through as many defenders as she can (Suika, Meiling, Patchouli and Flandre) to aid.
  • Grey-and-Gray Morality: With the exception of Yuyuko, it's difficult to place any single character as being purely good or evil. Reimu, Marisa, and Suika come closest to the "good" portion of the spectrum, and Yukari and Mokou closest on the "evil" side.
  • Happily Married: Eirin and Kaguya are very much this. Nearly two thousand years and counting.
  • Heavy Sleeper: As per canon, Yukari. Ran shamefully admits the lengths she went to wake her up during the Scarlet Mist Incident, including pitching her over a cliff. It didn't work.
  • Heroic BSoD: Reisen suffers a massive one both after realizing she's lost the last Lunarian child to Remilia, and years later, when said child, Sakuya, confronts her.
  • Hidden Depths: Sakuya hates Reimu and Marisa well into Remixed Cherry Blossom, apparently simply because they beat her. Actually, when they defeated Remilia and Flandre, they triggered their Character Development, indirectly making them better people. Sakuya, who had lived her entire life under Remilia's delusions of grandeur, was devastated to know everything she thought she knew about her mistress and the house she served was a lie.
  • Hidden Elf Village: Eientei, which in this universe is so well hidden, Yukari had no idea it existed before the Imperishable Night Incident.
  • Human Aliens: The Lunarians. Unlike the humans, they have Magitek, naturally white hair being a common trait, and their magic is less elemental and more based on time and space. Sakuya is one of them.
  • I Hate You, Vampire Dad: A variation. Sakuya, raised by Remilia (if never vampirized), develops some hate for her due to her less-than-ideal upbringing and the horrible things she had to do to provide for Flandre, and things come to an angry discussion during Reenactable Night. They manage to work it out with some effort with their Character Development.
  • Identity Amnesia: Flandre. While it breaks Remilia's heart, she comes out far saner and stable enough that she no longer needs to be sealed in the Mansion's cellars.
  • Implacable Man: The Kashoyo. A group attacks Patchouli and Koakuma when they're taking a stroll, only to be literally shredded to pieces when the former uses a spellcard invoking the power of an assault rifle. The remains literally pull themselves together into a coherent mass, this time human-sized. Remilia has to use a specialized card that tears them apart to the point they can no longer reform due to material capacity restrictions.
  • Inhumanly Beautiful Race: Youkai are described as this.
  • Innocent Prodigy: Akyu. A reincarnation of a woman who dedicated her life to recording the history of Gensokyo. What prevents her from being Wise Beyond Their Years is that, despite her intelligence and power, she still carries many childish traits.
  • Intertwined Fingers: Alice and Marisa in Redemption of Precarious Puppeteer.
  • Journey to the Center of the Mind: Repose and Inclusive Power consists mainly of this.
  • Kangaroo Court: Reimu is tried by Patchouli in one of these in the latter's dream. However, the entire "court" fades into nothing when Reimu's "testimony" reveals to Patchouli that the Kashoyo she destroyed aren't the only ones.
  • Large Ham: Per canon, Remilia. Unlike canon, though, this comes back to bite her. Hard. Her talk of damnation, the injustice of God and Hell, scared the already unstable Flandre to the point she thought it was better to erase everything than risk facing Him.
  • Like an Old Married Couple: Eirin and Kaguya through Reisen's eyes, before realizing that for all intents and purposes, they are an old married couple.
  • Madwoman in the Attic: Flandre, oh so very much. At least at first.
  • Magically-Binding Contract: The Shikigami Rite is carefully examined. Both Master and Servant have duties and obligations they have to obey, and the contract makes it so it's far harder to violate its spirit rather than the word. For example, when Ran realizes Yukari is suicidal, the Rite empowers her with Yukari's own energy when they begin fighting, because in spite of her spoken orders, she really wants to die.
  • Magitek: The Lunarians, whose magic is more based around space-time manipulation rather than Gensokyo's elemental bent.
  • Manipulative Bastard: Yukari. Using Youmu's concern for Yuyuko, the elder youkai convinces her to commit a terrible act Yuyuko would have never considered or abetted in pursuit of a tremendously selfish goal.
  • Marshmallow Hell: A running gag in Resolute And Ghostly Gardner is Youmu expieriencing this. By the end, she finally figures out a way to be able to breathe like this.
  • Medieval Stasis: Technology has hardly gone past the "feudal Japan" stage. Granted, the magic is so great that inventing machines would be unnecessary. (They even have magical lightbulbs!) Additionally, Gensokyo's denizens have adapted to the English language. English is referred to as "the new language", while Japanese is referred to as "the old language".
    • Regarding the language issue, there's something odd at work there. When Sanae came through the Boundary into Gensokyo, the transition exchanged all of her knowledge of the Japanese language for the English language. She could remember Kanako's name, but not what her gohei was called or precisely what honorific she used to refer to her father.
  • Mood Whiplash: Chapter Seven of Remixed Cherry Blossom has Sakuya brutally murdering Reimu and Marisa. The following chapter, we get to see Shanghai and Alice.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Narrowly averted in-universe. When Yukari's dealing a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to Ran and is poised to deliver the deathblow, Chen stops her. Yukari could have easily swat her away and killed both, and actually was about to do so for one terrible instant, before she desperately slams on the brakes and suffers a brutal Villainous BSoD instead. Yukari later confesses to Ran that the very next moment she realized that no matter the circumstances, hurting Chen then would have been an utterly irredeemable act and that had she gone through, she would have spent the rest of her life hating herself.
  • Moses in the Bulrushes: Sakuya is a Lunarian.
  • Motor Mouth: Shanghai uses long, nonsensical adjectives and modifiers along with extremely long sentences, and since she's a doll, she can keep on talking and talking long after any normal person would have stopped to breathe.
  • Non-Indicative Name: Repose and Inclusive Power, while interesting, has nothing to do with the fighting game Immaterial and Missing Power, with the exception of the cast of characters and the Mugen Shubin, instead being about Reimu's Journey to the Center of the Mind.
  • No-Sell: When Eirin attempts to use chronomancy to freeze the approaching heroines to give Reisen some free shots, the only unaffected one in the party is Sakuya.
  • Poor Communication Kills: Remilia's poor phrasing of her gripes with religion nearly spells doom for Gensokyo.
  • The Power of Love: All jokes about Marisa's Master Spark aside, a lot of the conflicts in the stories are resolved through love, forgiveness, trust, et cetera. The most common guilty party of this is Yuyuko and Reimu, though Reimu does have a harder time forgiving certain people. On the flipside, perhaps half of the conflicts in the stories are started or enabled because some characters made poor decisions in the name of love. This generally goes to show that the perpetrators aren't evil, simply misguided or afraid.
  • Really 700 Years Old: Many characters, but most of all Flandre, who as with the original can't even pretend to be mature.
  • Restraining Bolt: Laevateinn. Yukari had it pretty much handed to Flan to avoid a reprise of Reinterpretation of Scarlet Devil. And even with it she's still a terror to fight.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: Koishi Komeiji gets caught by an Eldritch Abomination of fire who might actually be this story's version of Nue Houjuu, who demands her family release it in exchange for her. Utsuho's attempts to accomplish this are the main impetus of her actions. It wouldn't take her too long to crack open the seal, given she'd kidnapped many extremely strong and clever mages (Yukari, Patchouli, Aya, Suika, Nitori and Alice). The problem is that it's extremely unlikely she'd bother to save them once she gets Koishi out, allowing the monster to kill them - which leads to the terrifying prospect of a nigh-apocalyptic scenario of the Boundary snapping with Yukari's death.
  • Shout-Out: Several Touhou memes sneak there way into the story, subtly enough that if you didn't know the meme you wouldn't notice anything was unusual.
  • Smug Snake: Alice Margatroid and Patchouli Knowledge. Patchouli in particular barely bothers to put a defense when confronted by Reimu and Marisa, preferring to send them to their doom with Sakuya.
  • Song Fic: On occasion, a character will sing a song from the games with lyrics added to them. They are generally relevant to the character singing or the plot. Perhaps the most amusing one being Suika's song of a hero marching forth to defeat an oni, only for his head to be immediately lopped off.
  • Spin-Off: Ibunshu has two stories that aren't part of the main continuity. Erroneous Paradisial Inception is the story of how Sanae and the Moriya Shrine got to Gensokyo, told from the point of view of Sanae, who basically has crap piled all over her until she breaks down (then pulls herself together and starts kicking ass). The other story, Sakurei, is a Porn Without Plot between Sakuya and Reimu.
  • Stealth Pun: At one point, Reimu finds Remilia in the mansion's conservatory, where she's playing the organ. While she's actually a decent musician, Remilia comments the song, Septette for the Dead Princess, her canon self's leitmotif, isn't very good since she's missing six instruments. This refers to the fact a septette is a piece of music designed to be played on seven instruments.
  • Summon Bigger Fish: After the heroines beat Cirno and her giant snowman, the infuriate fairy, smarting from both the previous defeat and an unpaid "debt" of Reimu's (she promised to let Cirno freeze her in order to get quick access to the Scarlet Devil Mansion), gets Letty Whiterock to deal with the humans.
  • Stuff Blowing Up: Marisa's experimentation blows up her house in Redemption. For a while, she moves in with Alice.
  • Stylistic Suck: Requiem Biblioliphic is written by Patchouli and as a result, smothered in Purple Prose. Tyler admitted in one of his blog entries that on of his favorite parts was trying to find how much Purple Prose he could shove into the text.
  • Sympathy for the Devil: As much as Reimu intellectually knows she's furious with Sakuya, seeing her helplessly sobbing after being forced to accept her Enemy Within somewhat softens her stance against her, giving them one more chance to establish a real friendship.
  • Tempting Fate:
    • In Remorse in Secession's Nobility, after Eirin explains the cornerstone behind Eientei's defenses to Reisen, she just has to say:
    Eirin: The ritual can be undone only by technicality. It’s effectively impenetrable.
    • The reader can easily and immediately identify several ways in which certain characters can tear apart Eirin's ritual.
  • Title Drop: Not the title of the story, however, but the title of the game on which the particular story is based.
  • Tsundere:
    • Discussed by Yukari about Reimu.
      “Oh my,” she said. “It’s not like I want to hold onto you, stupid Boundary youkai. I’m just afraid of heights, is all!” She glanced at Ran. “What was the word for that again?”
    • Poor Alice, as shown by a nightmare she had after Remixed Cherry Blossom.
      "Here lies Marisa Kirisame. Why did it hurt so bad when I thought she was dead? I don't care that much, I swear I don't."
  • Vampire Bites Suck: After Remilia bites Reimu, the latter notes it doesn't hurt as much as she'd expecting and realizes Remilia's saliva has anaesthetic properties.
  • Villainous Breakdown: Yukari's starts when she's confronted by Yuyuko and Youmu, and devolves into savagery when Ran returns. However, she collapses, sobbing, when confronted by Chen.
  • Water Source Tampering: Yukari killed Yuyuko's parents by tossing a dead fairy into the waterhole.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Flandre. Remilia's casual conversation about God frightened her to the point she thought blowing up Gensokyo was preferable than to live under His yoke.
  • Wham Episode: Chapters 7 and 15 of Remixed Cherry Blossom. Sakuya murders Marisa and Reimu in the first, and we have a good look at Yukari in the latter.
  • Who Wants to Live Forever?: The greatest issue for Yukari and Mokou, which has driven them to commit acts of villainy in the past. Kaguya and Eirin are not entirely immune, though their relationship with each other apparently serves as a buffer against the worst of it. Indeed, since Mokou herself sometimes acknowledges that Eirin didn't mean to kill her thieving father, and that she has herself to blame for drinking the Hourai Elixir, Mokou's chronic animosity towards them may be about envy for their relationship as much as it is about wanting an outlet for her immortality angst.
    • The differences between the two come to a head in the climax of Reenactable Night, where Phoenix presents an opportunity for the Hourai immortals to die. Eirin and Kaguya decide to remain immortal together, and Mokou chooses death.
  • Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Remilia, Flandre, Mokou and Yukari are varying flavours of "death to everyone" due to a long life (or unlife, in the case of the former two) of despair.
  • Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Rumia uses this against Reimu, appearing as an innocent child and piteously begging her to remove her ribbon, which is hurting her. Which it is, since it's her Power Limiter.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: The Kashoyo, fairies whose lifeforce has been burned out by Mokou's power and remade as a sort of hollow footsoldier attacking in swarms, driven by their lack of life. Mokou's been making them for ages, but she's been learning how to make more and more of them, and it seems the spillover are now appearing more and more often in random parts of Gensokyo instead of attacking Eientei.

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