Fanfic / Imperfect Cherry Blossom

Belief, faith, and fear are funny things. Kyon finds himself in a new world, a world of true fantasy. He will need help to get out of Gensokyo alive.

Imperfect Cherry Blossom is a Touhou Project/Haruhi Suzumiya crossover by Supperdudue9.

After the events of Snow Mountain Syndrome and Where Did The Cat Go? Kyon finds himself spirited away to Gensokyo in his sleep by Yukari and finds himself caught in the middle of the Perfect Cherry Blossom Incident.

Sounds like another gappy crossover right? But things aren't quite that simple.

Soundtrack companion available on Youtube. Search episode for playlists!

Tropes contained in Imperfect Cherry Blossom:

• A God Am I: Subverted by Sasaki, who views becoming a god as a downgrade from being human and actively avoids becoming one despite having the ability to do so easily.
  • Played straight by Alt!Hectia who states that she will become "a perfect god."
• Adaptational Badass: Pretty much everyone. Stage bosses now require multiple characters working together to beat, with some like Parsee even being capable of holding their own against the entire party, and even the mooks can be a serious threat to the heroes under the right circumstances.
  • Special mention goes to Kyon. Like in canon, Kyon starts off with no supernatural abilities whatsoever, but during the ICB arc he gains the ability to use the blossoms of the Saigyouji Ayakashi to create paranormal barriers that can heal allies or be used as magical bombs. Later chapters see him discover that he can also use heavens peaches to attain a Focus Mode, learn that he apparently qualifies to wield The Sword of Hisou, and have Nagato inject him with nanomachines to optimize his abilities. In the Meltdown arc, he leverages all that and the assistance of Cirno and the Three Faries of Light to defeat Alt!Clownpiece.
  • The Three Fairies of Light also deserve a shout out. While they're still cannon-fodder in a straight fight against any named character, their abilities make them an absolutely obscene force-multiplier when working with a group. During the PSC arc, they shatter the resistances defensive line pretty much single-handedly with a well-placed illusion and sneak past practically every incident resolver and their allies to retrieve the Miracle Mallet.
    • Justified due to Alt!Hectia and her Agreement meddling with the timeline specifically to invoke this. With the exception of Kyon.
• Batman Gambit: This is pretty much the MO of most of the schemers. Yukari sets up situations where the heroes better nature leads them to fulfill her goals, Yasumi creates a scenario where Tenshi's pride and desire for entertainment push her to go all out against the heroes and encourage the incident resolvers to keep training, and Alt!Hectia uses the information from past timelines to predict and manipulate the actions and abilities of the main characters.
• Berserk Button: Don't threaten the people Kyon cares about. You won't like what happens.
  • Do not mess with Reimu's shrine if you want to keep your teeth.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: The Altered. They're effectively magically brainwashed characters, identified by static where their eyes are. Much like zombies, they can spread the infection via contact and tend to ignore pain and damage. Their presence is one of the main indicators that an outside force is interfering with Gensokyo.
• The Corruption: The light of the false moon drives any and all Youkai in contact with it steadily insane regardless of their power or precautions. The afflicted then proceed to search out and kill anyone and everyone in Gensokyo, with a special emphasis on fairies. The only way to prevent it from twisting you is avoiding the moonlight entirely.
• Deconstructed Trope: Getting magic doesn't mean that you can automatically understand or use it, and even if you do figure it out, it doesn't make up for having any combat experience. Kyon spends most of the fights running support and his victories are the result of careful and creative use of his resources rather than outright power or skill. It takes years of training and power-ups for him to have a chance in a straight-up fight, and even then he's still far weaker than the rest of the incident resolvers and prefers to assist and coordinate over front-line combat.
  • Life-threatening situations and traumatic experiences aren't things you can just get over once the events are passed. Kyon ends up traumatized and depressed after he kills a Sky Canopy Domain unit at the end of the PN arc and struggles psychologically with recovery. It takes learning he's dead in the future and resolving to survive even if he has to kill for Kyon to even start moving past it.
  • Youkai preying on humans isn't something that the humans can just forget. Despite forging bonds with the residents of Gensokyo, the question of whether or not he's correct in protecting beings that kill people to survive or a society that seems to treat the weak as irrelevant is something that Kyon struggles with for quite a while.
• Deconstruction Fic: Imperfect Cherry Blossom takes a good long look at parts of Gensokyo that are rarely covered in the canon, such as the actual mortality rate of humans not part of the village, the fairness and potential lack-thereof of the status quo, and the darker side of some characters. With special mention going to Remilia and Yukari. All the wonder and joy of Gensokyo is still very much there, but there's no denying that it's a deadly and at times dark place and the dangers that the Youkai pose to humans are something that Kyon and the other humans can't forget.
  • It's also one of Gappy stories in general. Kyon goes through all the standard experiences, being dropped into Gensokyo, meeting and befriending the canon cast, working with them to resolve incidents, developing powers, and getting shipping moments with the girls. However, he's nearly eaten within minutes of arriving, the SDM plans to treat him as a test dummy and meal at first, he has no combat experience or understanding of his new abilities so he has to depend on the mercy of others to survive and make very careful use of what he has in order to contribute, his power is reliant on outside forces and mainly good for support, and he can't bring himself to abandon his life outside Gensokyo for a romance.
• Doorstopper: With four arcs totaling up to 857,000 words as of this edit, it's significantly longer than War and Peace.
• The Dreaded: Deliberately invoked by Yukari. She's effectively Genoksyo's boogeyman to the average being and the few instances of her cutting, mostly, loose are outright terrifying even for the incident resolvers.
  • Mima likes to think that she's this.
  • Alt!Hectia is what Mima dreams she was. The realization that she's the Big Bad is enough to trigger a stunned silence among the entire incident resolution team^* Reimu, Marisa, Sakuya, Youmu, Reisen, Mokou, Sanae, Tenshi, Koizumi, Kyon, Cirno, the Three Faries of Light, Mima, Yuuka, and Kasen and their supporters^* Yukari, Yuyuko, Suika, Eiren, Kaguya, Alice, Patchouli, Remilia, and Aya.
• The Gadfly: Satori. She isn't deliberately malicious about it, but she isn't above prodding people if she considers it useful. Such as how she reveals Kyon's collection of Mikaru pictures to distract him and Marisa and later goes on to reveal Sakuya's, and nearly the other heroines, most embarrassing secret when they start judging him.
• Grey-and-Grey Morality: There's a lot of this. The residents of Gensokyo are shown to be, for the most part, good and reasonable people who frequently put their lives on the line to protect their home and don't go out of their way to cause harm without reason. However, they also survive off the kidnapping and murder of countless humans and are a threat to humanity by their very nature. In contrast, Suou and her followers attempt outright genocide, enslave others, and try and kill anyone in their way, but do so in order to protect Haruhi-Earth from the threat Gensokyo poses.
  • The SCD is revealed to be more nuanced than in canon, with Suou and her followers simply being an extremist faction.
  • Alt!Hectia is the Big Bad and responsible for a truly immense amount of suffering, but their motives are undeniably benevolent and they're arguably the faction that cares the most about people. Unlike the forces of Gensokyo and Suou, who only care about maintaining and/or restoring their status quo, she wants to free humanity from the threat of the Youkai and Haruhi and bring about a utopia for every timeline.
• The Heart: Kyon, hands down. He's the only member of the incident resolvers who has unambiguously positive relationships with all the others and he's often the one who helps them work past their issues or recruits new allies. It's outright stated that his presence is the difference between the cast using the standard Touhou method^* everyone wandering around on their own, randomly beating people up until they find the culprit and the more cooperative and streamlined approach.
• A Lighter Shade of Grey: Gensokyo tends to come off as this. Despite the morally-dubious actions of the population they're largely portrayed sympathetically and don't perform the kind of atrocities that the other factions do. A lot of this comes down to the fact that outside of their dietary needs and the need for humans to fear them, youkai characters aren't shown acting maliciously beyond being overly manipulative or quick to pick fights, with even one as hostile Rumia befriending a human child and later being genuinely distraught at their death. Since the other factions are actively trying to kill the cast and many many innocent people and show little to no remorse for their actions, they tend to look significantly worse.
  • The fact that Gensokyo is the only major faction besides the SOS Brigade shown to undergo character development doesn't hurt.
• Outside-Context Problem: Play straight and averted. Kyon easily adapts his experiences with closed space and Haruhi to Gensokyo, but Yukari is blind-sided by the intrusion of the Sky Canopy Domain and forced into disadvantageous situations while she tries to adapt.
• Spanner in the Works: The entire PSC arc is this for Hectia and her arrangement. It is heavily implied that Yukari deliberately arranged for it to go the way it did in order to prevent Kyon's death and invoke this trope.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Kyon and Marisa. It's made clear that Kyon has a thing for her and that the feeling is mutual on her end, but Kyon's responsibilities in the outside world and the danger that would come from breaking Haruhi's heart makes a relationship between the two pretty much impossible.
• Tempting Fate: Suou makes the mistake of gloating to the captive heroes that she's researched every youkai in Gensokyo and accounted for their powers. Cue Mima blowing up the fake moon with a Twilight Spark.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Alt!Hectia. Her grand plan is to lead humanity across every timeline to prosperity. However, in the name of accomplishing this, she's destroyed countless timelines, killing at bare minimum trillions, orders the surviving timelines destroyed when she finds the one she wants, pushes to actively worsen timelines to strengthen Haruhi and Sasaki so that she can get more power when she steals theirs, and plans for her first act as a perfect god to be the total annihilation of every single Kyon in the Multiverse because of the vague and unexplained possibility in canon that Kyon can take Haruhi's powers and thus could possibly do the same to her if she wins.
• Wham Line: "All right, human. Let me spell it out for you, plain and simple so you can begin to grasp the situation. Gensokyo invaded our world".
  • "Remember. I can move through other existences... I think there is another me in play... from her own world..."
  • "Well, this is the time to come clean. No theatrics. You're going up against the Greek Goddess of Magic.
• Wham Shot: At the end of Chapter 40, Alt!Hectia is reading a book that is implied to have set her down her current path. Its title? The Disassociation of Haruhi Suziyama.