The New New Touhou Character Alternate Interpretation Compendium

Letty = Yuki-onna (sometimes lumped in with ghosts, so possibly dead)

Youmu = Half-phantom (half dead)

...

...why not? There are pairings with shakier logic.

Edit: you have a fic? Sounds interesting.

edited 11th Apr '14 11:01:20 AM by nuclearfairy

"Creative" doesn't mean "good", but it's fun no matter how you slice it.

My logic's not even that shaky, it's just different (see my title) but said logic would best be left for Youmu's discussion.

Well, I'd say the Letty conversation's wound down, though it wouldn't be the first time I was wrong if there was a surprise recovery.

If I've done the math right, Letty was our seventeenth conversation. And since the matter of review periods has come up, the question is whether we want to do them as the need arises - returning to democracy and occasionally voting whether we take a few days to play catch-up instead of proceeding with the random sequence - or whether we want to schedule review sessions every x characters or so.

I dunno. How did we do it last time?

Don't PM me. We don't like being PMed.

I think last time review periods came up during regular voting periods, proposed like any other character.

For lack of other input, I've come up with a plan - finish the next three topics of Kurumi, Yoshika and the SDM, then break for a review period on the twenty-two mark. Does that work? If we want a review period sooner, we could use one after the Kurumi discussion, which with all due respect to Touhou's first confirmed vampire probably won't last long.

Vampire Girl Kurumi

Appearance:

Stage and Music:
Famine ~ Lake of Blood
BGM: "Break the Sabbath"
Theme: "Scarlet Symphony ~ Scarlet Phoneme"

Signature Attack:
Being her own Midboss

Write-up:
A vampire with her very own lake of lovely purplish blood, Kurumi is a gatekeeper of sorts, who intentionally or not tries to keep Reimu and/or Marisa from passing through to Mugenkan. She fails, of course, and has not been heard of since. We at least know that her lake drained away, however.

Besides the obvious Yuuka connection, some people try to link this first native vampire with Gensokyo's more famous foreign vampires, though if you took away Kurumi's Ku and added an a, you might be reminded of another EoSD character.

Also, apparently Kurumi's wings give her a large hitbox. Ironic, since we somehow finished the Letty conversation without commenting on her above-average girth.

Relationships:

• Unknown

Interpretations:
"Vampire of the Dawn"
by Diamite

See also the first two compendiums.

edited 14th Apr '14 10:56:53 PM by Tacitus

Kurumi, is she native to Gensokyo or is she the Scarlett Devil's long lost family member?

"Eratoeir is a Gangsta."

Gensou Shoujo Taisen time; I like what they did with her themes.

Kurumi is a vampire! She serves as the gatekeeper of the lake of blood (which is a pretty sweet gig for a vampire), which in turn is the area that leads to Yuuka's pad. So is she with Yuuka?

I dunno.

Also, if she is a vampire, why is she out during the day?

I dunno.

Don't PM me. We don't like being PMed.

Yeah, why is she out during the day? Good question.

We know that Reimu's Stage 1 takes place during the day, while Marisa's Stage 1 takes place at night. We don't know how close nearby Stage 2 is to stage 1 (since unlike some other transitions, Stage 2 doesn't seem geographically close to stage 1), so for all we know the sun could have risen or set - although it doesn't look any different for the two alternate histories, so who knows, maybe they both went through there at night.

Anyway, Kurumi might just be a Stage 2 boss, but she does have some tricks up her sleeves - her exploding lasers (for lack of a better term) do require some precision to navigate through, she can shoot fast rings that change direction and rotate in mid-air, and her final pattern is actually fairly dangerous if the protagonist tries to time it out instead of end it by shooting it down.

Also, she's the midboss of her own stage, starting a long tradition of Reimu and Marisa saying "Didn't we just fight you back there?" and the boss replying "Yeah, but this time I'm serious."

edited 13th Apr '14 8:47:35 PM by Leylite

Kurumi:

A vampire that was the guardian of a lake of blood.

Vampire of the Dawn:

Kurumi's a vampire. She's different from other vampires since, well, she can walk around under the sun's blazing gaze without the need of a parasol. Did she build up a resistance to the sun, or was it a side effect of being the guardian of Blood Lake? The blood must have oozed out some magical properties that's capable of buffing a youkai's resistance to its weaknesses. Hmmm... but I suppose Kurumi would still be plagued by the other vampiric weaknesses. Well, some others. Since she walks around in the day, I can't imagine her getting stopped by moving water.

Feh, how did that lake of blood come to be, anyway? Perhaps it was the site of a great youkai war, the details too brutal to describe. A lot of blood was shed that day, a mixture of different youkai. But it dried up. Quite quickly. Guess it really was magical blood. Or perhaps there was no war, and it came to being because Kurumi's a secret practitioner of Blood Magic.

Before Gensokyan days began, Kurumi was an adopted member of the Scarlet family. She was a Cool Big Sis to Remillia and Flandre. She vanished under mysterious circumstances after declaring she would travel the world. She lost her memories of those times. Perhaps she suffered a major head trauma during her travels...

Since Kurumi's a daywalker, there are two types of vampires in the world; those who love the sun, and those who hate the sun.

edited 13th Apr '14 10:42:27 PM by Diamite

So what do we know about Kurumi? She's a stage two boss, she lives at a lake, she's not Cirno, she's a vampire,

She even dresses like Rumia ... kind of (why are EoSD's characters and setting so similar in design and/or species to LLS's?). In short, we don't know much.

edited 14th Apr '14 6:21:52 AM by Impostermetaknight

Either A; she's EX-Rumia or B; she's Flandre at her day job.

Or, y'know, ZUN just threw in a vampire at random, and didn't put any serious thought into them until four years later when he realised he should give Touhou an actual setting. Vampires in Japanese media seem to ignore the sunlight weakness a lot, usually without explanation.

The immediate response is "no, the Scarlets are from Europe, probably France or something, while Kurumi has a proper Japanese name and is therefore local." But, like the house that burned down underwater, that just leads to further questions - if the Scarlet vampires are foreign, why does a native bloodsucker share so many traits (save the sunlight thing, evidently)? Is this a case of parallel evolution, or were vampires in Japan before the Japanese caught wind of gaijin bloodsuckers? Or is Kurumi a vampire? Is she more of an oni or devil? What would one of those be doing guarding a dream mansion at the bottom of a lake of blood? Or is it an artificial distinction to begin with?

Huh, for a second I could've swore she was confirmed for one of the 2D fighters.

She could be a foreigner from a distant land who adopted a fake name.

Or she's like Yoshika and got bitten by some foreign vampire, who got bitten by some other vampire. Rinse and repeat until you get to the one that got Remilia and/or Flandre, possibly. The sun resistance may be because she didn't know that vampires are supposed to die in the sun. The sizzling remained because that's what was supposed to happen every time she exposed herself to the sun, at least according to her.

...thank goodness she didn't come up with other things.

In Reimu's scenario, she mentions keeping away intruders, which along with Elly's comment ("It's been a long time since the last time I fought.") implies long history with Yuuka or that intruders don't come by very often.

On the other hand, the image of her swatting mosquitoes and declaring them intruders to pass the time amuses me a bit.

edited 15th Apr '14 6:00:19 AM by nuclearfairy

"Creative" doesn't mean "good", but it's fun no matter how you slice it.

I wonder if Kurumi is an acquaintance of Yuuka but I am even more intrigued on how Kurumi even came to the Garden of the Sun? Since vampires sizzle and turn to dust when exposed to sunlight, you think she;d burnt to crisp by now. The Lake of Blood is a great buffet for vampires.

"Eratoeir is a Gangsta."

Maybe she spends most of her days bathing in blood or something, as a consequence she learned the little-known fact that bloods acts as an extremely potent type of sunblock for vampires.

So long as she applies liberally to her skin once a day, waits for it to dry and flake off and she's protected from the sun for twenty four hours.

The eyes are the windows that let us gaze upon the soul.

Now, drown in the vampire's crimson-colored tunes...

---

Malevolent Scarlet
Scarlet Rush
Breaking the Scarlet
Cheerful Phoneme
Bloody Scouse
Scarlet Sabbath
Sabbath

edited 15th Apr '14 9:02:08 PM by Diamite

Despite the name, EX-Rumia only goes from a stage one boss to a stage two boss.

EX-ing is relative, after all.

Hmm, hadn't considered that. Now I get to wonder how many Gensokyans with non-Japanese hair colors are truly native or have gone native. And of course with the art style there's no way of knowing...

I was going to correct you, but well, we don't know that the G o' da S wasn't planted on the fertile lakebed of a drained body of blood. Eeesh, imagine having that a few minutes away from the Human Village.

Think that was part of the hiring process? "Work for me and I will literally fill a lake with blood for you to wallow in." Maybe there were multiple Human Villages before that point.

That cheerful one was... pretty unexpected. And cheering.

Surprise, everyone's a foreigner. Yes, even Reimu.

...I'm sorry.

It does bring up some interesting thoughts. It's probably not an important thing to think about, though some are obviously native (Reimu, Yuyuko, Cirno) or close to it (Sanae, Miko).

That's... a lot of blood. Even if assuming that each human contains a gallon of blood, it's gonna take a bit more than 500 thousand humans to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The lake is most likely bigger than a giant pool.

...of course, there's the even weirder part about the blood lake drying up sometime after. You think it would leave something behind unless someone magically whisked it away. Yeah yeah, trying applying logic to Gensokyo and continuity and templates.

Which is why the Kurumi of today has to be content with a kiddy pool of blood.

"Creative" doesn't mean "good", but it's fun no matter how you slice it.

Maybe, just like how Remilia can create Scarlet Mist, Kurumi too has the power to create scarlet something, and that something is what made the Lake of Blood looks like blood, even though it's really a normal lake. Her theme is 'Scarlet Symphony', which may be a hint.

For even more plot twist, it's really the Great Toad's lake, which got annoyed by a random vampire making the lake red and ate her.

Remi can make scarlet gas, Kurumi can make scarlet liquid and Flan can make scarlet solids?

Flan makes scarlet po- Never mind.

edited 18th Apr '14 5:14:24 AM by TrueShadow1