The New New Touhou Character Alternate Interpretation Compendium

Iku is the messenger of the Dragon Palace, whose purpose is to listen to the Dragon God and relay the important stuff to the mortal beings living below. Iku also moves to warn people about earthquakes and other disasters.

Iku has the special ability to read the atmosphere and adapt accordingly. To this end, she is very flexible in dealing with situations. She can also use this ability vanish completely and parry any attack. Iku also has the ability to draw on the power of the Dragon God and thus can weird their power over rainfall and storms.

Also, she has lightning powers and will juggle your ass if you aren't careful.

When not on Dragon Palace duty, Iku prefers to leisurely float around in the clouds and observes as the Dragon God does mostly the same. Despite her role as a messenger of urgent news, Iku is laid back and passive in nature, never insisting on her opinions and preferring to watch others from the background.

Iku is very stylish.

Huh. I forgot about that line. I guess she was directly addressing people like me who just look at the words being the same.

Point being that Iku has clothes made of antimatter.

edited 3rd Sep '14 7:36:32 AM by Clarste

Good thing she has electro powers that can be stretched to electromagnetism maybe which could keep the antimatter from exploding her.

So basically if you try to steal her clothes as per the myth, you explode and give everyone around you five kinds of cancer?

Iku Nagae:

A prominent messenger of the Dragon Palace, and occasional aide of Tenshi. Very relaxed.

She can read the atmosphere. She would make a good meteorologist. And she can also read the atmosphere of current happenings. If they are tense, calm, and if this is the right time to say her peace. Well, I'm not sure if she can constantly read the mood, or she reads the mood, but is unaware that the mood changed...or something.

Considering the Fridge Horror about Tenshi's situation, even if Iku were to complain constantly about her to her family members, would they listen? Not that she cares, reporting to the Hinanawi Clan about possible earthquakes and Tenshi doing bad stuff is part of her current job. Just business.

She doesn't seem to like Tenshi much, especially that spoiled rich-kid attitude side of her. It's like she's working at some dead-end job, and she's tired of it. But unless there are other openings, she will do her best.

She borrows power from dragons. That makes her one high-tier opponent you don't want to mess with.

Her theme's quite nice. In fact, I consider it to be amongst the top of my favorite Touhou character themes.

Iku's one of the more stylish Touhou charas. She's quite electrifying.

No contest over the cool clothes, but the Touhou wiki raised an interesting point about the reading of the atmosphere - she can read and adjust to the situation in an instant, but in the cases where she doesn't, Iku is deliberately going against the flow in order to gain an advantage over her rival.

...Not that I can see any obvious example of Iku using her power in her storyline. Subtle, she is.

Or maybe her ability to glide through the local atmosphere extents to the subatomic level.

Worse - Dan Brown writes a book about the incident and gets everything about it insultingly wrong.

At this point I'm wondering what Tenshi would have to do to get booted from Heaven. But I like the way you phrase this question, it makes me think of Iku as a tragic figure, loyal to a corrupt and broken system, doing her duties to the best of her ability while Celestials nick cosmic keystones and an oni throws a kegger in what is supposed to be a contemplative paradise.

Iku Nagae is also an oarfish who has a reputation of being really long body that can only be carried by five or six people.

Forget to take off her shoes when entering the house.

Or you know, fifteen.◊

So, stuff from wikis. The oarfish's family name of Regalecidae indicates that even Western science dudes recognized their frilly majesty, but if we associate the critters with anything it's sea serpents and not, say, gods or dragons. Think that's due to our lack of animism, or the fact that our dragons are big winged lizards instead of whiskered serpents?

I'm also wondering how a servant of the Ryugu-jo wound up flying to and from Fluffy Cloud Heaven. Is this an evolution of the myth, or an adaptation for the setting since Gensokyo tragically lacks an ocean? Why couldn't an ocean dragon god set up a little coastal annex in Gensokyo?

edited 5th Sep '14 7:39:43 AM by Tacitus

Given how fandom works, I suppose its lucky that Iku hasn't ended up with fanon about her being fat or something.

Welp, that's my fanon now. Still graceful and regal, though.

I wonder if Iku is a babysitter, mentor figure to Tenshi?

Okay. At least I know you'll be more respectful to fluffy Iku than most of the fandom.

A downside of primarily being a lurker is that no one really notices when you leave for a couple of months, doesn't matter anyway I'm back now.

And since I don't have anything to say about Iku at the moment, I'd like to talk about Tenshi, but as always I can't find the words. I could see her eventually (emphasis on eventually, really) becoming "deserving" of her position as a celestial. I'll leave it at that while I try to gather my thoughts on the matter.

Edit: has my username always had spaces in it?

edited 7th Sep '14 6:35:25 AM by ImposterMetaKnight

When you have a word with multiple caps tvtropes treats it as an internal link. Since there's no page called Imposter Meta Knight it becomes a red link and gets spaces inserted into it.

Welcome back! Every voice is valued in our eternal struggle against silence.

Nah, we've got Letty for that. For Iku it'd be more like "haw haw, your flesh has the consistency of gelatin, making you ill-suited as a food source."

Is "late to the party Iku" a thing, though? Like, during SWR she kept warning people about earthquakes after one had already occurred. Sorta like a charismatic, disco-dancing Slowpoke news anchor.

True, but she was warning about a major one, whereas the one that had occured only wrecked the Hakurei shrine.

I am just amused how almost everyone either doesn't care about her warnings or somehow concludes that she's behind it and attacks her. Poor Iku.

Then again, a lot of the fights in SWR happen for no good reason, to the point where it's actually really common for the characters to go "wait, why did we just fight?" after the stage is completed. It's kinda amusing

If Iku were a Pokemon Trainer, her ace would be Absol. Because coming down from high, lofty places to tell everyone about misfortune and then being declared the bringers of misfortune by everyone is something they have in common.

I haven't played Pokemon in awhile but who would be the Tenshi to Absol's Iku?

Iku kind of reminds me of those responsible, older nanny's who try to stop teir charge's antics in SWR.

The sky is the biggest, bluest ocean, you see...

Hmmm, Iku.

I don't really see her as having any particular connection to Tenshi. If anything it's probably like Letty's relationship to Cirno in Canon. "Why would you associate someone as awesome as myself with that whiny kid?"

I wonder if she and the other servants pass notes through the atmosphere through a shared ability to read and manipulate it. The atmosphere aka the grapevine aka the gossip well.

edited 8th Sep '14 8:49:29 AM by Antimatter625

I think Iku's connection with Tenshi can be boiled down to "one of the celestial Servants who has to clean up her messes", but they didn't get to know each other personally until SWR (and by "get to know each other personally", I mean "beat the shit out of each other".)

The oarfish youkai having a mild form of "same race telepathy" via atmosphere reading is a cool concept.

They're neighbors, in that they both live in the sky. I don't have a huge problem with that, since it's basically the same as showing Parsee and Yuugi interacting, but I do find it annoying when people see Iku as another "servant character" who's always satelliting around Tenshi, even though they don't seem close at all. Personally I would compare this to Momiji sometimes being made into Aya's flunky.

The Dragon Palace is the Lunar Capital. There are a lot of connections between the Celestials and the Lunarians.

edited 8th Sep '14 5:48:35 PM by Clarste

And as we know, the moon is an ocean.

I am not saying that to be cheeky, I recall CiLR describing it as such, and how it "dries up" when Toyohime transistions between the "fantastic moon" and the "realistic moon".

Or something. It's been years since I read CiLR. ._.

The moon is absolutely an ocean in Touhou. This is like the most prominent feature of the moon. Fun fact: the trip to the moon is the first time either Marisa or Reimu saw the ocean, and for them that was the most memorable part of the trip. Also relates to Toyohime's "connecting mountains and sea" power: Earth is a mountain and the Moon is a sea.

Of course, it has no fish in it so the doesn't completely explain oarfish symbolism.