The New New Touhou Character Alternate Interpretation Compendium

You mean I missed a perfect opportunity to download, crop, upload to TV Tropes, replace her character page pic, and copy and paste the image location to her profile post for this compendium. And I suppose that's true.

Hmm... well, I don't like it. Black background is bothersome, and it's pulled in close to her face so if you keep its dimensions similar to the other pics, you're only seeing her from the waist up, sans most of her arms. The HM profile pic was a bit iffy art-wise, but you could see more of her. I'm balking on replacing it with this on the characters page.

If anyone wants to take another crack at cropping Nitori's new portrait, let me warn that you may want to edit it in another program before sending it to TV Tropes - when I tried to upload/edit the image as-is from the Touhou Wiki, it was so tall that I couldn't reach the bottom of the edit/submit panel.

EDIT: Fie on this awkward page-topper.

edited 6th May '15 10:06:52 PM by Tacitus

It's more work, but there are wider versions in-game, which can be seen in the trailer. That you could then shrink to have a better height-width ratio.

edited 6th May '15 10:22:34 PM by Clarste

So, Nitori. Having just read most of WaHH (at least the ones with completed translations), Nitori and her fellow kappa come off as being a race of eccentric geniuses. Great with machinery, but with terrible social skills, which manifest themselves in the kappa's inability to work together in large groups, or with Nitori herself, shyness and/or arrogance which, while seemingly contradictory, can both be interpreted as manifestations of general social awkwardness.

I think Sanae put it best in WaHH Chapter 5:

Nitori is the everykappa.

You meet a kappa, you met Nitori. And vice versa.

When people drown, their butthole widened because of some dead body functions.

Andcient Japanese didn't know it, so they assumed they got drowned and their butthole fisted by a turtle-man-cucumber-loving monster.

I still find this stuff amusing.

It was the only logical explanation

In a way, it's also a way of blaming the drowned person for their own deaths. They weren't polite enough to the kappa.

So they were not polite for getting drowned in water?

Nitori Kawashiro:

A kappa youkai who is quite the technological genius. Very confident in her abilities.

You know, perhaps her being shy in Mountain of Faith wasn't because she's shy by nature, but rather due to the social upheaval the Moriya's arrival had caused.

If you're looking for the latest in tech, look no further than Nitori and the rest of her race. When they aren't busy spewing gadgetry, they can be seen doing survival games. Kappa are even generous towards their fellow aquatic friends, taking care of a seal while making sure it's not overworked exciting those pesky humans.

I wonder if all kappa are arrogant, or if Nitori's more arrogant than the average kappa. And arrogance is too strong a word. Proud, dependable, those work well.

When the kappa invent too much junk— I mean, gadgets!— they take them to storage sheds that can be found all around Gensokyo. Kappa sure are amazing.

Give Nitori a crazy idea for an invention, and she'll find a way to make it work. There's nothing she can't make. Hm, makes me think she has great imagination, creativity, and stuff.

edited 8th May '15 5:33:14 PM by Diamite

I had a similar idea, that like how Nitori is convinced kappa are humans' best friends, she's similarly deluding herself by thinking she's shy. Sorta like those people who self-diagnose as autistics or aspies or whatever, when they're really folks who have put zero ranks into Diplomacy or Speech or what have you. So she acts kind of shy because she thinks she is, but during extended social interactions she forgets and her true personality surfaces.

Turtles with a hive mind, they are legion ♪

If you fish up a corpse with a distended anus, you'd hope that they did something to deserve it. Because the alternative is that you live in a world where that sort of thing can happen to good people.

But little in the way of teamwork or standardization, Kappa tech is very individualized. Something from being a river spirit, perhaps? The flowing but chaotic tendencies of water? Like without a vessel/project to fill it'll get everywhere, and even if it holds its shape, once you remove the vessel/project it just reverts to a mess?

Take a look at the Marisa-Nitori route in SA. Nitori is kind of a Jerkass, then instantly becomes humble and subservient to Yuugi when she realises she can hear her. Even in MoF the protagonists' interactions with her go something like:

edited 9th May '15 7:52:06 AM by Prime32

Kappa are afraid of oni and Nitori is kind of a jerk to people who are not oni.

Talk about blue and orange morality.

Okay, I guess Nitori put some ranks into Groveling at least.

More like a desperate wish for there to be any sort of morality in this crazy world of ours, so that we can do something to prevent our soggy corpses from having weird butts.

So more a "Nitori as representative of the kappa" question - engineers? How'd that happen? The tengu adapting their ninja/intelligence-gathering background into becoming paparazzi makes sense, but what about being a race of amphibious butt-goblins led the kappa to grow into gearheads? Or was it even their decision? Did the oni just point at them one day and said "we'll bash stuff, the birds can do the subtle stuff, so you gets to build junk."

Who knows? For all we know good at tinkering with stuff considering what they do drowned people.

Perhaps the old college try method of ripping into people's butts was becoming boring, so they brainstormed on new ways of doing that. Brainstorming led to other exciting ventures, and now they are the great tinkers of the world.

Tacitus calling them "butt goblins" made me imagine that they might be riding along with the current pop-cultural trend of making goblins tinkers and builders. They certainly act like MtG goblins in some ways...

edited 10th May '15 11:42:31 PM by Durazno

Where did that trend start anyway?

Same thing with people arbitrarily struck by lightning in Greece. Surely they must have done something dumb to anger Zeus.

While most goblins in Magic are Red (the color of "freedom through action" as classified by the game's color-based alignment system), Nitori looks more blue to me ("perfection through knowledge") thanks to her and her fellow kappa's scientific leanings and hydromancy. Then again, she specializes in machines (i.e. "artifacts", which are, with rare exceptions, colorless and can therefore be used by anyone regardless of alignment), and multicolored characters of any combinations are possible (having no color alignment is also possible, but reserved for artificial, eldritch, or transcendent beings in Magic). So Nitori could be both red and blue, depending on how emotional/rational you consider her. I'm sorry if I'm rambling. It's just that assigning color identities to characters from other franchises is a time-honored tradition among Magic fans.

Also known as the Just-world hypothesis. And sadly, it has indeed been used as an excuse for all sorts of victim blaming in the real world.

Hey, you're right! Lightblade's already examined the MtG angle, so I'd have to say that the kappa have plenty of parallels to Warcraft goblins - individualistic tinkerers, affection for heavy ordinance, spin themselves as everyone's friend but fleece their customers with a smile on their face, and they once served a race of brutes but have since struck out on their own.

I wonder if this was intentional, coincidence, or just natural evolution. Let's look at the races of the Youkai Mountain again - the oni were bruisers with a great deal of strength and toughness, and the tengu are blindingly fast which serves as both offense and defense. So how can the poor little kappa compete? They'll never be a match for the oni physically, and turtles aren't known for their speed or maneuverability in air engagements. So they had to get smart and make up for their deficiencies in other ways.

Or maybe it was unnatural. Gensokyo said "screw it" in 1885, about fifteen years into Japan's industrial revolution. That's a decent window for a curious kappa to get caught up in the "traditional values, foreign learning" sentiment.

All this from a random Beavis and Butt-Head reference, what are the odds.

Blizzard has probably done the most to popularize the "gearhead goblin" in our time, but even Tolkien mentioned that goblins had some degree of cleverness and were responsible for many wicked devices (even into the modern era, so tanks and stuff). And I guess you could go back even further to Norse mythology's tales of short tunnel-dwellers making incredible items, though the dwarves of course would take offense to that.

Red/Blue? I can see it. They'd get along pretty well with the Izzet League, I imagine.

That actually puts them in a position similar to humans in a lot of settings, doesn't it? At least before actual humans started tromping through.

And you know? The taxonomy of mythological creatures wasn't always so hard and fast as it tends to be in modern settings. I could easily see goblins being sort of like dwarves being sort of like black elves...

edited 12th May '15 1:03:46 AM by Durazno

Nitori's bag. I like the lock.

Also, it must be quite hard for her to move all that luggage around(Yeah, I remember carrying lots of stuff in one bag in high school. Hm, wasn't so bad when I think about it.)

Then I remember Pokemon Trainers carry around lots of stuff themselves and are perfectly fine, so Nitori's golden.

Wonder if she keeps all her gizmos in there, or if she has some in storage...

There is an Izzet League?!

I can attest to that.

Oh, is that what the key is for? Huh. I kinda preferred an alternate theory.

I'm sure someone familiar with the fighting games could give at least a partial inventory of what Nitori has stuffed into that backpack, but I can't imagine that it's everything she's put together. So maybe she has a home for herself at Genbu Ravine, even though the only sign of civilization I see in the pics of it are some pipes on the rock walls... Hmm. Saying that the kappa have underwater dwellings is too easy, so let's go with the optical camouflage angle and say that their homes are all over the place, we just can't make them out.

Something else to think about - kappa are highly individualistic, prolific inventors. We know of one of their creations, the dragon statue/weather prediction device in the Human Village, but how many other kappa devices are scattered about Gensokyo, forgotten by their owners and left behind by long-dead creators? How many abandoned laboratories and unguarded storehouses are cunningly hidden from searching eyes?

And what if a clever human girl stumbled upon a small kappa factory dedicated to producing tracked vehicles, and put her own spin on the designs...

"What if... instead of treads... I gave it a HUGE EYEBALL?"

Nitori's lock is also on her Last Word sprite in HM, though IIRC it's hard to see in actual gameplay.