Touhou

"Impurity" is basically a primitive conception of contagion or toxicity. Avoid these specific things or else bad things will happen to you. Avoiding corpses and blood is sound medical advice for not getting infected.

Most beliefs regarding things you shouldn't do origin from what you probably shouldn't do anyway, although usually for different reasons. If something's considered unclean, it was probably not something entirely safe. Pork is one example from religions that don't allow it. From my understanding, pork goes bad faster (or more easily) than beef or other food in warmer countries. Similarly, I get the impression that a lot of the methods to deal with youkai in folk tales can be summed up with behaving like a proper Japanese person should be behaving.

Isn't that basically every fairy tale in nutshell?

Pigs are also fairly close to humans, so a larger number of pathogens are compatible and can jump from them to us. Hep C is a nasty example, and studies have found that countries that eat more sausage, like Germany, have higher infection rates.

Junko's never identified as ever having been a Lunarian, just a divine spirit who purified herself completely..

This confusion seems to be because I originally misidentified her as a Lunarian in my early plot summaries. To be fair, she's mythologically the same person as Chang'e so the idea of her not being a Lunarian still seems kind of odd to me, but it's certainly the case that the story never identifies her as such.

For some reason, the idea of test tube babies hadn't occured to me. That probably would deal with a lot of the kegare issues.

Annnd yeah, I guess Moonrabbits are just... their own thing. However they come into existence is presumably kegare-free because the moon was pure before the Lunarians and had moonbunnies there at the time already. Maybe they just pop out of each other's ears fully grown like some sort of cartoon. Who knows?

I suspect this is (mostly) true. It's possible they're just on a much much longer cycle (As was pointed out, they carried some kegare with them when moving to the moon, so I doubt they're entirely without). Which does handily solve birth rate issues. If you're only fertile 3 days once every ten thousand years, then it's not much of a problem, especially if you're conscious of the fact and avoid sexy times during that.

Which is probably easier if you're temporarily exiled and shut away in some sort of cage or whatever to prevent all the kegare from getting all over the place.

One myth has rabbits being put on the moon by a/the Buddha when a rabbit threw itself in a fire to provide a/the Buddha something to eat.

Rabbits go hardcore.

^ Lunarians are not Vulcans.

Indeed. Lunarians are just arrogant moon elves who are obsessed with (Shinto) purity and cleanliness.

Since childhood, Do not look to the past, Kosuzu

Technically, they're human, just ones free-er from impurity.

Also, kind of late to ask this, but Toyohime is supposed to be Otohime from Urashima Tarou story, yes?

Technically, they're gods.

Otohime = Toyotama-hime. Her sister is Tamayori-hime.

Not in the same way as Kanako/Suwako, though?

Which are the basis of Toyohime and Yorihime.

In the sense that Jupiter and Mercury aren't gods in the same way as the Lares.

I'd say it's more like the Aesir and the Vanir, if one conquered and subjugated the other. Japan has two separate clans of gods, the Amatsukami (Heavenly Gods) and the Kunitsukami (Earthly Gods). Kanako and Suwako specifically represent the most famous conflict between the two, with Kanako being the invading Amatsukami who defeated the leader of the Kunitsukami. Touhou pretty much never uses this specific terminology, preferring to be coy about it.

However, the one time they do mention it is in one of Sanae's LoLK endings, where Kanako points out that Sanae, a kunitsukami descended from Suwako, managed to take revenge on the amatsukami by invading the moon.

Edit: Kanako's specific position is a bit odd, especially since her Akyu profile almost explicitly notes that she's likely a deified version of an invading general or army that settled in Japan during ancient times, but in general the Amatsukami seem to be older than humanity and not rally care about faith, ie: Eirin.

edited 30th May '16 10:24:25 AM by Clarste

This just strikes me, so, basically Lunarians are "human-gods" (forgot the term) like Sanae then? Originally they were humans that lived on the moon, but earth humans deified them so they also became gods.

Have Kanako specifically been identified as a heavenly god?

She's a god of wind and rain with the power to create qian. She's definitely got a 'sky' theme.

I mean, like, her faction.

In Touhou lore, it seems that Amatsukami = Lunarian and Kunitsukami = various gods like Suwako, Hina, and Aki sisters.

Where does Kanako falls here?

The term for beings like Sanae is arahitogami.

edited 30th May '16 8:53:22 PM by rmctagg09

So let me get this straight, an Amatsukami is a being like Amaterasu and a Kunitsukami is a being like the Aki sisters, right?

More or less.

No, the term arahitogami refers specifically to people who are "living gods" in that they're considered gods while at the same time being mortal humans. Normally, people wait until you're dead before they start worshiping you, which was the case for Kanako, Urashima Taro, and Miko. You can think of it as the difference between Jesus (who is supposed to have been literally God while also a man), and any of the various saints in Catholicism, who were pretty much just great people who get worshiped. "God" doesn't really have the same connotation of being almighty as it does in English, so deified humans are pretty much just saints, in practical terms.

As for the Lunarians though, I don't think the majority of them were ever human, since their history predates humanity. Izanagi Object pretty explicitly dates the era of the gods when it claims that Izanagi created the Japanese archipelago hundreds of millions of years ago, and Eirin (Omoikane) is Izanagi's older sibling. Toyohime also speaks about the evolution of life as if it's something that disappointed Tsukuyomi. In general, the impression seems to be that the the era of the gods covers the billions of years of Earth's prehistory.

edited 30th May '16 11:39:28 PM by Clarste