Even a strong incident specialist would not want to be in a 1 on 3 death fight where enemies can hide but they cannot.
...Where to even start with this one?
Warning: Spoilers.
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General
- The variants as a whole are this. Every one of them is a cruel, violently unstable and grotesque parody of their canon counterpart, in appearance and/or actions, and it's usually both. Variant Marisa's the most reasonable of them, not because she's particularly kind, but because she's the only one so far that could be reasoned with at all. Given that she's an aggressive, sociopathic Blood Knight, that speaks volumes as to what the rest are like...
- Variant Sanae's easily the most horrifying of the lot. Her appearance as a lanky, eyeless, corpselike Sanae with a constant Ghostly Gape and Slasher Smile is somehow the least of it. The curses she casts assault her victims with nightmarish visions, Sanae's whispering in their heads, and eventually their death in a hellish high school... and while it's unclear how real her illusions are, what is clear is that at least part of them very much are. The lethal bad luck the target suffers is just the icing on the cake. Even Variant Marisa calls her ability scary.
Prologue
- The prologue has a terrifying Variant Reimu killing Suika and Kana Anaberal, and severely injured Remilia. Later, Suika is revealed to survive the attack, but the scene where Variant Reimu abrubtly pierces Suika's head with needles is still terrifying.
Marisa arc
- Sunny Milk gets eaten alive by a variant monster, while Marisa can only watch helplessly.
Sakuya arc
- Sakuya's death. The poor maid is left desperately crawling away, begging Variant Reimu not to kill her, and screaming for help. It does no good; the variant stabs her with what has to be at least dozens of needles, one after another, as Sakuya spits up blood. She finally dies when she's stabbed through the head with three needles at once...
- And her suffering doesn't end there. Rin shows up, cheerfully adding corpses to her wheelbarrow, and gets an unsettling look in her eyes as she collects Sakuya's, saying she wants to try an experiment... What follows is like something out of Frankenstien, if the doctor's lab doubled as a torture chamber, complete with heads on meat hooks and a shelf full of organs in jars. Rin pulls a switch and seemingly reanimates Sakuya with a massive shock, before happily approaching the smoking corpse with a cleaver in hand. The kasha brings the cleaver down on Sakuya's head, and starts musing to herself as the maid's eyes close:Rin: "Maybe I used too much power? Well, there are still lots of parts left. So we'll try about 100 times more~ So give your best."
- Outside, the Underground residents are being massacred; Parsee is crushed beneath the foot of Variant Parsee, Yuugi's head is crushed by Variant Yuugi, who punches her body out of sight, and judging from the funeral shrine Rin has set up with Utsuho and Koishi's pictures, they've been killed offscreen. What appear to be zombies march towards the Palace of the Earth Spirits, with Variant Satori trailing behind them. The route ends with a close-up of Variant Satori, who appears to have a hole full of eyes for a face, rapidly flickering across the screen.
- Speaking of the underground variants, their designs are suitably freaky. Aside from the aforementioned Variant Satori, Variant Parsee is a vaguely draconic, multi-eyed monster with Parsee's face atop her head, Variant Yuugi seems to be a hulking, armor-clad mass of horns, Variant Yamame is a giant spider with at least 6 bulging eyes, and Variant Kisume's arguably the worst of the lot; she bursts out of the ground with a Nightmare Face resembling a demonic, shrieking skull, most of her body hidden in a gigantic, wormlike bucket.
Cirno arc
- The wild fairies are getting brutally massacred by the variant creatures, with Cirno being the Sole Survivor. Even the particularly strong fairies like Lily Black and Vinca can only stand up to the variants for so long, especially without the ability to revive. The only reason fairy is not an extinct species in this Gensokyo is because Remilia employs fairies in her mansion as servants.
- Yukari once implies that The Three Fairies of Light can pose major threats if they realize their full power. Well, this series have their variant counterpart use their stealth based powers to the fullest and efficiently wear down their targets like professional assassins, unlike many variant monsters that mostly use brute force. Special mention to Star Sapphire Variant for being even sneakier than her real fairy version.
Patchouli arc
- Variant Minoriko is a downplayed case compared to the rest of the route, but there's still something unnerving about a demonic looking bug with huge, grinning, human teeth. She goes down quickly enough, but her self-destruction obliterates Voile, and sets Patchouli up for the rest of the route's horror.
- In the aftermath of Variant Minoriko's explosion, Patchouli muses about the possibility of a mastermind to the incident... and then notices a bloody hand resting on her desk. Patchy looks up, and she and the viewer are introduced to Variant Sanae with a jumpscare of her twitching, shrieking face.
- Immediately after, Patchouli seemingly wakes up from a nap, and apart from ominous bursts of static, things seem to be back to relative normalcy. And then Variant Sanae abruptly pops her screeching head out from behind Patchy's.
- Patchouli's investigation takes her down to a room far below the mansion, where her books of forbidden black magic are kept. The fact that many of these are bad enough that Patchy wants nothing to do with them if she doesn't absolutely have to is unnerving enough, but the increasingly low lighting and complete lack of music make things ominous even before anything happens. Then Variant Sanae shows up, and things promptly go to hell. Patchouli runs up the stairs for dear life amidst rapid bursts of static, with a huge eye popping up, drawings of smiling, bleeding children on the walls, and screaming mannequin heads with human eyes and mouths floating above the stairs. To top it all off, the door's locked, and it's an absolute miracle one of the fairy maids opens it in time; Variant Sanae is right behind Patchouli by then.
- Patchy resurrects and brainwashes Variant Minoriko for an interrogation, and things go well up until Variant Sanae's named as the mastermind. Variant Minoriko begins madly rambling, ignoring Patchouli's orders to stop in a barrage of Word Salad Horror. It only ends when the variant's head explodes, showering Patchy and the wall behind her in blood.
- Marisa's come by with Remilia in tow, Patchy's gotten a brief moment of respite, and has a viable plan to deal with Variant Sanae's mental attacks until Remilia wakes up. The music's eerie, but otherwise, things'll be fine, right? WRONG. As soon as Patchouli closes her eyes, she finds herself in a run-down school, with Variant Sanae reading at a table. She gets up, Patchy braces herself... and Variant Sanae slides out from behind the librarian, screeching her head off in a massive Nightmare Face that puts all her previous ones to shame. What follows is a barrage of surreal and nightmarish imagery, from something grabbing Patchouli, to a frog being run over by an ambulance, to frog-headed students watching as a twisted, corpse-like Variant Sanae continues to scream, stretching up to the ceiling. It's no wonder when Vissel finally manages to wake her, Patchouli promptly throws up from stress.
- The horror doesn't end when Patchouli wakes up; she looks across the room to see someone peering in from a broken door, before darting away... and given that the other person has eyes, it's not Variant Sanae.
- Speaking of the variant priestess, if the previous encounter with her wasn't enough indication Patchy's plan wasn't working, Vissel's death is where it's officially shot to hell. The fairy wanders off in search of Remilia, and slips on the water that's somehow spilled from the nearby fish tank. Before Patchouli can do anything, the tank falls, and smashes Vissel's head open.
- Variant Sanae shows up not a minute later, her corpse-like body on full display as she hangs in the corner, her hair spreading across the room as she grins. The entire room starts falling apart as Patchy desperately runs for the door, manages to make it in time... and it's locked. She barely manages to haul herself through the window... and straight into Variant Sanae's school. Patchouli tries telling herself it's just a hallucination... and then starts wondering when it began.
- The truly concerning part is that Marisa's arrival was definitely a hallucination. At the time, it was welcome relief from all the horror, but thinking back to the ending of Marisa's route, the entire thing was a massive red flag. Marisa showed up with Remilia and went through the front door... and Patchouli was dead by that point. So if Variant Sanae's powers can create a convincing, non-nightmarish scenario like that... how much of anything Patchouli's been through was real?!
- Patchy is left running from a mishmash of corpses, three of which are Meiling, Koakuma and Sakuya, and ends up on the school roof. She stops for a moment... and hears growling behind her. She turns just in time to see Variant Sanae charge her, scuttling on all fours like a spider, head thrown back, and knock her off the side of the roof. Her powers gone with her library, Patchouli sadly falls to her death as the school changes back to the Scarlet Devil Mansion in a burst of static.???: "In the end, she couldn't escape her fate. ...but you don't need to feel bad for her. Neither I nor you can escape from fate... congratulations... congratulations...
- After the credits, a fairy maid wanders into a room where someone's talking, and finds Variants Nue and Mamizou waiting for her. She tries to run, and Variant Mamizou smashes her to a bloody paste with her tail. The most concerning part is when she tells Variant Nue to clean up, and prepare for the Demon King's arrival. Unless that somehow refers to Variant Sanae, despite what Variant Minoriko said, someone else is running things.
Meiling arc
Flandre arc
- Variant Marisa has a paper fan that can shred and deatomize her victims with just a swing, which she eventually uses to slaughter a bunch of low class variant monsters Flandre has just befriended. The Magitek paper fan weapon is awfully similar to the one owned by Toyohime of Lunar Capital. What if the paper fan actually belong to Toyohime? How did Variant Marisa acquire such weapon that scares even Yukari? What happened in the Lunar Capital of that universe?
Three Mischievous Fairies arc
- Variant Reisen kills both Luna Child and Star Sapphire with such ease. And this is supposed to be one of the tamest arcs in the story.
Yuuka arc
- Variant Medicine's lethal poison and her equally horrifying looks. At least the real Medicine looks normal when she's not ranting about humans.
- Yuuka's Stepford Smiler face when she is angry is also pretty frightening. Gensokyo is lucky that Yukka somewhat fights for the good cause.
Rumia arc
- Variant Yuuka kills Wriggle in cold blood, then proceeds to torture Mystia and Rumia.
Alice arc
Mokou arc
- Variant Mokou and Variant Kaguya are two of the most frightening characters in this fan series, they have immense power that matches their grotesque looks. Bonus point as they are immortals and cannot be killed.
