The New Touhou Character Alternate Interpretation Compendium!

I could at least see a low level spell card that flashes her camera around herself, destroying the opponent's bullets and upping her attack power relative to the number destroyed for yea number of seconds.

Saw some other walks on Youtube, but still no Aya (sigh). Iku does what can only be described as 'stylish floating'. Remilia has a sort of mince. Sakuya has an extremey cool swagger. Also, how could I have forgotten Suika's drunken stagger? For shame, Asterism.

There's already a bomb item that destroys bullets so I could see a slightly altered version being an Aya specific thing.

Mince, huh? Is that what that tiptoe, hands weirdly held thing is? I think her back walk is more normal. Since she's not using her wings to float barely in touch with the ground.

Suika's drunken stagger is awesome.

edited 19th Sep '11 2:53:50 PM by Bocaj

Finally found an Aya walk. Frankly, I'm more impressed by the pose she uses when she summons a flock of crows. To whit: she balances on one foot, while resting her other foot on her knee. She's reclining whilst standing up.

EDIT: This pose right here◊. Bravo, Shameimaru.

DOUBLE EDIT: I misremembered Suika's walk. She actually runs with her arms up in the air.

edited 19th Sep '11 3:00:35 PM by asterism

Suika does a Bird Run and it is adorable

Wait when the hell was Bird Run renamed to Airplane Arms

edited 19th Sep '11 3:22:57 PM by Metaflare

Since I was a troper so... about a year or two.

Doesn't seem to have been a necessary change really.

Frankly, when I hear Airplane Arms, I think about a really little kid going "Erhhhn! Eirhhn!" and not just that odd running posture that some characters prefer.

Rumia would have Airplane Arms, whereas Suika does a Bird Run.

Rumia's not an aeroplane. She's the number 10 a crucified saint.

Was there a music dump for Aya? I'm gonna make a music dump.

Gliding With Feather and Crow Called Windgirl by CROW'SCLAW. The first is hard rock/metal, it has that exciting feeling and you can definitely hear the neoclassical inspiration in the guitar solo, the latter has a slower blues/rock kind of feeling to it. [1] by dBu mostly focuses on the synths as the main instrument, but the bass and drums are solid in my opinion. Dragonforce style by Demtori. Killing the God of Wind by Iron Attack.

Titeless Sites by EastNewSound. Hooray for Harmonicas. Orchestras and Harps FTW. Electronic with awesome vocals

Aya's theme's has always been one of my favorites. The beginning of Wind God Girl is exciting and the rest of the arrange isn't that bad either. I prefer to Youkai Mountain though, it just appeals to me more for some reason.

Not music related but I find this funny

The thing about Wind God Girl, is that it seems ZUN intentionally made it jazzy. And everyone loves jazz. So everyone loves Wind God Girl.

It makes perfect sense!

Aya ~ Truth

Yes, Hatate, I remember when I first met Aya. It was when I was still only a few hundred years old, rising up in the ranks of the white wolf tengu. I was only a private at the time, if I remember correctly. The oni had just left to go underground and us white wolf tengu were no longer needed as we once wer. So, to celebrae the peace, a few of us grabbed a few bottles of sake and went to celebrate with the kappa. I'm not one for sake, but I always love a game of Dai Shogi with the Kappa elders. Occasionally, in the middle of my matches, I'd see a shadow at the edge of my sight, feel a light breeze fall on me. I figured that it was just my nerves messing with me, so I ignored them.

Two days later, there was a newsletter out in the courtyard, a simple woodprint. "WHITE WOLVES AND KAPPA HOLD DRUNKEN ORGY" screamed the headline. Below it, there was a rough drawing of us holding cups of sake larger than our heads. The article following it conveniently omitted any mention of my sake-less Dai Shogi matches. And at the very bottom of this farce, "Shameimaru Aya" was neatly printed, as if the whole thing was a scholarly paper.

She'd always been like that since that day. Going about the mountain, sticking her nose into everything. If you had a secret, she'd 'interview' you until you got fed up and told her. If you had a diary, she'd sneak in and read the diary for days on end, never letting you know she was there. At the end of the month, she'd hold a special exposé on you. If you had a secret relationship, well, you'd save yourself the trouble by making it public. The worst thing was that no one could stop her. In between her little escapades, she'd continue to do the espionage duties assigned to her by Lord Tenma. More so, she wouldn't touch him or any of the powerful elders. She'd be so polite whenever she wasn't snooping that you wouldn't think that she's as bad as people said she was. And as a spy, she was allowed by the law to do whatever deemend necessary to get her information, even if it was from her own flesh and feathers. No one could convince the people in power that she was a pest. Besides, even if we could arrest her, how could we? Even then, when she was barely two hundred years old, she could outfly any three of us.

We eventually convinced Lord Tenma, through the sheer bulk of our complaints, to bring an end to this. He summoned Aya to our meeting place and showed her our complaints, all 240 of them, and asked for an explanation. "Lord Tenma," she said, doffing her tokin, "I have a mission. You see, the tengu are the greatest out of all the youkai. Only we are smart enough and clever enough to create this grand society which you lead. However, we are still people of deceit. We do not make our intentions clear, instead hiding our true motives in the shadows. This should not be. Were not the oni, the only beings more powerful than us, people of truth? Of candidness? I am trying to make us as good, no, better than the oni. I am teaching the people to fear deceit, to fear secrets. We will learn to not bother with shadowy talks in the least. When I am done, I nor anyone else, will have to spy on the tengu ever again." As she closed her speech, my heart sank. For one thing, Lord Tenma would certainly accept that as a suitable answer. For another, she actually had a point. She was an evil, but a necessary evil.

For your sake, I'm glad that she 'completed' her mission before you arrived. Now she's obsessed with distorting the truth of the humans and youkai below us. She thinks that they're getting more intelligent, more capable of competing with us. However, according to her theory, as long as she controls and confounds their truth, they'll never be as powerful as us.

Perhaps the evil isn't necessary anymore.

This was originally supposed to be Momiji looking down at Aya for being younger and less respectful than she was. I like this better.

Hmm. That was an interesting take on Aya's relation with the other tengu, and the early days of the newspaper, as well as what she does now.

I really liked the idea that before she got her camera, she crudely drew her own pictures.

Also, Aya's speech sounds kinda odd coming from her (though this is just my personal interpretation of Aya of course). Did she have it preperpared in case she got called out?

edited 19th Sep '11 6:13:52 PM by Otherarrow

I guess, on some lower level, that is actually the reasoning behind Aya's actions. Or, rather, her actions are driven primarily by the Id and the explanation comes from her Superego. In other words, it's her self-justification for why she's not a blight upon youkaidom.

And it sounds like that because Aya's trying to be so polite about it. that it makes her detractors look silly.

I always assumed tengu were a self-propagating species of youkai, whereas stuff like kitsune aren't born, but are made from a starter animal + time. So I guess the "originally a crow" comment could joss that, or else it's referring to how the tengu as a whole are derived from crows in the sense that they're sorta supernatural human-animal hybrids, like how kappa are turtlefolk and... Rumia is... moving along. And then we can start speculating over whether Japanese mythology was inspired by the tengu, or if the tengu were created as the direct result of humanity's belief in them.

And where did "bird people" become "wolf-bird people?" I suppose it could be worse ("pig-bear men"), but still, odd.

Intriguing. "Aya + Cirno" picdump time which is as always NSFW the ads I mean not the pics I wouldn't do that without a warning on the link itself anyways:

• Commentators can't decide if she's comforting Cirno with a hanky or has just stolen her panties
• Cirno relates the time she soloed the SDM
• Handheld
• Blasphemy, heresy, gluttony
• Some doujin cover
• Cirno has had enough of her snide insinuations
• Papergirl
• Not their intended use
• Sometimes the paper is just an excuse for juvenile behavior
• It's got "Human Interest" all over it, c'mon!

There's an idea, Aya immersing herself in a fad every few decades or so and building her identity around it. So... what was "in" in Japan during the early 1800s? Anyone?

This isn't English cla... pardon, this isn't Literature class. There's no assignments or anything, and you shouldn't feel obligated to meet some sort of post quota. You don't have to force yourself to come up with something you aren't happy about to earn your fellow tropers' approval. Write if the mood strikes you, and if the muse eludes you, no worries.

That said, there will be a final. If I were you I'd start studying the PC-98 crowd just to stay ahead of the game.

She dots the i's in "incestuous vampire affair" with little hearts, it's adorable.

Maybe they go for "take-out" but they're terrible at it? Oh, to have some drawing ability and be able to make a comic about an ill-fated hunting expedition. It's just not fair to be a maneater in an age of tasers and mace.

Yes, but the more the merrier - I missed the vocal stuff and tend to avoid metal, so thanks for rounding out the selection.

Hmm. Journalism is supposed to be about the public good, about improving society through the free flow of information. So is Aya staying true to that or twisting it to a more selfish purpose - not "the people need to know," but "newspapers will make ours the greatest civilization." Also, Aya's woodcuts = lol. Now imagining a prehistoric Aya doing scandalous cave paintings.

There's no way Aya is that much of a creep. She'd definitely make sure to brand it as an underage incestuous vampire affair and condemn it accordingly.

edited 19th Sep '11 11:05:57 PM by SuperDimensionman

For the record, the tengu claim that they drink 18 liters of sake as a greeting. And their hat doubles as a sake cup for emergencies. When Suika invites Aya for a drink she treats it as a challenge and accepts it, knowing that she's in a drinking contest with an oni. So they're a culture of big drinkers. I'm not sure implicating them for drinking large amounts of sake would actually count as libel in this society. Unless of course you meant to imply that the sake cups were only as large as their heads. I mean, how could they get drunk with so little sake?

edited 19th Sep '11 11:30:01 PM by Clarste

Well, since she was saying that head-sized cup of sake was involved in a drunken kappa orgy, you could take it as implying that Momiji can't hold her booze.

Seriously! I mean, geez Remilia! Wait until she's 500, ya creep!

But if she was so obsessed with the truth, why was the headline about Momiji such an obvious lie?

If the border had gone up just a little later, she would still be a ninja, except now she'd wear black. Or orange overalls, either or.

It seems Aya stalks Reimu whenever there's an incident. Presumably she does not whenever she's directly involved with one (MoF, SWR), and in SA she uses Yukari's radio orbs because she's spooked by the oni, but otherwise...

It's not hard to imagine Aya hiding in the bushes during UFO and TD, and getting annoyed when the ship leaves for Makai/the mausoleum door closes before she can get in.

edited 20th Sep '11 2:36:33 AM by asterism

She'd let out a resigned sigh and go and make up stuff like usual. But it just wasn't the same without the pictures.

The Great Tengu called her into his/her office and complimented her on her complete absence of any sense of reality but asked why there were no pictures.

At the annual newsies, the article got an honorable mention with the judges saying that if it had pictures, it could have won first place.

She becomes barraged by well-meaning readers who ask her if her camera broke or something.

She drags herself home, shoulders slumped in defeat. A single gun shot is heard on Youkai Mountain that night.*

Careful where you're aiming that post, Bocaj, I almost got a sore throat.

That "sorta winning" headline better have been "Shrine Maiden and pals fight Kung Fu Zombie Hordes"

Anyway, yeah. Aya has a nice hat thingy.

Bah. It ranks not in the Top 10 Nicest Hats, and comes nowhere near to the Stylish Gods of Millinery that are the hats of Renko Usami, Iku Nagae and Koishi Komeiji.