Presumably because Hell is for the damned, and potentially to serve as Makai's Beef Gate. Unless you're asking why Shingyoku in particular is in that position, to which we can only wonder.
Anyhoo. Up next will be Flandre, followed by Youmu and it looks like... hmm, just some little devil. Oh well.
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Themes: "Highly Responsive to Prayers"
note , "Oriental Magician"
note , "The Legend of KAGE"
note , "Romantic Children"
note , "Maple Wise"
note ,"The Last Judgment"
note , "End of the World ~ World's End"
note , "Alice in Wonderland"
note , "Rural Makai City Esoteria"
note , "Fires of Hokkai"
note
Write-Up:
It's a land of demons, but far from a Hell.
The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume, but will help you unlock your magical potential.
It's an alien realm of shadow whose inhabitants live in peace and harmony.
Makai, the Demon World, is a plane of existence accessible from Gensokyo, if one can find and overcome the barriers between the worlds. It should not be confused with Hell, and Makai is neither an afterlife nor a form of eternal punishment - it is simply a world very different from that of mortals, even if its inhabitants appear reassuringly human.
The alien nature of Makai makes it inherently hostile to visitors, but the same eldritch miasma that fills its air empowers arcanists, so some brave humans and youkai visit the realm as part of their magical training. Makai's terrain includes hazy red skies, black wastes, and fields of blue ice, but the natives are surprisingly civilized and, to people like Reimu and Marisa, boringly peaceful. A demonic "invasion" of many years ago was evidently a civilian travel agency arranging for tours of Gensokyo.
Besides the Makai folk's main city, visitors to this realm may want to see (or stay well away from) the crystalline citadel of Pandæmonium, the fortress of Makai's ruler and alleged creator. The isolated region of Hokkai may be less welcoming (assuming one can find it), as its purpose seems to be to seal away dangerous prisoners. Places like the Ruins of Vina and the Fallen Temple, which conspicuously sports a Christian crucifix, offer their own mysteries, while the most inquisitive of explorers may uncover one young magician's private Wonderland. Though for most travelers, simply surviving in Makai will occupy their full attention, leaving little time for tourism.
See also the previous compendium.
The Chew Toy of Gaming
Something tells me that the events of Mystic Square would have woken Shinki up and destroyed Makai as a result. As Makai shows up again in UFO (assuming that PC-98 is actually canon), that's kinda impossible. It's definitely her creation, though.
Lampshade Hanging: It's a lifestyle.Well, the Makai we see in UFO is a smoky wasteland quite unlike the cities, valleys, ice fields and castles of MS. So it's possible that the Makai we saw in the latter was Shinki's dream creation, and after it went poof all that was left was stuff like Hokkai. A dump, in other words.
So that would make non-dump Makai a dream of Shinki's, the outside world a dream of Yukari's, Gensokyo a dream of Mary's, that nameless dreamworld from LLS's Ex-stage might have been a dream of the 'getsus, then there's the Dream World a certain baku showed up in, and the fantasy world under the Lake of Blood, and whatever the World of Fantasies in SoEW was...
This is a convoluted cosmology.
Alright, an excuse to do some world-building for a potential future writing project.
Makai - History
The world of Makai is positively inundated in magical energy. Sources differ as to whether Makai is "just" a dimension with higher-than-usual background magic, or even the primordial source of magic itself. At any rate, it is a highly morphic plane of existence of great value to those possessing any degree of magical power. And thus, a place worth fighting over.
We can only speculate how many demon lords or archmages have claimed Makai as their own over its history, and what civilizations of magic have risen and fallen. But the evidence suggests that Makai has seen some quite varied occupiers, including an Abrahamic angel who inhabited an evidently Christian shrine.
At any rate, its current ruler is Shinki, who claims to be both a goddess and Makai's creator. It may be more accurate to say that she has created its current incarnation: a peaceful, civilized realm with a seemingly-human population. Or perhaps she is indeed Makai's original creator, who does not have total control over the plane or who has only recently regained that control.
- Inhabitants -
Most of Makai's population are demonic folk, likely formed from the stuff of Makai itself. This makes them natural magicians, while those who choose to specialize in magic can become formidable indeed.
Aside from visiting human mages seeking to improve their powers, Makai is also home to a few youkai, particularly devils, and most interestingly a devilish magician (perhaps even a vampiric one at that) with a foreign name. A possible connection with the aforementioned angel is intriguing - did a host of foreign devils attempt to conquer this font of magic to further their own schemes? And though they were defeated, could they potentially rise again?
Possible, but since Shou refers to Hokkai as a "corner of the infinite plane of Makai," my hunch is that there's only one layer to it.
But that question over whether Shinki still exists - well, it's an interesting one. We usually assume with the PC-98 characters that either they never existed in the first place or are still around but never mentioned. But I suppose it's entirely possible that Shinki was toppled after Mystic Square (just like Sariel was toppled after HRtP?). And boy would that explain what Alice is doing in Gensokyo, huh? Might wonder how many other "magicians" who nobody recognizes from the Human Villages are actually Makai refugees.
Shifting gears somewhat - the way I see it, there's three possibilities for how Makai works:
The first let's call "there can be only one." There's only one ruler of Makai at any given time, and it's changed from game to game. In the first one, some weird pseudo-Christian entity named Sariel was lording it up, with magician-devil-vampires and electric eyeballs as flunkies. Then the fallen angel got a yin-yang in the face and Shinki was able to take over, reshaping Makai and creating a new race of demons to dwell in it. She either continues to rule in the modern continuity offscreen or has since been replaced by a new "god of Makai."
Second let's call "Makai is contested." There's multiple powerful beings controlling their own realms, each claiming to be the true creator/ruler/god of the plane. Reimu visited and wrecked one in HRtP, then visited and wrecked another in MS. This would give an author lots of room to insert an OC demon lord who's trying to get a piece of that sweet miasma.
Third scenario let's call "Makai has a hegemon," a compromise between the previous two. Shinki is either the plane's original creator or its most powerful inhabitant, and controls her own prosperous and peaceful domain, which we saw (and wrecked) in MS. But this domain has hinterlands and inhabitants beyond its borders, strangers like Sariel and Elis. Since Shinki seems to voluntarily limit her authority over her own people, it's entirely possible she wouldn't feel the need to totally dominate Makai. This allows for petty rivals to lurk on the fringes, but they won't be strong enough to seriously contest Shinki's dominance.
Personally, I like the third one the best. It keeps Shinki around and gives her most of the prestige and influence she's attributed with by fans, while still allowing for a more complex Makai that includes a vengeful Sariel as a potential source of conflict.
I personally apply the Occam's Razor, and choose the simplest interpretation.
Shinki is and has always been the creator and ruler of Makai, but as a Reasonable Authority Figure rather than a tyrant. She lets her people do their things and handle their own problems, unless things get really grave. Which is why she only shows up in MS, as that's the only one where we storm the capital.
In Hrt P, we barely know what's the deal with Elis and Sariel. They could have been simple street thugs for all we know, and the grand queen usually doesn't show up in street fights.
UFO? It takes place in Hokkai, which is noted to be in a corner of Makai. Suppose Pandemonium is the United States, Hokkai is likely the equivalent of Antarctica. And the heroine isn't even doing anything problematic there, just some good ol' spellcard duels.
A new image of Makai I've started considering is one that is comparable to the Elder Scrolls concept of Oblivion: by default a great big expanse of nothing, existing outside the normal world/afterlife, that can be shaped or filled as desired. Anyone who doesn't want to deal with the way earth/heaven/hell/the netherworld work — and has the means to leave them — can make their way to this infinite blank slate and shape part of it into a home of their own, run by their rules. In this way we potentially have Shinki's kingdom as one plane of Makai, the wasteland of Hokkai as another, Sariel's dimension as a third, etc.
edited 28th Sep '15 9:44:53 AM by trepmaws
I joined a turkey club once. It was fun and delicious.Well, if Makai is indeed infinite, and neither of them control all of it, then statistically speaking their realm's total area are both endlessly approaching zero.
I like it. Makes sense, too, if there's that much magic just in Makai's air, it should be easy to reshape. And the way you put it suggests that Makai is home to a bunch of misfits, malcontents and nonconformists who aren't happy with the current cosmological arrangement. Rather than put up with boring old Earth, the corrupt nepotism of Heaven, or the bureaucratic nightmare of Hell, they decided to go start their own world.
Which would make a fallen angel's presence more explicable. Is Sariel a rebel to rebels, who has deserted Lucifer's legions for a shot at an independent existence?
I'm warming to the idea that Sariel isn't the Sariel mentioned in various Abrahamic texts, but a local entity who has taken up the name and some of the iconography. Which would explain the crucifix at least.
The existence and function of Hokkai raises questions depending on how we interpret Shinki's control of Makai. If we think she has limited (even if it's self-imposed) influence over the plane, then there's not really a problem with outsiders using a corner of it as a dumping ground for troublesome magic monks, but if she does have complete control over Makai, then we have to ask why she was okay with Byakuren being sealed.
The explanation I went with was that she was obligated by treaty to accept prisoners, though I suppose perhaps Shinki has some problem with Byakuren and thinks she deserves jail time. But then that raises the question of how Byakuren learned one of Shinki's most famous attacks.
The Chew Toy of Gaming
Shinki may not have directly taught her the attack. For all we know, the two could have fought and Byakuren could have stolen the attack from her Marisa-style.
Lampshade Hanging: It's a lifestyle.Maybe she saw it used during the Mystic Square fiasco. Granted this assumes she had a good view of Pandaemonium at the time, which I'm not getting the impression was particularly likely.
Or maybe she learned it more indirectly. The fact that we have fairies flitting about Hokkai with Shinki's wings has me speculating (and this assumes Hokkai is part of Shinki's turf) that the magic used to create the plane contains an imprint of its creator. This shows up physically on fairies, given they originate from the land made by said magic. Byakuren, meanwhile, spent centuries in this strange land honing her skills with the kind of diligence one would expect from someone who's both a magician 'and' a monk (so a lot). If she was studying the magic of the plane for that long, perhaps eventually she saw far enough into the Matrix, so to speak, to see how the mother of this realm would have used it. Enough so to make a power-enhancing scroll with a will of its own (mimicking the will nearly everything in this world seems to have), and perhaps also enough to mimic what may have been the creator's fighting style. And the latter, as the player sees, turned out to be a pretty good approximation.
...heck, now I'm starting to wonder what else Byakuren could have reverse-engineered if she had another millennium to work with before someone busted her out. Maybe she'd have become skilled enough to walk right out of there herself, with a scroll pulsing with demonic power and Shinki's full arsenal of pseudo-spellcards in tow.
edited 30th Sep '15 8:21:10 AM by trepmaws
I joined a turkey club once. It was fun and delicious.And now a discussion about Makai has introduced the interpretation of Byakuren as a Marisa who multiclassed with a divine casting class. Awesome.
Thinkin' about names, and not just the fact that the Makai folk in Mystic Square are a mix of Western (Sara, Louise and Alice) and Eastern (Yuki, Mai, Yumeko, Shinki) names. Shinki's castle is Pandæmonium, but why did she name it that? Did she flip through some foreign religious books and thought it sounded cool? Or is it truly meant to be a citadel for all demonkind? And would the latter suggest that there are other, non-Shinki demons in Makai?
@Hokkai
I see Shinki as being quite lax in her government. Given that magicians often travel to Makai, and Makaians once planned a disastrous, unpolicied holiday to Gensokyo, Makai doesn't seem to have strict international (or interdimensional) laws.
Likely she just shrugged Byakuren's case off as unimportant. Maybe she even paid her a visit and have some tea time together.
Shinki and Satori should have a "let's not pay attention to what our subjects/pets are doing" party. It'll have tea, cake, discussion of favorite books, and an entire world burning down just outside the palace; should be great.
If Shinki was a demon who left Hell for greener pastures, it would make sense for her to have such as a hands-off approach to governance, as a response to the strict control and bureaucracy of where she came from. No, this is her world now, and if people can handle the harsh environment of Makai then they're welcome to live in it and do as they please. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there were other demons that either followed her when she peaced out or showed up after they heard a viable alternative to the bullcrap of Hell existed. And Pandaemonium, the "place for all demons," is happy to have them. Oh, and I guess anyone else who is gutsy enough to make the trip.
Shinki's "do what thou wilt" attitude of course can lead to things like the Gensokyo tour fiasco, but I think she was prepared to accept that. When you allow for chaos you should be ready for things to get broken every once in a while. It's not like she can't rebuild and adjust things as needed.
As for her interacting with Byakuren, it's not impossible to imagine Shinki talking to one of her more personable prisoners. Their conversations would likely have been pretty interesting, especially when they got to the topic of where they respectively came from; both see their former homes as flawed but differ on how to respond to it (fixing it vs. abandoning it).
edited 30th Sep '15 11:14:46 AM by trepmaws
I joined a turkey club once. It was fun and delicious.Shinki's wings aren't all that crazy, they're just noteworthy for changing appearance during her battle. Or maybe they're not all that crazy compared to crystal chandelier wings.
Right, let's bid the mystical miasma of Makai a fond farewell. Further down the pipeline are Youmu, Koakuma, and... hmm, can't quite identify it. But first, the one, the only - well, unless she's cloned herself again:
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Stage: Touhou Scarlet Devil Lunatic ~ Sister of Scarlet
BGM: "The Centennial Festival for Magical Girls"
note
Theme: "U. N. Owen Was Her?"
note
Spellcard Motif: Verboten Zaubersprüche
Spellcards: EoSD
, GoM
, StB
Taboo "Cranberry Trap," Taboo "Lävatein," Taboo "Four of a Kind," Taboo "Kagome, Kagome," Taboo "Maze of Love," Forbidden Barrage "Starbow Break," Forbidden Barrage "Catadioptric," Forbidden Barrage "Clock that Ticks Away the Past," Secret Barrage "And Then Will There Be None?," Q.E.D. "Ripples of 495 Years," Taboo "Forbidden Fruit," Taboo "Forbidden Games"
Write-up:
The Scarlet Devil Mansion's other resident vampire, who is as dangerous as she is rarely seen. Flandre Scarlet spends most of her time shut inside her home, a frightful surprise to anyone who would wander its halls uninvited. She combines a vampire's usual superhuman abilities with the special power to destroy anything with a thought, and to make matters worse is mentally unstable.
But at the same time, Flandre is also innocent and sheltered - she's too powerful to feed upon humans normally, and hasn't made the connection between her vampiric dietary requirements and the "cakes" and "tea" she's served. She idolizes her big sister Remilia, though Flan isn't above talking about her behind her back, and while Flandre will complain about not getting to visit the Hakurei Shrine, her isolation inside the Scarlet Devil Mansion seems to be to some extent voluntary.
Although it's been a long time since she appeared in a main Touhou title and she pops up only rarely in the supplementary material, Flandre Scarlet remains one of the franchise's most recognizable and popular characters. So surely we'll have something to say about her, hmm?
Relations
- Remilia Scarlet (big sister)
- Patchouli Knowledge (housemate who occasionally rains on Flan's parade)
- Sakuya Izayoi (big sister's head maid)
- Hong Meiling (big sister's gatekeeper)
- Marisa Kirisame (occasional surprise(d) visitor)
See also the previous
two
compendiums.
edited 3rd Oct '15 12:57:00 PM by Tacitus

Hmm, so would they be tsukumogami formed from old youkai-fighting weapons? Interesting notion. If we can get specific youkai from specific abandoned items, this scenario isn't far-fetched at all. We could even posit that Shingyoku's male and female forms both spawned from one yin-yang orb due to how it represents duality and the genders - so that'd be what, a one mind, two bodies situation?
Also, Reimu is just wasted on mentor figures. Genjii, Yukari, Kasen, it's like the girl floats away when you try to instruct her.