The New New Touhou Character Alternate Interpretation Compendium

Time to move on?

Wwll, one more thign I want to ask. What exactly Akyuu's stance on reimu? Does she hate her with a passion or does she think that Reimu could do more with her job?

I always thought it was the latter, she doesn't like the way Reimu goes about her job and has no evidence to suggest that she actually does anything.

If I remember correctly Akyuu doesn't actually know that Reimu goes around solving all these incidents that threaten Gensokyo and only has her day-to-day behaviour to work off of.

Well, and the hearsay of the villagers... and Reimu's reputation amongst them is... well, horrendous, to put it nicely.

As a bit of closing words, Akyuu is seriously great in FS. And a great peer for Kosuzu to bounce off of.

Yeah, I think we got some good discussion.

And yeah, Akyuu's low opinion of Reimu is probably just a product of her reputation (though her breaking up the Symposium with flimsy, often unreleated, evidence probably didn't endear her either).

...I still need to read Forbidden Scrollery. ._.

I'd put the link up again, but now mangafox is saying it's "licensed, and unavailable." So now you can never read it.

Oh, speaking of manga, finally read the ones Antimatter recommended. The Focal Length is Nine Feet was cute, and never quite admitted that Akyuu wanted to remember more about her current incarnation than her work. I can't really think of anything to say about Monologue though. It has Akyuu-Mokou interactions in it, and I don't disapprove of them?

On the one hand, she can probably remember Hakurei who were better shrine maidens and youkai slayers, but Akyuu should also recognize what Reimu's enforcement of the spell card rules has done for Gensokyo.

Actually, she does recognize that, and how it's putting her out of a job.

At any rate, unless Akyuu conversation picks up again, I'll put up Yumemi's profile at some point tomorrow. Will it be two in the afternoon or two in the morning? We'll see!

Mangafox isn't the only manga reading site.

http://www.batoto.net/comic/_/comics/touhou-suzunaan-forbidden-scrollery-r7266

edited 28th Feb '14 1:40:52 AM by TrueShadow1

Oh. Well, that's good news.

Ahem. Next in our sequence of topics are the remaining tsukumogami, Medicine and then Kogasa, followed by... a location, Bhava-agra! Unless we don't want to talk about that location. In which case I'll ask random.org to give me another topic.

But before that, a ripple in space-time, a flash of crimson!

Yumemi Okazaki

Themes: "Love of Magical Chimes"*

Strawberry Crisis!!

Signature Attacks: Cross-Shaped Danmaku, Four-Dimensional Positron Bomb (unused)

Write-up:
Just an ordinary human, from an extraordinary setting. Dr. Okazaki hails from another dimension, a world where an eighteen-year-old can teach Comparative Physics and a Grand Unified Theory explains everything. But Yumemi believes in something called "magic," which got her laughed out of the academy and drove her to take a probability space hypervessel to Gensokyo in search of research subjects. This soon devolved into a bizarre fighting tournament over the right to enter some "ruins" and make a wish - in other words, Yumemi got the authentic Gensokyo experience. She went home afterward and tried to present her findings, but was expelled from her institution. Beyond that, it's hard to say; some claim that Yumemi returned to Gensokyo with her young assistant, but they've yet to make a reappearance.

Yumemi is one of the few characters from the PC-98 era who more than a minority of modern fans remember. Maybe it's because she's an endboss, or maybe it's her theme song. Perhaps it's the cape, or the time she jokingly tried to destroy the world. Or maybe fans like trying to puzzle out where exactly she came from, and whether Maribel and Renko are living in the precursor to Yumemi and Chiyuri's world.

She also has a Gensokyo doppelganger, but they get along well due to their shared approach to physical discipline.

Relationships:

• Chiyuri Kitashirakawa (grad assistant)
• Yumemi Okazaki (wait, what?)
• Ruukoto and Mimi-chan (sentient, potentially destructive property)

Interpretations:
"To Infinity and Beyond"
by shiroimahotsukai

"The Professor and Her Dimensional Dream"
by Diamite

See also the first two Compendiums.

edited 2nd Mar '14 10:28:40 PM by Tacitus

At some point after Dim.Dream Yumemi was accepted by the kappa as one of their own.

She and Nitori are usually competing at the kappa science fairs and such, Nitori's growing disdain for humans originates from her.

Finally, she's behind that one background kappa from Hopeless Masquerade's Godot eyes.

edited 28th Feb '14 7:03:08 PM by Grounder

It's entirely possible that Yumemi might have a Gensokyo doppleganger like Chiyuri does, but if so, we've never met or seen them. The Yumemi #2 that Yumemi fights at the end of her story is a parallel-dimension Yumemi that Chiyuri accidentally created by messing around with the probability hyperspace vessel; Yumemi #2 doesn't seem to be from Gensokyo but is instead almost exactly the same as our more familiar Yumemi (except she wears purple clothing, and maybe she likes a different flavor of ice cream or something).

Yumemi knows that you absolutely have to be dressed well in order to fight danmaku battles; she makes the protagonist wait while she puts on a cape.

She's generally considered one of the hardest final bosses in the series, mostly because her computer-AI is very good and will generally not ever get hit unless it collides with either a boss, an enemy, or sometimes a fast-moving EX attack like Reimu's yin-yang orb - it only collides with regular bullets once in a blue moon. Additionally, depending on how nice the computer is feeling today, she can last up to five whole minutes before taking any damage. The obvious conclusion is that Yumemi has played bullet-hell games before.

Okay, so that's all well and good, but what's her personality? Well, in the few fanworks that feature her, she generally inherits a lot of professor-archetype qualities - sometimes absent-minded, but authoritative and generally reliable enough to finish any Scientific Work. She obviously has a healthy relationship with Chiyuri, given that she's friendly enough to just laugh off getting hit with a folding chair.

Personally, I'm just surprised she hasn't shown up as a cameo in one of those crowd scenes yet. She probably doesn't get outdoors very often, despite being so interested in observing Gensokyo's magical residents.

edited 28th Feb '14 7:27:11 PM by Leylite

We see that happen. It's a bonus scene you get for 1CCing the game

PC-98 character

Anyway, Yumemi. In-game she's powerful but kind of awkward to use; her charge attack, while strong, is slow and covers little area. I'd say this suggests a forceful and somewhat egotistical personality: All she needs is power— of course it'll work, she's the one doing it

Also, her boss attack is named 'Fantasy Legend'. Ego all the way

Yumemi Okazaki:

A former professor of Comparative Physics who believes in magic. Very confident.

Yumemi believes in magic. Unfortunately for her, she was born into a world where such belief turns someone into the town joke. Heh, at least it's better than being accused of heresy.

Even though the world called her mad, she stood by her belief with unwavering resolve. And even though she returned only to lose her job, I'm sure she's not busy cursing magic's existence. She'd be loving it more.

Perhaps she saw the beauty in chanting incantations. Perhaps she thought that by combining magic with science, her world will become a more enjoyable place to live in. To her, magical things are just beautiful, majestic works of art.

She uses crosses. Twould be cool if she had a Cross-gun like Wolfwood. To take it up a notch, a magical cross-gun.

Her favourite fruit is strawberry. It's red, just like her!

To Infinity and Beyond

What’s left for you when you’ve done everything? Such was the question that troubled the sleep of one Yumemi Okazaki. She stood at the pinnacle of her field of comparative physics, and she always spearheaded new research projects when they came up. Or at least that’s what she would have told you (and regularly told anyone who asked), in reality there were no new research projects and there hadn’t been for years now.

The “Grand Unified Theory”, the final result of centuries of mankind’s greatest scientists working towards the pursuit of knowledge from cradle to grave… and the bane of all those still living. Without anything left to develop, any fields to further progress in what was left? There was no way to stand out anymore. No way to prove yourself. She’d already done it, only the second generation to grow up with the Theory she had learned quickly, application had come as naturally to her breathing. For others who weren’t so quick everything wold already be done, applied to everything all limits would be surpassed and experience and skill would mean nothing. Even a child with a calculator could perform the same advanced functions she could.

Still, that’s all there could be – application, no discovery. Yumemi longed for the days of her ancestors, back when there was still something to be learned. Her grandfather had told her stories of his own days in university (at 19 if you could believe it!) where he had worked on a project for inter-dimensional travel. Such was standard now at every transport station, once the Theory had been developed it had been simple to determine co-ordinates of other dimensions and calibrate ships to get there and back.

They were forbidden by tradition stronger than law in academic circles, however, to visit any dimension not as advanced as their own, meaning 99% of them were off-limits. This was what kept her up at night, what might they have that she didn’t? What was there to learn from them?

Magic, the very work rang with power. Something no-one had even considered for who knows how long, written out of children’s books for being too implausible it was almost unheard in her own time. It resonated within her, the possibility of something the Theory couldn’t explain, all the evidence said there had to be at least a seed of truth in such an idea for it have lasted thousands of years.

She presented her ideas at the Global Annual Science Convention. The entire thing had become a formality over the last ten years and now served merely as an excuse to celebrate another year of science and get drunk as opposed to its original goal of sharing new knowledge and theories. Naturally of course her proposition was received with drunken laughter and jeers. The rejection, though she expected it still hurt, where were bright faces eager for knowledge she had imagined as a child?

With this last unpleasant image of science burned into her mind’s eye she made a decision, she’d leave. Inviting (read: kidnapping) her current top student Chiyuri she boarded a trans-dimensional liner, purchased with surplus research grants (not like it was being used) and set sail for magic.

It didn’t work out as well as she thought, lost her job, her respect, her authority and any chance of working in a scientific field again, however, she still had her ship. The navigation logs had been lost on re-entry so the co-ordinates of that fantastic place were lost also. Still Yumemi had hope, she’d find it again, a world where magic was commonplace, where science was a flourishing field, the occupation of only a select few who cared, and a Grand Unified Theory millennia away.

She had caught a glimpse of heaven and she’d be damned if she let it get away from her. Chiyuri helped where she could, as excited as herself at the prospect of returning to Gensokyo, a dream for the future, driving them forward. Finally she’d found purpose again.

Not sure why I wrote that really, I probably could have said what I wanted with a paragraph on Desperately Lookingfora Purposein Life. Nevertheless it matters not, I guess I wanted to show my opinion on her thought processes and views on her world where nothing is left to learn.

EDIT: Anyone know why the link comes out missing spaces?

edited 1st Mar '14 4:18:51 AM by shiroimahotsukai

Ah yes. Yumemi.

In a world where everything scientific has been solved by a unified theory, she believes that there is something else that has yet to be solved. In a world of the scientific, she seeks the magical. To this end, she and her assistant Chiyuri travel to a parallel world in their Probability Space Hypervessel to gather data on magic so they can prove its the existence. Arriving in Gensoukyou, she ultimately resolves to study and bring back one of the magic using residents to prove her theory (though only after Chiyuri accidentally set up a fighting tournament by advertising the Hypervessel as magical ruins that will grant a wish to those who visit)

Yumemi has a flair for the dramatic, insisting on dawning a cape for battle and using fancy crosses in her danmaku for the heck of it.

Yumemi fights using "scientific magic" or danmaku created using science that replicates magic. She points out that this is nothing like the real deal though.

Art:

Older stuff
StrawberryCrisis!!
Yumemi
15
Professor
Yumemi and Mimi-chan
Science
Yumemi

edited 1st Mar '14 3:52:00 PM by Hylarn

Yumemi is a scientist from another dimension who is learning about magic. Most scientists in fictionland tend to say that magic doesn't exist and it cannot be observed as Sephiroth points out in Final Fantasy VII of all games, saying that magic doesn't exist is just as unscientific. You know Eirin, Rikado and Yumemi seem pretty chill despite acknowledging that magic as a thing exists and/or youkai.

The Professor and Her Dimensional Dream:

She was dreaming. It was a wonderful dream. She found herself surrounded by phenomena that could not be explained by scientific means.

The name of the phenomena: Magic.

Magic being used to rejuvenate one's health, people casting wind, fire, water, etc. from their hands, creating new landmasses without the use of tools... Oh, what a wonderful world she was in...

Sadly, with a chime from her alarm clock that signaled the end of her afternoon nap, Yumemi Okazaki awoke from her dream.

Season: Mid-Spring. It has already been two weeks since she was laughed off the university's podium for reporting her thesis on the existence of magic. But such jeers from great minds that reveled in their stagnation of knowledge weren't enough to bring her down. Yumemi was going to find that one world of magic, even if she has to do it alone!

It is now early summer. Yumemi's interdimensional preparations are nearing completion. Suddenly, she received a call from a very spunky girl named Chiyuri Kitashirakawa, who wanted to lend her assistance to the expedition to the magic world as her part-time job. Yumemi was overjoyed. To think there was someone else who's enthusiastic about magic! Together, preparations for the interdimensional travel was finished quicker than usual.

And then, it finally happened. Yumemi arrived in Gensokyo, and it far exceeded her expectations. It was so...different from her realm. The sky, the inhabitants, the magic!! Yumemi felt that overall, Gensokyo had a more energetic atmosphere compared to her realm. She felt...free. This was it. The realm she so longed to see. The realm that she wanted to show those stuffy coots and say "Here's my proof of it's existence!" The realm of...MAGIC!

And so, Yumemi set out to...recruit one of the residents as part of her research and proof of magic's existence. Unfortunately, hijinks ensued, and the 'recruitment drive' boiled down to a tournament with the promise of a prize.

At the end of the day, she basically came home empty-handed, her venture nothing more than a dimensional dream to the largely ignorant masses. BUT, as someone who lived the dream, Yumemi Okazaki knows, and will forever take joy in, the existence of magic.

Future expeditions pending.

Why doesn't Yumemi bring her research back to her world? Yumemi knows that magic as a thing exists and there are types of magic. Did she get laughed at by her peers?

Or have we? Could one of the other red-headed and red-eyed Touhous - Kotohime, Orange, Koakuma, Orin, Sekibanki, Raiko - be, unknowingly or not, Yumemi's Gensokyan equivalent?

Come to think of it, "Fantasy Legend" is an odd title for an extradimensional scientist. Maybe it's implying that, in this world of fantasy, her status is legendary? Even though she just arrived, and nobody knows she's there but her assistant. Or maybe she's a legend in her fantastical world of science.

That's a good point - her expulsion basically validates her brilliance, showing just how clueless those buffoons at the academy are for not recognizing perfectly good data.

Arguably she's a better scientist than her fellows, challenging theories that everyone takes for granted. Her fascination with magic might not be a love of incantations or spell circles, but a thirst for discovery - she wants there to be something that the Grand Unified Theory doesn't explain yet, so she can try to explain it.

Ha, teach me to answer old comments before reading the newer ones - all I've done is say what shiroimahotsukai did better.

This feels so very right. My suggestion would be that Chiyuri was the only one doofy enough to go along with Yumemi's not-quite-sanctioned field research, but Yumemi being willing to shanghai a student feels reassuringly in-character.

The PSH raises a mess of questions - if Yumemi was able to use one to travel to Gensokyo, she'd presumably have to locate the demiplane somehow, and if she could do that, why couldn't anyone else? Why didn't the Academy turn on their sensormajigs and say "oi, what's that blip?" If these devices are available to college professors investigating disreputable theories, why hasn't anyone found a magical dimension out there?

All of this can be tidied up easily - it was a rare prototype, and Yumemi stole it.

Now I'm imaging some other refugees from high-science dimensions retiring to Gensokyo, living a simple life in a world that has something their own lacks. Not all that different from modern extra-Border humans deciding to stay in Gensokyo. Presumably Yukari makes sure they don't share their tech - you really don't want someone like Kanako getting wind of positron devices. Just look what she's done with nuclear power...

Presumably they called her mad, leaving her to vow to someday show them, show them all.

Not sure what exactly she presented. Certainly not a human(ish) captive - maybe fuzzy and confusing footage of her and Chiyuri flailing about in a blizzard of energy pellets? A recording error commonly referred to as a "ghost?" A heap of anomalous energy ratings that fit no pre-established pattern, making them outliers to be discarded, or an indication of equipment failure?

Way to go, PoDD Protagonist. If you'd just come quietly you wouldn't have destroyed Yumemi's career.

I think it's 'cause the wiki is smart enough to see that all the letters of the trope title are there to form the Wiki Word, but not smart enough to fix the spacing and capitalization. You can always put the words in {{squiggly brackets}} so the Wiki Word works regardless of how you type it, so long as the letters are all in the right order.

So, a few thoughts RE: why she got laughed out of the academy. That is, allow me to be the critic of her 'scientific' paper on magic.

First, data can be fabricated, and doing so is super-double-plus-ungood in the scientific community^note Imagine if I said "No no, this data is totally reliable, I just got it from an alternate reality that I totally found but none of you have ever heard of." It would not exactly be considered particularly meaningful. Even if alternate realities are well known to exist, it stands to reason they may have different physical properties. Perhaps the first noble gas is still called helium, but it has an atomic number of 8, with an extra 6 elements crammed in on the first line of the table. Suddenly -everything- changes... but how many of those changes are immediately apparent may not be obvious.

So the first order of business should be finding out the physical laws of the reality in which you're collecting data. Yumemi shows no signs of doing this.

Sure, so she brings a 'magician' back. Guess what, the magician can't work the magic Yumemi insisted she could (And she looks an awful lot like a clone of her grad student), claiming 'there's no magic here to work.' Yet another reason to investigate the rules of the reality you enter.

Furthermore, Mrs. Okazaki failed to realize that the application of alternate realities towards any practical ends in our own universe is of course fruitless. So even if she had provided meaningful data (she didn't), and provided critical context such as the physical laws under which said data was gathered (she didn't), and further provided outright proof of magic's existence in another realm (she didn't)...

Then it wouldn't matter anyway, because it's in another realm and of no use to the home dimension, considering the danger and unreliability inherent in the PSH technology.

You may not be able to guide its destination. Perhaps it was a tremendous fluke she found Gensokyo (rather than, say, the plane of acid-that-eats-Probability-Space-Hyperdrives), and an even larger one that she made it back home... and after the first 100 of the things vanished with only one returning, it probably wouldn't be considered safe for use to anyone but the very most desperate of professors.

Like running water or reliable electricity? I guess it's a mentality some people get, but there's a reason most people live in homes instead of in tents in fields.

IIRC Gensokyo!Chiryuri stows away on the ship when they return home and is found out. So... Yumemi potentially -had- a sample (canonicity of multiple endings notwithstanding).

It only inserts spaces before capital-letters-after-the-first. So yeah, either use squigglies or capitalize each word.

edited 3rd Mar '14 8:42:29 PM by Antimatter625

Yumemi prepares herself for a dimensional romp. Strawberry tunes!

Magical Bell
Western Crisis
Inside Flowing Time
Time Crisis
Crisis Core
Chaotic Flight
Cool Strawberry
Strawberry Catastrophe
Strawberry Alert
Time of Red Crisis
The Crisis

Hmm, I'm gonna have to go with remix #5 for the bestie.

I'm not sure if "applicability" was the objective of her adventure, though, I thought she was more interested in getting evidence for her Non-Unified Magic World Theory. Though I supposed the next question is, "okay, so how does one do that?" Is the existence of magic in a universe enough, or do you need to find it in your universe, which is of course the only one of consequence. And then I suppose you need to build a theory out of it? From data collected during one trip?

As an aside, a good plot bunny would be some Evil Corporation or whatnot stumbling upon Yumemi's findings and launching an invasion of Gensokyo for Sinister Applications of... Rumia, I guess.

Dammit, Yukari! We need an "angry guy shaking fist" emoticon.

Come now, outside worlders in this dimension occasionally give up the opportunity to return home in favor of being chased by a hungry Rumia. There's probably plenty of bored scientists and whatnot from Yumemi's dimension who'd be happy to have something to study, even if they had to rough it. Like a lot of real-world scientists, even.

But we all know Chiyuri screws everything up. Doubling the Chiyuri assigned to a project can only sabotage it further.

Now, I think I've narrowed down which character is unknowingly Yumemi's equivalent Gensokyan. The way I see it, Yumemi is... well, a bit of a loonie. Not just in the "unorthodox theories" way, but she is overly-dramatic, doesn't seem to have thought her actions through, and is pretty irresponsible with her "rewards." She doesn't like it if someone questions her title, has an affinity for explosives, is pretty comfortable with the idea of kidnapping someone, and considers magic a "beautiful power."

So, which of her opponents could this description just as well apply to?

...Come to think of it, a lot of them. Anyway, it's Kotohime.

Ignoring that the two Chiyuri shared an appearance and name, Kotohime seems to be legitimately insane, while Yumemi is just a bit of a crackpot

Unless Yumemi was medicated down to crackpot, I guess

edited 6th Mar '14 2:30:34 AM by Hylarn

Yumemi is mad scientist but is otherwise pretty chill about magic and monster roaming about. Yumemi may be a nut but she is no less insane than any denizen of Gensokyo although Kotohime is out there...