The New New Touhou Character Alternate Interpretation Compendium

Right, you can go back underground now, Wriggle. Next will be the indomitable Orange, the unfathomable Konngara, and it looks like the indefatigable Orin! But first, perhaps the two most popular characters who have yet to be involved in a danmaku duel...

Maribel Hearn and Renko Usami

Appearances:

Mary's Themes: "Mary, the Magician", "Strange Bird of the Moon, Illusion of Mysterious Cat"
Renko's Theme: "Greenwich in the Sky" (unofficial)
Sealing Club Themes: "Girls' Sealing Club", "Kid's Festival ~ Innocent Treasures" (unofficial)

Write-up:
In the grim darkness of the near future, there is moon tourism, artificial strawberries, and children who do not smile... as well as a pair of university students searching for the magic the world has forgotten. This two-person Sealing Club goes to unusual locations in hopes of stumbling upon the paranormal. Many people would be surprised at just how successful they've been.

The secret to the club's success is undoubtedly Maribel Hearn, a young woman who has long seen the borders between our world and others, but has recently been able to show others her visions, or even transport them to other worlds through dreams. You could even call her power the manipulation of boundaries. Accompanying her on these adventures is Renko Usami, a rational and scientific Super Unified Physics major who is nevertheless more excited than Mary about their investigations, even if she's jealous of Mary's abilities (the most Renko can do is calculate the time based on the moon and stars).

So far the Sealing Club has found a portal to the Netherworld and visited a lost space station, but Mary has made her own independent journeys (or so she says) to a strange land inhabited by terrifying youkai, maids serving cookies at a scarlet mansion, and girls wrapped in phoenix fire. Evidence suggests that Mary will only grow more familiar with this land, while Renko's fate is as yet unwritten.

Relationships:

• Yukari Yakumo (the Koizumi to Mary's Lafcadio?)

See also the first and second compendiums.

edited 2nd Jan '15 6:10:28 PM by Tacitus

I used to read the Indefatigable Orin until they rebooted her so that the four previous years were just a dream.

I'm at least fairly sure there isn't much new to say about these two, so instead I'm going for a plot twist.

What if Renko was actually Yukari?

I guess she could eat Merryberry to gain her powers/hair color.

Yukari is like Renko and Maribel combined. The calculating genius of Renko and the boundary shenanigans of Maribel.

Being a fusion of the two would certainly solve the mystery of just what happened to Renko...

There's always the "Renko became the first Hakurei shrine maiden" theory. I mean, if you squint you can sort of see how Renko's "know where and when you are" ability could mutate into Reimu's "know where and when you should be".

edited 2nd Jan '15 8:01:46 PM by Prime32

Maribel would make more sense than Renko as the Hakurei shrine maiden. Doesn't the Hakurei shrine deal with barriers and stuff? Renko, on the other hand, is all math.

Mary and Renko

In the (distant?) future, humanity is entering a steady decline. The fruit is artificial, the population is "stabilizing", and children don't smile. Physics is considered "complete", and trips to the moon are common, if not expensive. It does seem like the twilight years for the young human race.

Living in this time are two college students with an interest in the supernatural and strange worlds that the world of science has forgotten, of the fantastic that happens in the background, ignored (or even disregarded) by the people of the present.

It must exist, right? After all, they too are pretty fantastic.

The Sealing Club is a group of necromancers (abit in name only) consisting of Maribel Hearn, a foreigner with a weird first name that makes no sense to anyone, and Renko Usami, a native to Tokyo. They live and attend university in Kyoto.

Maribel, Mary to her friends, is the protagonist of the Sealing Club's adventures, a strange, kinda out of it, girl who has the ability to see the boundaries between worlds, which eventually evolves into the ability to manipulate and travel through them. At first, she would merely slip between worlds (mostly Gensoukyou) in her dreams, but as her powers evolved, she was able to travel through the boundaries of her own will, and even take Renko with her (abit, the experience is less "real" to Renko, more like a dream). According to Mary herself, her powers are genetic and passed down, but whether her relatives have had their powers evolve like her's is yet to be seen.

Mary looks suspiciously familiar, but to who I can't put my finger on. Probably Alice. Or maybe Parsee. One of those "popular, but hasn't shown up in ages" characters. It's probably in the name. Something about "Hearn" seems familiar.

Renko is also strange, but her strangeness is more down to Earth than Mary's. Renko is the logical thinker of the group, yet despite what this would imply, she is actually more excited at witnessing the fantastic than Mary is. She is also very punctual...at not being punctual. She'll be late, but tell you just how late she was. This related to her own special ability, the ability to tell the time by just observing the position of the moon and stars.

Naturally, having a kinda low key power and being stuck in the boring world of tomorrow, Renko gets jealous of Mary's ability to go to fantastic world's and has gotten afraid that Mary will leave her behind.

Renko is also very stylish, I mean, seriously. Very nice hat and outfit.

The Sealing Club, despite being relatively divorced from the rest of the setting, has had some degree of success! Their first recorded adventure had them discover a back door into the Netherworld, they've used Mary's powers to travel to the lost space station TORIFUNE, and they've begun seeking out the Izanagi Objects glimpsed from the realm of the gods.

Their future seems bright! I wonder where it leads...

edited 3rd Jan '15 6:48:03 PM by Otherarrow

Maribel Hearn:

A member of the Sealing Club. Quite ditzy.

Renko Usagi:

Founder of the Sealing Club. Quite punctual.

Together, they fight crime! The crime of humanity not even thinking about fantastical realms.

They live in a world where children lost their smiles. ...Hm, they seem to be happy themselves. Don't tell me...they're just putting on a facade!?

Maribel has traveled to distant lands, and saw things. Things that Renko want to see for herself, but she doesn't have the power.

...Come to think of it, they are the only members of the Sealing Club. Renko must've went through a lot of pain just to get one member. She must've been lau- I mean ignored by her peers, their apathy showing strongly. Then in comes a foreigner. Her name's Maribel, and she's intrigued by this pursuit of Renko's. And that is the story of how the two met. ...Is their club even official?

...The point being, should she lose her only member, she will suffer a despair-inducing loneliness. One soul-crushing enough to kill her smile. Permanently.

Playing with the Maribel is Yukari theory...when Yukari hibernates, she becomes a dreamseer, seeing the future of the human world. ...Can't she see the future of her own realm? Guess she doesn't want to ruin her surprise.

Mmm, forgot how awesome "Girls' Sealing Club" is...

If I can read dates correctly, Trojan Green Asteroid and Neo-traditionalism of Japan both came out a year after our last discussion... well, the last discussion in the Compendium. I'm sure much has been said in the main Touhou thread.

It's not a decline, it's just, ah, a comfortable middle age. Your species' demographics start receding a little, you might not be able to enjoy the same treats you gobbled up in your youth, but you've fully mastered your scientific vocation. You just have to resist the urge to blow a lot of money on a trip to outer space you don't really need.

On the subject of dates, I'd just like to point out that Ghostly Field Club came out at the very end of 2003, while The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya debuted in June of that year. I'm not implying anything, just pointing.

I also remember, maybe it was during the first Compendium, some conspiracy theories about who provided Renko with a photo she used to encourage Mary. Like some secret organization is interested in what this two-person club comes up with, and Renko may or may not be in on the deception.

You know, that would be an interesting twist - Mary isn't Yukari's past self, but a construct, an echo given life as the dreamer explores what may come to pass. Mary's "dreams" of Gensokyo are actually Yukari's memories being interpreted by this semi-independent entity, and her growing powers are simply Yukari becoming more comfortable with her proxy.

At this point the "Yukari is future Mary in the past" theory is so nearly canon that I'm looking for fun alternative WMGs to hold onto.

I always did find this one line from Trojan Green Asteroid from Renko fairly peculiar, "We'll be fine! Right now I'm almost like the protagonist of a shooting game!". It's almost as if ZUN was toying with the idea of Renko either being a future protagonist of Touhou or being related to Reimu in some way or form. Though, unlike Mary=Yukari, I don't see much other evidence pointing towards this, with the only other piece of evidence I could think of is that one scene in Silent Sinner in Blue where Reimu has a hat thatlooks like Renko's.

Renko herself I always did find more mysterious than Mary. The "I have connections you don't know" line with regards to the Netherworld in Ghostly Field Club, makes me think she has some relation to Gensoukyou even before Mary enters Gensoukyou or similar. I mean, it feels like she's deliberately guiding Mary to places like these in order to indoctrinate/familiarize her or similar before sending her to Gensoukyou. It's certainly a different way from looking at this.

Also, massive WMG on my part, a particularly insane one from me follows. Basically one day I was looking at the Dolls in Pseudo Paradise characters◊ and noticed how both the Blonde Haired Girl and the Black haired Girl somewhat resemble Mary and Renko respectively, like a proto-Mary and proto-Renko before Ghostly Field Club. So my theory is that Di PP could be like the conclusion to the Sealing Club adventures, with Renko ending up as the Hakurei shrine maiden and Mary becoming the blonde girl who'll end up as Yukari?

Off-topic, but future outside world sounds like an absolutely terrible place, with the need to terraform Earth and nature reclaiming Tokyo among other things. Maybe Mary and Renko would have wanted to willingly enter Gensoukyou and avoid the outside world?

Also, this has no bearing on any Sealing Club stories or whatever, but I always wondered where Maribel is form. I've always speculated she could be an American, given Lafcadio parallels and the fact that Maribel is a fairly common English name.

edited 3rd Jan '15 9:46:22 PM by Zansnae793

My favorite "alternate Yukari-Maribel" theory is still that Mary is actually Yukari's descendent, since Mary's powers are apparently genetic.

I wonder where did the whole 'Yukari is Maribel' theory come from? Also, I wonder if Yukari got involved in any Timey Wimey Ball shenanigans?

They have similar appearances and powers, plus the existing Hearn-Yakumo connection.

The more I think about it, the more I come to believe that her name is actually intended to be Maryberry. I may have to go on a crusade at some point in the future to get rid of this Maribel nonsense.

Nonsense. Huh.

I will support you for the noble reason that Maryberry sounds funnier.

Wasn't her name "Maeriberii" or something? Maribel would be "Meriberu" or "Mariberu", right?

Merryberry may not be a real name

but only in our backwards primitive culture. In the far off near future, we may be more advanced in our naming patterns.

If I recall, even ZUN has no idea what her name is supposed to be.

So call her whatever. Maryberry works find.

Are you guys sure that it's "Maryberry", and not "Mary Berry"? It could be that she simply said her first and middle name too quick or something...

Also, I'm of either one of two camps for this: the "Mary is Yukari's daughter" camp, or the "Mary and Renko became one as Yukari" camp. Not both.

She explicitly says that Mary isn't her real name and Renko only uses it because she can't pronounce Mary's real name.

For the former angle, there's no reason to make such a direct connection.

Gensokyo the isolated Japanese valley is pretty old. Gensokyo the sealed-off demiplane is pretty young, and even after the Barrier went up, there's still movement across it. It wouldn't exactly be common, but there'd be opportunities for people to move around, for families to branch off and immigrate to villages where forgotten possessions don't sprout legs and run around, formerly sleeping terrors don't walk into the flower shop, and fairies don't steal your laundry.

So Renko? Part of the Hakurei lineage, descended from a former shrine maiden who married that nice Usami boy on the other side of the mountains. Generations away from the background magic of Gensokyo have weakened her natural talents so that she has less hope than Meira of claiming the Power of the Hakurei, but there's enough left in her blood for Renko to intuit things based on a glance at the sky. This would also explain where she gets things like that photo of the Netherworld - there's no conspiracy, her (great?)grandma simply knows full well that weird places exist because she's been to them. She might have sat down and had a very special talk with young Renko one day, a discussion Renko may have put down to senility until she met Mary.

And Mary? Well, Yukari does like to "spirit away" people she finds interesting, and who's to say she ate every one of them? Mary probably doesn't have a Yakumo in her family tree just because there's no place on the birth certificate for "my father was abducted and seduced by a gap monster, who turned out to be a deadbeat mom."

Though on second thought, given the nature of Yukari's power, she might be more careful than that when it comes to reproduction. So it's more likely that Mary is a contingency plan, a potential successor who could step in should Yukari grow tired of her unofficial role as Gensokyo's protector. Her growing boundary powers could be either a sign that Yukari has miscalculated and now has a wild card running around, or that Yukari is preparing to step down, a supernatural vacuum that is now calling to Mary.

They look very similar, they think very similar, they have very similar abilities, a note from Mary was found in Gensokyo several hundred years before Akyuu examined it which implies that Mary can travel through time, and a certain Lafcadio Hearn became a nationalized Japanese citizen under the name Koizumi Yakumo.

"The last time I tried Time Travel I got stranded a thousand years in the past" would be a pretty good excuse for Yukari not to mess around with time anymore, wouldn't it?

Clearly her name is meant to be Mulberry, in order to properly invoke the color purple.

Obviously her name is Mxyzptlk.

edited 5th Jan '15 6:55:57 PM by Grounder