The New New Touhou Character Alternate Interpretation Compendium

I have a theory as to why Orin has both cat ears and 'human' ears - first she became a nekomata (as evident by her tails) and only afterwards she became a kasha and gained the pointy ears.

You ready for an epic road trip? Thanks for choosing Orin Hell Motors as your preferred traveling choice. Now listen to these tunes.

Gothic Corpse
Solemn Lullaby
Journey of a Thousand Corpses
Lullaby of Innocence
Traditional Voyage
Corpse Fight
Lullaby of Strength
A Voyage of Class
Lullaby of Flight
Lullaby of Grace
Sweet Trip

edited 16th Feb '15 10:19:13 PM by Diamite

Whoa... I still can't figure out the deal with her ears, but what you said could explain the confusion over what the hell she is. What if kasha isn't a youkai species, but a job description? Like the original kasha were oni, and then when Hell relocated and the oni mostly wandered off, other supernatural creatures started filling the position?

So Orin started out as an ordinary housecat who happened to live in Hell, spent the required amount of time under Satori's care, and became a nekomata. Before long she decides to help her master out and takes up a job carting corpses. Hence why she doesn't have any corpse-snatching ability beyond her own skill - she was never born with any because she wasn't born to be a corpse-thief.

Oooh, good stuff. That first "techno-gothic" one is particularly interesting, I have no idea what genre to put it in, but I likes it. And the Esperanto vocal piece was loverly. The only thing I can think to add would be this remix of "Lullaby" by =Neutral=

...What do Orin's songs say about her? First tries to be upbeat in the face of desolation but still comes off as a bit melancholy. Then he proper theme is remarkably bright for something accompanying a boss battle. Guess it goes to show how she perseveres despite some harsh circumstances, and may be inappropriately cheerful for what she's actually doing. So she endures and does her duty, but perhaps not quite in the right way.

Well, more like, if an animal or human can turn into a youkai, can't youkai change into a different kind of youkai too?

Well, according to P Mi SS youkai who consume the flesh of a hermit get elevated somehow, so yes?

Yeah, but this is a very popular legend in general and is special on its own. Youkai consuming humans and stuff don't really level them up all that much, but if they happen to capture a hermit and consume them. They will receive a massive power up. Think of it as a ticket straight to final boss level, where the youkai in question is now equal to the stuff of legends, regardless of how strong they were before.

Welp, this conversation seems to be about ready for Orin to cart away. Any last thoughts on the four-eared cat lady before moving up to the Lunar Capital?

Does she triangulate sounds with a skill that would make even the keen-eared blush?

Man, I don't really wanna think about her skull structure...

Thing with multiple eyes is that the sensory stimulus is coming at the speed of light, so there shouldn't be any "lag" problems. But with sound waves, I dunno, having two ears up top and two ears on the side might be troublesome, like wearing earbuds where each bud isn't quite in sync with the other. It's certainly preferable to think that Rin has rather precise hearing rather than subtly screwed up hearing, though. Not sure why you'd need superior hearing to nab corpses...

Moral of the story: be careful when drawing catgirls, people.

Alright, take her away, Orin. Next up in the pipeline will be the Aki sisters, followed by Cirno, and it looks like Byakuren Hijiri! But first, look to the sky:

The Lunar Capital

Write-up:
In the primordial past, the Earth was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. The place was just riddled with impurities - things on it aged and decayed, and its inhabitants even died!

So a bunch of sages decided to relocate to a purer land, settling on the dark side of the moon. Over a simultaneously timeless and incredibly long span of history, these Lunarians built a flourishing civilization, where science and magic have merged into one discipline, creating medicines that can induce immortality. It's such a wonderful place, in fact, that its worst criminals are exiled to Earth.

All isn't entirely peachy in this land of peach trees, lifeless seas and udonge, however. The moon's population of rabbits are treated at best as pets, and the moon itself has been invaded several times - once by the youkai of Gensokyo a thousand years ago, again by human space programs, and most recently by a mixture of both Gensokyan humans and youkai. This is a serious concern, as even a single human visitor threatens contaminating the purity of the moon if he stays long enough.

Is the Lunar Capital safe behind its phantasmal barrier? Can it survive as humanity takes its first (second) faltering steps out from its cradle? And if it's such a wonderful place, why would someone like Kaguya choose to remain in exile on Earth?

Lunar notables:

• Lord Tsukuyomi (god, founder, boss)
• Watatsuki no Toyohime and Watatsuki no Yorihime (princesses, heads of Lunar Defense Corps)

Lunar unnotables:

• Reisen (rabbit)

Former residents:

• Kaguya Houraisan (princess, immortal)
• Eirin Yagokoro (goddess, founder, sage)
• Mizue no Uranoshimako (fisherman)
• Reisen Udongein Inaba (rabbit)

See also the previous compendium.

I wonder know a lot of people hate the Lunarians but I wonder if humans will contact them in the future? I also wonder about eh whole purity thing?

Kegare. It's an important concept in Shinto. Important points: it's a form of sin, but unrelated to moral judgements (I guess you could also say that 'sin' is a mistranslation of 'tsumi' in this context), and going before the gods while carrying kegare is a bad idea.

Basically the moon is being treated like a sacred place, a shrine.

edited 21st Feb '15 1:14:49 AM by Clarste

A few last thoughts on Orin since I've been busy:

At a bare minimum, she's probably resistant to high temperatures. Marisa/Reimu are sweating buckets in stages 5/6, while Orin's still all perky.

I doubt it. She wasn't really being two-faced... she was simply hiding. Honest, straightforward people can and will hide if they feel threatened. She was being pretty subtle in her call to the surface too.

She's just a cat that liked a bird and didn't want the bird or itself to be denied food even though the bird is totally messing up the kitchen, so she led a maid to get it cleaned up before the master came home. Not because master wouldn't know (The maid would tell her, obviously), but because it would be cleaned up and not a mess on master's floor.

The defining character moment for Orin in my mind really is the end of stage 5. The lonely, quiet, desolate abandoned hell gusts a solemn breeze... A beautiful Lullaby that shows the twilight has come. And that's alright. Everything needs to just wind down... everything ends someday.

Then a cat comes running on screen... and immediately makes it clear that its not that end for the Blazing Hell just yet. As she transforms, Orin overpowers that desolate feeling with her presence alone, and the music shifts to reflect that the hell isn't empty: It has Orin, and she has vigor enough to keep hell's flames alive and then some.

This might fall under more of a Yama writeup, but... maybe the reason Eiki Shiki is so determined to guide people away from hell... is because hell's got funding issues and they're being shut down.

I figure the fires themselves are simply a byproduct of the presence of so many hellravens and such living there. Or just being that deep underground. The smelting of the souls to seperate them from their impurities like life/mercury and greed/gold is the purpose of the hell more than it's... means.

If I understand it correctly, it's not so much a matter of "you have broken god's law" as it is "you stepped in dog doo, don't track that onto the nice carpet." Lots of dogs on Earth, there are.

As for why the moon is pure, well, I don't know a whole lot about Eastern mythology. Maybe it's tied into the supernatural significance of the moon, like how it empowers monsters and magic. Or it might be as simple as contrasting the Earth with other realms - on Earth things rot and die, so in Higan, Bhava-agra, or the moon things are obviously different.

My follow-up question then is whether the rest of our solar system counts as pure lands, and if so, why were the Lunarians content to settle for a dusty gray rock. A Jovian civilization in the clouds would be pretty cool.

Mmm. I like this.

Almost makes me wanna cast Orin as the Samwise to Satori's Frodo. The loyal, faithful servant, ever cheerful, never one to despair, straightforward and yet resourceful and occasionally, surprisingly subtle.

According to Toyohime, the moon is pure because there are no living things competing for survival and dying all the time.

Well, that was how I interpreted it. But this is an alternate interpretation compendium so...

edited 22nd Feb '15 2:03:01 AM by joergenjetsam

I think that is probably so. This has been mentioned in Cage in Lunatic Runagate.

But oh, the questions it raises. Question the First - where do the Lunar rabbits fit into this? If they're native to the moon, were they somehow able to survive without generating impurity? Pacifist, enlightened useless little bunnies only good for their sex appeal? And how were the Lunarians able to subjugate them without generating impurity?

Question B - if the bunnies aren't native to the moon, isn't bringing them along with the Lunarian immigrants a risk? Or if they were some of the youkai purportedly created by Lunarians, that didn't also create impurity from the whole "playing god" thing?

Third question - if conflict generates impurity, why field a Lunar Defense Corps and train the rabbits enough to be cannon fodder that gets nearly wiped out in the Great Lunar War? Why not focus on supernatural defenses based around avoiding conflict altogether?

They're rabbits. You don't subjugate rabbits. The idea is absurd. You pick one up and adopt it because it's so fluffy, and after generations of domestication they stop trying to run away as vigorously.

I suppose the answer then is "wear thick sleeves when picking them up so their claws don't draw blood".

edited 22nd Feb '15 7:18:01 PM by Clarste

Can you subjugate rabbits when they're human shaped, have (dumb) human level thinking abilities, and wear human clothes?

Have you ever tried? In a box with a fox? Or in a boat with a goat? Try it, try it and you may! Try it try it try it, I say!

Well, I'm not a Lunarian either so the question doesn't really apply. Suffice to say I think they could develop thick enough sleeve technology.

That seems a fitting way to describe it. In fact, this is probably how I'm going to describe the concept to people completely unfamiliar with it from now on.

Of course, it's not perfect. Dog doo doesn't steal away your agelessness.

Regarding the presence of bunnies and impurity or lack thereof. It could be that the moonbunnies simply... came into being there on the moon. Since people believed fervently enough that rabbit-people are on the moon. Created like any other youkai/god. Then the Lunarians got there (or already were) and were like "Huh. Well, I guess we needed a working class. This works out welll."

The Lunar Defense Corps might be intended as an interception force. After all, if blood isn't spilled on the moon, no trouble. Just fly out and sabotage astronaut ships or the like. Boarding parties, if you will.

They did. The whole moon barrier thing around the Lunar capital is that exact thing. Rampant paranoia (From the astronauts completely failing to find the real moon capital but MAYBE THEY COULD HAVE CAN WE BE SURE MAKE A DEFENSE ARMY IN CASE!) is what likely cause the formation of the Lunar Defense Corps. It's also possible killing/dying on the mundane moon wouldn't have any effect on the Lunar Capital.

Maybe I should've specified "focus the energy they put into the Defense Corps into making their wards even stronger." But I guess you gotta have some sort of armed forces, right? I'm not sure if the Lunarians would be more or less annoying if they were also pacifists. I also guess that the question of violence leads into the questions and retcons over just how bad the Lunar War was. If the moonbunnies are all but wiped out, that would've generated a lot of bad mojo, right?

Just had the weird notion of a borderline suicide cult among the bunnies, threatening to unleash the impurity within their veins unless they get an additional after-lunch snack and a half-hour of naptime each work day.

More serious notion - what would happen if the Lunarians made contact with an Earth-based polity? (beyond the vagueness of the Lunar War, I mean) Perhaps they could reach an agreement with Earth's space programs to keep them off the moon? Or are they worried that word could get out about the immortality elixir and prompt a repeat of the Mount Fuji incident? Or do they already maintain secret relations with several key governments, much like how my headcanon Yukari interacts with the Japanese government?

I think it's pretty obvious that absolutely nothing happened in the Lunar Wars, except maybe some sabotage at NASA. The Lunarians wouldn't stand for there being any violence on the moon, and the humans were in no position to harm them anyway. Given that the outside world is seemingly the same as our own, what happened is just the Apollo Project in every detail, with the added information that some invisible space elves were biting their fingernails the whole time out of paranoia.

As for the rabbit defense corps, Yorihime's reaction to space invaders in SSiB and CiLR indicates that they don't trust the rabbits to do anything important anyway, so I doubt they've ever been put in real danger. Actually, since they're so incompetent it seems less like they're being forced to work and more like the Lunarians give them meaningless busywork to make them feel like they're useful.

edited 23rd Feb '15 8:41:09 PM by Clarste

The Lunar Rabvbits don't realy do anything important but they do make great mochi. Still, why don't Lunarians have a working military? The Moon might be invaded anytime soon but it is still better to be safe than sorry.

They do. They are called the Watatsuki sisters.

(Hi, I'm here too)