I don’t recall ever hearing that it would be released this month. I don’t know anything about the release date, but if I had to guess it’d be either at Comiket or Reitaisai. Both of which happen twice a year. So basically there are only 4 possible dates per year it might be released on, none of which are in November.
No offense, but the way you use “he” and “reincarnated” makes me wonder if you have any idea who the character actually is, or if you’re just trying to win an argument against someone claiming that there is a trans woman in Touhou.
But yes, it’s stated in Futo’s profile in SoPM that shikaisen have the freedom to choose what they look like when they’re reborn and also that Miko took advantage of this to change herself while Futo did not.
Even if it didn’t say this though, there’s really no possible interpretation where Miko was stuck in a body they didn’t want because it’s not “reincarnation” in the sense of randomly being assigned a body to be reborn into. They made the body themselves using Taoist alchemy, so why would they ever be stuck in a body they didn’t identify with? It seems to me that at worst the magic would just force their body to look the same as the original.
I cleared the new Contingency Contract map, but it’s a shameful clear because I had to borrow Silverash. Maybe I’ll do it again next week when they have more contracts?
Incidentally the timings were super tight which is why I wasn’t fast forwarding as much as I’d like.
Why? Marisa and Kosuzu are practically youkai themselves. The paradigm of youkai fighting duels with lone heroes is exactly the sustainable model that they want. First of all it’s not like Marisa is out there killing them, and second of all a youkai doesn’t fear death nearly as much as they fear irrelevance. What they fear is humanity taking collective action to change the status quo, creating a world where they are no longer relevant, and therefore are eventually forgotten.
Didn’t like it very much. It felt very “misery-porn” in a way that previous events/stories haven’t, even the memetically dark Children of Ursus. Essentially it posits a world where everything sucks, but anyone trying to fix it is even worse.
Honestly, it seemed so far off the usual tone of “it sucks, but we have to believe that there’s hope” that I have to wonder if it was written by a different writer, or perhaps with the Chinese censors breathing down their neck. In particular, the way it treats protestors is almost the opposite of how the story normally treats Reunion, with them causing less damage yet somehow given even less sympathy (ironically, Reunion is also present and are treated as noble warriors).
Furthermore, one of the main characters of the story (Severin) is treated with a ridiculous amount of sympathy for a guy who is ultimately just a petty asshole who always makes the “hard choice” to side with the corrupt authorities and continue to oppress the downtrodden. It’s a very… “Hard Men Making Hard Choices” form of storytelling, where all the sympathy lies with the guy in power choosing to hurt people, but since he feels a little guilty about it that’s okay. And every single other character in the story (except the protestors) constantly tells him that’s okay. It’s like the entire story was written for the sole purpose of making Severin seem like a good guy going through some bad times, despite literally everything he ever says or does. That’s not too dissimilar from Chen in the main story, but at least her arc has her eventually get fed up with it and point her sword at her boss, while Severin does the exact opposite.
That said, the event wasn’t all bad, as I liked the nods towards the lingering damage of colonialism and cultural genocide. And the characters of Folinic and Atro were nicely developed too. There were a lot of interesting ideas here, I just don’t think they were used very well in service to the story.
The issue is that Imperial Japan at the time was enforcing their own culture onto the countries they conquered, ie: Korea. So what was in Japan a perfectly ordinary and harmless style of fashion has become a symbol of oppression to everyone else.
Western colonial powers have done the same to places like Africa and India with things like suits and dresses, although I don’t know if this has been remembered in quite the same way. Basically, eliminating the local fashions is part of the standard colonial playbook to erase local culture, which Japan was trying to imitate in their quest to become a “Western” imperial power.
Anyway, as for Kosuzu in particular, ZUN actually comments in the latest SCoOW profile book that the idea behind her design was supposed to be that she’s on the cutting edge of fashion (from 150 years ago), which distinguishes her from Akyuu who dresses more conservatively. It just, well, happens to be the case that that was the cutting edge of fashion at almost exactly the same time that Imperial Japan was gearing up.
Is that racist? Almost certainly not. Culturally insensitive? Definitely if you plan on selling something in Korea, less so if you’re only selling it in Japan (but ZUN certainly knows that his works are being seen in other countries).
In a way, it’s sort of like the Manji/Swastika in that something that was originally harmless was coopted by evil people for their own ends. And perhaps that whether it’s offensive or not depends on the context it’s used. ZUN could certainly have avoided it if he’d been thinking about how it might be seen in Korea, but he seems to have approached it more like a period piece and chosen an iconic and recognizable style of dress from that time period.
