This entry was originally written on March 2018, but I'm publishing it now because it's endearing. To me.
But of course. I am an obnoxious yuri person and yuri ships were a huge part of what made me get so invested in Touhou (to this day!!). The person who introduced me to the world of Touhou was very adamant about not becoming a shallow shipper (because, you know, it's a fucking shooter!! What kind of sick person thinks about the pew-pewers kissing!) but guess what! I was too weak and strayed from the pure path of being into it for_the_games, and ended up considering the romantic affairs of the entire cast. Ew.
Oh, well. They all were the first f/f / yuri ships I ever loved, and this meant a lot for me because once LESBIANISM touches your life, it changes it forever. It can make you have a marked preference for same-gender couples in your media and (wait, this is very funny) even make you realize you're also a member of The Club*. Because of these reasons, my 2hu ships are very dear to my heart.
Since I have a lot of things to say about them, I'll make several posts like this listing my personal history with a particular ship and what I like about it. Let's begin with the only and one, THE original, the patron ship of them all:
Oh, well. They all were the first f/f / yuri ships I ever loved, and this meant a lot for me because once LESBIANISM touches your life, it changes it forever. It can make you have a marked preference for same-gender couples in your media and (wait, this is very funny) even make you realize you're also a member of The Club*. Because of these reasons, my 2hu ships are very dear to my heart.
Since I have a lot of things to say about them, I'll make several posts like this listing my personal history with a particular ship and what I like about it. Let's begin with the only and one, THE original, the patron ship of them all:
MariAli
This ship is a gateway drug. Okay, this is actually not the original gateway drug for Touhou shipping -- the first one is very explicitly presented in the source material: |
| Exhibit A. I heard someone describe this picture as "the one where Reimu is looking at Marisa in a sapphic way" once. This is the cover of LLS, released in '98. |
[...]Because of this, she often gets jealous of Reimu who never trains but still exceeds Marisa with her talent alone, and always tries to get in Reimu's way.
Surprisingly, Marisa is very attached to Reimu at the same time, so much that she'd die of boredom without her.
– Shuusou Gyoku, 創曲幻想.txt
...Yeah, this makes a strong case for ReiMari and no wonder why it's an all-time favorite in the fandom**. I, too, started out by timidly shipping them -- I was just getting comfortable with the mind-blowing concept of two women holding hands and well... turns out that if you're seriously into Touhou, shipping the characters is kind of unavoidable, unless you're a pussy ass straight little man who feels threatened by girls kissing girls, not kissing you.
Anyways, Reimu and Marisa are best friends forever, and that's about the best recipe for a nice, steady and complete relationship, if you ask me. I even suspect zun himself is aware of how good and romantic this pair is, but will never tell us because it's simply not relevant to the story he wants to tell and he knows how fucking awful this fandom is regarding the Word of God.
As I was dutifully cultivating my love for the series, the not-ship person (my 2hu mother?) kindly pointed me towards this video here (just because the music was soooo good, not because of the implicit sapphicism!):
Predictably, I fell for heroic Marisa who saves the lonely girl from herself and joyfully yanks her out to the vast and beautiful outside world and shows her that she can be loved as well. Back then I was extremely attracted to this, as all teenage girls are irresistibly drawn to YA literature-esque sappy shit, but hey! This left out the annoying heterosexuality out of the equation (for the best.) However, I didn't declare my love for MariPache publicly during those times, as I was still carefully dipping my toes into f/f and it's consequences for me. Before long, though, I found myself being thrown face-first into This Experience:
Oooooh, fucking yes. It's the IOSYS MariAli Experience, baby!! Look, unrequited love is great, but you know what tired and over-used trope is even more fantastic? The haunting and inevitable death of a lover.***
...Yeah, I know this is Yet Another case of fictional lesbians getting the short end of the stick, because the temporary happiness of two women in love comes at a price -- usually a life or two. But at the time, I just found the whole thing so moving and beautifully tragic, hell, not even fucking Shakespeare could top that for me. And that's all it took for me to finally dive into MariAli and into the world of f/f Touhou ships.
Now, putting aside this captivating scenario, I'm well aware that Alice's personality is actually a bit on the grim-annoying side and I highly doubt that Marisa would be the type to hang out at her house often because she's an extroverted, energetic, loud, curious girl who uses her quiet time for herself (eg. training, studying, experimenting, gathering stuff...), and both of them are just minding their own business. But as annoying as Alice may be and as free-willed Marisa is (meaning that she'd just roll her eyes and leave in light of Alice's ridiculousness), the truth is that they have chemistry together. The hilarity factor goes over the roof with these two, they're a fun couple! Marisa is the perfect straight man to Alice's fastidious, neurotic self.
Sadly, what little we have of this wonderfully fussy character that is Alice has been taken to the extremes (also, she only ever appears every once in a
Let's take the two most common depictions of Alice. She's either the unbearable tsundere or the creep who lusts after Marisa and is sexually violent towards her. Is either of these characterizations funny or interesting? Hell no. There are DOZENS of tsunderes everywhere and there's nothing that indicates that Alice is one of them (apart from saying one thing, then denying it afterwards and generally acting like a princess, but you know? I think zun just wanted people to say "huh, what the ever-loving-fuck are these women on?"). The Alice who is constantly horny and wants to force herself on Marisa in every occasion they cross paths is just boring.
Instead, it would be nice to see a nuanced character, a sort of insecure woman who likes to nitpick and who worries too much and has a grudge or two. I'd also expect her to meditate on life and what consciousness and humanity mean, perhaps someone who takes herself a bit too seriously and who's a little lonely deep inside. This woman would surely clash with the adventurous, carefree thief who lives in the middle of a mess and whose field in which she grows her fucks lies barren. I want them engaging in fun, witty banter and forgetting their loneliness and working hard on their magic enterprises together.
Alas, it's nice to dream. To my chagrin, such a dynamic rarely shows up anywhere and comics/fics where Alice is treated as an interesting and strong character do so at the expense of Marisa, who is often used as a prop to adore Alice forever and ever. They even go so far as to give her the role of a clingy child! Take, for example Yuuki Sakuraba's/Personal Color's works (some of them can be found here). Their Alice is lovely and they take the time to explore the transition the character must have undergone from the PC-98 era to the Windows era, the result of this integration is a rich, beautiful character, if a little bit too melancholic and ~dark. However, Marisa is shown as a literal child who is not only lonely and orphaned, but who depends heavily on others and is pressured to seek attention in order to feel loved... And that definitely goes against what I've seen of her in official works.
Note that this infantilization is pretty common with artists who like to focus on Alice/like to draw dominant Alice:
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| I know Marisa is supposed to be young, but come oooonnn [1] |
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| What's their age gap again? [2] |
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| This is hot but it also makes me want to call CPS. [3] |
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| Is it Marisa's lack of bosom or what? [4] |
(By the way, Tarou adopted another pen name later on and recognized his latent desire to draw porn nonstop -- he regaled us with one of the best steamysexyhot MariAli doujins. It's actually a sweet little tale that completely drops the weirddd anatomy classes we get in these things and has them LAUGHING and FEELING SILLY during sex. But that was his peak as he now draws generic moeblobs being fed gallons of cum and uhhh... miss me with that straight shit.)
NitoHina
Okay, this is one of those couples that spring up in fandoms just because they happen to share some kind of space (be it geographical, mythological, semantic, whatever) but have never really interacted. So, while everyone knows that Hina goes with Nitori, that they live in the same area and their stages in Mountain of Faith are subsequent, nobody has bothered to realllly explore or capture what the hell this ship would result in. Can't blame anyone for this, as there's literally zero dialogue between them in the games/comics, so all the stuff that the fans have made about them is ???? wild experimentation, truly in the spirit of doujin and what Touhou represents.I like this ship because they look cute together and because, upon thinking about them, I can't help but envisage an adorable disaster. The "uooo~" in "NitoHina is my uooo~" means they're falling... and making a cute mess.
A lot has been said about the exploits of Nitori the Valley Kappa and her greed/technical expertise, and wasn't she like, the exponent of faithlessness in Hopeless Masquerade? Zun's characterizations are all over the place and are subject to drastic changes -- Nitori is exhibit #1 of this -- but I'm sticking with my favorite one, which is NOT the adorable little ShyShyShy Nitori who's always hiding, but the ruthless engineering nut Nitori who aims to be some kind of patent troll and isn't afraid to tell people that they're fucking idiots and that they stink and will only be smiley-smiley with members of her community. Definitely not the swimsuit cutie all the lads gloat at.
This rules out the usual ultra sugary stuff you see about Hina and her, like Umekichi's Sweet Autumn of Misterious Mountain. Don't get me wrong, fluffy NitoHina is cute as fuck and I love it, but they have very, very different current personalities and I'm more interested in those, and publishing things based on that interpretation is one of the reasons why I started this blog.
Well, let's see. First of all, how would such a hyper-pragmatic character like her fall in love with anyone at all? It seems like she's only interested in three things: reverse-engineering stuff (I'm claiming her away from the CS nerds, she's mainly a hardware kappa), money and power. Little tenderness in sight. Also, she's abrasive -- this is not up for discussion, she is rude and has a superiority complex and will let this be known to anybody, except to tengu and oni. Just for them, she'll become the meek, compliant girl everyone thinks she is, because all youkai keep well in mind who's above them and who isn't and will respect those boundaries. But the rest? The rest of dirty non-kappa are possible customers or tiny nuisances or whatever. Allies, in the best case.
I assume that she does know about Hina, because it's true that they live in the same area and everyone and their moms on Youkai Mountain and the human village should know about the resident goddess of misfortune, especially if there's like, a holiday attached to her (the nagashi-bina festival). Hina probably hangs around rivers a lot to collect her cursed dolls, so at some point they must've run into each other. If Nitori is a sensible being like the rest of us, she must have felt drawn to and curious about this pretty doll-like woman here:
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| Anyone who has functioning eyes wonders. [5] |
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| Look at this environmentally-conscious darling. She's out there looking out for you and me. [6] |
... with a sugary fragile darling... who can't be touched at all. What exactly would lead to this and how would she approach it? Are they even friends? I've seen multiple depictions of them and, even though they're adorable and heart-melting, they don't fully showcase the (hilarious, in my opinion, and even disastrous) possibilities of the two of them being together and in love.
If Hina reciprocates these romantic feelings, what would she do? Let's not simply assign her the role of an elusive lovely girl who wanders around Youkai Mountain and who graciously says yes to anyone's love confession. Because first of all, people avoid her like the plague -- she's quite literally a plague goddess, but this doesn't seem to bother her too much. To what extent? The canon says she doesn't mind this and understands why everyone runs away from her, but I imagine she feels very lonely anyway. We also know she tries to interact with people (by going to the human village to sell used hina dolls occasionally) and is very friendly in general, which means she has a need to connect with them -- otherwise, she wouldn't bother. But she's aware of her potentially destructive power. What would she do, what would she like to do?
This is very speculative because, again, not many people care about this particular couple and there's very little canon material. But I think it's worth playing around with them -- the results would certainly be very amusing.
Art sources:
[1] This artwork was made by a very prolific MariAli artist who used to release a ton of stuff in this ultra shoujo style (they had like, prints and bags and the usual comiket fare with their works), but who no longer has a Pixiv page up. I don't remember their name, sorry. If I manage to get any info on them, I'll update this entry.
[2] This style is very distinctive, isn't it? It's Personal Color's.
[3] I wanted to link back at the source (Pixiv ID 3422452) but it appears that the artist has marked their work as private as of 2/25/18. It truly cannot be helped.
[4] Made by 猫耳ようかん@Pixiv. I used to think this was an illustration from a fanfic, but apparently it was inspired by this nice song, which has an epic Love's Theme vibe. Go listen to it.
[5] and [6] are illustrations made for Symposium of Post-mysticism.
[1] This artwork was made by a very prolific MariAli artist who used to release a ton of stuff in this ultra shoujo style (they had like, prints and bags and the usual comiket fare with their works), but who no longer has a Pixiv page up. I don't remember their name, sorry. If I manage to get any info on them, I'll update this entry.
[2] This style is very distinctive, isn't it? It's Personal Color's.
[3] I wanted to link back at the source (Pixiv ID 3422452) but it appears that the artist has marked their work as private as of 2/25/18. It truly cannot be helped.
[4] Made by 猫耳ようかん@Pixiv. I used to think this was an illustration from a fanfic, but apparently it was inspired by this nice song, which has an epic Love's Theme vibe. Go listen to it.
[5] and [6] are illustrations made for Symposium of Post-mysticism.
*I'm a bye-sexual.
**In 2025, I actually prefer ReiMari over MariAli. Who'd have thunk. It's thanks to zun's propaganda. And Mero's.
***Ever-green reason to like a ship, and why I also like Akyuusuzu.
