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I want there to be more places in Gensokyo with people in them! Seriously, there's only, like, 6 locations that people care about! Hakurei Shrine, Forest of Magic, Human Village, Youkai Mountain (I'm including Youkai Forest and Genbu Ravine as part of Y. Mtn.), Scarlet Devil Mansion, Myouren Temple, The Netherworld, Mosleum of Dreams, or whatever it's called—the Taoist place—the Bamboo Forest of the Lost, Kourindou, Underground, Hell... And it's the same people doing the same thing every time!
Everywhere else is just "___ Path," "___ Lake," "___ Flower Field," "___ Hill," and they have no people! They're filler! Or the center point of a mystery that goes nowhere! It's boring!
I want more villages! I want the sea! I want Hokkaidou! I want Kyuushuu! I want more youkai societies! I want faction conflicts that aren't just "Buddhism vs. Taoism," "Don't trespass on Youkai Mountain," "the villagers are afraid of youkai and chase them out," or "Hell is having another gang war!"
I want to complain about all the story ideas that I have that get cockblocked by stuff like "Murasa would never sail a ghost ship through the skies plundering the rich because 1) she's Buddhist, 2) she doesn't have a ghost ship, 3) the only people to plunder are the human villagers, but they're protected by the shrine maiden, so there's nowhere else to plunder while waiting for the heat die down" even though she's the only character to be able to do that!
You can have a story with the character but not in Gensokyo if you want stuff like that. It could be set in the past or the future, maybe even concurrent if you want to involve Gensokyo politics in it.
For your Murasa example, you could have a story in the past set after Byakuren was sealed where Murasa is, say, using the Palanquin ship to raid, with the justification that they were heathens, for example.
You can just make up your own locations. If you want a location for people to go to besides the 12 you listed, you can just make one up and have them go there. All the locations you listed didn't exist until ZUN wrote them. The faction conflicts didn't exist until ZUN wrote them. You can just write things!
Thanks for the frog!
Noooooooo! If it's outside Gensokyo, then it's in the outside world (I'm generally not a "PC-98 is a part of Windows canon" guy, and I consider Hell, the moon, and all the other places to be part of Gensokyo, not just the surface), which is boring! If it takes place in a different time period, I have to keep track of what characters I can't use because they might be inactive for whatever reason, or I have to make up a new shrine maiden, or some other reason I don't want to think about too hard! And then if it's a "Japanese government finds Gensokyo," then that's just a bigger human village, which is boring again!
Now, let me explain the thought process behind the Murasa idea: I had a Payday: The Heist stream vod open for background noise, and I immediately thought of the Panic Room plan, but with a giant gold statue of Buddha in the Myouren Temple. Replacing C4 with gunpowder is easy, but where do I get a helicopter? The kappas, of course, but this isn't a bathroom-sized, glass-and-steel room, this is a giant golden statue—I'd probably need more than one chinhook. Can the kappas make multiple on such short notice? Can the entire river be convinced to break bad? What about the Palanquin ship? I know it's Murasa robbing the woman she respects most in the world, but I can justify that with "her desire to help people warped her into trying to force everyone to be Buddhist" or something like that, "so now we need to steal the statue to snap her out of it." Hold on, the ship is the temple, and Byakuren controls what shape it takes, so that's out. Ghost ship, then, she can use a spell card or find one in Hell, why not? Well, now the problem is "I don't really care for the Gensokyo Payday Gang being the good guys in this story; I'd rather they were just unapologetically evil," but now I can't use Murasa. I could have her do it as a side gig, just for fun and not for money, but she still wouldn't do that plan. Whatever, I can just make an OC ship ghost to do the same thing, but I'll try to figure something else out.
It's ideas like that that I keep having—"I want this but Touhou," but then I find a detail or have a thought that makes it difficult to do. I feel like it would be so much simpler if Touhou took place in a mirror dimension or like a dream realm, rather than being in a tiny dome like the Simpsons movie.
I should just say fuck it and pretend like that's always been the case, and when someone calls me out, I'll tell them, "It's my story, and it's awesome!" but I'm too self-conscious to do that.
>>19404
I knoooow, but Gensokyo is the size of a nickel! If there was more than one human village, everyone would know about it! I'm willing to say there's a kitsune village and a tanuki village, but for others, I feel like I can't put them in unless Gensokyo was bigger!
>>19402
Write a story about Gensokyo getting bigger than, or just have it bigger. Sure people are anal retentive about canon but if they aren't willing to suspened an iota of suspension of disbelief than they shouldn't be reading fanfiction in the first place.
It's fanfiction do what you want. I wrote something for the last contest where an upcoming incident involving Gensokyo getting a coastal region, and aside from one Australian commenter complaining about complaining about my rather milquetoast environmental takes most people seemed more interested in an incident and adding a new region than kasen bumming around. That is to say the interest is there.
Besides that, I recently read Shinobi no Bakemono, and do you know what it features? A human village police department, do you know what it's there? Because the writer wanted to write about them and some conflict they have with the youkai, and so he added them to the story.
Nothing is stopping you from writing what you want to write, the Touhou police aren't going to arrest you.
>19405
>I could have her do it as a side gig, just for fun and not for money, but she still wouldn't do that plan.
Easy, she's doing it in secret because it's fun and she likes to fuck with people. Now you have tension in your story as Murasa has a secret to keep and possible conflict with the person she looks up to the most. Heck Byakuren already chaffs against the hobbies of the other Temple members like Kyouko and Mystia's band so it's not like it's out of her ballpark.
Also like with every Heist movie, building the team, and/or the ship in this case is half the story. Of course you could also just hand Murasa the ship and provide some exposition like.
>The oni made it for the mission since their bankrolling it and Yuugi (my wife) is backing this to fuck with kasen and Suika somehow because they were annoying at the last party.
Or something to that affect.
Gensoyko is a small backwater that no one cares about in the general Nagano/Yamanashi (read: Shinano) area. It's where ZUN grew up and a lot of the strangeness and traditions in the works are reflections of this fact. Without getting into folk traditions and beliefs over time and in the current day, there is very much a vibe and mood that's intrinsic to Touhou that's due to these facts.
But, well, with that said, the framing put forward here isn't really valid—stories don't really revolve around geographic locations so much as they do around characters. It is up to writers to make the audience care not only for the (usually sparsely-characterized-in-canon) characters but the locations and lives they live and good writing manages that regardless of what 'canon' or the spirit of things may be.
Hell, several popular stories seem to wholly reject the sensibilities of Touhou and what is depicted in the print works and official games and do their own thing. They are very much not to my taste and I think that they fundamentally misunderstand Gensokyo but they have enough of a following to prove the point that it's a matter of developing your premise adequately to a certain audience to get their buy-in. I don't think that the wider world is particularly relevant to the series but if you can justify this or that element in a satisfactory manner you'll find that you have plenty of leeway to tell the story that you want to.
tl;dr: skill issue fam
Nobody's got the power to change Touhou just to be convenient to you, so there's not much point in complaining about it. Work with the limitations, ignore them, or find something more fitting. That's the basic reality. The rest is up to skill and audience tastes.
>>19407
Thank you! You know, I keep going on Ao3 at work, and all I see is yuri, self-inserts, crossovers with fandoms I don't care about, fan-made character backstories, and other things that don't grab my attention. Why is our fanfiction of a series about mythological beings from a continent across the sea filled with the same thing over and over again? I'm glad there's someone else who wants to see something outlandish and fun!
I've actually always felt that the human village wouldn't have any kind of militia, only the walls and the shrine maiden for their only form of official protection.
Anyway, Byakuren would catch on immediately if she hears of a ghost ship doing naughty things, and I don't think Murasa would want to disappoint Mom. I'd definitely have her get framed, though, and become a fugitive if I decide to have another ship ghost do it. I'd want it to be less of a movie and more of a TV series with multiple heists hitting every faction they can, so I want the gang to have as few ties as possible to others as I can manage. (For the onis, it's going to be Cook Off from Payday 2, but they make moonshine tainted with hallucinogenic mushroom spores in the Forest of Magic.)
>>19411
Careful, all that straw makes your bullshit all the more flammable.
>>19412
nta, but Isn't the purpose of bullshit to be flammable?
Forgive me if I am given to a moment of introspection, but perhaps something akin to an OC who has the ability to steal or copy other people's abilities, and has connection to Yukari is in order.
Or if a crossover is more you pallet Blackbeard from One Piece could suffice, the Yami Yami no Mi does affect the abilties of devils in general, not just devil fruits, and the four elders being devils who have devil powers that transform them into youkai suggests that by One Piece standards and thus the standards of the Yami Yami no Mi, that Youkai are Devils. Thus Blackbeard should be able to steal the abilities of youkai.
Besides, what's wrong with straw? It tastes nice and it makes for good bedding.
Sorry, but that's not really to my tastes. This'll make you say, "then why do you like Touhou?", but I prefer it when characters don't have ridiculously strong abilities that make them gods among men.
I shouldn't expect you to believe me, but I meant to post with my trip code, but I forgot.
Where'd he go? Now I just look like a schizo!
>>19416
It's okay Maxis, I saw it too. But to explain my joke from above.
>an OC who has the ability to steal or copy other people's abilities, and has connection to Yukari is in order.
Is a rather stock SIOC that the Touhou fandom on the larger whole tends to occasionally reinvent independent of each other. While Blackbeard is crossover slop, which is making fun of my own love for crossovers by using a character for a series I'm disinterested in. Although the joke is only funny to me, I am a person far too easily entertained by his own thoughts.
>>19410
More seriously, I think you should broaden your conception of characters and try to become more comfortable with writing characters ooc in order to write the touhou story you want, or try to think of plots which would make those characters more easily bend. Murasa already goes and capsizes ships behind Byakuren's back so I can see her being lured into a life of crime due to the thrill, having to lead a double life and perhaps working with another ship phantom who's arrived with their own vessel and is making use of her in order to push forward some heist scheme.
Ah, I see! I'm that way, too, but I guess we just didn't know that about each other.
You're probably right. Again, I'm just worried that people are going to jeer my ideas just because they're too different, so then I decide to make an OC to better fit the situation thinking that'll be a better option. I didn't know that about Murasa, though, and I like that idea! Maybe I will keep her around for this.
