~Touhou Headcanons~

These are all the headcanons I've come up with for the Touhou Project, a multimedia doujinshi phenomenon (three highly impactful words, right there) which thrives in the imaginations of its fans.

One idea I'm especially partial to is that Gensokyo might be alive. A few people, including Yukari, can communicate with her; it turns out that Ms Gensokyo has a real passion for music and combat sports, and hates it when Youkai Mountain gets itchy. She has been known to change shape - sometimes her landscape will stretch out and rearrange itself to make room for a new mountain, or a youkai town that ZUN invented for the latest game.

~The PC-98 Era Touhou Characters - Where Are They Now?~

• SinGyoku is still quietly guarding the Hakurei Shrine. They've bonded with Aunn over both having two bodies.


• Elis is staying fresh in Makai, now in charge of a face-painting business. She loves to sing karaoke in her spare time.


• Rika builds tanks and repairs damaged machinery in Makai, where she is notable as the only human who actually wants to be there. She has rebuilt Evil Eye Sigma as "Defender Eye Sigma", to protect Makai from anything vulnerable to tanks.


• Meira is still roaming Gensokyo, challenging innocent passers-by to duels and trying to grow her power. Reimu is madly in love with her, to her immense chagrine; Meira has the distinction of being the only straight woman in Gensokyo.


• Ellen comes to Marisa’s place once in a while for tea and cake.


• Kana has become a good friend of the Prismriver Sisters. Although she's long since given up on trying to haunt people, she loves a spell-card duel.


• Yumemi is still doing Science! in the far future of a distant universe. Bit by bit, her esteemed colleagues are forced to admit that magic is perhaps, sort of, just a tiny bit, ahem, REAL.


• Chiyuri had a late growth spurt, catapulting her to an astonishing height of six foot three and a weight of eighty kilogrammes. Yumemi doesn't dare to spank her or insult her any more. Not frequently, anyway.


• Orange bought a skipping rope.


• Yuuka sacked a tearfully apologetic Elly after their mansion suddenly caught fire. Elly hasn't been seen since then.


• Sara is now a sergeant in the Makaian guard. Since Makai is closed off from Gensokyo, her life has become painfully boring.

~Entirely True and Verifiable Facts about Marisa Kirisame~

• Marisa keeps herself fit. She can lift twice her own weight (albeit while red-faced and dripping with sweat), and run a marathon in less than three hours, but she never needs to in practice.


• There is an unofficial Marisa Fan Club in the Human Village. She’s a hero to all the children and several of the adults. To some, she’s even more of a hero than Reimu, who as we know can be surly and slow to take action.


• Marisa is the sort of person who'll start a close friendship unilaterally, by barging into somebody's life every day until they get used to her. She is also a very enthusiastic eater, able to make a chocolate cheesecake disappear in seconds.


• Marisa is quite the anti-establishment figure, to the point where a few of the Human Village's stuffy old conservatives would like to see her branded an "honorary youkai" and banished. Marisa has no interest in being Respectable or playing by anyone else’s rules, valuing friendship, freedom and good cheer over tradition. She shelters a lot of runaways for this reason, including tengu who fled from Lord Tenma's regime.


• Marisa has a working knowledge of guns, but she never uses them, because it's so tiresome having to put fresh bullets in after every few shots. Her hakkero only needs new mushroom powder after a couple of weeks' regular usage.


• Marisa isn't a technically accomplished dancer, but she makes up for it with Enthusiasm.


• If she was a man, Marisa's fashion sense would be exactly the same. She might grow a beard, though.


• Marisa views mushrooms in much the same way as other people view flowers. She sends all her girlfriends bouquets of mushrooms... and flowers.


• The pain from Marisa's past is part of what drives her. The thought of how her story could have ended - being forced to submit to her father, give up on magic and live a Normal Life - only makes her want to get stronger, so she can protect herself and others from a similar fate. For the most part, she's made peace with it, but her father and his heavy copper blunderbuss still show up in her nightmares.


• Marisa usually wears some variety of sweet-smelling perfume. Too much of it, if anything. All her closest friends have learned to smell her coming before they see her, or even hear her.

~Entirely True and Verifiable Facts about Sakuya Izayoi~

• Sakuya flosses with a straight razor and shaves her legs with a Sri Lankan whip-sword.


• Sakuya can stand on top of quicksand without being in any danger. Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that she can fly. She could hold her breath for four hours, although she wouldn't particularly enjoy it.


• Whenever Sakuya falls ill, which happens about once every ten years, one of her while blood cells will smile sweetly and politely ask the bacteria to leave, looking them squarely in the eyes and sharpening her collection of razor-sharp antibodies. A particularly virulent strain of measles decided to try its luck once, and managed to give Sakuya one spot before being wiped out.


• Sakuya's blood is exceptionally delicious, but when Remilia tried some, she was struck by the irresistible urge to put on a frilly black-and-white dress and clean the entire mansion. It took three weeks before she was back to normal. She gave the dress to Flandre.


• Sakuya's feet look exactly like a completely normal pair of feet. She puts blue nail varnish on sometimes.


• Sakuya once managed to win a knife-throwing competition while fast asleep in a different country.


• Sakuya once managed to win a cookery competition which wasn’t even being held. The judges were very confused about why they were giving her the trophy.


• Sakuya's current record for balancing knives on top of Meiling's nose without waking her up is three hundred and seventeen. It would've been more but for Marisa barging in to play a trumpet solo.


• Sakuya managed to catch all but one of the falling knives, which fell at just the right place in just the right angle to cut off Marisa's bloomers. Marisa just stood there, wide-eyed and hyperventilating, while Sakuya ran to get her a new pair.


• The only time Sakuya ever cried was when Meiling proposed to her. (All those other times when she was chopping onions don't count.)


• Sakuya can make her body four-dimensional, but she never does, because it tends to reshape her clothes in strange and uncomfortable ways.


• As a five-year-old, Sakuya won her first game of chess by biting the enemy king in half. After being informed that biting was cheating, she brought an axe to the next game. After being informed that chopping pieces in half with an axe was also forbidden, she brought a hacksaw to the next game and cut the enemy king into three pieces. By that point, her parents were seriously considering an exorcism, as well as deducting the cost of a new chess set from her pocket money.


• Sakuya ate a leaf of lettuce once. She thought it was quite tasty.