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[lotuslegend]

Player nickname: Anna
Player LJ: kues
Way to contact you:
Email: aokigaharaden@gmail
AIM: only my wits
Other: hakurei@plurk
Are you at least 15?: Y
Current Characters: none

Character: Reimu Hakurei
Fandom: Touhou Project
Character Notes:
History:

☯ Some time in the near past, the 13th Hakurei Miko (unnamed) gave birth to Reimu, transferring over her divine rights and placing Reimu as the rightful heir to the Hakurei shrine. It's unknown what happened to Reimu's mother, though it's heavily implied Reimu grew up alone, learning to take care of herself on her own, with assistance from the Hakurei shrine's resident flying turtle, Genji.

☯ (Highly Responsive to Prayers) At some point when Reimu is younger, through a destructive accident that obliterated her shrine, Reimu harnessed the power of the Hakurei Yin-Yang orb. We...don't really know exactly what it does besides be a killer dodgeball. With this, she gains the confidence to go out and investigate Gensokyo's troubles, her shrine-maiden duties fullfilled.

☯ (Story of the Eastern Wonderland) Reimu goes training in the mountains, and comes back to see her shrine infested with spirits. This leads her to reunite with someone she met in Hell (Mima), and her future best friend, Marisa Kirisame.

☯ (Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream) A pile of metal ruins appear at the back of Reimu's shrine, and it's said a prize will be given to any who enter--however, only one may enter. A fight ensues, and Reimu, through winning, finds out that it's nothing more than a ruse to get experimented on by a kooky Outside World-scientist, Yumemi. Yumemi, however, offers to grant a heavily disappointed Reimu a wish if she is able to best her in combat--Reimu does, and she wishes for help in cleaning. Yumemi gives Reimu her robotic maid Ruukoto.

☯  (Lotus Land Story) Months later, a large influx of demons start attacking the Hakurei shrine, and Reimu and Marisa head out to extinguish the source. They find it comes from a lake of blood high up in the mountains--and within said lake happens to be a portal to a dream world, and its palace, Mugenkan. The two crash into the place, but soon have a fierce fight between them due to suspicions and tension. This ends up waking up the mastermind, Yuuka, who proceeds to try and kick them the hell out of her mansion. Laser-filled battle ensues.

☯ (Mystic Square) A portal from the demon world of Makai opens up, and many of Makai's demons begin frolicking around in Gensokyo. Reimu is Not Pleased, and sets off into Makai (along with Marisa, Mima, and Yuuka tailing along for their own reasons). Turns out Makai's leader, Shinki, had been sending her peeps into Gensokyo as a vacation resort. Shinki promptly gets her ass whooped, as per the normal.

☯ A large span of time goes by where not much is known about what happened. Reimu learned how to harness her flight powers on her own, and retired Genji to the back of the shrine, and she notably cut her hair with age. Her powers developed much more during this period.

☯ (Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil) A scarlet-colored mist appears in Gensokyo's air, blocking out all sunlight. Reimu and Marisa chase the source to an old mansion on Misty Lake, and find the generator is a small vampire girl, Remilia Scarlet, who wanted to go out because the sun burns her skin. She got her ass kicked.

☯ (Perfect Cherry Blossom) Winter seems to never end, snow still falling even in late may, when flowers should be blooming. Reimu, Marisa, and Remilia's chief maid Sakuya all head out to try and reverse the neverending cold, finding themselves in the Netherworld. They reunite with Alice Margatroid, a boss from the older games, and ultimately find out spring is literally being sucked out from Gensokyo itself to power a demonic cherry tree called Saigyou Ayakashi, in order to resuurect the corpse of Yuyuko Saigyouji, the Netherworld's princess. After this is explained, Yuyuko backs off and spring returns. However, Reimu runs into an old friend of Yuyuko's, the youkai in charge of the Great Border, Yukari Yakumo. Yukari takes a liking to Reimu, and proceeds to stick to her for amusement purposes.

☯ (Immaterial and Missing Power) There is rampant partying in Gensokyo. Apparently this is a problem, as Reimu once again heads out to find the source, and spots the culprit in the form of the oni, Suika Ibuki. Suika, using her powers of density to make the area a "party-dense" place, wanted to attract other oni. After she gets her ass handed to her on a platter courtesy of Reimu, she follows Yukari's initiative and hangs around Reimu for giggles, actually starting to live at the shrine.

☯ (Imperishable Night) In the late summer, some problems with the moon arise. Yukari notices that its been replaced with a fake moon that doesn't ever become full. She drags Reimu out to solve the problem with her, and after an encounter with Marisa eerily similar to the Mugenkan fight, the two eventually find that the Japanese lunar princess, Kaguya-hime, and her bodyguard Eirin, is behind it all.

☯ (Phantasmagoria of Flower View) Next spring, the flowers start blooming out of control, prompting numerous people besides Reimu to go out and start investigations, for a number of different reasons. Characters from the previous games show up, and through a series of odd fights, they all end up facing a shinigami--a ferryman of death, Komachi Onozuka. Turns out its her lazyness that caused a high number of spirits to show up and settle inside the flowers for lack of a proper resting place. Komachi is pushed aside, but her boss, a lord of hell, quickly comes to attempt to smooth the situation over.

☯ (Mountain of Faith) Over a year later, in the fall, Reimu's peace is shattered yet again when her shrine is visited by a mysterious person, a message left telling her to close down or the shrine itself will be demolished. She, along with Marisa, go into the mountains to find the deity behind the messenger, and eventually find her in the wind god Kanako Yasaka, a Shinto deity from the Outside World. The mysterious visitor turns out to be Sanae Kochiya, Kanako's chief miko. Sanae ends up viewing Reimu as a "business rival." Ooops.

☯ (Scarlet Weather Rhapsody) Later that spring, the weather starts to get wonky. Reimu herself is constantly followed around by persistent sunshine, contrasting with Marisa being followed around by a persistent drizzle. She eventually traces the incident back to the Celestial Tenshi Hinanawi, a bored girl with weather controlling powers who wanted to stir up trouble for the sake of causing trouble. Reimu attempts to beat sense into Tenshi, but this doesn't end up working (!!) and Tenshi goes right back to causing trouble. Nearly the entire cast has to come and beat up Tenshi before anything gets solved, and even then she manages to knock down the Hakurei shrine via earthquake. Once Tenshi feels she's repented, after getting knocked around by half the cast, Yukari comes and fights her once more...again demolishing the Hakurei shrine that Tenshi had finished rebuilding for Reimu. This, stunningly, reduces Reimu to actual tears. Suika ends up moving out once she finds that Heaven, Tenshi's homeland, has "free rent".

☯ (Subterranean Animism) After her shrine is repaired again, another incident starts up, naturally not letting Reimu rest for one second. A geyser erupts from the Underground, making a hotspring near the Hakurei shrine. Reimu and Marisa and undeterred by the odd presence of the hotspring and earth spirits climbing up from the ground to the surface, and actually set up a real hotsprings service there. Yukari and the other youkai, however, don't believe all is fine and dandy, and she talks with Patchouli, a friend of Remilia's originating from EoSD, both agreeing a search party is best to send down to the underground. Reimu and Marisa are sent to investigate with a partner waiting on the surface--Reimu's either being Yukari, Suika, or Aya Shameimaru (a boss from PoFV and MoF), Marisa's either being Alice, Patchouli, or Nitori (a boss from MoF). The two travel through the underground, going through the streets of the former hell, into the Palace of the Earth Spirits. There, they meet the mind-reading youkai Satori Komeiji, who (kind of) explains that the source of the geysers is her pet bird, Utsuho, and leads them to the Hell of Blazing Fires, where Utsuho has holed herself up. 

☯ (Subterranean Animism, cont.) After blazing past a friend of Utsuho's trying to protect her, the two end up in the middle of a nuclear reactor, face to face with Utsuho--who calmly explains that she wishes to completely incinerate Gensokyo with her newfound nuclear fusion powers, the geysers being her friend's way of warning people on the surface. Naturally they don't take this sitting down, and through a very, very harsh battle, manage to restrain Utsuho long enough to get her power back under control. It turns out that she, originally just an ordinary crow, was granted great powers after swallowing the sun god Yagaterasu--after being instructed to do so by Kanako, who wanted to harness her nuclear powers for herself. Reimu, of course, goes to have a word with Kanako about this (Marisa going because she's bored), and while on her way back to the shrine, meets up with Sanae and Satori's younger sister, Koishi. After some fights, Koishi attaches herself to Reimu and Marisa a la Yukari and Suika.

☯  (Undefined Fantastic Object) In the aftermath of Utsuho's geysers, a long-buried ship is forced up from the Underground. The inhabitants, wanting to free their companion, Byakuren Hijiri, from a deeper part of Makai, start hunting to find ways to free her. Shit happens, and Reimu, Marisa, and Sanae all go out when they see "flying saucers" in the sky, actually the shattered remnants of the key needed to free Byakuren. After travelling through Byakuren's crew's ship, and back into Makai, the three find Byakuren herself, forcibly breaking her prison open. She gives them a stern lecture about tolerance, traditional fights ensue, and then Byakuren goes back to living in Gensokyo. Sanae rather likes her, so she asks Suwako, her other patron deity alongside Kanako as well as Kanako herself, to help Byakuren construct a site to have her Buddhist temple. Oddly, Byakuren has a very specific site in mind.

☯ (Touhou Hisoutensoku/Unthinkable Natural Law) Reimu's role here is much more minor, only appearing as a boss for the story modes of Sanae, Cirno (former EoSD boss and PoFV character), and Meiling (EoSD boss).  A mysterious giant is seen in the distant mountains of Gensokyo, and the three heroines each have a theory as to what it is.

☯ (Double Spoiler) A few months later, Reimu is forcibly hunted down by Aya and her rival, Hatate Himekaidou, and photographed for their respective newspapers.

☯ (Ten Desires) It turns out Byakuren's temple plot was right next to a graveyard--and right on top of the "grave" of Taoist saint Toyosatomimi no Miko. Miko, being a distinctly Bad Person, had always butted heads with Byakuren while the two were still awake and on Gensokyo's surface 1000+ years before. In an attempt to keep Miko's inevitable reawakening delayed, she purposefully had Suwako and Kanako build her temple on top of Miko's mausoleum. It was, exactly, inevitable, as once more Miko begins to resurrect, flooding Gensokyo with divine spirits. Reimu, Marisa, Sanae, and Youmu (a boss from PCB and frequent player character in other games), find this unusual and head out find out what's going on. They're directed from the temple graveyard straight into Miko's mausoleum, and while Miko hasn't necessarily done anything wrong,  this is Touhou so of course there's a fight in which the heroines pummel Miko into the dirt.

Personality:

"You wouldn't flee somewhere where there's nothing, right?"

Reimu, at first glance, can seem ridiculously mean-spirited, irritable, and violent--to hell with you if you interfere with her work, or her fun, or whatever she happened to be doing that just got interrupted. She tends to solve Gensokyo's many problems with danmaku straight to the face, and brute force is her preferred method of interrogation. She has a rather entitled streak (this is her land), but it's understood--there's only one Border guardian, and if she dies, so does Gensokyo. Intimidating by default, and for a good reason, many smaller youkai avoid her completely for fear of being exorcised--and stronger youkai seek her out specifically for a challenge. If there's one thing Reimu is, it's passionate about her ideals and what she must maintain and protect, for the sake of both herself and every citizen of Gensokyo. Beyond just being seen as a bully to weaker beings, Reimu actually takes her duties as the Hakurei miko very seriously, never fooling around when the Border might be in danger of collapsing.

"It's so dark, I don't know where to go, but...the grounds here are so romantic at night." (<--carefree)

Most of that, however? It's Reimu's tough outer shell she built up for the sake of duty, and her life of isolation, her "mama bear" tendencies for Gensokyo taking center stage over her casual persona. On the inside, demonstrated a whole lot in the dialogue of her earlier appearances, Reimu can be quite carefree. She loves the little things, never forgetting to stop and smell the roses. In her younger years, Reimu did tend to use verbal persuasion before force to try and get what she needed. She can be quite a romantic and a poet without even realizing it, using flowery language and taking a liking to metaphors and word games. She likes animals a lot, and they like her, seemingly appreciating her guarding their land. She once needed to cross a river, and before she knew it, fish from below had risen up below her feet to make their own bridge for her. She's also honest to a fault, even becoming painfully obvious and awkward when she tries to lie. Reimu's attention span isn't the greatest, as she often takes route detours whenever she feels "bored." She's an intense optimist, though, never feeling anything is truly "the end"--even Gensokyo's impending incineration was just another incident to investigate to her, and she did not flinch in the face of the power-crazy girl who started it all. 

"You're a target? Now that's a surprise."

Generally, when she's off the job, Reimu treats everyone, both human and youkai and every type of being in between, the same: mild disinterest but an invitation for tea at her shrine. Her fair nature is another reason why she does a good job at maintaining (relative) peace in Gensokyo--everyone is the same brand of trouble to her. When she created the spellcard rules for fighting, she intended for them to make fights between common youkai easier to resolve, and that they did--deaths decreased dramatically. Sarcasm seems to be something she imploys when off the job, giving a snort of amusement at anyone who expects her to give three shits about insignificant things. She even holds off on using her most fearsome power that would, essentially, make her undefeatable, and all for the sake of a fair fight. Reimu's been called the glue that holds Gensokyo together for reasons besides the obvious physical ones--despite her normally serious personality, she manages to attract the wildest people in the land (Marisa the persistent thief and self-proclaimed lunatic even being her closest friend), and it's unsure if anyone actually hates her outright.

"That's not the problem! If I leave this alone, it'll look like I'm slacking off!"

It's worth noting that Reimu is lazy. Really, really lazy. She will not do anything she doesn't have to do, or doesn't mean Gensokyo or its general population are in danger. It's said she has enough power to be the strongest shrine maiden of the entire Hakurei family, being that of a god...if only she would train more to achieve that power. But she doesn't. She never actually puts forth the effort she needs to be 100%, instead settling for a passing 89%, per se. Her shrine is in perpetual poverty due to lack of donations (despite her continuous good deeds), and while she'll never be an outright money-grubber or beggar, it has caused her to be a tad bit greedy. Any sight of money she may get often becomes a "plus" to an otherwise bad situation. However, all clouds have a silver lining, and how Reimu has managed to keep her shrine up and running as well as keeping herself well-fed and living well is merely an example of her determination.

Other:

Reimu's shrine maiden status means she's of a divine nature, being able to access power granted to her by the gods. Potentially? It means she can pretty much exorcise anything demonic in nature, put nigh-impenetrable barriers, and is in general the most powerful character of the series. Her own unique ability, however, is "to fly" which might seem like a copout since everyone in the Touhou series can fly, but becomes meaningful when Reimu demonstrates she can actually fly out of reality itself, becoming forever intangible and godly.

She is, in fact, not a zombie. She's ambidextrous, and frequently cuts her hair throughout the series, unlike most characters. She's been in 17 of the 18 released games.

Additional Links: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Reimu, But Were Too Damn Lazy to Ask


First Person (entry type):

[A video feed opens. Reimu sits near a small fireplace, wrapped up in a large scarf, a cup of tea in her hand.]

It's gotten so cold here lately. Which wouldn't normally be a problem; Gensokyo has a variety of weather...except it's May right now.

[She sighs.]  I'm starting to think it's another bothersome incident, like that mist. ...although I don't think we have more vampires to fool around, so the suspects both are and aren't limited. Limited in the fact that vampires seem to be troublesome in general, so they're chief suspects. Not limited...in the same manner.

[She blinks a few times, blankly, and then shakes her head.] I think I'm going to have to do something...sooner if not later. As much as I hate this weather. Did you know this shrine has no internal heating? It's essentially just a rickety shack, as cold as it is outside. My only blessing is that it keeps out the snow itself. But 'heater' is just another thing to add to the list of 'things to buy when people actually start recognizing my work'.

All of you please keep safe. I don't want to have to deal with frozen friends. 

Third Person:

It was a rare occurrence that something inside of the shrine itself managed to capture Reimu's attention. She'd walked it inside-out, cleaned it, spent her entire life within it...so on the off-chance that something odd went on inside, she knew for sure it had to be investigated, lest she eventually come face to face with some sort of kappa flooding her closet, or a yuki-onna dumping snow on her while she slept.

It was a key. A single golden key, that she found underneath her pillow when she woke up that morning. Half of her wanted to be upset that a stupid key had woken her up from her lone day to sleep in, finding her in her slumber akin to the Princess and the Pea. That part of her wanted to chuck the key out the window and go back to sleep. But that part of her was overruled by her more sensible side. It couldn't have just been there for no reason. Someone had to have put it there or willed it there. They wanted her to see it.  She grumbled, climbing to her feet with key in hand, and trudged off and into the main hallway of the shrine.

She tried to figure out what it could mean. Well, keys opened things. What did this key open? A door? A gate? Something immaterial? She half imagined opening her bathroom door into a world full of flying spaghetti monsters and talking clams wanting to devour her flesh. Shuddering, she shook the thought away, and tried to examine the key further for clues. Except it didn't yield much at all--it seemed ordinary, no scratches, not a single trace of magic on it.

This was gonna be a long day.