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Fandom/Music CDs

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Revision as of 01:53, 3 November 2021 by Shioshou (talk | contribs) (→‎Maribel Hearn: Akyuu Hieda → Hieda no Akyuu)
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This sub-article lists unofficial content associated with characters that originally appeared in ZUN's Music CDs, primarily the Secret Sealing Club of Renko Usami and Maribel Hearn.

Unnamed girl on DiPP jacket

  • She is believed to be a Christian, due to what appears to be a cross in her right hand.
  • In the C62 version of the CDs Story, there was only one girl in the "eight honest men". There's a theory that the girl in this group is the same one on the CD cover.
  • There's also a speculation that this girl is Vera Claythorne from Agatha Christie's And There Were None. In the story, the girl hangs herself, when she was the last one left of the eight men, while Vera did exactly the same.
  • She is sometimes called Pierrot.

Renko Usami

  • Sometimes she appears with rabbit ears, because her name sounds like "Usamimi" (rabbit ears, in Japanese).
  • Is sometimes thought of as a counterpart to Reimu Hakurei, though unlike Maribel and Yukari Yakumo, is not often thought to be linked to her in any significant way.
  • Because they don't exist in the same world or time as other Touhou characters, Renko is most often paired with Maribel, either as friends, roomates or romantically.
  • She, by Maribel's words, tends to arrive late to any of their meetings, and it became a cliché in fanarts.

Maribel Hearn

  • Because they don't exist in the same world or time as other Touhou characters, Maribel is most often paired with Renko, either as friends or romantically.
  • Sometimes thought to be a foreigner of some sort.
  • Numerous theories abound as to a link with Yukari Yakumo. For instance, ZUN acknowledges a relationship between them, although he only explicitly mentioned Lafcadio Hearn. Other theories and questions as to the nature of Maribel and Yukari are as follows:
Appearance
Maribel and Yukari's appearances are very similar to each other. Both have the same hair color and (in most official portrayals) eye color. In addition to this, both are always depicted wearing some combination of purple and red (the opposite colors of the visible spectrum), as well as ribbons tied in the shape of an eight, which is stated to be one of the meanings of Yukari's name. Both also wear a bonnet.
Ability
Both Maribel and Yukari have the ability to see boundaries. Unlike Yukari, however, Maribel is only stated to be able to see boundaries, not manipulate them. However, after Maribel told Renko about her dreams involving going to another world in Changeability of Strange Dream, Renko speculates that Maribel's ability is evolving into the ability to manipulate boundaries, even though such a thing should be impossible. In later stories such as Trojan Green Asteroid and Neo-traditionalism of Japan, Maribel is outright taking Renko with her to different worlds and bringing things back from them, showing that her ability has advanced far beyond merely being able to see boundaries. Her power has grown so much that "Renko couldn't help but think that Maribel was on the same level as those youkai."
One of Yukari's most famous uses of her ability was to go to the moon through its reflection on the lake. At the end of Magical Astronomy, Maribel also gets an idea of how to get to the moon while looking at its reflection in the lake, although the story ends there without explicitly saying what it was.
Dreams
In Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, it mentions a couple speculations by various denizons of Gensokyo. One is that Yukari is a youkai from the outside world and spends her days and winters there (the time she claims to be sleeping). Another is that the outside world is Yukari's dream. It's also stated that Yukari's ability to manipulate boundaries includes the ability to enter dreams. Perfect Memento in Strict Sense doesn't state how valid these speculations are.
Maribel herself has visited Gensokyo in her dreams. In these dreams, she appears to still be Maribel and still be a human, as she says she is constantly attacked by youkai and runs from them in fear (which is the point when she typically wakes up).
Time Period
Maribel is descended from a lineage which has had the ability to sense the supernatural since long ago. She herself exists in a time in the near future (when her stories are stated to take place). Yukari meanwhile has existed for at least over 1,200 years before and up to the present day (when the Touhou Project takes place).
It's confirmed that travelling through time is possible in the Touhou Project. Watatsuki no Toyohime mentions that rarely, time is one of the things that a human can get spirited away through in Cage in Lunatic Runagate's third chapter. Maribel appears to have travelled through time on at least one occasion. In Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, there's an entry about a mysterious memo found "several hundred years ago" written by a person who believes she's wandering in the Bamboo Forest of the Lost while she's dreaming, mentioning such things as a GPS and a cell phone, and even the phrase "I'm gonna tell Renko about it when I wake up."
Going by this, Maribel was apparently herself in Gensokyo during at least two different times hundreds of years apart. In Changeability of Strange Dream, Maribel visits a scarlet mansion with a maid (presumably the Scarlet Devil Mansion) at one point, and at another point gets lost in a bamboo forest (of which the events where she gets lost indicates it's the Bamboo Forest of the Lost). The memo in Perfect Memento in Strict Sense shows that the period in which she got lost was several hundreds of years before the present day, while the Scarlet Devil Mansion is known to have arrived in Gensokyo only recently.
Yukari's Original Name
Yukari Yakumo is "probably" (quoted from Rinnosuke Morichika) not Yukari's original name. In Curiosities of Lotus Asia chapter 26, while analyzing the meaning of Yukari's name, Rinnosuke notes that Yukari is "probably" the name she chose for herself. Yukari's article in Perfect Memento in Strict Sense supports this by mentioning records from 1,200 years ago of a youkai that seems to be Yukari Yakumo (the wording shows those records didn't have the youkai's name recorded as Yukari Yakumo). As noted above, Maribel's namesake Lafcadio Hearn changed his name to Koizumi Yakumo when he became a Japanese citizen.
In Changeability of Strange Dream, Maribel also worries (to an unknown degree of seriousness) that her real name was forgotten because Renko always calls her "Merry".
Statements About Gensokyo's Reality
Maribel believes that the world in her dreams (Gensokyo) is merely a dream, although it's so realistic that it leads her to panic about whether her dream is the true reality or not. Renko, however, believes that it's not a dream and that Maribel has actually visited another world. In the end, after debating on a choice which would lead Maribel to either stay in that world by convincing her it's real, or the "real" world by convincing her it's just a dream, Renko decides to tell Maribel to make her dream a reality.
In Memorizable Gensokyo, Yukari refers to herself as the representative of Gensokyo's reality.
The State of Gensokyo
Changeability of Strange Dream's Japanese title translates to "The Science Era of Changing a bad dream to become true," while the synopsis includes the statement, "Two young female mediums, changing future nightmares into sweet dreams." Within the storyline where Maribel is trapped in Gensokyo, she comments, "The dreams usually end when I'm being chased by a youkai. It certainly seems like a nightmare, no matter how you see it, although..." followed by "Though, if I could change that nightmare to a pleasant dream, different from present reality..."
Yukari doesn't say how she feels about the state of Gensokyo as it is. Certainly, there are many events through out Gensokyo's history leading up to its current state which might have involved or been caused by her, but most can't be absolutely 100% confirmed. Hieda no Akyuu, however, does comment in the afterword of Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, "These peaceful, yet stimulating times are surely a golden age for humans and youkai alike. There's no doubt that Gensokyo has become the way it is thanks to the isolation brought about by the Great Hakurei Barrier." which was "the solution endorsed by the youkai sages" (which is confirmed to include Yukari in Subterranean Animism). Yukari's own section also states she was a major supporter of the great barrier.