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Miscellaneous Questions 7 - To Misc or not to Misc
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Electroll:

--- Quote from: Drake on August 21, 2017, 05:42:27 PM ---Chapter 15 is probably the most relevant to get the background, but 25 also contextualizes how "divine spirits" (and thus Junko) enter the picture. Yes it's pretty confusing.

--- End quote ---

After reading CoLA Chapter 15 and 25, can I safely say that Junko is a goddess too since she's a divine spirit. If divine spirits are indeed god/goddess, didn't the protagonists beat up a truck tons of gods during TD?


--- Quote from: Drake on August 21, 2017, 05:42:27 PM ---Kind of all of the above? She steals the magic you gathered (because it was her power that let you do so); you both leave through doors. Aya and Marisa acknowledge they had lost, Reimu and Cirno don't but are convinced otherwise.

--- End quote ---

So, what is the reason for Okina for teleporting the protagonists away or leaving through her own door if she had the upper hand? And how come the protagonists didnt realise that they are the one running away?


Hello Purvis:
While we're on the subject, I have a question. Is it officially known where Kanako falls into all of this? She isn't a native god, certainly, but does this imply that she fits in among the Lunarian deities? Or is she somewhere in between? I've assumed it was one of the latter two, but I am curious if there is anything other than fanon on the topic.
martelefort:
To just quote ZUN from his interview in Symposium of post mysticism : " My thought is that the Lunar Capital is where the highest, noblest gods live. On the other hand, Gensokyo is where the more friendly, indigenous gods live. ".

So Kanako fall into the second category. The creation of the Lunar Capital was that Lord Tsukoyomi fled the earth with his relatives ( Eirin being one of them ) to escape impurity. Maybe we can assume that most of his relatives or their descendant were or became lunarian gods. We can't even know if Kanako was alive(?) at the time.

That's all i can think of. Maybe if you gain enough faith as a God on earth, you can ascend as a God on the lunar capital ? I doubt it, but we never know.
TresserT:
The confusion comes from the fact that heavenly god and native god aren't strictly mutually exclusive. Heavenly god should be taken very literally- it's not so much a special race and more a nationality. A heavenly god is simply a god from heaven (takemagahara/the moon).
A native god, on the other hand, refers to a god born purely from faith, with no divine spirit as a basis. The opposite of a heavenly god isn't a native god, it'd just be an "earthly" god. Kanako is one of those "earthly" gods, but she's not a native god. She has a divine spirit. Hypothetically, you could have a god from heaven that's made purely of faith.

That said, IIRC, native gods are extremely impure. So in practice, you'll most likely never see a native heavenly god.

As for the other thing, the confusion here comes from the fact that there are several concepts which we in the west consider extremely different, but touhou calls them all "gods". To put it simply (and I might have some stuff wrong), there are two kinds of "gods". The first is closer to what we would call a soul. Once a soul becomes worshipped and deified, a god, as westerners understand it, is made from a copy of that soul. In TD you were fighting very weak spirits born from people's desires, which are gods in the former sense. Junko is a bodiless spirit so she's also a god in the former sense. But neither are worshipped by any means, so they're not gods in the latter sense.

Generally touhou refers to the former as spirits (either divine spirits, vengeful spirits, or whatever) and the latter as gods, but not always, so it gets kind of confusing.

EDIT: I also feel that I should add a disclaimer. ZUN has never said directly that "Lunarian gods and earth gods are the same in all but nationality", and if new material comes up that might prove to be totally wrong. He's just never given us any indication that they are different. That's besides the point either way, though. The more important thing is that Lunarian gods and native gods aren't strictly opposites, that's native gods and divine-spirit-type gods like kanako.

(Also that native god technically refers to something else but I don't know what else to call them. So for simplicity's sake I'm calling "gods that are born from purely faith" native gods.)
TrueShadow:
From what I know, way way back in ancient Japan, there were lots of different tribes, each with their own pantheon of gods. In Touhouverse this would include the Moriya, Suwako's people.

Then, one of these tribes, the Yamato, thought of unifying the entire land. So they conquered the other tribes, replacing their myths with their own. Kanako is one of the gods in the Yamato side.

I think native gods simply mean gods from pantheon other than the Yamato's one. This symbolized in Suwako's spellcard "Central Myth vs Native Myth".

Incidentally, "tsuchigumo" (Yamame's species) were originally derogatives of the remains of the native tribes.
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