/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>43688152
I guess, but my private adoration of the little maneater is pretty personal and specific.
I won't go into it beyond this post, but to compare the two, I think is pretty interesting.
Rumia, the Youkai of Darkness, has always been accepted as being unusually weak for someone with such a cool-sounding power.
Hell, it's actually one of the better ones to have, even with the fact that it's a very literal interpretation compared to how that's normally portrayed.
Yet, Rumia is a little dumbass who can't even really be bothered to think too hard about anything beyond eating people, and it's not even clear if she's even all that good at catching humans to eat.
However, she's still a very youkai-ish youkai, fairly pure in the sense that she still pretty much acts as I think she's always done, GHB or no.

Yuuka on the other hand, has a practically useless power. Flower manipulation is just not combat-useful, and even outside of that she only really uses it for a sick garden, and to annoy Reimu in one of LLS's endings.
It's not really specified that she eats people or not, but for her presence to be tolerated in the human village would imply that somehow she just doesn't need to. (Photosynthesis? Just joking.)
She's never actually stated to have seriously hurt someone, and she internally justifies her terrorisation of everyone who runs into her as her just having a little fun teasing them, and it's Eiki who jumps to the conclusion that she might take pleasure from their pain, i.e. Sadism.
She's stated, and shown to be, quite sharp, even really rather intelligent beyond just observation, and manipulates people into fighting her when they otherwise wouldn't, something that might not be all that hard to do in the context of a touhou game, but not something a fairy could pull of just verbally, Mystia's singing being an exception since it's got special stuff attached to it.

In a way, they should be complete opposites, and yet to me they seem fairly similar in some ways.
Both of them are quite headstrong and separated from humanity, both are not the kind of youkai you'd normally run into necessarily, and as far as I can glean Rumia's character from a paragraph of dialogue, they seem to have relatively similar personalities, being relatively whimsical, yet also violent in their own ways.
Rumia is very much the type of character I'd imagine Yuuka would find charming, maybe since she IS so weak she'd give her a little tutoring every now and again to pass the time.
Rumia's stupidity is moreso one of ignorance than of just limited brainpower, like the rest of team (9), since she shows no ambition whatsoever, or even really understanding that she COULD be any different than she is.
In contrast, Yuuka seems like the type to be so proud of herself because she's worked hard to have all of what she has, since flower manipulation is so useless in terms of survival, when a tiny little Yuuka first came into this world somehow, she must have come close to death once or twice, and worked hard on her powers that she did have in order to make herself powerful DESPITE them.
Also in contrast to Yukari, who can just kill people by waving her hand with little to no effort, and probably didn't have to try all that hard until it came to making Gensokyo, something she didn't do alone, and something she probably had a lot of time/resources to prepare for initially.

Yep, Yuuka is sort of a one-of-a-kind character, since she IS absurdly powerful, but for no particular reason ever being given, other than she's possibly one of the oldest Youkai in existence, at least enough to get the Yama concerned that she's lived longer than a supposedly indefinite life of a Youkai.
She also cares for things that normally, typical "evil" characters would trample over, and she's far from being insane, even if she's eccentric.
I wouldn't put it past her to find a little joy in caring for a weak minor youkai, one that lacks the fruit of knowledge, and give her just a little push in the right direction so she could have a desire, however small, to fulfill her potential.