/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>11955965
It’s really hard to come to any sort of extensive conclusion regarding what kind of personality Rumia has, how she lives her life, and so forth, without employing a lot of conjecture or assumptions that have no basis in canon. It doesn’t help that ZUN created her largely as a throwaway joke that was intended to help distinguish the Windows series of games from their PC-98 successors; it is made quite clear in EoSD and beyond that she is weak for a yokai and poses little threat to the main characters. This therefore makes her ominous-sounding powers (manipulation of darkness) sound ridiculous. ZUN has found little use for her in any other role, as she has been relegated to the status of a background character since The Grimoire of Marisa was published in 2009.

It is probably for the best that I list what little we can conclusively say about her. To start off with the obvious, Rumia is a yokai with relatively weak powers, for a yokai anyway. They most likely hinder her in effectively attacking humans, and it is apparent that they only exist to protect her from light, which is rather ruinous to her health. She has no broader aims or goals, and she spends her days and nights wandering about Gensokyo, randomly attacking people she runs into. Rumia has the simplistic mentality and reasoning of a child, although she is able to read Aya’s article about her. Her ribbon-amulet, despite sounding as equally ominous as her powers, is never further addressed in canon.