Jinsye
She/Her- 10,457
- 1,577
Thanks to SaikouTLK and Ultima_Reality for helping me make this thread.
This was originally going to be a downgrade thread but things got out of hand fast. So now it’s both. Massive upgrades and massive downgrades.
The main issue with Touhou profiles is that they take text way too literally and connect unrelated items to make abilities that don't exist in the first place. So we're just going to go through most of those abilities and point out which are bull.
However, first...
Infinite Speed
I don’t find these speed feats very convincing personally. Due to a variety of reasons.
First, let’s get Kaguya’s infinite corridor out of the way. While I do believe that it is genuinely an infinite corridor, I don’t believe this specific instance is a demonstration of crossing an infinite distance via pure speed.
One, we do have a finite timeframe for all of this. They cross it in a notable amount of time, so we would need some extraordinary proof that they walked through an infinite corridor through sheer speed.
And two, we do know Kaguya’s endless corridor itself is a spell which means it could pretty easily be altered in such a way. Though that’s a minor point.
Third. If characters had infinite speed, then the corridor would not be treated as a trap. However, it pretty blatantly is a trap. So, why would this be considered a trap at all if characters could move at infinite speeds and reach the end.
Fourth. It is treated as according to plan that the characters reach the end of the corridor. They aren’t an infinite distance away, and instead near the fake moon which they were led to. Obviously, if they overpowered the trap via sheer speed then Eirin should both be surprised and this little gimmick should not have worked at all. I’m fairly sure they were specifically let out of this corridor by Kaguya in order to be tricked into running into a fake moon.
And also, the ship feat doesn’t make sense to me. A corner does not necessarily mean an infinite distance away, or the edge of the world even. We shouldn’t be handing infinite speed by default, as we have no reason to think that the ship itself was infinitely away from this location.
Hax Revisions
So, I'm going to break these into multiple sections because there's a lot of them but most of these are very straightforward since they're really bad. A lot of it is flowery language or vague ass scans taken way out of context. So...
"Passive" Fear Aura
This one is one of the worst offenders. Not only are the scans taken entirely out of context, but they're completely contradicted.
To get the contradictions out of the way, Kogasa Tatara. Her entire character is her being unable to scare people, and literally starving because of this. This would be significantly less of a problem if she could just turn on a fear aura and cause people to passively get scared. So that's already a massive contradiction.
Secondly, the scans aren't even fear manip. The first set of scans says that youkai have an aura, which doesn't prove fear manip. The second scan is absolutely not fear manip if you read the original source. The youkai herself was scared, not the people around her. The third scan is isn't necessarily fear manipulation by default and we shouldn't assume it to be. It's much more likely that she was just nervous from the amount of youkai energy, and it's flowery language.
Youkai Mid-Godly
Fairly simple. Mid-Godly requires the complete destruction of the body, soul, and mind (+ whatever other incorporeal essence there might be). This does not apply to Youkai as they explicitly need their mind to survive. If you were to take over the mind of a youkai, they can't regenerate. Thus they should be put back to Low-Godly.
Reminder, it says Youkai's bodies are mostly made out of spirit. Temperament from what I know also mostly covers emotions, instead of the mind itself. Thus, I don't think that's enough evidence to overturn this contradiction.
Hourai Immortal High-Godly
Also simple, Hourai Immortals are explicitly reliant on their souls to survive. Saying that they can regenerate from the destruction of the soul is pretty silly. The whole Lunarian thing is just resistance at best, and even then Sagume’s info manipulation has not been used offensively to erase people so even that is shaky at best. It should just be Low-Godly, no resistance.
Spirit Manipulation things should be noted later.
Limited Conceptual Manip (Type 1)
Comes from this set of scans. This is another vague connection that shouldn't have ever been done in the first place. People defining their spell cards does not mean literally manipulating the abstract concept of the card create them. They just give it a meaning through applying a name to it, like how a person can give a word a meaning.
Second scan is also totally useless because nobody in-verse is saying that. It's simply ZUN going through his philosophy on designing spell cards, so anything he says would be meaningless in regards to the in-verse creation of spell cards.
Lunarian Type 1 Immortality
Lunarians require complete purity in order to be truly immortal, in which the moon does not have. Thus, they aren’t completely immortal like the Celestials and will probably die some day.
Acausality Type 4
The scan about Gensokyo having a slower flow of time is false, mostly because time passes mostly the same in both the outside world and the human world. The context is also heavily cropped, as the scan is talking about how long it would take for a ropeway to be finished. They say it can be finished at any time because time passes slowly/leisurely around here.
So, with that context it's pretty obviously metaphorical language for how Gensokyo is a pretty relaxed place. Not anything for acausality. This wouldn’t even grant acausality in the first place, as time having slower movement doesn’t really say anything about the nature of causality as it would still function normally. Thus, you can probably throw this entire scan out.
The Eientei is not actually separated from causality either, it is simply under the effects of Kaguya's eternity manipulation. This means that it's completely static, giving off the illusion that it is immune to change. Not that it actually is. Existing within this realm would not give any form of acausality, because the illusion is that nothing can change due to everything being frozen, not a separate realm in it's entirety.\
Dream Stuff
Meiling shouldn't be 5-C, as everything that happened to her is a dream. Dreams are real, however this does not mean they are direct reflections of reality, they are only just as real as reality.
In Doremy's profile, it's even explicitly stated that one can turn into anything in dreams. Doremy has to keep watch over people who realize this to make sure that they don't completely abuse it. This scan should not be used as the default assumption that everything in dreams is equal to reality by default, as nowhere is that stated. Applying this one character to a cosmological assumption is pretty silly.
Resistances
Resistance to Subjective Reality and Transmutation should be removed, as it isn't a resistance. Youkai used to be shaped by human thoughts but now they're not. That's simply an alteration/removal of their weakness in their physiology, not a resistance.
Resistance to Soul Manipulation should be removed because nobody actually demonstrates any of that. Literally everybody in Gensokyo is fine after the fact, and we have no demonstrations of resistance other than "well they exist after the event happened".
Hourai Immortals resistance to probability isn't very strong, due to the vagueness of the ability in general. We shouldn't assume it should allow people to kill Hourai Immortals by default. Kaguya keeps hers though.
Eientei isn't really a frozen flow of time. It's Kaguya's eternity manipulation applying to the area to make everything static. I wouldn't say this would apply to an inhabitant coming in from the outside.
Phantoms don't instantly take effect on others as the scan even notes that it happens over time and I don't think people sleep with phantoms or whatever. If they have feats of living with a phantom for extended periods of time, then they can get the resistance but otherwise it should be axed.
Resistance to Doremy's stuff, I'm fairly sure that falls under the Spell Card Rules so it shouldn't be a resistance. It's just an effect of the rules.
Resistance to Necromancy is goofy, because you aren't resisting anything there. You just don't leave a corpse behind when you die. This is not a relevant "resistance" to have.
Yukari has a resistance to power null, but it states that most foreign boundaries are negated. It doesn't say that no boundaries are allowed, so I kind of doubt that too.
Non-Physical Interaction
People cannot punch abstracts, that's a lie. Nobody punches the actual abstract forms of the gods, from what I know. Every time the gods are fought, they take physical form to be interacted with by normal people.
Nothing really has to be changed here just noting that.
Spirit Manipulation
Big doozy on this one. Let's take it power by power.
First off. This definitely is not durability negation in any form. In the games, spirit doesn't even drain when you attack an enemy normally. The only way you drain spirit is by hitting somebody who is guarding incorrectly. Assuming that it absorbs the soul with every basic attack is false when that is demonstrably not the case.
Second off. It isn't necessarily power null either, it's just reducing a resource pool so that you have none. This also means that this spirit manipulation shouldn't work out-of-verse either, as we wouldn't assume that characters function on the 'spirit' resource pool that exists in Touhou.
Third. Not Mid-Godly. Already contradicted by the fact that Youkai need their minds to survive, but replenishing a resource which is clearly not necessary for the basis of their existence (or else they would just die if they run out of spirit. Absolutely nothing indicates that your soul stops existing the second you run out of Spirit) does not necessitate Mid-Godly.
So, Spirit Manipulation is not this almighty hax that completely nullifies an enemy. It is a specific resource pool within Touhou that is used to cast attacks, defenses, and whatnot that can be drained. Thus, the page should be changed to reflect that.
Character Specific Stuff
Yukari Yakumo has fear manipulation via this scan. Except this isn't fearhax because it's simply Eirin being scared of Yukari, and the implications of the Lunar Invasion. Flowery language once again.
Kogasa also has fear manip for dumb reasons, as said above she literally is unable to scare others as a major part of her character. All forms of Kogasa's "fearhax" is literally just her jumping out of the bushes and saying boo. So she and other Tsukumogami should get their fearhax thrown out as well.
Koishi Komeiji currently has Nonexistent Physiology, but she is not actually so. The qualification for NEP is that you need to be physically nonexistent as well, which Koishi absolutely does not qualify for because people can pretty easily interact with her physically. They just can't remember she exists. It's also noted that she hasn't reached that state of enlightenment where she would be nonexistent yet. She's close, but not there.
High Tier to God Tier AP Alterations
The biggest part of the revision.
According to this past thread, Otherworlds (i e Hell, Gensokyo, and etc) are currently considered to each be Low 2-C structures on the basis that they are referred to as being braneworlds in the following scans:
To get to the point: This logic doesn't hold up. A "brane", as a quick read through the Wikipedia lage can tell you, is just the term given to a type of mathematical object like any other, whose dimensionality can be whatever it is defined to be. Strings are example of 1-dimensional Branes, for instance, and the name itself comes from "membrane," the 2-dimensional instances of those things.
In fact, even in the context of brane cosmology, they are not automatically spacetimes, or even 4-D structures at all. For example, our universe is often posited to be a 3-brane (A 3-D brane, obviously), set in parallel to other branes in a higher-dimensional bulk, and with the temporal dimension existing adjacent to that entire space (See, for reference, this paper, which is an introductory article to brane cosmology that focuses on its simplest consistent model. For illustrative purposes, see also this, this)
From a quick read of the above thread, it also seems the OP was under the impression that Branes are automatically Low 2-C because of the bulk, which she seems to think is something that every brane has. As seen in the pictures above, thus is wrong: There is one bulk that encompasses all branes. Each brane doesn't have its own personal bulk, or whatever. So the reason for, say, Gensokyo being Tier 2 in spite of being a tiny island is based on false premises, and thus invalid, and the same can be said for the reason behind Otherworlds being separate spacetimes at all.
Now, to be exact, as said in this page and drawn here, a brane does sweep out a path in space-time that corresponds to its history, and that's called a "worldvolume", which by nature is one dimension higher than its spatial part, but the brane itself can still be a 3-dimensional object, so affecting those is not inherently a sign of a 2-C or above feat.
That being said, there is the fact that the core proposition of brane cosmology involves two things: Our universe is a brane, and this brane is just the (or one of the many) surface of a higher-dimensional space called the "Bulk," which envelops it and whatever other branes may exist, like I said before. Added to the temporal dimension, all of that results in a 5-dimensional spacetime in which all universes exist. And as per the things outlined in the Tiering System FAQ, this structure would be Low 1-C:
As a result, everybody who affects the entirety of the cosmology would scale. So, Junko’s physical form, the high level Lunarians, as well as the primordial forms of the gods would be Low 1-C. This is due to the fact that the gods created the entire verse via giving things names and setting boundaries to everything.. These boundaries are directly noted to be essentially creating new existences from nothing. Thus, it should be obvious enough that the gods made this extra-dimensional bulk that the universe resides on, and didn’t just take parts of the bulk to make the universe. Junko would still retain this as she’s still partially a primordial goddess for some reason so she would still hold that same power. The Lunarians who can fight her would also scale to this.
Everyone else would be relegated to High 3-A. Yukari and Reimu both become big smurfs however, with Yukari's boundary manipulation being able to manipulate the fundamental concepts that make up this 5-Dimensional reality, and Reimu's Fantasy Nature allowing her to float entirely above it.
Conclusion
Touhou pages have a lot of random wank from just out of context statements. Thus, that should be fixed accordingly. However, the god tiers should be tier 1 due to the whole brane cosmology structure.
So, I guess we all win today.
This was originally going to be a downgrade thread but things got out of hand fast. So now it’s both. Massive upgrades and massive downgrades.
The main issue with Touhou profiles is that they take text way too literally and connect unrelated items to make abilities that don't exist in the first place. So we're just going to go through most of those abilities and point out which are bull.
However, first...
Infinite Speed
I don’t find these speed feats very convincing personally. Due to a variety of reasons.
First, let’s get Kaguya’s infinite corridor out of the way. While I do believe that it is genuinely an infinite corridor, I don’t believe this specific instance is a demonstration of crossing an infinite distance via pure speed.
One, we do have a finite timeframe for all of this. They cross it in a notable amount of time, so we would need some extraordinary proof that they walked through an infinite corridor through sheer speed.
And two, we do know Kaguya’s endless corridor itself is a spell which means it could pretty easily be altered in such a way. Though that’s a minor point.
Third. If characters had infinite speed, then the corridor would not be treated as a trap. However, it pretty blatantly is a trap. So, why would this be considered a trap at all if characters could move at infinite speeds and reach the end.
Fourth. It is treated as according to plan that the characters reach the end of the corridor. They aren’t an infinite distance away, and instead near the fake moon which they were led to. Obviously, if they overpowered the trap via sheer speed then Eirin should both be surprised and this little gimmick should not have worked at all. I’m fairly sure they were specifically let out of this corridor by Kaguya in order to be tricked into running into a fake moon.
And also, the ship feat doesn’t make sense to me. A corner does not necessarily mean an infinite distance away, or the edge of the world even. We shouldn’t be handing infinite speed by default, as we have no reason to think that the ship itself was infinitely away from this location.
Hax Revisions
So, I'm going to break these into multiple sections because there's a lot of them but most of these are very straightforward since they're really bad. A lot of it is flowery language or vague ass scans taken way out of context. So...
"Passive" Fear Aura
This one is one of the worst offenders. Not only are the scans taken entirely out of context, but they're completely contradicted.
To get the contradictions out of the way, Kogasa Tatara. Her entire character is her being unable to scare people, and literally starving because of this. This would be significantly less of a problem if she could just turn on a fear aura and cause people to passively get scared. So that's already a massive contradiction.
Secondly, the scans aren't even fear manip. The first set of scans says that youkai have an aura, which doesn't prove fear manip. The second scan is absolutely not fear manip if you read the original source. The youkai herself was scared, not the people around her. The third scan is isn't necessarily fear manipulation by default and we shouldn't assume it to be. It's much more likely that she was just nervous from the amount of youkai energy, and it's flowery language.
Youkai Mid-Godly
Fairly simple. Mid-Godly requires the complete destruction of the body, soul, and mind (+ whatever other incorporeal essence there might be). This does not apply to Youkai as they explicitly need their mind to survive. If you were to take over the mind of a youkai, they can't regenerate. Thus they should be put back to Low-Godly.
Reminder, it says Youkai's bodies are mostly made out of spirit. Temperament from what I know also mostly covers emotions, instead of the mind itself. Thus, I don't think that's enough evidence to overturn this contradiction.
Hourai Immortal High-Godly
Also simple, Hourai Immortals are explicitly reliant on their souls to survive. Saying that they can regenerate from the destruction of the soul is pretty silly. The whole Lunarian thing is just resistance at best, and even then Sagume’s info manipulation has not been used offensively to erase people so even that is shaky at best. It should just be Low-Godly, no resistance.
Spirit Manipulation things should be noted later.
Limited Conceptual Manip (Type 1)
Comes from this set of scans. This is another vague connection that shouldn't have ever been done in the first place. People defining their spell cards does not mean literally manipulating the abstract concept of the card create them. They just give it a meaning through applying a name to it, like how a person can give a word a meaning.
Second scan is also totally useless because nobody in-verse is saying that. It's simply ZUN going through his philosophy on designing spell cards, so anything he says would be meaningless in regards to the in-verse creation of spell cards.
Lunarian Type 1 Immortality
Lunarians require complete purity in order to be truly immortal, in which the moon does not have. Thus, they aren’t completely immortal like the Celestials and will probably die some day.
Acausality Type 4
The scan about Gensokyo having a slower flow of time is false, mostly because time passes mostly the same in both the outside world and the human world. The context is also heavily cropped, as the scan is talking about how long it would take for a ropeway to be finished. They say it can be finished at any time because time passes slowly/leisurely around here.
So, with that context it's pretty obviously metaphorical language for how Gensokyo is a pretty relaxed place. Not anything for acausality. This wouldn’t even grant acausality in the first place, as time having slower movement doesn’t really say anything about the nature of causality as it would still function normally. Thus, you can probably throw this entire scan out.
The Eientei is not actually separated from causality either, it is simply under the effects of Kaguya's eternity manipulation. This means that it's completely static, giving off the illusion that it is immune to change. Not that it actually is. Existing within this realm would not give any form of acausality, because the illusion is that nothing can change due to everything being frozen, not a separate realm in it's entirety.\
Dream Stuff
Meiling shouldn't be 5-C, as everything that happened to her is a dream. Dreams are real, however this does not mean they are direct reflections of reality, they are only just as real as reality.
In Doremy's profile, it's even explicitly stated that one can turn into anything in dreams. Doremy has to keep watch over people who realize this to make sure that they don't completely abuse it. This scan should not be used as the default assumption that everything in dreams is equal to reality by default, as nowhere is that stated. Applying this one character to a cosmological assumption is pretty silly.
Resistances
Resistance to Subjective Reality and Transmutation should be removed, as it isn't a resistance. Youkai used to be shaped by human thoughts but now they're not. That's simply an alteration/removal of their weakness in their physiology, not a resistance.
Resistance to Soul Manipulation should be removed because nobody actually demonstrates any of that. Literally everybody in Gensokyo is fine after the fact, and we have no demonstrations of resistance other than "well they exist after the event happened".
Hourai Immortals resistance to probability isn't very strong, due to the vagueness of the ability in general. We shouldn't assume it should allow people to kill Hourai Immortals by default. Kaguya keeps hers though.
Eientei isn't really a frozen flow of time. It's Kaguya's eternity manipulation applying to the area to make everything static. I wouldn't say this would apply to an inhabitant coming in from the outside.
Phantoms don't instantly take effect on others as the scan even notes that it happens over time and I don't think people sleep with phantoms or whatever. If they have feats of living with a phantom for extended periods of time, then they can get the resistance but otherwise it should be axed.
Resistance to Doremy's stuff, I'm fairly sure that falls under the Spell Card Rules so it shouldn't be a resistance. It's just an effect of the rules.
Resistance to Necromancy is goofy, because you aren't resisting anything there. You just don't leave a corpse behind when you die. This is not a relevant "resistance" to have.
Yukari has a resistance to power null, but it states that most foreign boundaries are negated. It doesn't say that no boundaries are allowed, so I kind of doubt that too.
Non-Physical Interaction
People cannot punch abstracts, that's a lie. Nobody punches the actual abstract forms of the gods, from what I know. Every time the gods are fought, they take physical form to be interacted with by normal people.
Nothing really has to be changed here just noting that.
Spirit Manipulation
Big doozy on this one. Let's take it power by power.
First off. This definitely is not durability negation in any form. In the games, spirit doesn't even drain when you attack an enemy normally. The only way you drain spirit is by hitting somebody who is guarding incorrectly. Assuming that it absorbs the soul with every basic attack is false when that is demonstrably not the case.
Second off. It isn't necessarily power null either, it's just reducing a resource pool so that you have none. This also means that this spirit manipulation shouldn't work out-of-verse either, as we wouldn't assume that characters function on the 'spirit' resource pool that exists in Touhou.
Third. Not Mid-Godly. Already contradicted by the fact that Youkai need their minds to survive, but replenishing a resource which is clearly not necessary for the basis of their existence (or else they would just die if they run out of spirit. Absolutely nothing indicates that your soul stops existing the second you run out of Spirit) does not necessitate Mid-Godly.
So, Spirit Manipulation is not this almighty hax that completely nullifies an enemy. It is a specific resource pool within Touhou that is used to cast attacks, defenses, and whatnot that can be drained. Thus, the page should be changed to reflect that.
Character Specific Stuff
Yukari Yakumo has fear manipulation via this scan. Except this isn't fearhax because it's simply Eirin being scared of Yukari, and the implications of the Lunar Invasion. Flowery language once again.
Kogasa also has fear manip for dumb reasons, as said above she literally is unable to scare others as a major part of her character. All forms of Kogasa's "fearhax" is literally just her jumping out of the bushes and saying boo. So she and other Tsukumogami should get their fearhax thrown out as well.
Koishi Komeiji currently has Nonexistent Physiology, but she is not actually so. The qualification for NEP is that you need to be physically nonexistent as well, which Koishi absolutely does not qualify for because people can pretty easily interact with her physically. They just can't remember she exists. It's also noted that she hasn't reached that state of enlightenment where she would be nonexistent yet. She's close, but not there.
High Tier to God Tier AP Alterations
The biggest part of the revision.
According to this past thread, Otherworlds (i e Hell, Gensokyo, and etc) are currently considered to each be Low 2-C structures on the basis that they are referred to as being braneworlds in the following scans:
To get to the point: This logic doesn't hold up. A "brane", as a quick read through the Wikipedia lage can tell you, is just the term given to a type of mathematical object like any other, whose dimensionality can be whatever it is defined to be. Strings are example of 1-dimensional Branes, for instance, and the name itself comes from "membrane," the 2-dimensional instances of those things.
In fact, even in the context of brane cosmology, they are not automatically spacetimes, or even 4-D structures at all. For example, our universe is often posited to be a 3-brane (A 3-D brane, obviously), set in parallel to other branes in a higher-dimensional bulk, and with the temporal dimension existing adjacent to that entire space (See, for reference, this paper, which is an introductory article to brane cosmology that focuses on its simplest consistent model. For illustrative purposes, see also this, this)
From a quick read of the above thread, it also seems the OP was under the impression that Branes are automatically Low 2-C because of the bulk, which she seems to think is something that every brane has. As seen in the pictures above, thus is wrong: There is one bulk that encompasses all branes. Each brane doesn't have its own personal bulk, or whatever. So the reason for, say, Gensokyo being Tier 2 in spite of being a tiny island is based on false premises, and thus invalid, and the same can be said for the reason behind Otherworlds being separate spacetimes at all.
Now, to be exact, as said in this page and drawn here, a brane does sweep out a path in space-time that corresponds to its history, and that's called a "worldvolume", which by nature is one dimension higher than its spatial part, but the brane itself can still be a 3-dimensional object, so affecting those is not inherently a sign of a 2-C or above feat.
That being said, there is the fact that the core proposition of brane cosmology involves two things: Our universe is a brane, and this brane is just the (or one of the many) surface of a higher-dimensional space called the "Bulk," which envelops it and whatever other branes may exist, like I said before. Added to the temporal dimension, all of that results in a 5-dimensional spacetime in which all universes exist. And as per the things outlined in the Tiering System FAQ, this structure would be Low 1-C:
One of the more straightforward ways to qualify for Tier 2 and up through higher dimensions is by affecting whole higher-dimensional universes which can embed the whole of lower-dimensional ones within themselves. For example: A cosmology where the entirety of our 3-dimensional universe is in fact a subset of a much greater 4-dimensional space, or generalizations of this same scenario to higher numbers of dimensions; i.e A cosmology where the four-dimensional spacetime continuum is just the infinitesimal surface of a 5-dimensional object, and etc.
As a result, everybody who affects the entirety of the cosmology would scale. So, Junko’s physical form, the high level Lunarians, as well as the primordial forms of the gods would be Low 1-C. This is due to the fact that the gods created the entire verse via giving things names and setting boundaries to everything.. These boundaries are directly noted to be essentially creating new existences from nothing. Thus, it should be obvious enough that the gods made this extra-dimensional bulk that the universe resides on, and didn’t just take parts of the bulk to make the universe. Junko would still retain this as she’s still partially a primordial goddess for some reason so she would still hold that same power. The Lunarians who can fight her would also scale to this.
Everyone else would be relegated to High 3-A. Yukari and Reimu both become big smurfs however, with Yukari's boundary manipulation being able to manipulate the fundamental concepts that make up this 5-Dimensional reality, and Reimu's Fantasy Nature allowing her to float entirely above it.
Conclusion
Touhou pages have a lot of random wank from just out of context statements. Thus, that should be fixed accordingly. However, the god tiers should be tier 1 due to the whole brane cosmology structure.
So, I guess we all win today.
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