Oh, this reminds me of something I noticed in the previous post and then forgot to comment on, what with all the other things going on...>>Or Marisa actually reads the books...
This implies that Zemyla picked up on one little detail I was rather hoping someone had noticed, that being: When Reimu said of the Zauberschulbuch, "I've studied this document thoroughly," what she meant was that she sort of skimmed it on the flight from Marseille to Ribeauvillé and figured that was good enough. (And Marisa would know that perfectly well, too, which gives that particular suggestion added weight.) It's in her nature to half-ass things she's already convinced she knows enough about.
'Cause, based on my reading, I reckon one of the critical things about Reimu is that she's never had to try. Her position is hereditary, and so are her powers. Hell, one of her key abilities is "things just work out for her". She acts all cool and on top of things, but in reality she has the biggest damn case of gifted kid syndrome you ever saw. Some people think she's lazy, but really she just wouldn't know how to approach anything that involved actual effort, because nothing she's ever been expected to do in her life has required any.
She knows intellectually that the role of the Hakurei miko is supposed to be a Terrible Responsibility, but it's never seemed that way to her. All she has to do is appear at court in Kyōto a few times a year, do the ceremonies on the feast days (and nobody ever shows up for those anyway, because the Hakurei Shrine is in the absolute back of beyond and nobody who isn't an Imperial Fusō Army Air Service witch would ever prioritize going there over, say, Ise, or Izumo, or even Yasukuni*), preside over the very occasional IFA witch's court-martial, and... that's it, really, most of the time, apart from venturing forth now and then to execute somebody's coffee table that's mysteriously come to life. It's not like they get a ton of yōkai activity in twentieth-century Fusō.
The problem--well, a problem, we are uncovering a lot of problems with this particular plotline tonight--is that I don't have any readily evident way to convey any of the above in the narrative. The way the thing has to go down, she just shows up and Is a Problem. G doesn't have a way, or the time, to learn any of it before he has to deal with her. He'd probably be more sympathetic to her situation if he did, even though she's coming after him.
>I wouldn't want to see her win, not after her attitude, both toward
>Remilia (and, probably not knowingly, also Flandre,) and toward the
>concept of let alone the person of G. However the duel went, Reimu's
>pride needed a few holes poked into it IMHO.
In fairness, she doesn't really think Remilia (automatically) needs exterminating; as she admitted when called on it, she said that to see what kind of reaction she'd get. Someone under yōkai psychic domination would have reacted a lot more aggressively to a direct death threat against his master, and though she's never encountered a Western vampire before, she assumed (see above) that the effect should be about the same, so the outwardly mild and obviously considered nature of his response puzzled her.
--G.
* It probably goes without saying that this place is way less controversial in the OWaW universe than IRL.
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