LAST EDITED ON May-13-21 AT 07:22 PM (EDT)
 
>I'm not especially familiar with Wan Shi Tong, but my impression is
>that anybody coming into his library is an annoyance, and that
>somebody staying there, regardless of how respectful they are of the
>library, would be a major annoyance.

The thing that really annoyed WST about Patchy was that she didn't die. He's let humans camp out in the Library before, because there's no cafeteria or anything, so he knew what they hadn't thought of: they wouldn't survive for long.

(Seriously, this is canon. In ATLA, he grudgingly allows a human scholar to linger, and a number of decades later in TLOK, when a character remarks that she could spend a lifetime studying the Library's wonders, he points to a cobwebby skeleton sitting where the scholar from ATLA was last seen and makes a remark to the effect of, "Yeah, didn't work out so well for the last guy who said that." The implication is that he knew, when he agreed to let the guy stay, that he would starve to death in fairly short order, and just went ahead and let him do that, because fuck humans.)

Patchouli, on the other hand, has mastered the Three Abandonments,* so she doesn't need to eat. Or drink. Or sleep. Or do anything other than sit there reading his books. Forever. Or at least until a priority interrupt happens.

(In fact, it's not really quite that simple, but again, we'll get into that.)

--G.
* That is, the abandonments of food, sleep, and death. These are the spells a human sorcerer in Touhou must learn in order to cast off mortality and become an undying yōkai magician--kinda like a lich, but without a phylactery or that disconcerting tendency to look like Eddie from the Iron Maiden album covers. Unsurprisingly, a lot of fan work--particularly the ones in which Marisa learns those spells--spend a lot of time maundering about whether someone who does that is Truly Even Still Alive, because Touhou fandom is obsessed with finding downsides to everything. Also, they're not canonically called that, with the capital letters and everything, as far as I know. I just did that because it makes it seem more formal. :)
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