Mmmm...my biggest doubt here is due to the OWAW canon being in-universe fiction. I think we'll definitely see evolutionary parallels, though, first and foremost being 'burgeoning independent AI, struggling with being burdened with -truly existing- for the first time'.

>
>On the much-belabored subject of the fight scene... honestly, I like
>it better this way. Not so much because I don't like a good fight,
>but because G puts out a LOT of those scenes in his work, and they're
>always good. We have enough prior examples to extrapolate
>from, and leaving it to the imagination how things went is a nice
>change of pace. Also, speaking from experience, choreographing a
>fight scene in text is HARD. Not quite so hard as acting one out, of
>course - or perhaps hard in a different way might be a better way to
>put it? Anyway, this is far from the first time we've had a cut-away
>like this one. There's always room to throw in tidbits in flashbacks
>later, if such a thing proves to be desirable; getting the story
>moving along is the better move. If this were a book, I might be a
>trifle disappointed, but you have to remember that this is a living
>medium of sorts. We can't read ahead and know what's planned
>ahead of time (no moreso than, I suspect, G can). And even if the
>scene doesn't make the cut elsewhere... it's not like we haven't seen
>plenty of action, or that there isn't more to come.
>
>tl;dr: I eagerly await more of this masterpiece, G.

I have a number of thoughts about the fight scene thing, so I'll take them in order:

First, it wasn't more than the first couple of Reimu's lines into the piece when I told myself Gryphon is WAY WAY stronger than this girl. Simply put, she's newly introduced and there's no narrative reason to think she had anything like Flandre's advantages. If she did anything more than put up an honorable but doomed attempt, it would feel too much like a lame shonen anime, like Bleach's or DB's constant oneupsmanship nonsense.

Second, I know next to nothing about Touhou. I neither know nor care what she's like in Touhou canon, because from what we'd read of her so far in this piece she's a retired witch with a desk job. From her behavior we can assume she's not completely powerless, but she comes across as cocky, not genuinely skilled, and in OWaW established canon, she should by all rights be in a combat wing if she has fighting chops left. Her attitude would be better utilized there than in an investigative role, as well.

Third, because of the first two points I fully expected any fight scene to be an anticlimax. I think the scene that deserves more attention is the one where she realizes her error and apologizes, because that shows both character and story development. I didn't think the fight would have shown much of either.

Lastly, and this is a separate note from the fight thing, I feel like Reimu's companions need a little more screen time for me to understand what's going on with them. As it stands now, they feel like stand-ins; like A-Ko and B-Ko.

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Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge