Heh, well, I'm all for subverting the vampire tropes, so, there you go. It's not a democracy, but one does consult the Senate from time to time. :)

(See also: the bit in Night of the Kissogram! where Saya lampshades, among other things, the Vampire the Masquerade backstory by pointing out that Marceline is Queen of the Vampires, but that avails her nothing in practice because vampires are scattered individualists without an internal power structure. Camarilla, my ass. :)

>>(And don't even get me started on the one doujin I stumbled across
>>with Psycho Flan brutally dismembering repeated iterations of
>>Patchouli's devil-girl familiar, Koakuma.
>
>I don't always mind the ol' ultraviolence (I think The Boys is
>an excellent show for example) but as with pretty much all things,
>surprising people with somewhat extreme events in entertainment is
>generally not cool.

The thing that really bothered me about that one was less the actual gore (although I'm not a big fan of it, hence blacklisting the tag) as the fact that Patchy and Remi knew it was going to happen to each Koa they sent in there (and so did the Koas), but they kept summoning them and forcing them them to go in anyway, because fuck 'em, they're only minor demons, and somebody's got to keep Flan occupied until she gets bored of this. I hate the takes where they're just... actual monsters, in the "vile, terrible people" sense.

>>One of them is a witch with no sense of proportion, and the other is a
>>mercenary shrine maiden.* Neither one really goes in for moderation.
>
>Together, they fight crime?

Well, in Gensōkyō they call them "incidents". :)

They can be presented as sympathetic characters (in a fair fiew doujins set after Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, they're actually depicted as friends of the SDM gang, having somehow bonded with them over the shared experience of having broken in and assaulted everyone there to halt what was really not that major a shenanigan). I like Marisa (the witch) a bit better of the two in those scenarios, because she's really pretty harmless, she just has poor impulse control (as opposed to Reimu, who, with the best will in the world, is still a bit of a bully even when being portrayed as basically nice). Evidently there's a line at the end of the game wherein Flan (who is the bonus-stage boss, the last one you fight) takes a liking to her because, although she lost, it was the first fun she's had in years, and so in the follow-up art you see them hanging out, which is cute.

(She's also one of those female characters who are always depicted as talking like dudes from yakuza movies, ending almost every sentence with da ze, which for some reason I find very cute. My mind translates that into English with a Bugs Bunny/Harley Quinn accent. :)

>I'm not sure if that's a trope, or some random things I've stumbled
>across were Touhou related without my knowledge (both seem equally
>likely at this point,) because I've seen that concept (including the
>'any job' qualifier, doujin and hentai could often be confused as
>synonyms by someone unfamiliar with the actual definitions) a few
>times while making the rounds.

Yeah, once you've taken the decision to depict a character as desperately poor, those H-doujins just about write themselves.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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