If being a woman is the peak evolution of a youkai for their youkai purposes, do you think yukari accidentally cause that?
early joumon yukari, either way. Weird recently exhuman girl somehow became a more successful horror than any other youkai so they had to follow her example or get dead
They’re not really being women in any concrete way. They’re taking the form of human women, but to be a woman implies participating in the dance of gender that human society constructs. Which they don’t really do; the “role” attached to the word “woman” is not something they participate in (at least in Touhou; some youkai do to an extent in legends, but even they don’t fulfill the role entirely. See Kuzunoha and other fox-wives, or the tales of yuki-onna.)
I think you wouldn’t really need the influence of Merry being a former human who still took that form in order for youkai to make the connection that “Ah, this form is associated with a nonthreatening and appealing role in human society. We should probably take it if we want to be more successful at preying on humans.” Though there are other forms often taken by youkai in legends; salespeople, servants, monks, old women. Touhou characters looking like girls specifically is probably due to the types of legends that persisted into the Meiji era (a subversion of expectations has a tendency to be more interesting the more dramatic it is). And, in a Doylist sense, because all of Gensoukyou is an elaborate bit playing off of Lafcadio Hearn’s illusionary Hourai. (Really obviously in early Windows, and still pretty obviously today.)
Basically, as long as people have made up legends about still being preyed on by things much bigger and scarier than the wolves and bears that no longer terrorize them, they’ve made up legends about those things looking like people. Merry looking like a people initially is convenient for her, but I don’t think she was necessarily a trendsetter in that way.
She’s definitely a trendsetter in the sense of inspiring youkai to manipulate the truth and spin their own legends, though. Gensoukyou (and its youkai who battle over information control in the human village) is the kind of thing that requires a decidedly human perspective to think up, which is precisely why all the sages are former humans. If you’ve only ever been a legend, and all the legends around you have too, you’ll never think about changing your own destiny. But something that used to have no defined meaning to its existence, that wasn’t conceptually anything, yet was part of the species that desires a meaning for its existence… Well, that’s going to cause some new ideas to pop up, isn’t it?
yes or “remind me later” NO LET ME SAY NO I WANT TO SAY NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
every week i get that shitty “Let’s finish setting up your computer!” thing when i turn it on and it’s SO fucking aggravating because i’ve been using this thing for years now and i don’t need nor WANT to fucking “set it up” (read: use microsoft edge, buy windows office, whatever the fuck else they try to sell me) like i’m very obviously perfectly fine. and i can’t just say No because No is a very privileged limited time answer we had in the tech future so now it’s always “remind me later” no motherfucker i am adamant in my need to tell you NO. i fucking hate the removal of no from our options and vocabulary. i am expressing a boundary i need you to fucking know i am saying NO
Hit the Windows + I keys together. Go into SYSTEM then NOTIFICATIONS AND ACTIONS and uncheck “suggest ways I can finish setting up my device to get the most out of Windows”
I think a lot of slasher horror gets stuck in a rut because the monsters are only moderately Catholic. Like, ooh, you’re cutting people up for entry-level sexual immorality – how edgy. I want to see a monster that cuts people up for something that’s only a sin in one specific early 4th Century heresy, and half the movie is taken up with the protagonists trying to figure out what it’s even mad about.
Short version: one of the central tenets of Roman Catholicism is that God reveals himself to the world in three distinct persons – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – while remaining one God; this is known as the “Holy Trinity”, and belief in it as “Trinitarianism”.
The specific Trinitarian formula described above was formalised at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, and all alternative formulations were denounced as heresy. One of those alternatives held that Christ the Son is a created being, subordinate to God the Father, rather than an eternal person of the Trinity; this formulation is customarily known as “Arianism”, after its most well-known proponent, Arius of Alexandria.
Catholic folklore holds that Arius personally attended the Council of Nicea in order to present his argument; upon hearing it, Saint Nicholas of Myra – yes, that Saint Nicholas – became so incensed that he got up and punched Arius in the fucking face. Nicholas was subsequently imprisoned and stripped of his authority for disrupting the Council with violence, until a miraculous manifestation of Christ and Mary persuaded Emperor Constantine to pardon him.
This story is regarded as apocryphal, both for its late provenance (the earliest attested versions appear over a millennium after the fact), and because there’s no evidence that Arius attended the Council of Nicea in the first place. However, it’s accepted as historical fact in some Christian denominations, and it’s for this reason that Nicholas of Myra is sometimes (incorrectly) cited as the patron saint of pugilists.
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