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sukimas · 6 months

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On Shrine Maidens, Gods, and the History of Gensoukyou

My personal opinion is that shrine maiden #13 (from the PCB prologue) is Reimu's predecessor; the attitude that she holds is similar to PC-98 Reimu's, in that both seem to be aware of youkai as a problem but neither act especially threatened by them. The "kind of an airhead" trait seems to be common among shrine maidens.

Now, why do I think that she's the thirteenth shrine maiden since Gensoukyou was founded, specifically? That's primarily because the Hakurei Shrine has... well... a lot wrong with it in the modern day. A god of youkai extermination is working alongside youkai.

Explicitly not for the purposes of youkai extermination, at that:

You could see them as a collaborator in the Gensoukyou project, except for this:

If they were aware and a willing architect of Reimu's job being just "to balance between humans and youkai" rather than "to tend the shrine", it would be hard for them to be angry because she's always off doing her job. I think it's quite likely that they're angry about the fact that A.) They've been forgotten entirely and B.) Their shrine maiden is working with youkai instead of exterminating them.

There's another piece of the puzzle in terms of their role in Gensoukyou:

A youkai calling the Hakurei Shrine her shrine. Not "our" shrine, like you'd expect if the Hakurei God was a collaborator on this project- Yukari's shrine specifically. (Of course, we can conclude from the "god of youkai extermination" and "the god of this shrine is angry" comments that Yukari isn't a god playing at being a youkai, either.) The Hakurei Shrine, as it currently stands, is something that you can consider an "artificial creation of youkai."

Rinnosuke comes to a similar conclusion.

So, the Hakurei Shrine is a defiled mockery of a shrine, that much is true. But what does that have to do with shrine maiden lifespans? Well, if the shrine was created in its current form alongside Gensoukyou, that implies about 140 years of history. (138, to be specific, but let's not bother with the details. This will still be on my blog by 2025, hopefully.) We get the 13th Hakurei shrine maiden's inscription (presumably before the year 1996, since she's not Reimu.) describing the current conditions of Gensoukyou as similar to those of the PC-98 games.

However, how do we know that she's the 13th shrine maiden since Gensoukyou was created, rather than simply since the Hakurei Shrine was founded? Well, it's a simple process of inference. The Hakurei Shrine prior to Gensoukyou as it is today was likely a proper youkai-exterminating shrine.

That it has become what it is now is a surprising discontinuity.

There aren't any records that remain to tell what the Hakurei God's name is, which is somewhat odd; you'd think that in a land which has been known as a place where youkai extermination is necessary for hundreds of years, people would remember that there was a god of it.

That is to say, the records probably didn't just stop being kept; they were probably deliberately lost, or destroyed. But we have the 13th Hakurei Shrine Maiden's inscription of Gensoukyou's current state- so it isn't like all records of what happen with the shrine disappear.

It's easy to infer, under these conditions, what happened. The god of youkai extermination, losing influence as youkai also lost influence, had a shrine that nobody visited any more. Youkai viewed that shrine as a good keystone for the barrier surrounding Gensoukyou, due to its location, and revived it, beginning a new series of shrine maidens entirely; the first Hakurei shrine maiden was, of course, the first since that revival. The god in there didn't gain anything from this, of course; there's no reason for the youkai to allow it to, and in fact it would be quite inconvenient if people knew the shrine's blessing was really youkai extermination.

But 14 shrine maidens is quite a lot in 140 years. That's an average tenure of a little more than 9 years per shrine maiden! (Excluding Reimu, it's around 8.5). It was, of course, a fairly dangerous job prior to the spell card rules; we don't know how dangerous, though. Or do we?

Thank you very much, Komachi, for solving the mystery of the shrine.

#touhou #怪 #hakurei god #(i GUESS miette is technically here.)#gensoukyou meta

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