Tinkerer sort of characters is fun to have and the bits we’ve seen of kappa tech in the games but also in the manga, like the not-gameboy, show the creative side of the kappa generally and Nitori in particular. As her profile states, she’d take apart and put together outside tech for the fun of it though I have to wonder how much of her creation process is copying as opposed to truly understanding underlying principles. Is there some sort of kappa technical institute? Would Nitori be a graduate or a teacher of some sort too? She’s not explicitly named as a leader or particularly important but in small bits of manga it does seem that she helps coordinate some things or make decisions when there’s a group of kappa.

Putting that aside, there’s plenty of links with various groups and areas too. Nitori has negotiated setting up ventures with both shrines for festivals and the like and she also worked on the mountain ropeway. She’s somewhat active in the village, with not only using an old shack as a warehouse, but ordering stuff from Suzunan and later on even running a stall in disguise in CDS. Seems like she has a nose for business as well, given the aforementioned as well as as her actions in UliL and 100th Black Market, so I wouldn’t put it past her to partner up with an (unknowing) human as a more long-term solution to selling kappa goods in the village. So from the perspective of having her in a story, she has plenty of reasonable grounds for appearing in different scenarios.

Looking at the Who’s Who article more carefully, I had missed ZUN saying that the kappa were based on overseas continental craftsmen who would have lived in the riverbanks. Yeah, it seems like a pretty clear reference to the marginalized groups in society like burakumin. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it but the overseas and continental bit makes me think of Japan’s own history of using Chinese (and especially) Korean laborers who were taken to Japan and similarly mostly excluded from society. I have my doubts that it’s explicitly that—there’s just a tenuous parallel with mountain society and kappa being at the bottom of the pecking order. In practice, it feels lik

I like turtles.

Also, sorry for coming in so late. I'm coming to the end of my exhibition entry, so maybe I can be less distracted now. I don't have a whole lot in the way of distinct thoughts right this moment, so I'm just going to throw a couple of responses out for now.

>>17831
In all honesty, I say this a lot about 2hu things, but I'll once more point to the general idea of otaku as a pretty strong part of the kappa conceptually. I think it's hard to say a whole lot about Nitori specifically, considering all of her profiles kind of lean more towards talking about the kappa generally, but if she's anything like the rest of them, then she's basically an otaku stereotype: insular, self-impressed, and prone to fiddling with things out of pure enthusiasm for fiddling. And whilst it's tempting to position her as a leader figure among her species, I tend to read her continual appearances as simply an expedient way of representing the kappa interest by having an existing kappa character speak for the rest.

>I have to wonder how much of her creation process is copying as opposed to truly understanding underlying principles
I feel like kappa just kind of kit-bash things together without much understanding of the principles, which fits with their whole otaku-y thing. If you look at the way they suck at working together, it seems likely they reinvent the wheel every time on an individual level. It's the kind of thing that makes me think kappa technology is probably approached from the standpoint of one-off curios as opposed to actually mass-produced items, exceptions notwithstanding.

Something I haven't seen brought up yet is the relationship between the kappa and yamawaro and t

>>17832 again.

I've thought about it a little, and I think there's a little bit of the same thing I saw with Hatate here with Nitori. That is, as 'yet another [species]' with no real established background, there's a sort of openness in the sorts of 'roles' she can play in anything, because she can potentially be a lot of things. Of course, the similarities also extend to probably needing to elaborate a bit on what counts as kappa society in order to provide enough of a reasonable backing. So, I guess I can ramble a bit about one such potential Nitori, though I think she would likely differ depending on the particular story.

For example, let's say that I see Nitori as maybe less outright inventive compared to other kappa, perhaps more of a work(wo)man than a tinkerer. That means that she's devoted a bit more time and energy to learning how to sell than others. Maybe she acts as a middle-woman who puzzles out difficult repair jobs on other kappa's prize machines. Maybe she does reverse-engineering work, acting as a gun-for-hire who deciphers closely-held processes and secrets. Hell, maybe she picks up work being the equivalent of a shop teacher, teaching young kappa the bare basics of fiddling with things. The exact context of a lot of that would depend on the story, but I guess what I'm saying is that she could feasibly be a sort of mercenary among kappa, less dedicated to 'the craft' and more focused on 'the biz'. That's where you have room for stuff like conflict with the yamawaro. Maybe Nitori, in all her industriousness, finds herself stepping on the toes of the 'mountain monkeys', causing them to make trouble for other kappa. This, in turn, causes her fellows to pressure her against creating such fierce competition between the camps. And so on.

I don't think much of what I said is in violat

Shit Fart Online sucked and VR is a forced meme.

Gensokyo is still not real and VR is shit.

>>17826
Coming along with one, yeah. Needs more work before it's even close to done, though. I'm trying not to get down to the wire this time.

Around 10 days left. Hope you've managed to be industrious. There's still time to write things up and polish as needed.

>>17837
Finished and polished about as much I think it can be polished. Pretty pleased with how it turned out. Hope we get a good turnout.

Just realized I forgot to say what it even is, Gensokyo D20 is a Touhou D&D 3.5 conversion.

>>17617
You know what they say—what's good for Deleuze is good for DeLanda.

... That is to say, DeLanda's EGS lectures are a good place to start, if you're more academically-minded and want to start boiling the frog slowly, instead of jumping straight into Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

You know, you're not supposed to leave a promise so late that fulfilling it becomes a surprise.

Ahahaha... Apologies, everyone. After far, far too long of a delay... I've finally finished the first of the two prizes!

You can find the runner-up prize at >>/shorts/3043. Man, writing three essentially arbitrary characters into one story is really hard; I had the vague story I wanted to do early on, but it wasn't until very recently that the way to present that story finally came into shape in a format I was happy with. I hope you all enjoy!

>>17712
Oh, that was gorgeous, I love it! Thank you so much! That was a really clever, and very pretty, way to get all of our characters together.

As I'm busy preparing to go out of the country for the next month, I don't have that much time to deal with this thread, so we're going on hold yet again. The thread's near auto-sage anyway, so this is as good a point as any to drop off for now. See you in November with a fresh thread.

In all honesty, maybe you'll just offload the thread to someone else (again) instead of shutting it down?
It doesn't seem like much work to take on, simply post a first post with roll and a second one with collection of canonical sources, that's all for mandatory threadkeeping.

I'll be taking over the character discussion threads for the foreseeable future. This thread is almost auto-saged so new thread:
>>17620

Pretty quiet around here. Guess I'll take that as nobody else having much to say. In which case, here's the face reveal: I wrote The Problem with Civilisation.

In all honesty, it was a struggle to bring this piece to any kind of conclusion. I didn't start with much momentum, and life made it hard to ramp up to any degree. Various obligations that I couldn't put off left me with little focus or free time a lot of days, so there were many days where I simply made no progress at all. That I made it with a couple of days to spare so I could do a perfunctory self-edit and proofread was a feat in and of itself.

It all just underscores that I'm not a writer who can work quickly at all, nor can I very readily reconcile the basic conceptual matter of a story with actual written words. The concept of this piece took me close to a week to even nail down, for instance. I had initially felt like doing something involving tengu, based on one of the suggestions in the OP, but I couldn't come up with anything at all. I suppose the choice of Nemuno was largely due to the Character Discussion Thread. I still had a bit of the discussion about her kicking around in the back of my head by the time the contest started, so I guess she was just sort of an 'easy' choice at the time. She's also deceptively simple as a character. Deceptively.

I say that because I did struggle to feel as if I had a good sense of how to portray the mountain hag beyond the most superficial elements. The particular tone of her dialogue was simple enough, but figuring out what she would actually say, for instance, had me pulling out my hair at points. There were instances where I had to cut back on dialogue for her and try to use Byakuren to push things along instead. Then, when Kenji was actually awake and in the scene, I had to struggle to figure out how she would deal with him. Yes, yes, mommy hag and all, but I wasn't interested in taking the absolute easiest route possible. In that sense, my own struggle to reckon with Nemuno as a character is represented in some of the struggle she has wit

Same poster from >>17559

Otherworldly Flavor

A cute short that felt absolutely like a Touhou work, this one I enjoyed. The characters were used effectively, and I felt like I was reading Youmu and Yuyuko and people with similar names. The theme was simple but strong; Youmu was obligated to fulfill her master's order, and she took the opportunity to go out and party while still getting the job done.

My favorite short in this exhibition. The author had an idea, and they executed it well.

Eientei M.D.

I see the idea; you know how to leave clues, and throughout the story, I felt like I could figure out the mystery. To me, that's where half the fun is, feel close to solving the puzzle and I think you did fine from that angle.

I would like to see you hone your skill in making a mystery. The grammar could use work, but that'll naturally improve the more you write and read. You love House M.D? Watch the episodes and study them; Engage with the media you love and dissect it. You watched your favorite episode? Study and see why it stood out from the rest. Least favorite? Study and ask yourself why it leaves a weaker impact on you.

Be wary of giving a pre-existing character a child. It's a powerful hook and doubly so for someone like Mokou No Fujiwara. It creates intrigue and a lot of questions which is what you want for mystery fic.

Who's the father? Magic exists, so was it with a woman instead? What is the parents' relationship with each other? What is their relation to their daughter and etc.

But the fic wasn't about the daughter, so those questions are left unanswered because it wouldn't affect the actual story. It's a powerful trope so give it serious thought if you really want to make a child oc, or stick to the pre-existing character because in this situation, you could have Mokou and it would not have changed the story.

I hope I can see your writing again in the next exhibition; I'm making an assumption here, but I did feel like you enjoyed writing

Records of a Burdens

I like the story and it did tug at my heart, some things didn't stick the landing for me.

Despite the story's conflict happening because of Akyuu's sense of impending death from her curse, it's odd that it wasn't shown. The closest we get is her hand straining, but that's due to overworking. She tells us how her body reminds her that she should be dead by now, so show us what she's feeling. Keine says she looks haggard, but we never get a physical description of her body outside her writing hand. You can describe how messy her hair is or maybe she couldn't bring herself to put the brush on the paper.

To summarize: Show me what the characters are telling. A short paragraph about Akyuu's body feeling off would go a long way.

Otherworldly Flavors
This is my favorite and it's hard to suggest any improvement. If I could make one suggestion, I would like it if the story had a more prominent conflict. Youmu goes to get snacks for Yuyuko, but there aren't many obstacles that stand in her way. There was the tengu, but the fight was stopped before it started. When Youmu was flying back, I thought that was when the conflict would start and she now had to resist eating all the snacks while drunk, but that didn't happen either.

You could have it that when she was paying for her snack, Youmu realized the money Yuyuko gave her was missing, or she was more tempted to eat all the snacks before reaching home. Anything that would make the reader wonder if she'll succeed in her quest or fail trying.

The Problem with Civilization
I've seen you talk about your struggle in writing, and I want to say I am happy to see your writing in this exhibition. I also appreciate you taking the time to critique my work and show where I can improve. However, there's room for improvement as a writer and a critic.

For writing: Byuakren and her group's whole purpose in the story was to bind Nemuno and Kenji to

That's probably why I didn't see it.
In the character.txt of my PCB copy it's translated as: "Like Chen, her shape is unchanged and she has a well-sociable personality."
It's a difference of how 性格は丸い is translated.

"Well-sociable personality" isn't wrong, either; it's just how they ignored the overall structure of the sentence.
>姿かたち：普段と代わりが無い
>が、
>性格：丸い。
が "but" draws a contrast between these two topic/comments. Translating it as "and" is just a weirdly lazy move.

>>17531
>>17532
re: 'crime', that wasn't the focus of my mutterings. The point was whether or not youkai have any vested interest in keeping villagers from harming each other, considering they are of outmoded importance to Gensokyo's order. To be clear, I don't think there's any factual answer to that question, though my feeling is that, yes, they have some interest. To what extent? Well, that's a whole other question.

>>17504
Nothing so trivial. It's their personalities. Their characterizations. What sequence of events bring out the feelings and thoughts about those things and them isn't really something I can suggest—that's up to you because it depends on the things you want to do with those characters.

Maybe I'm doing a poor job of explaining this but it seems obvious to me: I would like to learn more about who they actually are because one of the things that seemed clear to me from reading the story was that they were all hiding their actual thoughts and feelings because (plot) reasons. I want to see a little behind the curtain and it doesn't matter if it's their opinions on whatever trite things you listed so long as it's something that's important to them or their character. Again, not something I can suggest since only you would know what those things are. All I can offer is the most general setups for that like Aun sleuthing around, uncovering something that can't be avoided, overhearing something, being nosy, talking over drinks/tea, etc. since I can't know what you know and feel about the characters and what would come out.

If you can't do that, that's fine. I don't mind little vignettes as suggested by another poster and a clash with Aya in terms of reporting or managing the "truth" that's printed in any article could be interesting. My main interest in the story comes from the characters and their depictions and I can't tell you what they should be.

>>17506
In all honesty, I'm not sure if I can do what you're asking. Probably the deepest problem with the main story is that I figured out after a point that I don't feel secure in knowing much about the principle characters much less what to do with them. The plot, such as it was, was based on a couple of arbitrary answers to questions posed to me, and I'm lukewarm at best on those points now; the main thing stopping me from redoing everything is not knowing what I'd do instead. On top of that, I had (and still have) numerous wide gaps in my understanding of the characters that can't be bridged just by reading some profiles and manga. For instance, I couldn't tell you who Sanae is outside of her shrine maiden role; I don't know what she's actually interested in, what she normally does in her free time, how she feels about this thing or the other, etc. The foundations for all of those characters is shaky at best, and I don't know what concrete steps I can take to fix that.

So, I don't know what else to say. I can maybe string together something from suggestions about specific scenarios, and that's about the best I can do right now. Sitting still for a long time only continues to hurt me, so I'd like to somehow keep moving forward and eventually find some way of fixing the foundational issues, and I think the only way that's likely to happen is a process of doing and discovery. However, motivating that process isn't something I can do myself. What I'm doing right now is all I know to do at this point.

I'm sorry to unload all of this behind-the-curtain talk, but what you're asking touches right on a lot of the deep frustrations I've had with this story and writing in general.

>>17507
As I said before, it's fine if you can't. While I'm interested in what I'm interested, the simpler idea about the aftermath at the Hakurei shrine is also ok. I'm partial to a series of short notes/articles by Aya following attempts to interview the involved parties as a style and/or framing device. Though, perhaps, that might end up being more about Aya and her pushiness rather than the interview subjects (Reimu, Aunn, Marisa?, others?) themselves. Dunno what the other anon might think.