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In which I talk to you about a Touhou fanfiction

Art from Ch10 of Teeth and Claws, by dlartistanon

I read Teeth and Claws by GreatUnmovingLibrary last night and I get why it's considered one of the great English language Touhou fics.

The premise is pretty intriguing: Through a series of unplanned events, Reimu ends up becoming Yukari’s shikigami. The fic’s 21 chapters follow the impacts of this transformation, the physiological ones for Reimu as she starts to transform into a youkai, and the social ones as people around her respond to this complete upheaval for Gensokyo’s top youkai exterminator.

In a way the fic and its premise are reminiscent of Zounose’s infamous doujin works. Zounose often drills down on themes of transformation, usually to a level of grizzly detail that doesn’t shy away from the darker Grimm’s Fairy Tales elements that underpin the world of Touhou. At the same time, they never abandon the warm and fuzzies of Gensokyo — the very Simpsons-esque No Hugging, No Morals storytelling and the idealization of slackerdom, unstructured life, and Generally Chilling Out.

Zounose art

Teeth and Claws nails that balance. The sacred and the profane, if you will. Many English Touhou fics skew hard into one aspect of the Touhou vibe, be it the dark side or the screwball comedy, or veer into a stock fic writing mode, i.e. angst time. GreatUnmovingLibrary integrates elements of all of it, and in doing so produces a vibe that’s among the most authentically “Gensokyo” I’ve ever read outside of ZUN’s official works.

The other great thing is GreatUnmovingLibrary’s writing itself. Fanfic prose can often be rather, uh, rudimentary, or extremely purple and overwrought, with seemingly very little in between. One feels like they’re exerting active effort to enjoy the story in spite of the prose assaulting their eyes like Mystia when she’s not hawking lamprey kebabs. The prose in Teeth and Claws glides by, economical but vivid. It takes genuine skill to fully paint a scene with two sentences instead of twenty. I never ran into a single rough patch that pulled me out of the story. By the end it scarcely felt like I’d just powered through 50,000 words in a single day.

If I grope around a bit the only potential gripe I can come up with is that some obvious plot and character connections aren’t brought into play. For example, old Touhou hands will likely read the premise of this fic and imagine that Reimu would want to talk to Byakuren and/or Rinnosuke, both of whom are well acquainted with the taboo of a human becoming a youkai. Neither of them appear in the story though — never mind other people who’d have an intense interest in Reimu becoming a youkai, such as Kasen — and the idea is only explored in a brief side conversation with Alice, another human-to-youkai transitioner. That said, it’s clear most of those omissions were made in the interest of maintaining pace and thematic focus.

Because at the end of the day this is firmly a Yukareimu story. Other characters and relationships do show up, including a very interesting original character who ends up playing a major part in the main story thread, but Teeth and Claws is resolute about exploring the ins and outs of the relationship between Reimu and Yukari above all else. I’m not complaining about this at all since this is one of my favorite pairings in all of Touhou, but if it’s not your cup of sake you might be frustrated by the limited aperture on the story’s scope and ensemble.

Since the challenge of Yukareimu is that Yukari is literally an unfathomable great youkai whose mind bears no resemblance to that of the average human, a lot of fanworks add some kind of vulnerability to her to nudge her closer to something like a human character. Teeth and Claws does do a little bit of this but takes the novel approach of nudging Reimu into being something more like Yukari instead. The result is an engaging experience of watching Reimu slowly and stubbornly (this is Reimu after all) start to understand a tiny bit more about the Gap Hag’s life and way of thinking, now that she has the means to do so. There’s no bathos or Marvel-y cataclysmic showdowns here. Just sharp and sporadic little conflicts as well as mundane, cute moments quietly hinting at much deeper realizations and changes in thought — all very Touhou.

I can’t wait to check out more of GreatUnmovingLibrary’s back catalog.