Touhou Ibunshu

Touhou Ibunshu is a completed Fan Fiction series by Tyler "usuallydead" Lovell. It is, as the name suggests, an adaptation of the Touhou series (exclusively the Windows era, likely due to the PC-98 games being retconned out of existence), covering The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, Perfect Cherry Blossom, Immaterial and Missing Power, and Imperishable Night, with several side-stories covering the intervening periods, as well as two flashbacks. Each of the main stories (except the Immaterial and Missing Power adaptation, oddly enough) follow the general plot of the respective game, including the main threat, the characters that embark upon a quest to stop it, and the characters they encounter in a certain order, however the resemblance to the original plots mostly ends there.

The series is heavily Alternate Universe, with some of the more drastic changes being the removal of universal flight, danmaku reduced to single-use spellcards, Reimu and Marisa having their Power Levels dropped to bottom tier (Reimu has to borrow spellcards from Marisa), and the fact that everyone is speaking English. Furthermore, many things are far darker than normal, with Youkai that don't simply threaten to eat people, what little combat there is being swift and brutal, and characters entirely willing to use any Story Breaker Powers to their full extent. Regardless, earning a happy ending is never impossible.

The writing is also excellent, and the characters are far from two-dimensional.

Retelling of Oriental Stories
"Retelling of the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil"
 * The Reinterpretation of Scarlet Devil

"Retelling of Perfect Cherry Blossom"
 * Redemption of Precarious Puppeteer
 * Requiem Bibliophilic
 * Resolute and Ghostly Gardener
 * Remixed Cherry Blossom

"Retelling of Immaterial and Missing Power"
 * Recovery of Beloved Matriarch
 * Repose and Inclusive Power

"Retelling of Imperishable Night"
 * Remorse in Secession's Nobility
 * Recalled Lunar Romance
 * Recount and Full Moon Predecessor
 * Reenactable Night

Other Touhou Writings
"Retelling of Mountain of Faith"
 * Erroneous Paradisaical Inception


 * Sakurei

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Tropes for Touhou Ibunshu include:
""The patterns of romantic stories might expect our encounter that night to reach a romantic climax. Taking all our clothes off, feeling skin on skin, making sweet love on the lounge furniture. While that kind of scene happened many times afterwards, we got no further than a kiss this night.""
 * Alternate Universe Fic
 * Author Tract: One of the common criticisms against the story, though it's only really bad in a handful of places.
 * Butt Monkey: Chi- er, Hong Meiling, who can't seem to last a single scene without suffering grievous bodily harm of some sort. Definitely of the Iron Butt Monkey sub-trope.
 * Creepy Child: Flandre and Remilia initially. They get better.
 * Dark Fic: They do manage to earn a happy ending for each of the games, and almost every villain is eventually redeemed by the Power of Friendship, but this Gensokyo is a far more dangerous and less pleasant place than canon Gensokyo, and there's implications that most of the low-to-medium level youkai are just monsters and we happen to be looking at the ones who aren't. The main characters are also powered way down so as to make the adventures legitimately dangerous.
 * Daughter of a Whore: Mokou. However, she does get taken in and raised by the father.
 * Deadly Prank: Tewi nearly causes the destruction of Eintei and the death of Reisen through a prank she pulls on Reisen.
 * Deliberately Cute Child: Both Rumia and in Reinterpretation of Scarlet Devil.
 * Determinator: Sakuya goes through figurative hell over the course of Remixed Cherry Blossom, including trudging through miles and miles of snow with an untreated leg wound,, and facing down a monstrously corrupted  . And after all that, she gets to meet Yukari.
 * Driven to Suicide: . Fortunatey, they are saved by respectively.
 * Also, shockingly,, leading to the events of Remixed Cherry Blossom.
 * Easter Egg: Remorse in Secession's Nobility's acronym,
 * The Fair Folk: Most fairies are like this.
 * Fan Service: With the exceptions of Redemption of Precarious Puppeteer and Recalled Lunar Romance, someone ends up getting naked somehow. And even they had some brief moments of fanservice. Briefly lampshaded in the latter after a kiss scene.
 * Fan Service: With the exceptions of Redemption of Precarious Puppeteer and Recalled Lunar Romance, someone ends up getting naked somehow. And even they had some brief moments of fanservice. Briefly lampshaded in the latter after a kiss scene.

"Eirin: The ritual can be undone only by technicality. It’s effectively impenetrable."
 * Fantastic Racism: Far more obvious than the original, and far more justified. Much of Recount and Full Moon Predecessor is about this, Keine fearing that if she were to reveal her half-hakutaku nature she would be driven away from her home.
 * Grey and Gray Morality: With the exception of Yuyuko, it's difficult to place any single character as being purely good or evil. Reimu, Marisa, and Suika come closest to the "good" portion of the spectrum, and closest on the "evil" side.
 * Happily Married: Eirin and Kaguya are very much this. Nearly two thousand years and counting.
 * Human Aliens: The Lunarians. Unlike the humans, they have Magitek, naturally white hair being a common trait, and their magic is less elemental and more based on time and space.
 * Innocent Prodigy: Akyu. What prevents her from being Wise Beyond Their Years is that, despite her intelligence and power, she still carries many childish traits.
 * Intertwined Fingers:
 * Journey to The Center of The Mind: Repose and Inclusive Power consists mainly of this.
 * Knife Nut: Sakuya, just like the original, except that here someone capable of stopping time and hurling a knife at your face before you even blink is every bit as intimidating as she can be.
 * Madwoman in The Attic: Flandre, oh so very much.
 * Magitek: The Lunarians.
 * Manipulative Bastard:  Some things never change.
 * Marshmallow Hell: A running gag in Resolute And Ghostly Gardner is Youmu expieriencing this. By the end, she finally figures out a way to be able to breathe like this.
 * The Messiah: Though she has never been a protagonist, Yuyuko has been described as "Ghost Jesus".
 * Medieval Stasis: Technology has hardly gone past the "feudal Japan" stage. Granted, the magic is so great that inventing machines would be uneccessary. (They even have magical lightbulbs!) Additionally, Gensokyo's denizens have adapted to the English language. English is referred to as "the new language", while Japanese is referred to as "the old language".
 * Regarding the language issue, there's something odd at work there. When Sanae came through the Boundary into Gensokyo, the transition exchanged all of her knowledge of the Japanese language for the English language. She could remember Kanako's name, but not what her gohei was called or precisely what honorific she used to refer to her father.
 * Mood Whiplash: Chapter Seven of Remixed Cherry Blossom has Sakuya . The following chapter, we get to see Shanghai and Alice.
 * Motor Mouth: Shanghai
 * Nobody Over 50 Is Gay: Averted (or Inverted, depending on how seriously you take Les Yay) by Eirin and Kaguya, who are both very much in love with each other and about as over 50 as you can possibly get.
 * Non-Indicative Name: Repose and Inclusive Power, while interesting, has nothing to do with the fighting game Immaterial and Missing Power, with the exception of the cast of characters and the Mugen Shubin, instead being about Reimu's Journey to The Center of The Mind.
 * The Power of Love: All jokes about Marisa's Master Spark aside, a lot of the conflicts in the stories are resolved through love, forgiveness, trust, et cetera. The most common guilty party of this is Yuyuko and Reimu, though Reimu does have a harder time forgiving certain people.
 * On the flipside, perhaps half of the conflicts in the stories are started or enabled because some characters made poor decisions in the name of love. This generally goes to show that the perpetrators aren't evil, simply misguided or afraid.
 * Really Seven Hundred Years Old: Many characters, but most of all Flandre, who as with the original can't even pretend to be mature.
 * Shout-Out: Several Touhou memes sneak there way into the story, subtly enough that if you didn't know the meme you wouldn't notice anything was unusual.
 * Smug Snake: Alice Margatroid and Patchoulli Knowledge.
 * Song Fic: On occasion, a character will sing a song from the games with lyrics added to them. They are generally relevant to the character singing or the plot. Perhaps the most amusing one being Suika's song of a hero marching forth to defeat an oni, only for his head to be immediately lopped off.
 * Spin-Off: Ibunshu has two stories that aren't part of the main continuity. Erroneous Paradisial Inception is the story of how Sanae and the Moriya Shrine got to Gensokyo, told from the point of view of Sanae, who basically has crap piled all over her until she breaks down (then pulls herself together and starts kicking ass). The other story, Sakurei, is a Porn Without Plot between Sakuya and Reimu.
 * Stylistic Suck: Requim Biblioliphic is written by Patchoulli and as a result, smothered in Purple Prose. Tyler admitted in one of his blog entries that on of his favorite parts was trying to find how much Purple Prose he could shove into the text.
 * Tempting Fate: In Remorse in Secession's Nobility, after Eirin explains the cornerstone behind Eientei's defenses to Reisen, she just has to say:
 * Tempting Fate: In Remorse in Secession's Nobility, after Eirin explains the cornerstone behind Eientei's defenses to Reisen, she just has to say:

"“Oh my,” she said. “It’s not like I want to hold onto you, stupid Boundary youkai. I’m just afraid of heights, is all!” She glanced at Ran. “What was the word for that again?”"
 * Even more amusing is the fact that the reader can easily and immediately identify several ways in which certain characters can tear apart Eirin's ritual.
 * Title Drop: Not the title of the story however, but the title of the game on which the particular story is based.
 * Tsundere: Discussed by Yukari about Reimu.


 * Wham! Episode: Chapter 7 of Remixed Cherry Blossom.
 * Who Wants to Live Forever?: The greatest issue for Yukari and Mokou, which has driven them to commit acts of villainy in the past. Kaguya and Eirin are not entirely immune, though their relationship with each other apparently serves as a buffer against the worst of it. Indeed, since Mokou herself sometimes acknowledges that Eirin didn't mean to kill her thieving father, and that she has herself to blame for drinking the Houari Elixir, Mokou's chronic animosity towards them may be about envy for their relationship as much as it is about wanting an outlet for her immortality angst.
 * The differences between the two come to a head in the climax of Reenactable Night, where  presents an opportunity for the Hourai immortals to die.
 * Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Rumia uses against Reimu.
 * Zombie Apocalypse: The Kashoyo. Mokou's been making them for ages, but she's been learning how to make more and more of them, and it seems the spillover are now appearing more and more often in random parts of Gensokyo instead of attacking Eientei.