Touhou Abilities and Power Levels Explained | Touhou Lore

Every Touhou character has a special ability or two. But how powerful are they actually? What do the abilities even mean? It's a little more complicated than one might think. Luckily, I'll be going over the translations and lore implications in this video!

Songs Used
Sealed Gods - ZUN
G Free - ZUN

[GensouChronicle]

So many roadblocks just to get a 3 minute video out. I'm just surprised I managed it somehow.
In any case, I'd like to thank @NaokiP72 and @richard_effendi for their research into the topic. I wouldn't have known about the Pixiv Dictionary link otherwise. And with that... I'm getting on my plane finally.

[pinglawd]

I think that Zun just wanted it to be vague since that’s his style of writing like how he mostly leaves a lot of the lore to the reader’s imagination. It can also be that he wanted a special ability for each character but didn’t want to restrict them to only one or make it the only defining characteristic of a character.

[ThatSplatoonTouhouGuy]

Eika Ebisu is the epitome of "vaguely described abilities that can be described in multiple ways". Some people see her as being able to stack literal _planets_ on top of each other, making even the strongest gods shiver with fear.

[KazmirRunik]

I think the true interpretation for an ability is just in how it manifests itself. Like, Akyuu's ability is complete recall, but her memory also extends into past lives because of how the in-universe mechanics work out. For Remilia's ability to manipulate fate, she says in the PCB prologue that Spring would return ONE DAY after Sakuya left the mansion, and Sakuya's ingame route has her mentioning that it took her ONE DAY to reach Yuyuko & return spring. Yukari can manipulate many boundaries, but she presumably can't manipulate the boundary between good & evil because she states that she can't oppose Shiki Eiki. Sakuya uses her time manipulation ability to also manipulate space, as stated by Patchoulli in EoSD, when asked why the mansion seems bigger on the inside than on the outside.

I would take the ability descriptions as more of a metric by which you measure an ability, as opposed to being the actual measurement. It's like saying, the extent of a ruler's ability is in its measurement of length. This doesn't describe WHAT that extent is; the information isn't given on how long the ruler is, how precise its measurements are, what units it uses, we just know that the ruler has the ability to measure length.

Similarly, when we say Parsee has the ability to manipulate jealousy, we don't know to what extent, just that the extent is measured in how well she manipulates jealousy. She's able to make herself jealous of other people to find reasons to attack, she binds one world to the next through her regrets, she can "fan the flames of jealousy in the hearts of others, " but we don't know if she can also reduce or eliminate jealousy, if her ability drains her like Satori's does, if she has precision control of how jealous to make someone, if she needs the person to have already been jealous in order for her to fan the flames, if there's an upper limit to how jealous she can make someone, just a lot of things that are open to interpretation but that still all fall within the ability to manipulate jealousy. It describes the nature of the ability, the extent or degree BY WHICH you measure it but not the extent or degree TO WHICH it measures up.

For what purpose, I would say it's because it's very healthy for discovery writing, as ZUN both doesn't know what he'll want his characters to do in the future and enjoys there being a plurality of fan interpretations since he was a patron of doujin circles to begin with, even before he made Touhou.

[jvts]

Some of the confusion is due to characters like Yukari canonically using multiple definitions of a word in her powers. There's also special cases like Kogasa, whose ability to "surprise" is sometimes understood as surprising the *player* from beyond the fourth wall for being the CD poster girl and extra boss.

[danteshi]

Zun "ability to drink beer nonstop and making game at the same time"

[nawalathhariansyah]

I like to think that having the characters abilities so vaguely described allows for some pretty interesting interpretations, and the mystery of how much of their descriptions are true and how much are just deliberate exaggerations makes it all the more fun to speculate about it all.

And i agree, Kosuzu definitely has the ability to be cute no matter what she is doing : D

[sebc]

The comparison of abilities in Touhou to Stands was presented as a joke in the video, but I actually somewhat share that theory; I believe they're pretty similar in the sense that they're deliberately left vague enough to allow for more creative freedom in how the characters utilize their powers. In Touhou, this is of course expressed primarily through Spell Card bullet patterns; whereas in JoJo, a large aspect of its confrontations is figuring out how the opponent's powers work, and that often involves said enemy utilizing their Stand is unexpected ways.

[brickstonesonn]

Imo it's for the same reason why ZUN doesn't directly tell the complete backstories & whatnot of each character. To keep it vague to allow interpretations, but also to encourage interpretation & to encourage people to create.

Its for the "doujin spirit" as ZUN himself once put it. He's always wanted people to get into creating doujins & find the same success that he has. And if you look at pretty much every aspect of Touhou, you'll realize that a lot of it is built in a way to really make you want to create something yourself; whether simply creating your own interpretation, or loving a character so much you want to tell a story with them, or maybe hearing a piece of the OST & thinking it's got a lot of potential if applied to a particular genre, etc.

[izzymosley]

This is just one other reason out of many why touhou is a nightmare for power scalers.

[sleeplessnarcolept]

Honestly one of the vague powers I love to death is Seija's power to flip things. While it was primarily used to rotate things, the thought that she flipped the roles in her special spin off game was fun. Plus it makes me think of what god like things she could do if strengthened, like flipping night to day

[dionysos]

I think Touhou characters are suppose to be a halfstep between powerful entities who can influence the rules of the world and normal relatable people. It is true that they have absolutely crazy ablilties, that however have set limitations. I think this approach works extremely well for the series, with some hickups here and there in the printworks, which is understandable, because writing such characters is extremely hard.

[luiztomikawa]

Touhou is so vague that the characters could be just street level or world ending depending on how much you stretch the extension to their abilities. And i love to see fan works reimagining those abilities.

[jotarodopudim]

Zun be like: we do some trolling to an extent

[timur_glazkov]

The first video (instead of a forum thread/post) discussing this

Only takes the fandom some 20 years

I think we can all agree Reimu nocliping out of reality is broken as hell

[WorldWide]

Really like how vague ZUN makes their powers to be as it allows for a huge range of interpretations/creativity.

Especially like how Kaguya's power is interpreted in some doujin works I.e turning a single instant of time into an infinite one (stopping time) or shortening a certain length of time into an instant (fast forward)

[invictus_]

Good video, I always thought that yokai and the magic in gensokyo were powered by "faith" /the humans perception of things and that extended to how things work. Like yes if someone in our world could fly they would have the ability to manipulate gravity or whatever other forces they use to do it, but since most people when asked to imagine a person flying they picture someone just moving as they please that's how yokai and magic flight works. Like Reimu has the ability to create barriers and people think of barriers as something that blocks or impedes not the underlying physics of stopping something she can seal things because yeah barriers keep things in, but couldn't manipulate gravity to separate an atom.

[Rabbotic]

Nah, to me once he started with the windows era Zun just wanted to mess around, he didn't expected it to become so popular, so he just kept with the bit and now he can't back down, a true Chad

[Acertaintouhoufan]

Well you weren't joking about this video being 3 minutes, it definitely felt shorter than usual. That being said, i quite enjoyed it as it was brief and right up to the point while still being informational. Good work!

[XquizetBlix]

Power levels in Touhou are basically impossible to imagine, mostly because of spellcard rules and the fact that some bosses do not scale with power

Also, ZUN is really really good at making vague lore. He said once in an email that Hecatia was the strongest canon character, even though Junko’s stage was arguably more difficult. And if we fixed the spellcard rules situation, some character would end up winning because of what is literally stated in the wiki (Ex: Sakuya would do the old abdomen stabbing, Flandre would just explode everyone)