Touhou Shinkainote ~ Awakening Deep Mythos is a fan-made Touhou Project-themed album developed by Wookywok and released in Nov, 9th 2022. The download made available featuring a tie-in story booklet detailing a story structured like the average Touhou game.
It all started out as a seemingly simple incident, with the fairies and youkai becoming aggressive, with unrest spreading throughout Gensokyo. But then things escalate: nightmares spread through the population with Doremy unable to help, the humans are all going insane, plants are growing out of whack, and the color and life in certain areas are being drained. Gensokyo is falling to chaos.
And this is before the true worst event even begins. Momoyo Himemushi arrives at the Hakurei Shrine to warn of an invasion of mysterious monsters coming from a strange hole deep within Rainbow Dragon Cave. As the normally strong youkai couldn't stand up to the horde of monsters, this necessitates the intervention of both the strongest incident-solvers and youkai for this to be resolved.
The album alongside the story booklet can be downloaded on Wookywok's itch.io here
, while the album itself can be heard on this playlist.
This album contains the following tropes:
- Apocalypse How: The pantheon's equivalent to Earth in their origin universe had experienced a Class X-2 scaled fate, with its Sun going supernova and the civilization hosted on the planet doomed to die off. It was only with Cathu's quick thinking that the eldritch gods lived to tell the tale, at the cost of losing the faith to sustain a new civilization.
- Ascended Extra: Momoyo Himemushi, Doremy Sweet and Sumireko Usami all star as "playable" roles in the story.
- Armor-Piercing Question: Yukari to Hatsuda, regarding her plan to rob Gensokyo of faith from its inhabitants, (a place that's already scraping by with faith due to the evolution of the logical outside world) despite already having enough faith to sustain her kind.Yukari: What is your real reason? Is this really for your people?
Hatsuda: I... - Deliberately Monochrome: What spurred Reimu's investigation of the incident is when an area around Youkai Mountain is drained of its color In-Universe. This is later revealed to be caused by Etsuko Fukano, an unusual youkai whose ability has a negative effect on her surroundings.
- Fantastic Flora: The various plant-life end up growing into twisted shapes as just one example of the chaos caused by the incident. The Forest of Magic in particular features trees that grow in irregular and impossible angles, with its branches spiralling into fractals.
- Fiendish Fish: Stage 1 features fish jumping out of Misty Lake as enemies. It's implied to be because of Insumo, the mermaid that controls fish, going unnaturally havoc-happy.
- Hidden Heart of Gold: The first paragraph focusing on Marisa paints her as Only in It for the Money, only for the very next paragraph to note that she's secretly concerned about Gensokyo's invasion and wishes to help Momoyo out of respect.
- Lovecraft Lite: The antagonists are Eldritch Abominations (albeit in Touhou-style cute girl form) based on the Cthulhu Mythos who seek to take over Gensokyo by driving the inhabitants insane and Zerg Rushing with an army of unusual monsters. But not only are the heroes powerhouses (including Yukari and Doremy Sweet) that are undaunted in facing off against the threat and eventually succeed, the pantheon of eldritch gods are of a sympathetic kind, due to their original home-world facing an Apocalypse How that left them without a civilization to sustain enough faith for the remaining gods and youkai. Even after the conflict, some of the monsters would find themselves integrating into Gensokyo more peacefully, with the main antagonist, Hasuta Aurelia, having a possible epiphany over her flawed actions.
- Meat Moss: The Rainbow Dragon Cave ends up coated in meat of a grey coloration, along with some bones and other body parts to indicate its a full organism.
- Noodle Incident: Something happened to the one fairy who said she didn't know what a Saturn was to Chima, the latter's increased aggression likely not helping matters.
- Tradesnark™: Marisa's title as the "Ordinary Magician" has the "™" symbol affixed to it in her introduction, as if she copyrighted her title to the point of influencing it out-of-universe.
- Outside-Context Problem: With the incident escalating to the point of becoming unusual and hazardous, including an invasion of monsters weird even in the context of the Fantastic Nature Reserve that is Gensokyo, this warrants calling upon some of the strongest Youkai residents to take action. Yukari in particular even puts aside sleeping in for the incident upon realizing that something akin to her gaps is being used to cause everything to happen.
- Void Between the Worlds: The Void Passage, a realm populated with monster and eldritch horrors, is a dimension outside the realm of Gensokyo, described as a realm of chaos with random bits of whatever and a total lack of Euclidean space. It is also Hatsuda's last resort refuge home to host the pantheon and other monsters/youkai after their home-world got destroyed, but it's not a good home for those who need faith to survive, hence the invasion of other dimensions.
