Webcomic / Touhou Nekokayou

The first image from Create.swf Adventures

Touhou Nekokayou: Scarlet Weather Archive in Japanese Red is a silly fancomic about Touhou Project, made using Walfas create.swf, a character creation tool, and created by Kimiko Muffin. It also has associated prose fiction, as well as Create.swf Adventures, an Interactive Comic heavily influenced by MS Paint Adventures.

Originally tried to follow the game continuity a minimum, but ended up throwing this idea out the border. This came to a head with the fanfic Redefined Fantastic Object and the Story Arc Rethinking the Natural Law, which respectively retell Undefined Fantastic Object and Touhou Hisoutensoku with readily-apparent changes.

Officially ended by Muffin herself, due to being preoccupied with web design and making Villainmad, not to mention it being hard and boring from Muffin's side.

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Provides examples of:

• Action Mom: When Shinki is introduced in Shenanigans in a Magical Forest, the Boss Subtitles go through several titles relating to maternity and divinity before settling on "Almighty, Like All Mothers".
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Attend askance at addle-brained adversaries, arm anatomy, and alliterate all antagonists!
• All There in the Manual: The prose fanfiction on the site tends to be part of the comic's canon. Which means if you do an Archive Binge of just the comics (or just Create.swf Adventures), you'll inevitably find yourself asking questions like "When did Koishi hook up with Flandre?", or "Since when is Flandre's power 'Manipulation of Destruction'?", or even "When did Marisa move in with Alice?"
• Alternate Character Interpretationinvoked:
  • Mokou was actually a lesbian who was jealous of Kaguya's suitors, but never realized this until Remilia manipulated their fate so that they'd fall in love.
  • Kisume is completely freaking nuts, and reasons that only someone who is insane would want to live in a bucket the way members of her species do, and it is implied that all tsurube-otoshis are like this.
• Anachronic Order: A side-effect of throwing in "this takes place between Subterranean Animism and Undefined Fantastic Object" after the fact. In particular, Rethinking the Natural Law initially cheerfully and strictly followed the reverse order of the available story modes in Touhou 12.3; this was also the optimal order to avoid actually revealing anything, including the identity of the new villain, until the arc was more than halfway over. The timeline was once the subject of frequent retcons.
• Angst? What Angst?invoked: Orange is stated to be a "youkai of resilience who recovers more easily than [she] fears" by Hina; she's less bothered by the fact that she was sealed away by Reimu for eleven years (according to the timeline) than she is by everyone smothering her in worry and concern.
• Alternate Universe: Seihou Nekokayou: Spectral World Archive on a 99GB Diskette. That is, this is the comic which Muffin would have created in the Touhou universe (all other things being equal). The Rant for the actual comic #59, in addition to implying that it also shares the same Stealth Pun in the title, discusses other implications, and now and then Muffin adds more items to the list (without it showing up in the site updates) ...
• Ambiguous Gender: It's sort of an open secret that "Kimiko"Muffin is male.
  • WAS male. As her introduction page now says, Kimiko is trans. See here.
• Armor-Piercing Question: In Ends and Beginnings, Kaguya calls Mokou's entire reason for her feud into question with "Did you want me as your mother?" (Shipping ensues.)
• Art Evolution: Which is to say, that of KirbyM, who made Updated Rereleases of most Create.swf characters after a certain point.
• Artists Are Not Architects: The continual difficulty scaling the characters in relation to one another (i.e. Flandre changes sizes during the Catness ark so that she can be smaller than Remilia, but larger than Cirno). However, Muffin since created a scale for character-sizes which was applied to every comic since #92 or so.
• As You Know:
  • Played for laughs here, with a Lampshade Hanging:
    Gengetsu: Mu... all of us know all that.
  • Also pointedly averted with respect to Rin Satsuki's Mysterious Past — the characters obviously know what happened between Rin and Yukari, and they keep referring to it, but no explanation has been forthcoming so far.
• Author Appeal: Just from being a fan, first of all, but ...
• Author Catchphrase: "Apart from anything else ..." to mean "for one thing ..." (Muffin has remarked on its overuse in The Rant for #88); it's originally taken from Discworld.
• Badass Longcoat: "Vampire hunter Sakuya," aka "The Huntress."
• Bad Powers, Bad People: Averted; apart from canon ones like Yamame, Flandre, once her "destroy things" power gets upgraded to "Manipulation Of Destruction," uses it to heal people (by "removing" the destruction). And Medicine, once she gets over her hatred of humans, is actually really rather nice, if a bit shy.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Neil Armstrong was a soldier sent to invade the moon, and the crew of Apollo 13 had been ready to deal the decisive blow to the Lunar military when their ship was stopped by Eirin! (Note: this may or may not actually be canon.) And then it's all happening again!
• Berserk Button: Do not insult Utsuho in front of Cirno (towards bottom)
• Big Bad Wannabe: Meimu, jealous of Reimu, Yukari, and Marisa's fame, travels back in time to try to steal Reimu's thunder by interfering with "the Hisou Tensoku incident," and then, implied in a future-timeline comic, use her prior knowledge of Incidents to solve them ahead of Reimu and Marisa.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Often used as a brief gag, although it was actually used in-character once (as a Lampshade Hanging on Real Life Writes the Plot. Incidentally, Thefre only implemented multicolored danmaku just a few days after a note was added to this line which said, "Incidentally, Thefre still hasn't implemented multicolored danmaku ...") And it's justified in the case of referring to each other as "stage (whichever) bosses"! (The idea of justifying that is meant to be at least as silly as the trope itself.)
  • In Shenanigans in a Magical Forest, Yukari supposedly broke through the fourth wall, and Reimu did it less literally but no less decisively; however, it turned out to be a Fourth Wall Psych.
• Butt-Monkey: Averted — Muffin has professed a deep "haet" for the fan community's habit of abusing certain characters (particularly Alice and Meiling) and, in some cases, has set up happy and stable relationships for those characters. At one point this went as far as creating comics specifically to show victories for certain characters who had been shown to lose in previous incidents, though whether that actually works is up for debate.
• The Cameo: Jenny Everywhere appears in #111.
• Canon Discontinuityinvoked: Ellen has been stricken from Nekokayou's version of the Touhou canon, being that she was originally from a non-ZUN work (of course, being a PC98 character, her position in Touhou canon is shaky anyways).
• Carebear Stare:
  Utsuho: Well, if you don't leave me alone, I'm gonna go and be cute with Cirno!
  Yasora: ... I'm impressed. Not only is that the most ridiculous threat I've ever heard in my entire existence, it's also one of the most effective in my circumstances.
• Catapult Nightmare: Maribel has one in a Dream Within a Dream. Averted when she actually wakes up.
• Cat Girl: Invoked by Catness. Though one could wonder if Tenshi was going for cat girls in the first place.
• Censor Box: One labelled "Use your imagination" in #43 when Sakuya's Berserk Button gets pressed hard enough.
• Characterization Marches On: Alice shows signs of her bashful/lovestruck personality from general-fanon early on, before Muffin developed a certain loathe for this interpretation. Other characters occasionally had a similar shift in behavior.
• Chekhov's Gun/Chekhov's Gunman: In Shenanigans in a Magical Forest, one mushroom that got left behind toward the beginning becomes a main character after turning into a Youkai.
• Chekhov's Skill: The Rant for comic #82, "Magic A Is As Magic A Does", describes Marisa's useless-in-a-world-with-no-physical-combat "Fist-Shield" spell as this.
  • In Shenanigans in a Magical Forest: early on, Marisa threatens to sic Orin (who has the power to control evil spirits) on Mima (an evil spirit). Much later ...
• Chew Bubblegum:
  • When a character arms herself with no danger present:
  It's good for two things: sacred rituals, and bapping supernatural heads. And you're all out of rituals! ... uh ... and heads.
  • Also, the only command ever given to Shinki is "Kick ass, chew bubblegum... but be all out of bubblegum."
• Cerebus Syndrome: Averted; there are one or two multi-part arcs, but it always goes back to the original one-shot setup, and it retains the humorous tone. The more serious stories are reserved for the surrounding fanfics. Also parodied with the out-of-continuity "It's REALLY epic!" comics.
• Colon Cancer: The Story Arc comics which have an individual name for each installment, e.g. Touhou Nekokayou #102: Touhou Saisoutensoku #9: Faith Is For The Transient Boss Battle
• Cosmic Retcon: Keine's mini-arc revolves around turning PC-98 Canon Discontinuity into this.
• Crack Pairing: Apart from Mokou x Kaguya (they want to kill each other in canon), Kimiko has shipped Cirno (fairy with ice powers) with Utsuho (hell raven with the power of a three-legged crow with the power of control over nuclear fusion), solely over the "cold fusion" pun (and the fact that Cirno is known as a ⑨, while Utsuho is a ⑥). Muffin has also made a few peoples' heads explode by merely suggesting Shinki x Daiyousei (that is, a world-creating Final Boss goddess and a Mid-Boss fairy, respectively). Invoked with the random pairing generator on the site.
• Crapsack World: According to Word Of Muffin, the Outside World must be like this (for magic-users and youkai if not necessarily for the Muggles), given the implications of the fact that Gensokyo is (a) a world of illusion, where things exist if enough people actively disbelieve in them in the Outside World, and (b) a paradise where nothing seriously bad happens in the long run.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Meiling, (bonus points for also being "totally a dragon"), who in "Issue #33", despite being a stage 3 boss, was able to stop Flandre's rampage with her martial arts, taking on four of her at once. Unfortunately, in general, martial arts are useless against danmaku ...
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Most of the fight scenes are like this for comedic purposes; in particular, in the "Rethinking the Natural Law" Story Arc, every fight that ends with a decisive victory for one side or the other is like this — particularly against Meimu, who loses every fight in this manner ... until she fights with Reimu and Rin.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon:
  • "I'm gonna hit you so hard, your descendants will feel it!" (And they do.)
  • And in another, Ran shouts "I'LL KILL YOU UNTIL YOU DIE *AGAIN!*" at Mima (a ghost).
  • "Mind your own business if you want to remain not on fire."
• Deconstruction: Touhou's canon is extremely vague on a lot of things. Muffin sometimes takes a particular aspect of canon and says "Okay, so ... how would this really work?" about it (see above, under Crapsack World).
  • In particular, Meimu/Kon Yakumo's depiction was meant to deconstruct the Mary Sue archetype: on top of the idea of "Meimu" to begin with, she is the daughter of a canon character and she barges into the plot of one of the games to try to make herself all important, but she is a bratty idiot and everyone realizes this (on top of having a power which resembles Yukari's, but is much less versatile or useful). The execution, however, was a bit lacking.
• Doomed by Canon: We get to be the Yatagarasu? Nice. *A few centuries later* "Hey Okuu, you wanna eat that dead sun god here?" (Not that it is actually canon that the Yatagarasu in question had been involved with Yukari's lunar invasion. But regardless, she had to be a corpse by the time of Subterranean Animism.)
• Everyone Is Bi: Only a couple mentions which nearly amount to Lampshade Hanging in some cases; the driving force of shipping is mentioned in Perfect Square, when Alice compares peoples' reactions to her relationship with Marisa to what would happen if Marisa was going out with, say, Reimu; in A Different Story of an Eastern Wonderland, Daisuke and Keine explicitly spell it out for Renko and Maribel that being entirely straight or gay is unusual in Gensokyo and that Outsiders are considered weird for considering this weird; and in (one of the variants of) #19 when Mokou reveals to Kaguya that she is not bi but a lesbian, i.e. a flamer.
• Flat "What": Word for word here.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Attempts to control Yukari in Create.swf Adventures tend to go extremely poorly, and it's eventually pointed out that this is because the Fourth Wall is a boundary.
• Gratuitous Japanese: The title, which translates to "Oriental Cat Prettyface"; Muffin freely admits that this was "because I am a dork." (Incidentally, none of the Japanese Touhou-fans who are aware of it seem to refer to it by that name.)
• Homosexual Reproduction:
  • Carroll, who refers to Alice as her mother and Marisa as her "father." Shanghai, who was merely created, refers to Marisa as "other-Mom." Mika and Midori also had fun once considering this idea with respect to Kaguya, in light of the existence of Kaguya the mouse.
  • "IS THIS A FAMILIAL RESEMBLANCE I SEE?" (Though this wasn't an actual example — Sakuya merely assumed it was.)
    • "Mommy!"
• Hulk Speak: Cirno, whenever she uses her "Great Crusher" attack: "CIRNO SMASH PUNY (whatever) WITH GLACIER-MALLET!" (a Shout-Out to the Scarlet Weather Rhapsody wiki).
• Humiliation Conga: At the end of the Catness arc, Tenshi gets wailed on by the others in an increasingly brutal fashion. Even Cirno gets a shot in.
  • Subverted relatively quickly, although the subversion in itself is dealt with in a similarly quick fashion.
• I Always Wanted to Say That
  Boon: Neither enemy nor friend! I come from a world where such things are meaningless!
  Boon/Aya: I have always wanted to say that! (Warning. Clicking the link is a spoiler.)
• Infinite Canvas: The comics are variable-length after the third one or so, ranging between Yonkoma and the 35-panel monstrosity comprising the climax of the Catness arc (which also had a long panel at one point); this has gotten to the point where Muffin has begun breaking the comics into two files by default to keep their hugeness from bogging down peoples' connections. Furthermore, several comics randomly change things every time the page is loaded...
• In Medias Res: The beginning of Redefined Fantastic Object.
• Interactive Comic: Create.swf Adventures: Shenanigans in a Magical Forest and Cottagesnagged, both done in the style of MS Paint Adventures (the former moreso than the latter).
• Interspecies Romance: See most of the entries under the "shipping" link. Human/human-turned-magician (though Marisa changes down the line, too), ghost/half-ghost, vampire/satori, ice-fairy/hell-raven ...
• I Take Offense to That Last One: From this strip:
  Meimu: Maybe you're the strongest fairy there is. Maybe. But you're still weaker than even a human, and all your opponents will still very easily outwit and curbstomp you, especially with that stupid "Icicle Fall" Spell Card.
  Cirno: Hey, I haven't actually used Icicle Fall in like months.
  Meimu: Oh, so you admit that the rest of...?
• It's All About Me: Meimu. The best example of this is when Rin Satsuki reveals that she was a Fake Defector, citing the fact that Meimu was trying to get her to go against her best friend. Meimu replies, "You don't care about me at all, do you!?"
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Averted; the cast-lists throughout Rethinking the Natural Law list Meimu's name without linking to her profile on the OC Character Sheet, and Rin Satsuki's profile has always been "UNKNOWN!! UNKNOWN!!" repeated over and over again.
• Leitmotif: The are a few for the Original Characters:
  • "Strange Bird of the Moon, Illusion of Mysterious Cat ~ On The Shoulder of Hisou Tensoku" for Rin Satsuki;
  • "Edge of Spacetime ~ Navy-Blue Generation" for Meimu;
  • "Yasora's Awakening" and "Subterranean God ~ Sunfire" for Yasora Kojiwa;
  • "Mushroom Land ~ Little Red Mushroom" for Masha Kinoko.
• Mayfly–December Romance: Marisa with Alice (youkai-magician), as well as Sakuya with Meiling (totally a dragon) and Youmu with Yuyuko (Cute Ghost Girl); though this has been dealt with by the "Fate of 60 Years" timeframe, with Marisa having also turned into a Youkai Magician, Sakuya becoming a vampire, and Youmu being another ghost.
• Memetic Mutationinvoked: Sometimes various memes are referenced to some extent or other (such as in the fanfic "Alice Illness"); the second "epic" comic contains something of a Hurricane Of Memes.
• Mundane Utility: Sakuya just needs a few minutes to calm down.
• Mushroom Man: Masha Kinoko is a Moe Anthropomorphism version.
• Misapplied Phlebotinum: Discussed in terms of Touhou in an article on the site.
• Never Mess with Granny: Old Reimu.
• Noodle Implements: One of the ways Kaguya once killed Mokou. The "kinky" variety also somewhat occurred in-character in an inverted fashion in comic #16 when Aya overheard Marisa saying "I bet you didn't know I could do that with a mini-hakkero!" (she was tickling Alice's hitbox with it) and immediately assumed that something more naughty was happening.
• Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here: Parodied in #111, which shows what constitutes "ordinary" for Reimu and Marisa.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: "Actual dialogue in ''EOSD.'' I am not making this up."
• O.C. Stand-in: Marisa's father Daisuke, who doesn't have so much as a name in canon, and Rin Satsuki, who had a name in canon and not much else.
• Oh, My Gods!: Yasora's "Oh, me!"
• One-Steve Limit: Touhou itself, with its numerous characters, has been an example of this trope for years (Rin Satsuki and Rin "Orin" Kaenbyou notwithstanding), but Muffin has expressed a desire to maintain the trope within the webcomic: having declared the original Ellen not part of the Nekokayou canon, she promptly appropriated the name for the otherwise nameless-in-canon Tokiko, since there's no way that she can accidentally duplicate a ZUN-created name that way (apart from Rin Satsuki and Satsuki Hakurei).
• Original Character:
  • Mika and Midori, who form Those Two Guys for the Eientei crew.
  • Tsumami and Tsukiyo, who more or less serve the same purpose as Colon and Nobby for Kotohime's police force
  • Satsuki "Sacchin" Hakurei, Reimu's adopted granddaughter after the Time Skip.
  • Carroll Kirisame, Marisa and Alice's daughter.
  • Masha Kinoko, a mushroom-youkai who comes into existence during Shenanigans in a Magical Forest.
  • Two particularly unusual examples are Meimu (AKA Kon Yakumo), who was already a sort of public-domain OC, but Muffin created an entirely new backstory for her which was only partially based on the "original" version; and Shanghai Margatroid, who was simply a magically-controlled puppet in canon until Alice and Marisa made her into an Independent Doll in the ending to Shenanigans in a Magical Forest. Then there's EX-Rumia, AKA Rumia Yagami ...
  • The Yatagarasu got introduced as Yasora Kojiwa in Shenanigans in a Magical Forest ... and was then killed one strip later. (Her ghost remains, however.)
  • Character sheets for all of the above can now be found here.
• Overly Narrow Superlative:"You are the guiltiest HELL-RAVEN with the power of a CROW with the power of THE SUN in the entire UNDERGROUND!
• Overused Running Gag: Keikaku Doori, initially.
• Painting the Medium: In the fan fiction, spoken dialogue in English is given in an italicized serif font (except in cases where it's really obviously not in Japanese-plus-Translation Convention), and Sakuya's Time Stop gets its own coloring as well. In Create.swf Adventures, dialogue and the names of certain items (including most characters) are colored blue when they're supposedly literally in English, green for Romaji, and red for "Japanese-plus-Translation Convention."
• Parody Episode:
  • The "Marisa Gear Solid" comics, most of which were made before Muffin had actually played any of the games.
  • CSI: Gensokyo, complete with Cold Open and CSI (Caine) style Quip to Black.
• Postmodernism: This is Create.swf Adventures in a nutshell. At its heart, it is a deconstruction of the MS Paint Adventures format:
  • In the first act, the players aren't controlling the characters in the "Player Character" sense of the word; rather, the "commands" the characters are receiving are from bizarre spirits, a side effect of an overabundance of magical fungal spores. The characters who discover this start working against it. That's right: the characters were fighting against the players.
  • In the second act, the main character is Masha Kinoko, a youkai "born" from the mushroom that produced the aforementioned spores; the Player Characters are no longer the result of "WEIRD POSTMODERN SHIT." Also, Marisa visits Muffin's site at one point, and finds a Create.swf Adventures page made in 2016 — which is to say, six years after the comic was created.
  • In the third act, the main character is Utsuho Reiuji, but the players aren't directly controlling her. Rather, the commands are going through the yatagarasu she consumed — and said yatagarasu is mostly failing fantastically at Grand Theft Me, mostly due to Utsuho's Cloudcuckoolander, Too Dumb to Fool tendencies.
  • "Act ⑥" (the fourth act): It is revealed that this is all an "ADVENTURE-GAME / RPG / DANMAKU hybrid" being played by Muffin, and that KirbyM (who is a different individual from "Walfas") is the creator of it and Touhou Nekokayou as a series of adventure games, which were made with the aid of Create.swf. On the page in which Muffin becomes the "Player Character" ("Thou art I, and I am thou You are now MUFFIN."), it alternates between first-person and second-person narration. Soon after, Muffin starts cheating at the game, giving the characters God Mode, and wrestling with the game's anti-cheat measures.
• Phrase Catcher: DAMNIT YUKARI!
• Plot-Relevant Age-Up: Alice, who became a youkai and stopped aging when she was fifteen, is using a spell so that she grows up along with Marisa (who was, of course, still aging nine years later). Remilia and Flandre have since gotten Patchouli to create a similar spell that works on vampires, though they both usually stay in their younger forms.
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner:
  Sakuya (with Slasher Smile): "Hello. You have committed a fatal exception error."
  Meimu (sweatdropping): "W-what!? Isn't that a computer thing?"
  Sakuya: "Well, I meant that my lady and I take exception to trying to kidnap Meiling like that. It was therefore a fatal error."
• Rainbow Speak: In Create.swf Adventures, text is colored red for text "translated" from Japanese, blue for text "already in English", and green for romaji. Outside of dialogue, in which everything is one of these colors, the coloring tends to be reserved for key-items (and capitalized, in Shenanigans in a Magical Forest).
• Retcon: Dissatisfied with how comics 97-100 turned out, Muffin tossed them into a bin and basically started remaking them. To say nothing of the timeline ...
• Retired Badass: Sakuya, not that it stops her from being badass nowadays.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: In comic #61, the events of Imperishable Night, which were started by Lunarians, have resulted in moonbeams driving fairies crazy and making them superpowered. Mokou, fighting off fairies, wonders out loud why this is happening; a fairy promptly attacks her and, in Talkative Loon-mode, blurts out, "BECAUSE ALIENS FROM THE MOOOOON!"
• Rule of Funny:
  • The Catness arc, in which half of Gensokyo's not-already-animal-humanoid population gets turned into cats, and in which "shiny objects" is a technical magical term, and susceptibility to the effects of the catness is based on stupidity or strength (but not both). And that's just the tip of the iceberg in the comic as a whole ...
  Wriggle: (after Mokou has just been defeated by Tenshi) "Yeesh ... never send a lesbian to do a bisexual crossdresser's job. (also doubles as A Rare Sentence)"
• Schizo Tech: They've been in Medieval Stasis since 1884, but the Moriya Shrine and Yukari have started bringing in electricity and computers (Yukari even brought in television and computers before Subterranean Animism), leading to this.
• Schmuck Bait: Referenced by name in one of the supplemental fictions.
• Screw Yourself: Oh Yuka.
• Seinfeldian Conversation: Mika and Midori tend to have these while fleeing in terror.
• Self-Deprecation: In "Ask Masha":
  Anonymous asked: Do you read Seihou Nekokayou? If so, what do you think of it?
  Masha: Eh, it seemed to me to be kind of overrated when I went through it. It wasn't always that original, it kept using the "just as planned" joke, and it used OCs a little too much...
  • According to Muffin's main Tumblr, this was based on actual criticisms she'd seen about the comic.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: Flandre and Koishi hide in a side-passage in the Underground in #84; the "camera" remains trained on the dark entrance to said passage. Unfortunately, Flandre has not yet had The Talk at that point ...
• Sexy Shirt Switch: Take a good look at Koishi and Flandre in #118.
• She Is All Grown Up: Fate of 60 Years features grown-up Cirno (dubbed "Cirno-nee").
• Shipping: And lots of it! (Muffin has often bemoaned the inability to resist doing them ...)invoked
• Shout-Out:
  • In addition to Metal Gear Solid parody episodes, the "Time Paradox" gag from MGS3 is often used, not to mention that Nitori has developed a knockoff CODEC technology which has seen use outside the direct parodies.
    • At one point in Cottagesnagged, we see a CODEC device's box, which has a picture of a metal gear.
  • Sakuya is a walking Shout-Out to Dio Brando. This is in Touhou canon. The trope is present here by way of the fact that when she uses her Time Stop ability, the declared spell card is always (the technically Canon) "ZA WARUDO" and the fact that Muffin is responsible for KirbyM including Dio-Sakuya poses in create.swf.
  • Death Note: Remilia's fate-manipulation has similar requirements and effects; Komachi even has a Death Note at one point (and can see your name and "lifespan in Shinigami time" by looking at your face), in addition to overuse of "JUST AS PLANNED."
  • Marisa's "NO WAY! THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE!" line is borrowed from KirbyM's ouvre, as is the punchline for #84 ... though the line in KirbyM's flash is said for entirely different reasons.
  • The entirety of "Create.swf Adventures" is a shout out to MS Paint Adventures, using many of the running jokes established therein (the pumpkin, the retrieval of arms, the Added Alliterative Appeal of the Strife Modus screen...), with Rumia's "Team ❽" forming a parody of the Midnight Crew.
    • Hilarious in Hindsight: CSA0363 references the "Huge Bitch" running joke. Not even a week later...
  • Eiki Shiki's measures peoples' morality with a literal Karma Meter, designed to look like one from a Knights of the Old Republic-era BioWare RPG.
  • Kisume can apparently travel between buckets by "following recipriversexclusions of [her] mind and soul." Sakuya then describes the term when asked (though obviously not referring to the book by name.)
  • In comic #37, a bit of text in the second to last panel is qrrbrbirlbel. Oddly enough, this one was NOT picked up quickly.
  • Create.swf Adventures: Cottagesnagged at one point parodies a Loading Screen which uses iconic text from the Touhou games ... but which is actually designed after the excessive loading screens from Sonic the Hedgehog (2006).
  • The commentary for Comic #59, particularly the long list of Alternate History occurrences that includes a link to an Alternate Universe version of the comic itself, is a reference to Darths & Droids Comic #50.
  • ... and many more!
• Slasher Smile: Flandre, in her more psychotic moments. However, Sakuya has taken the cake.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: It falls firmly towards the "idealistic" end, but with a certain amount of cynicism. For instance, Eiki Shiki's KotOR-Karma Meter places Reimu on the good end but closer to the middle, with a note to the effect that this is "slightly below normal people" (although presumably Eiki Shiki's Karma Meter is all about the more stringent requirements of getting into Heaven).
• Speak of the Devil: Muffin keeps track of hits to her site and where they're coming from. This enabled her to pop up on message boards where people have linked to her site ...
• Stealth Pun: Well, to start with, the English title is a mashup of two other works, with the missing words leading one to ask is this the real life, or is this just fantasy.
• Story Arc: AKA "the dreaded continuity" due to the fact that the comic is usually a gag-a-day strip.
• Superpowered Evil Side:
  • EX-Rumia, AKA Rumia Yagami, who acted like a Sealed Large Ham In A Humanitarian Cheerful Child in her first appearance, Axe-Crazy the second time, and just plain cartoonishly evil the third time. She has formed a Shout-Out to the Midnight Crew during the next 60 years.
  • Yasora, who pretty much set herself up as an evil side of Utsuho the moment she comes out.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: From this comic:
  Sanae: Excuse me...
  Cirno: N-NO I DIDN'T SEE A DAIDARABOTCHI!
  Sanae: (skeptical) A what?
  Cirno: Um, n-nothing, I definitely didn't see any big shadows anywhere.
• "Take That!" Kiss: Daiyousei, of all people, does this to Cirno just to drive home how weak Cirno's Icicle Fall - Easy - really was.
• Theme Naming:
  • Alice's daughter is named Carroll. The spelling clinches it.
  • Meimu's real name is Kon Yakumo. Kon means "navy-blue" to put her in with Yukari (violet), Ran (indigo), and Chen (orange).
  • The titles of the members of Team ❽, in addition to having the same initials as The Midnight Crew, are all darkness-themed.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill:
  • Well, it is Touhou Project, so obviously it counts. Special mention, though, must go to Reimu's Hax Sign "You Just Plain F***ing Lose" and Koishi's Recollection "RED THE NIGHTLESS MOTHERF***ER".
  • Also when all the heroines team up to fight Tenshi at the end of Catness.
  • Reimu's Unlimited Fantasy Heaven. Which then results in a Heroic RRoD.
• This Is Gonna Suck:
  Cirno: This is still gonna hurt so much I'm going to be feeling it next week, isn't it?
  • Due to Schedule Slip, it ended up being two weeks.
• Time Skip: The "Fate of 60 Years" line, which takes place at the end of the 60-year cycle which began in Phantasmagoria of Flower View.
• Tom Swifty: Shenanigans in a Magical Forest has a triple-layered example without any actual dialogue:
  You quickly bring her up to speed, in the manner of Tom Swift.
• Trade Snark: "All Touhou Project characters are © Team Shanghai Alice and/or ZUN; create.swf is ⑨ KirbyM with help from Thefre."
• Translation Convention: The characters are presumably speaking Japanese, except when otherwise specified, with a Lampshade Hanging from Remilia at one point ("Speak English! — or ... Japanese. Whichever." in response to a Wall Of Magibabble from Patchouli).
  Marisa: "Looks more like ... uh ... I can't think of a good comeback that makes sense in English."
• TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life: Mentioned In-Universe. Muffin has created a short bit of code which generates links to TV Tropes and appends a disclaimer to that effect, and uses it whenever linking to TVTropes. She's since stopped linking here, for various reasons.
• Undead Author: A variation appears in which Sanae recounts an encounter with Koishi, ending it with "and when she left my field of vision, I forgot the entire experience!"
• Unsound Effect: To compensate for the Virtual Paper Doll limitations, and sometimes for exposition. But mostly they're rather silly in general.
  • "Baboon" almost sounds like the SFX for an explosion. "Gorilla," not so much.
  • As well as "BOOMIES" (for fire) and "SPOOOOOOON" (for the "death" SFX from the Windows games, plus in #95, when it is used for ... yeah).
  • "SFX: MAKEOUTS"
  • "SFX: (BOOMIES, EXCEPT THERE'S NO SOUND IN SPACE)"
  • UNICODE!
• Unusual Euphemism: "SON OF A DUCK!"
• Visual Pun: IT'S SPRING!
• Watsonian versus Doylist: Occasionally, Muffin explains discrepancies and plotholes ("How did Koishi immediately steal Red The Nightless Castle from Remilia? According to Grimoire of Marisa, Satori needs to use Terrifying Hypnotism first!") with both forms ("I haven't read all of Grimore of Marisa/she got it from Flandre earlier").
• Webcomic of the Game: There was a Story Arc which parodied Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, as well as comic adaptations of each of the 12.X storylines.
• Wham Episode: Shenanigans in a Magical Forest had a relatively tame reveal: It takes place 10 years into the main comic's future. There was actually some Foreshadowing towards that.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Among the original characters, Mika has the ability to manipulate wind in leaves, and Midori can manipulate flavors. Although Tewi was clever enough to come up with a simple prank using them ...
• The Worf Effect: Parodied in the out-of-continuity "it's really epic!" comics, which are a reaction to several fanfics Muffin read which, in order to take on an "epic scale," killed off major characters just to show they mean business!
• Yandere: Subverted when Yukari and Tewi tried to pull a prank that involved manipulating the Border of Tsundere and Yandere, only to discover that Alice wasn't an actual tsundere anymore - she was all out of "tsun".
• Yuri Genre: There is more emphasis placed on romance in this comic than the original games (which is to say, there is some emphasis placed on romance in this comic), and so far all of it is female/female except for Rinnosuke/Tokiko.

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...And a lot of other tropes present in the original material.

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