Usagi Sumireko
THE Sumireko Usami
Hello hello, greetings, salutations, it is I, ROARESS, aka Usagi Sumireko, and I have come here today to obsess over a line of code from EoSD (even though I usually don't), i.e talk about none other than the mysterious Rin Satsuki, as well as my personal interpretation of her (which is, frankly, the whole point of this thread) and other's speculations about her (some of which, I agree with)
Rin Satsuki (also known as Rin Saetsuki or Rin Saezuki, which I've seen people say it's the more accurate reading of her name, but for ease, I'll just call her Rin for the remainder of this thread; not to be confused with Rin Kaenbyou, or known in the fandom as Orin) was supposed to be the third protagonist, or triagonist, of the Touhou Project franchise, up there with Reimu Hakurei and Marisa Kirisame, and could've potentially been the only "protagonist" that actually debuted as a player character rather than a stage boss, and hasn't made any appearance in the prior PC-98 era, i.e the only one of the supposed Main 3 who didn't appear in the PC-98 era and instead debuting in the 6th Touhou game, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, but unfortunately, due to time constraints at the time of making EoSD, ZUN (the creator) had to scrape Rin altogether and, since it seems she didn't appear in the other 14+ Windows games, have her never see the light of day ever (or will she?).
A lot of fans have found out about Rin around 2010-2011 by looking inside the files for EoSD, where there seems to be an unused line of code below Reimu's and Marisa's with the name "冴月麟" (or the hex code "8D E1 8C 8E 20 97 D9" in Shift-JIS encoding) along with two attack types: Flower Sign (花) and Wind Sign (風), and the fact that, to put it shortly, there doesn't seem to be a "face02" character portrait file, where "face00" is Reimu, "face01" is Marisa and "face03" is Rumia, the 1st stage boss. Because of this, people have asked ZUN about her and whatever happened to her, in which he brought up the above information I mentioned among other things, which will be important later on. This is what he said:
Other than all this, we don't know anything else about her (at least during the making of this thread)... other than speculation. Oh yes, with how fan-driven Touhou is, if you got yourself a character that doesn't have much canon info and other such things like Rin, there's bound to be a lot of speculations and fan interpretations of who she is, what she looks likes, etc. Some of which I will be bringing up alongsides my own.
If you look her up anywhere, you might usually see this design being used to represent Rin:
And you might be thinking, "Is this her official design that fans somehow managed to find and stick to?" And to that, I'll say: You're dead wrong
This design actually originated from a circle cut from Comiket 62 meant to advertise Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, where there seems to be an unknown poster girl that did not show up anywhere in the actual game.
Now, of course, as you can see, the poster girl seems to be not really colored in, and will never be officially colored in; so you might be now wondering, "Well, where did the color palette come from?"
While it is easy to assume that it came from a combination of Reimu's and Marisa's palettes, making it look like a short-haired no-braid Marisa wearing something akin to Reimu's outfit with the way it was combined, there's also a possibility that it came from an old miscellaneous illustration by ZUN of an unnamed miko from 2001 that came from his old website.
He made a few others which, along with the one above, hasn't appeared in any Windows-era mainline game (including spin-offs) and probably never will (but we may never know!), but this one in particular had ZUN's comment mention that he was thinking about creating a new character and ended up with this.
Of course, this miko never appeared anywhere else, and we don't know if he was making a new character for EoSD or just for fun, but nonetheless, fans have naturally adopted this design, since, again, it was accompanied with the caption about a "new character", and combined it with the circle cut girl, who, again, despite being only shown in promotional material for EoSD, never actually appeared in the actual game.
There's also a popular theory that she might've been a nurse to go along with Reimu being a miko and Marisa being a witch, which is supported by the dialogue exchange between Marisa and Flandre in the extra stage of EoSD, where the former pretends to be a miko — i.e impersonate Reimu — upon meeting the latter, only for her to find out the former isn't a miko, making Marisa think that she could've just pretended to be a nurse.
It's pretty plausible to assume that the reason why Marisa considered pretending to be a nurse instead because it would contextualize the joke as her impersonating both protagonists, the nurse being Rin, rather than simply remarking that maybe she looks or acts more like a nurse than a shrine maiden (not with that pointy hat!). Besides, who else is supposed to be the nurse character? Eirin, who first debuted two games later? As a stage boss??
This theory is also accompanied by another one where she might have been a Kirin, which essentially is an East Asian equivalent of a Unicorn. This theory is not only supported by the kanji 麟 ("rin") in her name being short for Kirin, but also by her name (atleast her most popular pronounciation in the making of this thread) in the Japanese order sounding out "Satsuki Rin"; characters like Satori Komeiji, whose species is explicitly referenced in her name, further validate this.
Because the Kirin, like I mentioned earlier, is often conflated with the Unicorn, which is known to have healing powers, it's pretty plausible to have these two theories coexist with each other, since there is a correlation between that and a nurse being essentially someone who "heals"; It is even more plausible in that the correlation between Kirins and Unicorns are also common in JRPGs, which were a big inspiration for ZUN and EoSD, being mentioned as the origin of Flandre's Laevateinn.
Those are the most popular speculations and theories that we have about Rin, at least at the moment...
Now what do I think about these? What about my own interpretation, the whole reason I'm making this thread?
Now this is where things get good!
So firstly, Rin being a nurse: this is probably the only Big Three of Rin Theories that I fully agree with, since it fits within the aforementioned theme of contrarianism, especially if you consider that she potentially would've been the only playable nurse character in a game where you could only attack.
Secondly, Rin being... well, a Kirin: even though it's literally in her name, I'm personally mixed on this. Bear in mind that ZUN is very much human-leaning when it comes to protagonists, as shown by Reimu and Marisa, and he even directly stated this on Sakuya from the Dai Touhouten plaque, where he says:
"Your old enemy becomes a playable character in later series is the sort of flow I like. Although, generically speaking, a character's background and related stories are often conflicting with such flow, in Touhou the world's unspoken theme is about human vs non-human, she being a human alone is easy enough to justify her being another protagonist."
Rin serving a Kirin, similar to how Reimu and Sanae serve gods or Youmu and Sakuya serve Yuyuko and Remilia, respectively, would've been more plausible to my interpretation, in my opinion, if Rin were to be a human instead. Rin would have been another intriguing look into the interaction between humans and non-humans, even if these relationships are all extremely different in and of themselves. This connects back to ZUN's comment above.
Speaking of Kirins, you know how I mentioned earlier that they were essentially the East Asian equivalent to unicorns? Well to be more specific, they're actually originated from China, as Qilins (I only first knew this from messing around on fantasynamegenerators.com)! So building off of this and the contrarianism of Reimu being (obviously) Japanese and Marisa having Western traits, Rin might as well be Chinese herself.
And lastly, the popular fan design everyone and their mother's been using: even though the Touhou fandom has already been so used to the circle cut girl representing Rin for about years now that pretty much any other fan designs of her made that's separate from the circle cut girl kinda falls into obscurity, to that, I'll say:
HER ASS IS NOT RIN!!!!!!!!!
Seriously, it's been debunked couple of times that the circle cut girl ISN'T Rin! ZUN himself even said this during Comiket 68 when asked by a fan:
Granted, this was asked during a busy Comiket, as the wiki page states, Not only that, but ZUN already made an illustration for Rin prior to scraping that we never apparently got to see, as stated in one of the interviews mentioned above.
And here's my biggest complaint about the use of the circle cut girl as Rin: If she's supposed to be a nurse, then why is she dressed like a miko?
And why would she look like, as I described earlier, a short-haired no-braid Marisa wearing something akin to Reimu's outfit? I know that a lot of characters in EoSD are similar to each other one way or another, but I don't think it would be this deliberate to have the third protagonist look like that!
So that's why I decided to make my own design of her, in the form of (my first attempt at) an EoSD-ZUN-style illustration!
*Drumrolls please!!!*
TA-DAAA~!! HERE SHE IS!!
I know that some people might think this illustration isn't entirely accurate to actual EoSD illustrations, but again, it's my first attempt at ZUN-style in general. Feel free to make more EoSD-accurate illustrations as well as some for if she were to be in the other 14+ games and post it here as you wish; I'd love to see it!!
(Feel free to correct me on anything I might've missed or gotten wrong! This took me a long time to make, especially because of outside stuff and not knowing how to organize this...)
So, who even is Rin Satsuki, exactly?
If you happen to stumble upon this thread and ask yourself: "who the fuck is Rin Satsuki?????" and you also happen to be in a circumstance where you don't (or can't) bother to look it up, worry not, my child, here's her wiki page and, if you happen to, let's say, not be able to access it, here's my explanation:Rin Satsuki (also known as Rin Saetsuki or Rin Saezuki, which I've seen people say it's the more accurate reading of her name, but for ease, I'll just call her Rin for the remainder of this thread; not to be confused with Rin Kaenbyou, or known in the fandom as Orin) was supposed to be the third protagonist, or triagonist, of the Touhou Project franchise, up there with Reimu Hakurei and Marisa Kirisame, and could've potentially been the only "protagonist" that actually debuted as a player character rather than a stage boss, and hasn't made any appearance in the prior PC-98 era, i.e the only one of the supposed Main 3 who didn't appear in the PC-98 era and instead debuting in the 6th Touhou game, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, but unfortunately, due to time constraints at the time of making EoSD, ZUN (the creator) had to scrape Rin altogether and, since it seems she didn't appear in the other 14+ Windows games, have her never see the light of day ever (or will she?).
A lot of fans have found out about Rin around 2010-2011 by looking inside the files for EoSD, where there seems to be an unused line of code below Reimu's and Marisa's with the name "冴月麟" (or the hex code "8D E1 8C 8E 20 97 D9" in Shift-JIS encoding) along with two attack types: Flower Sign (花) and Wind Sign (風), and the fact that, to put it shortly, there doesn't seem to be a "face02" character portrait file, where "face00" is Reimu, "face01" is Marisa and "face03" is Rumia, the 1st stage boss. Because of this, people have asked ZUN about her and whatever happened to her, in which he brought up the above information I mentioned among other things, which will be important later on. This is what he said:
~ Anime Weekend Atlanta 2013 ~
- Q: Is there anything you can tell us about Satsuki Rin? The character that was cut out from Embodiment of Scarlet Devil?
- ZUN: *Paused in confusion* …OH! Ahhh… Well, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil was the 1st for the Windows platform. I wanted her to be a playable character in the game, but due to time constraints I had to cut her out. You know a lot about these games, don't you? *laughs*
~ Tokai/Satpro Highschool Talkshow ~
- Q: What is the correct reading of "Satsuki Rin"?
- ZUN: Well... I had planned to make her the third main character until the very last moment, but I simply didn't have enough time. Her illustration was already done, but... in the end, she's just a scrapped character.
Other than all this, we don't know anything else about her (at least during the making of this thread)... other than speculation. Oh yes, with how fan-driven Touhou is, if you got yourself a character that doesn't have much canon info and other such things like Rin, there's bound to be a lot of speculations and fan interpretations of who she is, what she looks likes, etc. Some of which I will be bringing up alongsides my own.
Popular Theories, Speculations and Interpretation Among the Fandom (with a bit of some more context)
Just so you know, I will come back to all of these in the next section. Here, I'm just presenting them for a bit of more contextIf you look her up anywhere, you might usually see this design being used to represent Rin:
And you might be thinking, "Is this her official design that fans somehow managed to find and stick to?" And to that, I'll say: You're dead wrong
This design actually originated from a circle cut from Comiket 62 meant to advertise Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, where there seems to be an unknown poster girl that did not show up anywhere in the actual game.
Now, of course, as you can see, the poster girl seems to be not really colored in, and will never be officially colored in; so you might be now wondering, "Well, where did the color palette come from?"
While it is easy to assume that it came from a combination of Reimu's and Marisa's palettes, making it look like a short-haired no-braid Marisa wearing something akin to Reimu's outfit with the way it was combined, there's also a possibility that it came from an old miscellaneous illustration by ZUN of an unnamed miko from 2001 that came from his old website.
He made a few others which, along with the one above, hasn't appeared in any Windows-era mainline game (including spin-offs) and probably never will (but we may never know!), but this one in particular had ZUN's comment mention that he was thinking about creating a new character and ended up with this.
Of course, this miko never appeared anywhere else, and we don't know if he was making a new character for EoSD or just for fun, but nonetheless, fans have naturally adopted this design, since, again, it was accompanied with the caption about a "new character", and combined it with the circle cut girl, who, again, despite being only shown in promotional material for EoSD, never actually appeared in the actual game.
There's also a popular theory that she might've been a nurse to go along with Reimu being a miko and Marisa being a witch, which is supported by the dialogue exchange between Marisa and Flandre in the extra stage of EoSD, where the former pretends to be a miko — i.e impersonate Reimu — upon meeting the latter, only for her to find out the former isn't a miko, making Marisa think that she could've just pretended to be a nurse.
It's pretty plausible to assume that the reason why Marisa considered pretending to be a nurse instead because it would contextualize the joke as her impersonating both protagonists, the nurse being Rin, rather than simply remarking that maybe she looks or acts more like a nurse than a shrine maiden (not with that pointy hat!). Besides, who else is supposed to be the nurse character? Eirin, who first debuted two games later? As a stage boss??
This theory is also accompanied by another one where she might have been a Kirin, which essentially is an East Asian equivalent of a Unicorn. This theory is not only supported by the kanji 麟 ("rin") in her name being short for Kirin, but also by her name (atleast her most popular pronounciation in the making of this thread) in the Japanese order sounding out "Satsuki Rin"; characters like Satori Komeiji, whose species is explicitly referenced in her name, further validate this.
Because the Kirin, like I mentioned earlier, is often conflated with the Unicorn, which is known to have healing powers, it's pretty plausible to have these two theories coexist with each other, since there is a correlation between that and a nurse being essentially someone who "heals"; It is even more plausible in that the correlation between Kirins and Unicorns are also common in JRPGs, which were a big inspiration for ZUN and EoSD, being mentioned as the origin of Flandre's Laevateinn.
Those are the most popular speculations and theories that we have about Rin, at least at the moment...
Now what do I think about these? What about my own interpretation, the whole reason I'm making this thread?
Now this is where things get good!
[Insert Title Drop]
Bear in mind that a recurring motif of this part — and the reason why I interpret this way — is one of the central themes of EoSD, that being a degree of contrarianism. On the Dai Touhouten plaque, ZUN states that he intentionally included a number of conflicting themes for a good number of characters, including as Reimu, Rumia, Meiling, and Flandre.So firstly, Rin being a nurse: this is probably the only Big Three of Rin Theories that I fully agree with, since it fits within the aforementioned theme of contrarianism, especially if you consider that she potentially would've been the only playable nurse character in a game where you could only attack.
Secondly, Rin being... well, a Kirin: even though it's literally in her name, I'm personally mixed on this. Bear in mind that ZUN is very much human-leaning when it comes to protagonists, as shown by Reimu and Marisa, and he even directly stated this on Sakuya from the Dai Touhouten plaque, where he says:
"Your old enemy becomes a playable character in later series is the sort of flow I like. Although, generically speaking, a character's background and related stories are often conflicting with such flow, in Touhou the world's unspoken theme is about human vs non-human, she being a human alone is easy enough to justify her being another protagonist."
Rin serving a Kirin, similar to how Reimu and Sanae serve gods or Youmu and Sakuya serve Yuyuko and Remilia, respectively, would've been more plausible to my interpretation, in my opinion, if Rin were to be a human instead. Rin would have been another intriguing look into the interaction between humans and non-humans, even if these relationships are all extremely different in and of themselves. This connects back to ZUN's comment above.
Speaking of Kirins, you know how I mentioned earlier that they were essentially the East Asian equivalent to unicorns? Well to be more specific, they're actually originated from China, as Qilins (I only first knew this from messing around on fantasynamegenerators.com)! So building off of this and the contrarianism of Reimu being (obviously) Japanese and Marisa having Western traits, Rin might as well be Chinese herself.
You know Hong Meiling, and how Japanese fans have misread the hanzi/kanji in her name as "Kurenai Misuzu" back then? There could be a possibility that Rin's name, going off by how you would read her name in Chinese, would instead be "Hu Yuelin", but I'm pretty sure that that could be debunked by the fact that ZUN recognized who the interviewers were talking about by them pronouncing her name the Japanese way, but who am I to tell? After all, he was the one who misheard the question about how to pronounce her name as instead being about who she is.
And while we're at it at building contrarianism of the trio, if we have a typically grumpy-ish Reimu and a tomboyish trickster Marisa, then I feel Rin would be more kind, sweet, moe-like and (maybe???) shy. (Though this could be a bit more fanon but I digress)
And and and!!! There was also potential for Rin to be the only one seriously engaging with the story while the other two are goofing around like they are in the final game, but I'm not sure if this could contradict with the above...
And while we're at it at building contrarianism of the trio, if we have a typically grumpy-ish Reimu and a tomboyish trickster Marisa, then I feel Rin would be more kind, sweet, moe-like and (maybe???) shy. (Though this could be a bit more fanon but I digress)
And and and!!! There was also potential for Rin to be the only one seriously engaging with the story while the other two are goofing around like they are in the final game, but I'm not sure if this could contradict with the above...
And lastly, the popular fan design everyone and their mother's been using: even though the Touhou fandom has already been so used to the circle cut girl representing Rin for about years now that pretty much any other fan designs of her made that's separate from the circle cut girl kinda falls into obscurity, to that, I'll say:
HER ASS IS NOT RIN!!!!!!!!!
Seriously, it's been debunked couple of times that the circle cut girl ISN'T Rin! ZUN himself even said this during Comiket 68 when asked by a fan:
- Q: Is the illustration in the Comic Market 62 circle cut a character scheduled to appear in [EoSD]? Or is she the circle's mascot character?
- ZUN: It's nothing like that at all. I probably just drew it on a whim.
Granted, this was asked during a busy Comiket, as the wiki page states, Not only that, but ZUN already made an illustration for Rin prior to scraping that we never apparently got to see, as stated in one of the interviews mentioned above.
And here's my biggest complaint about the use of the circle cut girl as Rin: If she's supposed to be a nurse, then why is she dressed like a miko?
And why would she look like, as I described earlier, a short-haired no-braid Marisa wearing something akin to Reimu's outfit? I know that a lot of characters in EoSD are similar to each other one way or another, but I don't think it would be this deliberate to have the third protagonist look like that!
So that's why I decided to make my own design of her, in the form of (my first attempt at) an EoSD-ZUN-style illustration!
*Drumrolls please!!!*
I know that some people might think this illustration isn't entirely accurate to actual EoSD illustrations, but again, it's my first attempt at ZUN-style in general. Feel free to make more EoSD-accurate illustrations as well as some for if she were to be in the other 14+ games and post it here as you wish; I'd love to see it!!
Conclusion
So that's pretty much everything I have for how I interpret Rin Satsuki as of now! With the EoSD remake release date coming close as of writing and posting this, if she actually does come back this time (as many people including myself have speculated; and also taking into account that there might be less time constraints than last time), I wonder if I might be right about a lot of these, especially her design... But what do you think?(Feel free to correct me on anything I might've missed or gotten wrong! This took me a long time to make, especially because of outside stuff and not knowing how to organize this...)
