Posted by Gap people?
Check out NijiKakushi here.
The term NijiKakushi is a combination of niji (rainbow) and kakushi (hiding), it’s completely made-up and is a reference to kami-kakushi, or “spiriting away.” It just so happens that I couldn’t find a better way to translate Yukari’s “gapping” action other than kami-kakushi, so here we are.
The game had its origins in a jam hosted by Touhou Station, but only had the most rudimentary elements during cutoff time. Much of the labor took place long after the jam had left our collective memory. Since the jam’s themes were market, rainbow, atsui, and utsuru (don’t worry about the latter two, these are homophones in Japanese and can have more than one meaning, and also I didn’t use them), my fan game had rainbow and money elements.
Me being me, I snuck in subtle political undertones into the story that’s pretty easy to miss if you don’t have the right kind of brainworm. We have a leprechaun-inspired fairy named Áine (romanized to oo’nya) that runs around in the Outside World carrying a pot of gold. The way things work is, Áine’s ability happens to be a cursed one – it’s to fill up the pot of gold by turning children into youkai and infusing them with rainbow powers. And voilà, we have an incident.
A reactionary position to marginalized groups asking for acceptance (especially in terms of sexual orientation and gender identity) is “think of the children.” An appeal to fear. The fact that transfigured children terrify the commoners in the game speaks to that. And the fact that the culprit gains gold doing so speaks to how stoking fear is a profit motive. (And as a little bonus, all the youkai that the children transform into are female, regardless of whether the original child is a boy or girl. But hey, that could just be Touhou.)
When the gold in the pot are brought into Gensokyo, they transform into vulgar spirits that represent fear (i.e. the desire for safety, as Yukari points out) thereby reflecting their true essence more accurately.
It’s still a fairly light-hearted game, and I didn’t portray any malice in Áine. She’s young, and a fairy, and is too innocent to see beyond her purpose of filling up her pot with gold. At least, in karmic Gensokyo, she does get punished by losing all her money. Anyway, I guess that’s about as far as the political messaging goes.
Credit is due to @BigBee420 for Aine’s character design. The original request was nothing more than a “fairy of the four-leaf clover,” and “pot of gold,” and they decided to not go the obvious route of making it completely leprechaun-based.
Now then, how many youkai can you spirit away?
@ me here.