When your frail kid brother tells you he wants to be an astronaut when he grows up, you’d probably tell him to ‘give it up, stop being such a dumbass’. Or, if you’re more compassionate than I am, maybe just ‘you might wanna rethink that’. Your brother will then probably get all puffy and say how he’ll show you and ‘all that cal’, thinking you’re just being a douche and there’s no basis to your words.

Why? Well, it’s not, ahem, rocket science. It takes quality and perseverance to build an astronaut. Your brother may have the motivation, but he sure doesn’t have the body. He’d probably discover this years into the future, and, being realistic about the situation, quickly discards the notion and pursues some other talent he discovered he had over the years. Yet why were you able to tell him this so many years before? Simple: you’ve been there, done that. You know not to pursue ridiculous dreams. But to your brother then, you made no sense whatsoever. Only you knew it. It’s knowledge you gain throughout life; coming to understand more concepts and the realities of the world as you age is a natural process. And thus we arrive at:

Part II – Old People are Insane

I’d like to show you a Magic card. No, this isn’t the Magic nerd in me that has to express itself every three days. Just watch for a sec.

Being a Magic newb, I can’t quite appraise it with a skillful eye, but I can say that it’s not a bad card, albeit it needs a bit of time investment for you to search costlier cards. But of course, again, my point isn’t there. Notice the flavor text. ‘Those who hear her go mad with inspiration’. What could that mean? The ‘queen’ mentioned in this context is Oona, Queen of the Fae. The impressively powerful game-finishing fairy queen may be a bit dissimilar to our other elderly ladies, but she presents my point well.
I think, there are three ways the mind of an extremely aged character can develop. This is the first, to become ‘maddeningly inspirational’.

In my humble viewpoint, I believe that with great age comes great knowledge, and great philosophy. One’s grandparents can come up with some pretty impressive stuff that one might not have even understood when one was younger, and these grandparents are within that hundred year time frame. One gains a great deal of knowhow over the years, picking up concepts that are difficult to be understood by those in younger generations without the experiences that elicit the thought processes that facilitate realization of these concepts.

Long sentence, vague idea, but recall the example earlier with the younger brother; assuming you are as old as I am, which is not very, there wouldn’t even be a disparity of ten years between you and your brother. Not even ten years, and see how you can already present an idea beyond his scope of understanding. Perhaps the example is a little unfair, as the infantile years are the time when the brain develops the most, but I believe that growth from experience in later years isn’t all too unproportional compared to the growth in one’s childhood; simply, we humans go through so many relations with other people every day that we are simply deluged by experiences. It’s only a matter of time before a certain one gives you a new viewpoint on life.

Assumedly, throughout the lifetimes of these ancient humanoids they have been interacting with other people. It’s part of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; a humanoid mind can’t maintain proper mental health without interpersonal interaction. Thus, factoring in also their fiction-granted immense life spans means that a character of superhuman age would possess as well a greatly superhuman base of experiences, presuming their minds don’t deteriorate as their bodies do not. Less than a hundred years is already enough knowledge to give you such a deep understanding of the human collective, its beauties and its grotesque parts, that you become quite tired of it. Now, if one idea is all that it takes to give you a new viewpoint of life, and the longer you live, the greater the chances you will encounter these ideas, how many such ideas did, say, Yagokoro Eirin, older than the human race itself come across in her life?

The thing with the limits of human knowledge is that it has a human lifespan. As we grow older, our minds deteriorate, reducing our aptitude to gain knowledge. Finally, there is death, the usurping of all knowledge from a woman. Elderly individuals, astute individuals, they present to us the limit of an individual’s intelligence. But what if this wasn’t the limit? What if one day a woman, the wisest of which she normally hears coming from her octogenarian grandmother, suddenly meets the over thirty thousand year old Yagokoro Eirin and one of her life changing ideas?

To a human being, an idea is what we understand. ‘It is raining’. You register the fact, think about it, there, it’s an idea. But what I believe is that an idea is simply a thought forced into our minds by our senses – you hear something new, you see something new, and then it is up to our perception to realize it. What we don’t understand does not become an idea, it becomes a mess, and you’d say ‘that blows my mind’. After all, people only shout ‘I’ve got an idea!’ when they come to realize something. Then, inspiration is ideas conferred to a person that isn’t their own. Now, imagine the caliber of the ‘inspiration’ you can attain from Eirin’s single idea she bestows you, one probably tempered near infinitely by millennia of doubt, revisions and philosophizing. It would likely simply break your mind. Can you now better understand what I meant by ‘maddeningly inspirational’?

Now of course, Touhou canon is basically non-existent. Canon to us fans takes the form of the fanon, driven into our brains through doujin after doujin of the same trait. Cirno is stupid. Reimu is a moneygrabber. Sakuya wears pads. Even Okuu’s nuclear wand being a cannon instead is actually fanon. You probably don’t even think about that last one – but how we’re convinced of this is basically conditioning by its own right. But because of the different works we’re exposed to, everyone has got their own fanon-reality. It’s okay. You don’t have to agree with my Touhou universe, but the ideas are there.

Houraisan Kaguya-hime had allegedly asked all those who proposed to her to obtain impossible to attain items from fairytale planes as conditions for her hand. This was clearly impossible for mere men to do, and thus no one had been able to successfully court her. Why did she do this? As a way of turning down suitors it seems redundant to tell them to do so much when simply rejecting them would’ve hastened matters. Could there have been a sinister, underlying bid to bestrew despair among these candidates by telling them to look for something they never would?
Perhaps. We’ve all seen the cold malice the moon princess is capable of. But then, how would one explain her genuine desire to obtain theses treasures? In the many years to come, Kaguya sought these exotic items herself, gradually building and completing her collection until she comes to own all five.

Maybe logic dictates that she had done this to first have someone else try to seek these things for her, and then attempting herself. Surely she would’ve known though that it would be impossible for a human to fulfill such a task. Our logic simply cannot properly explain her actions. Does that mean she’s pathologic? Maybe, but.

I simply can’t bring myself to believe that pure logic is all that suffices in explaining Houraisan Kaguya. After all, our ‘pure logic’ is, as I had postulated before, cognitive thinking to the best of our abilities limited by the hundred odd years of the human lifespan. A hundred pales in comparison to Kaguya’s one thousand three/four hundred. To us she’s insane. But to her, thirteen centuries more experienced than us, she’s doing the right thing by showing Mokou the severed head of a village companion. You be the judge.

Before we all leave for today I’d like to present one more angle. We’ve seen the angle of the brilliant, as well as that of the seemingly insane. Now what about the angle that stretches beyond 360 degrees? Somebody who’s range of understandings is worlds ahead of Houraisan Kaguya, or even Yagokoro Eirin?

In my humble opinion, Yakumo Yukari would be the apex of untouchable concepts. She can understand and manipulate the boundaries of the world; everything in it has boundaries of some sort. From physical boundaries, like the dimensions of an object, to ethereal boundaries, like the limits of your strength – they’re simply like alterable computer settings to her. And in that sense, she’s an ace technician, if you would forgive the layman’s analogy. ‘Manipulation of any boundary’, four simple words. But can we ever begin to understand what that truly is? No. Just, no. It’s analogous to conceptualizing five dimensions in your head.

Perhaps this may put things in perspective. Here is one of the only three polytopes in the fifth dimension, the penteract. It has eighty faces, all of which are squares. Does it form a tangible image in your mind? I’d hope not, or part III should probably be about you.

I’d daresay that this magnitude of knowledge is at such a pinnacle that it can truly receive our human definition of ‘godlike’. In conclusion, it’s this incompossible knowledge and age that build truly fascinating characters. Even unconsciously we are drawn to the awing ‘ideas’ of these characters, for the thirst and curiosity for intelligence is only human nature. And by reconnecting with our main point at hand is how I’m wrapping it up. Just as with psychopaths, we’re inexplicably drawn to the mad and the conscienceless. Only, these ladies probably aren’t insane at all.

Really though, does that mean God is old? A ridiculously grand consciousness in the form of an umbrella-toting woman who was once capable of cognitive thought, but to who we’re now utterly incomparable to? I don’t know. Debate on the truth of our beliefs which stem from a conditioned collective of minds is one ridiculously long, one without end, one of extreme controversy, and one without any end result – not something you’d ever want to talk about when brevity is in question. And personally, I don’t ever want to know.

Ningyo

Part 3

Related posts:

1. She’s Three Thousand For A Reason, You Know. Pt 3
2. She’s Three Thousand For A Reason, You Know.
3. The Informational Explanatory Essay
4. So You’re Driving By Slowly Wh- BAM WALL OF TEXT