/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>44525856
"Fear of the unknown" is youkai in general; it wouldn't make much sense to give it to one character in particular.
Though the bigger issue is her characterization. Rumia is a minor youkai who only cares about flying around in her own darkness. She's less ambitious and more simple-minded than even fairies are, to the point where it worries Aya, since youkai like her are apparently becoming more and more common.
She may have been intended as a character who illustrates how youkai have lost their purpose and many fail to adapt, but that doesn't seem to have been of ongoing importance to Touhou as a whole.
Someone like Mystia got more flexible characterization really on that give them something to work with, but Rumia is basically just written as a NEET who is entirely okay with her life of doing nothing whatsoever, to the point where she doesn't even care about hunting humans.

>>44048369
And since I'm here, Rumia is also extremely youkai moe in her dedication to her darkness schtick even though it constantly leads her to ram into trees.

>>43690887
>Rather, it is more strange that she DOESN'T aspire to anything, rather than aspiring to be the strongest or greatest at anything.
Nah, that's actually pretty normal for youkai. Aya even mentions in her interview with Rumia that she's been seeing a lot of youkai like her; completely lacking in ambition or purpose and just doing whatever pointless thing they feel like.
It's part of the setting, really. Gensokyo is kind of a preserve for youkai, but they don't have a real purpose, and much of their life is just pretense now. Even incidents are just a show involving play fights with a predetermined winner. The youkai basically domesticated themselves and for many youkai, such as Rumia, that means aimlessly flying around without any actual goals in life.

>My main point in that regard is that Rumia *should* be very powerful, but instead isn't, quite the complete opposite. She stand out a little among the minor youkai for not being a beast youkai with limited comprehension and intelligence by virtue of their race, but by simply being inexplicably handicapped in some way.
There's no reason to believe that Rumia should be powerful just because she has power over "darkness". "Darkness" is generally considered to be powerful due to its association with Maoh-type villains for whom it's mostly metaphorical, so it's about summoning monsters, corrupting things, and other powerful magics, but the joke in Rumia's case is that her power is really just about literal darkness, and not even that much of it, so rather than a demon king, she's just a cute blob of black that sometimes eats people, when she can be bothered. Her power is basically on par with Sunny's (except she's a lot more inventive with hers), and never implied to be anything more than that. Literal darkness just isn't super imposing.

>My point here is that she should actually have great unrealised potential, but has only achieved an infinitesimal quantity of that for some reason.
There's really nowhere in the main works that implies some great hidden power behind Rumia; everyone just treats her like a simple-minded weakling. Contrast with Cirno, who *is* the exact kind of character you describe here, where her high potential is just continuously reinforced almost every time she shows up (PoFV; both Grimoires have characters talk about how Cirno's spell cards actually do some impressive things, while Marisa just considers Rumia's card "boring"; Fairy Wars has her put up a really good fight against Marisa, who is generally considered a high-tier combatant; HSiFS actually has her latent power released and there's so much of it that her fairy body physically cannot handle it and starts breaking down, and she ends up fighting against one of the most powerful people in Gensokyo).
ZUN's super blatant with her and Rumia gets no hints on that level. The only thing Rumia has going for her is the ofuda, but it's hardly guaranteed to seal away any significant amount of power. For all we know, it just makes her less aggressive, or just restrains her darkness blob to prevent her from interrupting the then-active shrine maiden's sunbathing, or it might even do nothing other than be mildly annoying and be pretty much just a decoration that Rumia can't touch herself. It's entirely plausible that the whole thing may just be a gag.

>Someone with as much free time on her hands as Yuuka would/should probably take interest in that kind of thing once she takes notice of the discrepancy, and Yuuka is exactly the right kind of whimsically chaotic person to go ahead to see what would happen.
Maybe, but it definitely wouldn't involve Rumia (plants like sunlight, anyway), and I'm honestly not sure if Yuuka would even bother with such a thing. She's pretty content being by herself with just her flowers, and her whims tend to be short-term, rather than involve any long projects.

>>42619525
And youkai might be able to go years without eating anything anyway, since it's a being of pure magic. And youkai tend to live off of legends made about them, so it makes sense she repeats the same stuff about "eating you" every time. For all we know she might think she's eating people when she's actually just feeding through scaring them, she's not exactly bright.
Remember they like strong emotions like fear, but love and related feelings are also very strong emotions.