Yukari Yakumo

Yukari Yakumo is a character from the Touhou Project games.

Yukari is a legendary youkai who is able to manipulate boundaries. She is the master of Ran Yakumo. She is called the "gap youkai", although "gap youkai" is not the name of a species, as she is more of a one-of-a-kind type of youkai. Regardless of her power, Yukari appears to be the most well-informed being in Gensokyou of any kind, and usually achieves her goals through manipulating events rather than direct combat.

In the Unlikely Heroes Chronicles fics, Yukari is a member of the Unlikely Heroes and serves as it's founder.

Appearance
Her first appearance was in Perfect Cherry Blossom, where she is depicted with purple eyes and long blonde hair. She carries a pink lace parasol and a paper fan, and rides on a red gap that leads to an unknown destination. She wears a deep purple dress, a pale pink mob cap with a thin red ribbon, and smaller ribbons tied liberally on her accessories and the tips of her hair.

In her appearances in Immaterial and Missing Power and Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, her eyes have become dark golden. She wears a purple Chinese-style tabard with various Trigrams over a pale pink Western-style dress (similar to Ran Yakumo's outfit), wears her hair coiled up into her mob cap, and usually carries a pink parasol. She wears the same outfit in Imperishable Night, but her hair is left loose. In the Japanese community this outfit is known as the "Taoist dress".

In Antinomy of Common Flowers, her sleeves get black bands with a white design on them.

According to ZUN, the purple dress in Perfect Cherry Blossom is her casual daywear, and the pink one with the Ba Gua symbol in Imperishable Night is the work attire she wears when she commands her Shikigami.

Personality
Yukari is known for being a very youkai-like youkai who sleeps all day and lives for the enjoyment of life. Though she rarely leaves her house, she's well-connected and is acquainted with most of the most powerful youkai as well as anyone having anything to do with the Great Hakurei Barrier or the outside world, although she rarely attacks humans. She has a tendency to toy with her opponents rather than use her full power from the start. If anyone is suited for the role of "mastermind", it's Yukari. She excels at mathematics and is experienced due to her long life.

She possesses superhuman intellect, and especially surpasses in dealing with numbers. In Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red, as Ran Yakumo said, this intellect is something that even Ran is not able to understand, to the extent that for example that she is able to determine the depths of the darkness of Avici or determine in an instant how long it would take for Ursa Major to devour the North Star, as it seems. Concretely to what extent this amazing intellect goes is hard to know, but it would be no mistake to think that this intellect far surpasses that of humans.

She often has a great deal of insight and understanding about whatever happens in Gensokyo, and possesses considerable intellectual prowess, as well. Though she seems flaky and unreliable most of the time, when the safety or security of Gensokyo is at stake, she won't hesitate to get involved, even if it means using others to do the work for her. For example, in Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, she treats Tenshi Hinanawi with much hostility after finding out the plot of the Heavens. She could easily be either a villain or a heroine, depending on her whims.

Yukari deals with problems by manipulating others to act to resolve things for her. She seems to rarely act directly except in particularly egregious situations. In all cases, she rarely lets anyone know what her true aims or goals are, and sometimes these goals are extremely abstract. Yukari has a well-deserved reputation of being fickle, whimsical, and lying often, and thus many characters in Gensokyo dislike her. For whatever reason, Yukari takes it all in stride and does not seriously deny any of those comments. She seems to actively try to keep her more obviously-altruistic actions a secret, such as her donations to the Hakurei Shrine in Strange and Bright Nature Deity. She possibly cultivates this image to ensure that people continue to fear her as a youkai, as this is what her true goal for a particularly complex gambit is revealed to be at the end of Cage in Lunatic Runagate.

Abilities
Yukari is with no doubt one of the most powerful youkai in Gensokyo. A few other youkai like Suika Ibuki and Yuugi Hoshiguma have been considered to be around her level. Yukari also refers to Watatsuki no Toyohime as being stronger than she is, and tries to avoid direct confrontations with her. Despite her power, she might still lose spell card battles to humans or youkai.

Her physical strength is what you'd expect from a youkai. While the extent of an average youkai's strength is never really specified, their bodily ability is typically very high, so her strength is still far from that of a human. There are some examples and statements which show Yukari's physical prowess: Yukari states in her own win quotes in Immaterial and Missing Power that she has no weaknesses, and even shooting, cutting, stabbing, hitting, or killing her is useless.[5] In Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, her ability is yet again described as being "without weaknesses", and as one of the most dangerous that youkai are known to possess. Her Imperishable Night profile also states that "she easily has enough power to annihilate all of Gensokyo if she so desires", while the manual says that "the danger and potency of her ability is beyond imagination".
 * In Curiosities of Lotus Asia Chapter 12, Yukari's hand is able to effortlessly block and brush aside a mallet swung by Rinnosuke Morichika with all his might, leaving him shocked that a small slender feminine hand was able to pull off such a feat. Rinnosuke said that it feels like he hit a pillow.
 * Hong Meiling, in one of her Touhou Hisoutensoku win quotes, notes that she felt a odd resistance from Yukari's body (presumably after punching and kicking her a lot), to the point where she wondered if Yukari was wearing something else under that presumably delicate dress of hers.

By mostly moving around in gaps, one would usually not see her as doing much physical labor at all, and according to Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, since she ends up in blurting out herself such sayings like "to do mountain climbing at such an age", there is the image that she is like an indoors-type youkai, but in the end, she is still a youkai.

Manipulation of Boundaries

With the word "boundary" in its name, Yukari is capable of pretty much anything put under the influence of this ability. In her monologue during A Beautiful Flower Blooming Violet Every Sixty Years, she explains that this power allows her to control the boundaries "between any and all things", like Gensokyo and the outside world, the worlds of the living and the dead, humans and youkai, and even the day and the night. The most common application of Yukari's boundary manipulation abilities is opening "gaps" (sukima) which act as portals between two places,　where she's able to hold, sit on or emerge from such gaps. By manipulating borders in space and creating a chasm, she is able to link together separate places. According to this, she's able to show up in unexpected places from time to time, but the aforementioned suspiciousness has been refined. Although this gap is a kind of sub-space, within Yukari's gap, one can see a lot of eyes. These eyes are a manifestation of what one can say is the image of "how desires are swirling around" that Yukari sees in the outside world. The description of Yukari's Magic Eye "Laplace's Demon" spell card implies that Yukari can see using the eyes, as well. Also, although sign posts and other flotsam also drift about, these things also come from Yukari's image of "things that have come to be of no use in the outside world".

Other than that, since there is a boundary on the water surface so to speak, as there is definitely a distinction between water and atmosphere, and since there is the boundary called the horizon that separates the sky from the earth, as was said, she can freely manipulate the boundary of all existent things at will. According to Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, it seems that not only are physical boundaries, but also the general idea of boundaries are also able to be manipulated, and it seems like she would be able to manipulate the boundary between dreams and reality and open up holes for people to enter into dreams. Yukari is also capable of seeing (and seeing through) boundaries that are normally invisible; when the Human Village was displaced from history by Keine Kamishirasawa, Yukari was still able to see it.

It's shown that Yukari can also control the boundaries and bend them to her will as seen in Immaterial and Missing Power when she adjusted the sky by manipulating the border between the daylight and moonlight to unite the day and the night. According to Marisa Kirisame, Yukari can even control the boundary between "a danmaku for play and a danmaku for battle".

There are limits to the kinds of places Yukari can connect with her gaps; she required multiple trips to reach Heaven in Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, while in Silent Sinner in Blue she could only create a gap to the Moon under highly specific circumstances (and had to travel much of the distance to the Lunar Capital on foot). She is, however, capable of travelling between Gensokyo and the Outside World. Yukari can create gaps through which only she can pass, or through which anything can pass.

Ultimately, since existence of anything consists of having a boundary, for anything to lose its boundary is a very big thing, as it would then not be able to have its own individual existence. As the rules that govern boundaries would govern this, it is said that to make a new boundary is to create a new existence, and to destroy a boundary is to negate an existence. Hieda no Akyuu evaluated this ability, saying "there is not any sort of defense method nor countermeasure, a power comparable to the power of gods". However, Yukari is capable of sensing and repairing damage to the Great Hakurei Barrier, and is widely believed to have aided in its construction (Yuyuko Saigyouji states that Yukari could not have done so herself). To add to all this, Hieda no Akyuu writes that "manipulation of boundaries" is theoretically a godlike power which would allow Yukari to create or destroy anything, but that all the stories about it are impossible to confirm. Yukari is skilled in Onmyoudou, the Taoism-derived arts of traditional Japanese court wizards, and specializes in spells which create and manipulate barriers (presumably due to overlap with her innate abilities). Yukari has been able to teach some of her spells to Reimu Hakurei, whose own techniques have similar roots.
 * Onmyoudou

Yukari also displays great aptitude with shikigami, binding a powerful kitsune and numerous lesser servants at once. As Shikigami are strongest when following orders, Yukari must also be skilled at giving the correct orders to fully maximize her shikigamis' potential. In an interview with Aya Shameimaru, Ran Yakumo states that despite sleeping most of the time, Yukari is capable of giving orders no one else would think up the instant she opens her mouth, and Yukari uses complex equations to increase Ran's power indefinitely (This manner of using shikigami is likely one of the reasons Yukari views computers and shikigami as one and the same).

Trivia

 * Yukari is probably one of the strongest youkai (if not the strongest) in all Gensokyo along with Yuuka Kazami and Suika Ibuki.


 * According to Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, not only she is Ran's master but the one who gave Ran her name.


 * Because of her understanding of technology from the outside world, there are rumours that she lives in the outside world from time to time.


 * In the Unlikely Heroes Chronicles fics, Yukari is friends with Mario Martinez from the Heroes Coalition fics.