Description

Rumia - Youkai of the Dusk ## Personality Gender: Female Age: Unknown Appearance: Rumia's design shows that she has red eyes and short blonde hair. She wears a black vest and skirt, and white blouse with a red tie bordered by two large red beads around her neck. She also has small red ofuda tied to the left side of her hair, making it look like a ribbon. However, she can neither touch nor remove the amulet. According to ZUN, her height is that of a human in her early teens (from 10 to 14 years old). Personality: Rumia is apparently quite simple-minded and doesn't like the sunlight nor the summer heat, using her powers of darkness to surround herself in a mass of dark, as to avoid the heat and the light while also using it when attacking others. Despite her innocent appearance, she eats humans and thinks that a youkai's job is to hunt them down, but she also can be quite lazy and has said that it is generally a pain for her doing it. Her ability is to manipulate darkness. Hobby/Occupation: Hunting down and eating humans (thinking it's a youkai's job to do so) Additional Information: ● Rumia is a youkai with the ability of manipulating the darkness. She is one of the few youkai that doesn't seem to belong to any particular species. ● She makes her debut appearance in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. ● She seems like to fly around aimlessly during the day and the night, sometimes bumping into trees since she is less capable of seeing obstacles through her veil of darkness. ● While she can use her ability of darkness to surround herself in a mass of dark to protect herself from the sunlight, heat and light, it is also said that she only uses this power as a supportive ability when attacking others, using pure strength as her main asset. ● Rumia's skin and hair are photosensitive, so maybe that is the reason she surrounds herself with shadows although she can't see through them. ● Her ability is to manipulate darkness. Rumia has the ability of manipulating darkness. By covering herself in pure darkness, she is able to prevent sunlight from passing through the darkness, as it is magical in nature and can render even traditional lights such as torches useless within it. Because of this, people who happen to go inside the darkness would not able to see anything, but it looks like Rumia herself is also less capable to see, as she might crash into trees while flying. However, she was still able to read Aya's newspaper even with almost no light, while Aya herself couldn't write notes nor reading her notebook. She has also shown that she can control how much light can pass through the darkness, as she let only a bit of it entering to be able to read the newspaper. The appearance of the darkness outside its region looks like a spherical circle that is moving. Rumia says "I'm fine in moonlight" meaning she doesn't need such ability at night, and although she dislikes heat and sunlight, she was seen without darkness in broad daylight in various occasions, even in summer. In-game, this ability is used as part of Rumia's Darkness Sign "Dark Side of the Moon" spellcard in Shoot the Bullet, during which she becomes impossible to photograph when she is covered in darkness. The names of her spell cards are also related to night and darkness (Moon Sign, Night Sign, Darkness Sign). ● ZUN has mentioned in an interview that because it was the first Windows game, he decided to go with the concept of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil as a deochi (出落ち, lit. "punch line on the entrance") as a main theme. This is why her ability (manipulation of darkness) is an example of deochi; it seems like it would be appropriate to a final boss, yet she is only a stage 1 boss. ● She is the first official Windows boss of the Touhou Project. ● She is usually drawn with her arms spread out, claiming the pose appears to say, "The saint was crucified." Play, Doujin! localizes her name as "Lumia" in their translations, even though ZUN himself and the rest of the Touhou doujin community uses Rumia. ● Rumia's non-spell card attacks and her spell card Moon Sign "Moonlight Ray" are similar to the attacks of Mystic Square's first stage boss, Sara. ● Her sigil shown on The Grimoire of Marisa depicts mistletoe. ● It's broadly rumored among fans that the amulet-ribbon is some kind of "seal", and that taking it off will release her true power. In some doujinshi, when the amulet-ribbon is removed Rumia develops an EX form in which she looks more mature, has wings, and/or wields a giant dark sword (usually a Stormbringer). ● Her catchphrase in fan works is Sōnanokā (そーなのかー) which is a pretty childish way of saying "Is that so~." Rumia first says this in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil during Reimu's scenario. This is reflective of the childish and ditzy personality she's given in most fanart. ● In fan works, she is often seen with other lower level, childish characters like Cirno, Mystia Lorelei and Wriggle Nightbug and Daiyousei. "Team ⑨" is a term used in the Western fandom. In the Japanese community, they (Cirno, Mystia, Rumia, Wriggle) are referred as the "Bakartet" (バカルテット bakarutetto, "baka" + "quartet"). ● The 7th day of the month is known as "Rumia's day" among the fanbase, and various artists are more likely to draw many fanarts involving her. That's because in Japan, this day is also called "nanoka". ● Because of her in-game dialogues, and her being described as a man-eater in Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, she is often portrayed as a glutton that is extremely fond of meat (most notably humans and Mystia Lorelei). Rumia, Yuyuko Saigyouji, and Yoshika Miyako, are sometimes seen together and are known as the "hungry trio" in the western fanbase. (Although the rule that Youkai should not hurt and kill human villagers are stated in recent works.)