Marisa Kirisame (Touhou Project) Papercraft Model

27 Sep, 2021

Getting to Know the Characters of the Touhou Project - Marisa Kirisame

Marisa Kirisame is an ordinary magician who specializes in light and heat magic and lives in the Forest of Magic. He has a motto: "It ain't magic if it ain't flashy. Danmaku is all about firepower," and he has a compulsive mania for collecting items. He is considered one of the protagonists of the Touhou Project, with the other protagonist being Reimu Hakurei.

Personality

Marisa is very forthright and informal with everyone. He can act arrogant, as if trying to deceive others, and often has difficulty showing sympathy. He is quick to act when he hears interesting things. Marisa is also used to lying, but she doesn't make the effort to actually cheat because her lies are so obvious. However, he showed intelligence. Her personality seemed somewhat charming due to the friends she had and the ability to casually enter the Scarlet Devil Mansion.

He has a craze for collecting things and may have a hoarding disorder. He is stubborn and reluctant to help. As a hard worker, he is very diligent, but he doesn't like it when other people know about it.

Unlike most of the characters, Marisa is known to speak differently. The most particular and well-known example is the use of the sentence ending particle ze(ぜ). "Ze" is used at the end of syllables of verbs that make a "male" and "rough" sound to the listener/reader. Ze is mostly used in context to express a person's desire to act (same as "let's" in English), and using it in other cases sounds quite unnatural, which may be "flabby" and "flashy". While he does speak in a "male" tone, he does not speak in "heavy" and "masculine" language, but in "rough/relaxed" and "male" language.

Work

Marisa runs a shop for anything to add to her home. Even though that was his main job, he was usually absent. Inside the shop, things were in such a mess that it looked like the min-Forest of Magic.

Perfect Memento in Strict Sense provides some information about the magic shop. Although Marisa is surprisingly honest with her service, refusing to accept payment for a failed job, the shop is of little use due to its hard-to-find location within the Forest of Magic and the ambiguous nature of what her service actually is (in Touhou Sangetsusei, on Kirisame Magic's nameplate. Shop, instead of the shop name, nothing is written except "what will you do"(なんかします)).

Three Fairies of Light was his shop's first customer, but Perfect Memento in Strict Sense mentions that he's had customers ever since, though not many.

Robbery

According to ``Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, Marisa bravely breaks down the front door and openly says her motto "I borrow this ze" while carrying things. He mostly steals books, so he's probably not the kind of person who steals money. His knack for "studying other people's movements" probably stems from his nature as a thief.

As opposed to how she is called a usurper in the Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red, Marisa says: "My life is shorter than yours after all, so can't you just take everything back after I kick the bucket? I'm just borrowing it until then . It should be good for the stuff I picked up that way, too." Aya Shameimaru's response was, "The content of the quote is very human-like and childish".

Ownership

The magic broom is a bamboo broom that Marisa uses to fly. The broom was actually an ordinary broom, but the constant exposure to magic had caused the development of curiosity to begin. Even though the bamboo is dead, leaves seem to grow from the hilt, independently of Marisa's magic. Even though in shooting games, the broom is just an object to ride on, in fighting games, the broom becomes a weapon for hitting, and a firearm barrel for shooting danmaku, thus used for many purposes. The brooms and wizard-like outfits are exclusively for real wizards.

Mini -Hakkeko

The Mini-Hakkeko, Marisa's most cherished item, is a fireplace she uses to power her special Master Spark moves. From the flames of a tabletop stove, to resembling a flamethrower, to a powerful and unrivaled wide magicannon, the mini-Hakkeko has a low range of use. Marisa herself says, "I don't even think about making a living without it". The item was given to Marisa by Rinnosuke Morichika as a farewell gift when Marisa left her family to live in the Forest of Magic, even though it was risky for a girl her age to hold it.

Mushroom Items

Marisa carries, hidden in her skirt, a dangerous mushroom end product made from mushroom magic. After throwing the item, the item exploded. The fact that she hid them in her skirt seemed dangerous even to Hieda no Akyuu as noted in Perfect Memento in Strict Sense.

Ability and Strength

Magic use

Marisa has trained herself in magic and is a specialist in light and heat. He's an Eastern mage who takes a Western approach, as opposed to Patchouli Knowledge. Even though he couldn't use magic other than to destroy objects, his own destructive power was immense. The magic had a slight drawback, being equally effective for humans or youkai. When he used the spell card system, he made a glowing magic display while eradicating youkai without regret. The magic makes for a great show for the danmaku, but that may only be her uphill and honest struggle to create the layered effect. Most of his spells rely on power over ingenuity and are named after stars and other astronomical phenomena.

Fly

Marisa is almost always depicted driving her broom as she flies. In the fighting game spinoff, he pilots a broom only during assault skills such as Witch Leyline and Stardust Reverie, while on all other occasions such as his intro sequence and midair dash and flight, he flies without a broom. However, the graphics of the games were drawn by Twilight Frontier, not by ZUN, so that doesn't mean that Marisa can fly without a broom. In Shuusou Gyoku, however, he flies without a broom.

Perfect Memento in Strict Sense mentions that he uses a magic broom to steer around because he believes that it is an essential tool for a magician. At first the broom was an ordinary broom but leaves grew as a side effect of Marisa using it in magic rituals. Whether he really needs his broom to fly or just to show off is unconfirmed.