Chimata is pretty neat :) SO I just want to talk about Chimata for a lil bit because I think she's pretty cool. First off is her design, it's a rainbow design which most of time can look really ugly. Due to a lack of color consistency making it really hard to focus on the character. However, Chimata's design circumvents this by using colors' natural values.
Some colors are just naturally darker (or have lower values) than other colors. Chimata's design uses these natural values. Just in case if you're a bit confused, I have all the colors all the way to the top right, yet, some of them are still darker.
Our eyes naturally tend to look at what is the lightest. In this case, you're going to look at Chimata's center, her face and her white coat. Then they're going to travel downwards to the yellow, portion, then to the blue/green, then to the purple. Then again from chimata's center, your eyes travel to the orange, and then to the red of her arms.
This is such a clever way to do a rainbow design and I love it so much cause of that. It might still look off to some people though because of the really high saturation, which is why some artists desaturate her colors just a teensy bit. Ok now i wanna talk about her theme, "Where is that Bustling Marketplace Now ~ Immemorial Marketeers", specifically the Rainbow-Colored Septentrion version of the theme. Unlike most Touhou final boss themes, these theme feels desperate and powerless. The closest theme that I think gets to the feeling of desperation this theme has is Sukuna's theme with it's final part. Zun described the song as being split into two halfs, a 'wailing' section and a 'upbeat' section. The trumpets that appear 50 seconds into the song which really emphasizes that wailing part, they're slow and completely cut off the climax that the song was building up to at that point. Then once more, it builds tension up and up again, but once more it fails to capitalize on it and goes into THE BELL SECTION (my fav part !) A calm before the storm before the actual climax with a cool fast piano! This part always feels like a last resort, I know to many it sounds upbeat but to me it always sounded desperate. It has barely any long notes, and is a super frantic. The melody also has this funky lil shape I like Picture from chronondecay's transcription of Chimata's theme
The melody is constantly going up and down in fast sucession. The stops within it, especially with the zunpets, feel like gasps of air to just barely continue. Until it falls down again into a repeating zunpet part that sounds like it's trying to recapture the feeling of the previous section, but just can't. That thing this song does, of rising to a climax that just doesn't come is so cool in my opinion. It feels so desperate and confused as to the direction of where it has to go. Showing Chimata's feelings during the incident where she is completely at a disadvantage due to the pandemic of the outside world, and being a newcomer to Gensokyo. She's trying to survive, but doesn't know how to go about it. Well thats my best try at an analysis of a song 😎 since my knowledge of music just comes from looking at midis lol. I'd like to talk about some of her story stuff too, like the incident and her relationship with Megumu that get's explored in Lotus Eaters but I AM TIRED. Instead of doing my homework thats due in 5 hours I did this for like an hour so I'mma stop for now. Hope you all like Chimata a bit more!
