warellis said: Still, isn't Kagerou a werewolf instead of an animal youkai?
I know they're both youkai but still...
She's simply the same as Keine. Keine is still a Hakutaku, she just happens to be a Were on top of that. Kagerou is still a Wolf Youkai in the same vein that Momiji is a Wolf Youkai, she's just a different breed. In this case, She Kagerou just happens to be a Were type vs Momiji's White Tengu Wolf.
Tetsamaru said: She's simply the same as Keine. Keine is still a Hakutaku, she just happens to be a Were on top of that.
Keine's nature is gained from an actual hakutaku and makes her count as a half-youkai - that's also a delicate term - when transformed under under the full moon. She's ultimately more a human with a curse. Kagerou is an actual lycantrope, that is to say, a werewolf as a whole creature and not a human bitten by a prior werewolf. There doesn't seem like much we can do in regards to separating a werefoo from a foo youkai from a foo that "turned youkai," though, unless Zun writes more about the process. Akyuu just lumps them all together under the word "therianthropy."
Kagerou is still a Wolf Youkai in the same vein that Momiji is a Wolf Youkai, she's just a different breed. In this case, She Kagerou just happens to be a Were type vs Momiji's White Tengu Wolf.
This comparison is hard to make since tengu are a very prominent type of youkai that stand on their own. I think we actually lack the an important piece of background material information that would be useful to this discussion - how tengu society is divided by attributes into a species of tengu like crows, a species of tengu like wolves, and the more traditional red-faced long-nose tengu. (I blame Akyuu again, this time for never writing a Momiji article.)
There also might be an issue with trying to be inconspicuous in view of the extinction. I know this wouldn't be much of a problem in the normal run of things, but in situations where being able to hide in one's fully transformed state loses a lot of it's effectiveness if the animal you are no longer exists. If one was a werewolf in our world, being in Japan would be a problem, as even in wolf mode you'd stick out due to the fact there are no longer any wolves in the wild to blend in with (actually, even when there were you'd have to stick to Hokkaido and north, because you'd need a place where they had the normal sized Hokkaido wolf (Canus lupus hattai) as opposed to the standard Japanese super tiny "bonsai" Honshu wolf (Canis lupus hodophilax).
FJH said: (I blame Akyuu again, this time for never writing a Momiji article.)
Which in turn more or less blame ZUN. And it's really hard to get any kinda long detailed info from the guy since he mostly moves on from one game to the next. Since Akyuu's scrolls are written by "Akyuu" not ZUN, so all those bits have her own bias or guesswork in it.
To this day, all of our "Handbook" stuff is written by in universe characters. Aya and Akyuu being the more prominent ones. Any time we do get concrete info, it's from ZUN's random interviews rather than him sitting down to write anything as "Himself".