@Mokou Last I checked, Yukari is not omniscient. As in, she could very well fail to realize how she might kill Mokou if she were so inclined (and based on the text, she's more interested in just hurting Mokou than killing her). You really haven't addressed that Yukari can do the same thing as old Yog-Sothoth, if in a more roundabout manner. Right now though, you're making a slightly more interesting claim than you've been making. Namely, that in drinking the Hourai elixir, a whole new being, one that is immortal, comes in to existence. This gets around my previous objection of immortality as a state vs. nature.
If you're going to pull her away from the elixir in a world where she drank it, that entity was pre-made before she even drank it.
This line, however, doesn't really make any sense, and your "argument" rests upon it. How can you really say that the Immortal Mokou existed beforehand? Nothing about Mokou drinking the elixir necessitates that the immortal version of her existed beforehand. I'd say it makes more sense to say that the immortal Mokou was in fact created at that moment; after all, if the immortal version existed before, when was it made? Where was it? If it always existed, then your claim about her BECOMING retroactively immortal is nonsensical. Furthermore, just because something has forward existential security does not mean that if their origin point is removed, then they suddenly start existing further back in the past. "If you'll take away that 'start', it will no longer need one either," is completely wrong. If I tell you to count from 1 to infinity, but 1 somehow ceases to exist when you get to 50, it doesn't mean you started counting at negative infinity, or negative anything, or even zero. At best it means that you basically started at 2 and counted onwards, and at worst renders everything you've counted unintelligible. Alternatively, I tell you to count from 1 to 50, except that when you get to 14, start counting to infinity instead. If I prevent you from going past 10 (Through ANY means), you WILL NOT be counting to infinity. Nor, for that matter, will it mean that you started counting at some number other than 1. Replace counting numbers with years of age and this would simulate Mokou's case almost exactly.
As for understanding the end of the universe bit, you need to recognize that non-existence and death are distinct things in dualism (in worlds where some sort of soul exists). As Alice points out, the soul of the drinker of Hourai is made immortal and re-creates a body if it (the body) is destroyed. Souls seem to be vulnerable in this series only while not housed in a body; Thus the Hourai soul, which eternally re-creates its body, is invulnerable. However, this does not preclude it from simply ceasing to be, e.g. when all existence ceases (such as the universe ending). And no, Mokou being a universe in and of herself is silly.
Furthermore, the point about it being impossible to kill her isn't quite as air-tight as you claim it is. Yuyuko's dialogue about "the cycle of Hourai [ending]" seems to imply that the effect can be undone. Other dialogue implies that the elixir actually resides in the liver of the drinker. One then wonders how a destroyed body can be re-created. Your arguments against this have basically amounted to, "nope, she's immortal, so these must be wrong." Well, even assuming your definition of immortality, maybe she isn't as immortal as you or she thinks she is. She also thinks Kaguya created the elixir so clearly she can be wrong about it. Most likely, her knowledge of being "immortal" is that no one has been able to kill her, she is immune to natural death from, say, illness (whether she can actually get ill is a bit more contentious), and she doesn't age.
Anyways, I have spent far more time on this than I should, so peace out.
Ok, how about this: Yog-Sothoth. Yog-Sothoth is coterminous with all time and space, and is thus able in its natural state to manipulate events at any point in space-time. Thus, Yog-Sothoth exists at the same time and place as both mortal Mokou and immortal Mokou. Yog-Sothoth chooses to kill mortal Mokou. Immortal Mokou ceases to be, because her gaining immortality never came about (she died before it happened). Yog-Sothoth still exists at all points of time simultaneously, so it retained its "motivation" for killing her even after doing so (it gets around your appeal to the time travel paradox).
Yog-Sothoth>>>>Everything
If we wish to stay "in-universe," consider that Yukari need only manipulate the boundaries of time and space in herself to achieve more or less the same results.
Also, as I hoped to mention before but now realize I didn't, it is highly contestable whether or not the consumer of Hourai can outlive the universe itself. It is quite possible (I would go so far as to say likely) that with the ending of the universe, so too would the existence of one who imbibed the elixir be ended.
Basically, surefire candidates for killing someone under the effects of Hourai are Yog-Sothoth and Yukari, and the debatable candidates, the natural or non-natural ending of the universe (by, say, a Lovecraftian elder god).
Komachi personally is probably one of the wealthier inhabitants of Gensokyo. She has enough money that her danmaku bullets are exclusively coins, most of them gold or silver.
Remember that she is the ferry(wo)man of the dead, and every soul that crosses the river must pay her using money created for the soul based on the number of people whose lives are touched by that person and the degree to which they are so touched. So when someone like Mother Teresa dies, Komachi is instantly rich. To quote the wiki's translation of her official profile:
A shinigami judges one to be good or bad not by the amount of crimes, but by money. That is to say, not the money that the deceased may have had while they were alive, but rather the total amount of those who yearned and missed that person from the bottom of their hearts....
Komachi always demands those she guides to pay all the money they have...
And with that, I officially think about this crap too much.
All of the shadows are of the original characters that she is cosplaying as, with the last shadow being the original GSC female, namely Crystal (hence the cameo tag).
OK, a few points. First, Mokou mentioned that time exists outside the universe, existing before the universe, and persisting after its end. Modern physics disagrees. Strenuously.
Mokou said: Before you even say anything, I can arguably say that being immortal means you can't be negated back. Because immortality means eternal life, and it's not eternal if it can be negated.
You make the distinction between a power and a state of immortality, but even that doesn't quite capture it. The question you seem to be posing is whether immortality is a state or a nature. To clarify this distinction, a state is merely the condition something is in, while a nature is intrinsic to the thing.
If immortality is a state, then it is entirely consistent to say that said state can be removed. To compare it to a similar notion, let us discuss agelessness. I could, in theory, be in a state of agelessness: that is, I do not age at all. If I began to age, then I would clearly not be ageless. However, just because I am not ageless now does not negate that I was ageless before, as I was clearly able to reap the benefits of agelessness for however long I WAS ageless. Likewise, in the case of immortality, it seems perfectly consistent to discuss being immortal before, and then ceasing to so be, and thus become mortal.
However, you seem to be asserting a notion of immortality as an intrinsic nature. If there is such a nature, then it is indeed incoherent to discuss losing immortality, or, for that matter, gaining it. If a property is intrinsic to something, then it is the case that said property exists in that thing from its creation. It can only gain the property in the trivial sense that it only has properties when it comes into existence. This view is problematic in Mokou's case, because she explicitly GAINED immortality from drinking the elixir. As was just mentioned, you cannot gain an intrinsic property. If immortality was truly intrinsic in this case, then it would be incoherent to talk of the possibility of killing her even before she drank the elixir, and not just in a determinist sense (she is here now, so she wasn't killed, ergo she could not have been killed). And yet, it seems perfectly coherent to discuss if someone had killed her beforehand. Mokou seems to disagree, but I can honestly see no justification through evidence or intuition to support this, while I suspect that most people would intuitively agree with my assertion of the coherence of discussing Mokou's murder prior to Hourai. I conclude then, that immortality is NOT an intrinsic property in the case of the Hourai elixir.
With that said, however, immortality, in order to have any real meaning, must be a highly existentially secure state. That is to say that in order for a being to really have immortality to begin with, it must be a state that is nigh impossible (though not necessarily absolutely impossible) to get rid of; otherwise, there is nothing to distinguish it from a simple difficulty to kill someone. Absent of any such probabilistic outliers, Mokou will live forever, and thus may be said to be immortal.
In any case, she cannot be destroyed. Suppose this, that elixir acts like a kind of boundary that separates the invincible entity in Mokou from the vincible one. Suppose that, erasing the elixir may make the opposite effect, that because there's no boundary, that invincible entity seeps into the past. If that's the case, erasing the elixir may make Mokou exist infinitely in both the future AND the past. Just like a Phoenix, she's reborn stronger than before.
I...what? The only way that I can see that this even begins to make sense is if you pre-suppose that Mokou (the character) was immortal and would be immortal even if she never drank the elixir. In your dualism of the drinker having an invincible and a vincible part, the Hourai elixir is not a boundary between the two, it IS the invincible part. Erasing the Hourai elixir would erase the invincible. How one could go about erasing the elixir is a formidible task, but it would NOT sensibly result in any retroactive super-invincibility. Your suppositions are outlandish.
He didn't steal the belt. He stole the underwear. What we infer from this is the underwear is enchanted to give him muscle, but it does too much so he wears the belt to supress the effect. Mr. Mime will now die under the weight of his own expanding muscles. Green kills so many of her pokemon...
[rant]*points at Axel* Bullcrap at the no actual feelings. It's more likely that was something Xemnas lied to them all about and they accept this because it's convenient to believe. Given that all of the founding members willingly became Nobodies (I'm pretty sure that's said in KH2 in Hollow Bastion/Radiant Garden), they aren't exactly good people to begin with, so it shouldn't be surprising for them to be assholes after becoming Nobodies, particularly if they retain their original personalities. The thing is, if they truly have no heart, and the game canon states that those without hearts cannot feel, then none of them should experience anger, or jealousy, or even desire. If the canon actually holds on that no hearts=no feelings thing, then none of them should even care enough to try to make kingdom hearts. Either those without hearts can have feelings (though they very well might experience feelings by some other means), or the Organization members have hearts.[/rant] Regardless, adorable picture.
