How They Compare: Sagume Kishin (Touhou)

Hello Everybody! Today is a very special day for me, and to mark the occasion, I wanted to talk about a certain character whom I think is special, but also underappreciated. The Touhou antagonist who never got to be the main focus, the one who is shrouded in mystery, and even I feel as though I never mention, because honestly she's the character I feel is more like me than any other character in the series, and that makes me avoid the subject, but not today! So strap in as we look at none other than Sagume Kishin, The Goddess who Invites Unfortunate Slips of the Tongue. Let’s see how she stacks up?

When one looks up at the clear night sky, they see the pale celestial body known as the Moon, orbiting uninhabited around us, or so one would think. In reality, this sphere is home to the Lunar Kingdom, made up of a powerful race of Pure beings known as the Lunarians, and their legions of Moon Rabbits. This advanced alien race is one of the mightiest forces in all of Touhou, wielding advanced technology and reality warping powers, but it's their last and greatest line of defense we are discussing today. Sagume Kishin is a Lunarian Goddess, and leading member of the Lunar Capitol Counsel, who works directly under the Moon Gods, Lord Tsukuyomi and Chang’e. She is a Hybrid of a Heavenly and Native God, which resulted in her having one angel wing on her heavenly side, yet none on the other. This balanced state makes her great at considering situations from every angle, and making the most rational decisions to benefit her kingdom. She is a powerful and pragmatic crisis manager for the moon, who functions totally autonomously without needing permission, in order to assure the prosperity of her homeland.

Sagume is able to very casually fight the Touhou main characters, Reimu and Marisa. Despite letting them win against her, she’s one of the only characters in the entire series to not be shown taking battle damage from them. Just before their fight, these two were able to fly across Doremy’s dream plane in about 5 minutes. This dream she made, was an exact replica of the universe, which they physically entered from the edge and were able to reach the moon within that time frame, which would require speeds of nearly 5 quadrillion times the speed of light. They have also been able to defeat numerous characters that are easily able to wipe out the entire universe, one of which being Suika, who can casually destroy the Heavens, a celestial plane large enough to contain a god so enormous, he makes the entire universe look like a quantum string by comparison. Sagume’s true form is that of a Divine Spirit, in the Touhou world, these are primordial, nameless entities that existed before even concepts, once being part of Everything before becoming separate via choosing a physical being to latch onto. Because of this Sagume’s true self is Omnipresent, and exists on the Absolute Plane, making it unable to be hit or effected by anything short of metafictional manipulation, as it is simply more Real than what she is fighting. Because Sagume’s physical form is now inseparably tied to this, it has essentially become an avatar. This means that so long as her Primordial form remains, she can regenerate her physical form from total annihilation, and duplicate it as many times as she wants.

Sagume’s physical form is that of a Half Lunarian, Half Amanojaku which was likely just her heritage before ascending to her current nature. Because of this she has many powers associated with both species, which combine together in interesting ways. Lunarians are pure beings who exist in a state separated from Life and Death, they cannot age or catch diseases and no longer require needs like food, water or oxygen to survive. This is because the Lunar Kingdom is an Artificial Pure Land where Time doesn’t exist, there are no seasons, days or nights, and everything in there is eternal and doesn’t decay. This also gives them massive stamina more impressive than any other youkai, senses that can detect life and death in beings, and intelligence enough to build the most advanced tech in all of Touhou. Lunarians are resistant to Probability Manipulation, due to having so much fortune that it cannot be reduced, and possess the mental fortitude to shrug off the effects of the True Moon, which was able to drive everyone on Earth completely Insane and can be fatal out of sheer madness. Sagume in particular can even resist Conceptual Manipulation, as her true form is in total control of her original name. Like Most Touhou characters, Sagume can fire a wide variety of Danmaku energy projectiles, hit and physically interact with Intangible entities, and despite only having one wing, is perfectly capable of flight. She can also Teleport, create Force Fields, travel to Other Dimensions, Drain Energy from others, and was able to Temporarily Freeze the entire Lunar Kingdom in Stasis while she dealt with Junko’s assault. However none of these are her most dangerous power, that comes from her Amanojaku side.

Amanojaku are twisted spirits of contradiction and perversity, they think and act contrarily, liking and disliking the opposite of what any normal being with common sense would, and possessing the power to turn anything on its head. But because Sagume is a Pure Goddess, she doesn’t think or act like this at all, instead, this power manifests in causing the world itself to move in opposition to her based on her words. When Sagume speaks about a particular situation or event, that situation will eventually proceed to reverse itself, through whatever means possible. If she speaks about an attempt to achieve a goal, it will fail in some way. If she speaks about something bad occurring, it will be resolved in some way. Every single state of things she speaks about will cause reality itself to change or prevent it, crises will all resolve themselves, Plans will all fail, and outcomes will all skew, as her voice is host to a power known as Causality Manipulation. Sagume’s causality changing voice is potent enough to effect events across the entire Touhou multiverse, and was even once used at the request of Yukari Yakumo to stop an all out battle of the most powerful characters in the verse, showing that not even characters like them can resist it, and it is able to accomplish things Yukari cannot. She can even impart her power onto a location itself to manipulate reality based on what anyone says. This made Lies into Truths, and brought every single Urban Legend that was spoken of into reality, including Turbo Granny, The Loch Ness Monster, Spontaneous Combustion, Kunekune, The M.I.B., and The Girl from The Gap. People could also utilize these legends to do things like boost their stats, control the elements, drive others insane, summon alien minions, and manipulate space. This was all part of Sagume’s plan to ensure The Lunar Kingdom would survive the assault from Junko. Should the rumor that NASA hid what they actually found on the moon spread, it would have transported The Lunar Kingdom atop Gensokyo. Sagume didn’t actually want to go through with that plan however, only setting it up as a last resort. When confronted by the Main Characters, she told them all about this, as she knew that in doing so it wouldn’t come to fruition, and the simplest way for her power to ensure that would be to make the main characters defeat Junko, thus rendering all her contingencies unnecessary. This does lead into the greatest drawback of her power..

This ability is passive, Sagume is not able to turn it off, and everything she says has the potential danger of altering reality in unpredictable ways. Because of this, Sagume tends not to talk much, only when necessary or when spoken too, and when she does, she is always extremely careful about her wording so as not to accidentally trigger her power. Also, As a Lunarian she is unable to see beings who are more pure than she is, plus, any muting abilities will take away her greatest weapon. Some Lunarians are also weak to impurity, things with Life or Death, which has led to the hilarious trait of them being terrified of the vastly weaker Fairies, due to them being made from Life Energy of Nature. Sagume however never shows this same fear, in fact being perfectly polite and reasonable to all those she meets and has even paid friendly social visits to Gensokyo multiple times after the fact.

Name: Sagume Kishin

Origin: Touhou Project

Classification: Lunarian Goddess, Half-Amanojaku

Powers and Abilities: Flight, Danmaku, Causality Manipulation, Reality Warping, Mid-Godly Regeneration, Absolute True Form, Duplication, Immortality, Can Survive in a Vacuum, Extrasensory Perception, Anti Intangibility, Teleportation, Dimensional Travel, Spacetime Manipulation, Stasis, Forcefields, Energy Draining, Stat Boosts, Sanity Manipulation, Simulation Summoning, Elemental Control, Mind Manipulation Resistance, Probability Manipulation Resistance, Sanity Manipulation Resistance, Conceptual Manipulation Resistance.

Weaknesses: Cannot Turn off her power, Muting, Pure Characters.

Destructive Capacity: Universal+

Range: Universal+

Speed: MFTL+ (Quadrillions); Omnipresent in true form

Durability: Universal+

Stamina: Massive

Intelligence: Godly (Comparable to Eirin, who can make medicines that remove the concept of Death from people, likely also millions of years old)

 

So how would she do in other verses?

In DC Comics, Sagume would be an incredible threat, with power comparable to the strongest JLA members, and while lacking speed physically compared to them, her omnipresent true form would assist her in keeping up. Given her power sorta makes the opposite of what she says occur, it’s likely the mages would think she is using some offshoot of Backwards Magic like Zatanna. Which makes her vs the Justice League Dark an interesting discussion, with her having superior power, but then having an extremely diverse arsenal. It could be very interesting having Constantine try and manipulate her into saying things that benefit them in this bout, as Sagume wouldn’t try and kill him without reason, given how much weaker he is. Zatanna could also certainly disrupt her game plan with abilities like muting and sealing, it would be a dangerous fight, but she’s shown to be clever enough to survive The Great Evil Beast before, so certainly doable. In terms of actually stopping her for good though, you would need a 5th Dimensional Imp or better to be able to target her true form, or you could get lucky with Crazy Jane.

In Marvel, Sagume’s physical stats would rank her as a skyfather level entity, superior to all but the strongest heroes on marvel Earth, and due to her primordial form, would occupy a niche similar to Nightmare, the master of dreams. Because Marvel is much less reliant on magic than DC, it seems as though they would struggle so much more to figure out she was the source of the changes to the events of the world. With her ability to impart the power of her voice onto an area she could easily cause massive untraceable chaos. Take for example, her doing this to Marvel New York City, any of J. Jonah Jamerson’s famous anti-Spider-Man propaganda pieces would create Evil versions of Spider-Man loose on the city, and so would any other rumor or conspiracy someone brings up. In an all out fight, Sagume could only be ‘defeated’ by powerful magic characters like Ghost Rider, Scarlet Witch, Doctor Strange or Doctor Doom, but none of them would be able to put her done for good, as Absolute Plane attacks are basically unheard of in Marvel, only possessed by vastly weaker characters like Deadpool, or some of the top tiers of Marvel like the celestials.

In the Clamp Multiverse, Sagume would be one of the top tier characters for certain, but there's actually a fairly large group of characters up there with comparable power to her, and while her speed is much more impressive, The Clamp characters do have comparable reaction speeds and passive spacetime warping to protect them from being blitzed. Sagume would greatly excel in a multiverse where Magic is in the mundane due to the very fact her voice packs the majority of her power, and her ability imbue her power onto others to bring their urban legends to life, or to open rifts to other dimensions to fully explore the multiverse would be extremely helpful in causing mischief throughout the verse. Her Causality Manipulation would even be able to effect Yuuko despite her timeless state, where as Yuuko likely wouldn’t be able to do that much against her, a large part of which being because Yuuko doesn’t know Sagume’s true name, and won’t be able to get any information out of her without Heavy amounts of manipulation. Though Sagume would likely rather just have tea with her, If she did become too much trouble there are things that could pose a threat to her. Sakura for instance would be able to shrug off all of her attacks thanks to her Hope card protecting her from Causality magic, and as her Clow Cards are the life energy of nature, like fairies, they would have some power over her, particularly the Western Magic cards, which uses the magic of the Sun as opposed to the Moon. And that's not even mentioning The Silent, which forcibly mutes the target, taking Sagume’s greatest weapon away. That said, Sagume’s Absolute true form still proves enough protection to prevent her from being destroyed for good.

In the Saint Seiya Series, Sagume would still remain quite the imposing figure. She's far above the likes of Silver Saints and could well compete with several weaker Gold Saints, but numerous of the more powerful Gold Saint Tier Characters manage to massively eclipse her in stats. But even if they were to say, One-shot her, Sagume can just come back, and could even duplicate herself to make an army of her if she wanted, essentially being a more broken version of the 8th sense. Sagume has a lot of powers to throw at them sure, but as anyone who has experience with Saints knows, it's rather hard to affect them, already having resistances to powers like Dimensional BFR, Insanity and Reality Warping, and can additionally gain resistance to new abilities after it is used on them once. However, that power would not work on Causality Manipulation, as it doesn’t target a saint, it changes the universe around the saint to create natural results, meaning this is potentially fatal, However even this could potentially be countered by The Power of Miracles.

I mean, Come on, she's a literal one-winged angel, I had to. That said, Even with the recent upgrades they received, Sagume would totally one-shot Sephiroth, and solo VII. In some of the Other Final Fantasy games however, she’d be more balanced. Sagume would fit best into Final Fantasy XIII or XIV, having stats even higher than Lightning Farron, and being able to compete with boss villains like Bhunivelze or The Cloud of Darkness. The Cloud of Darkness is a conceptual being that uses advanced Void manipulation powers to erase entire universes from existence, but because Sagume’s Divine Spirit body exists beyond concepts, she could interact with its true form and attack and potentially kill this monster before it managed to lay waste to its world. Even her physical form would be pretty well suited to stopping it thanks to her Purity protecting her from its corruption, and having the general inability to be BFR’d, she couldn't rely on her most Dangerous weapon though, thanks to its use of the Silent Materia, so would have to make due with her other powers.

While we are talking about Angels on the Moon, in Sailor Moon, Sagume would be comparable in power to the top tiers of the Stars arc, with speeds relevant to the Dream arc. Sagume, as an ancient defender of the Moon against all threats, and as someone who has no problem with the earth on top of that, would almost certainly ally herself with Usagi and her Senshi to protect it from the various Chaos Stars. And against them, Sagume would be extremely hard to stop. Sagume being able to manipulate causality, means not only can she resist Nehelenia’s curse technique, but use an even more potent version against any of them. Sagume can resist the Mind Manipulation of The Evil Eye, and even if reduced to a Star Seed, would still be able to just regenerate back, unaffected by any changes even Galaxia would try to make to her concept. Because there’s very little Absolute plane abilities in Sailor Moon, Sagume would be functionally as hard to permanently defeat as Sailor Chaos itself. And while it’s questionable if she could kill Chaos, she COULD use her power to delay her return indefinitely.

In the Billy and Mandy verse, Sagume’s nature would put her in a similar place to the various Deities like Eris, with her initially having the stat advantage over everyone, but them having the potential to surpass her via stat bolstering themselves. Sagume’s Causality Manipulation would certainly be a threat to the verse, but not that uncommon a threat, as monsters and gods being able to subtly manipulate the universe with their casual actions is pretty commonplace here, as seen in the ep, Chaos Theory. Her powers like Dimensional Travel, simulation summoning and reality warping would all be extremely helpful here, but are also not unusual powers for the verse. Funnily enough the thing that makes the Gods in the verse so hard to stop is them being Platonic Concepts in their true form, which Sagume likely couldn’t stop. But Sagume still does them one better by being an Absolute entity in true form, and given The only meta-fictional powers Grim, or any of the guards have shown is simply awareness of the 4th wall, they couldn’t attack her. One character however, CAN affect her true form, and that is Mandy, who was once able to straight up walk out of their cartoon world through the 4th wall, meaning she Can hit Sagume’s true form. Now obviously Mandy is not equipped normally to take on someone like Sagume in a fight, even her very impressive planetary mind control would not work as Sagume happens to have mind manipulation resistance exactly as strong. But the future Empress Mandy, established to be invincible in verse, certainly could! Who would win in that scenario would be difficult to say, as they could resist all of the other’s powers, but Mandy would be smart enough to find her true form, and could potentially beat her in a slugfest should she have the stat bolstering of Grim’s scythe.

And while we are talking about Gods, Why not Bring up the furthest possible series from Touhou, God of War! So I think an immediate comparison to draw here would be to the Fates, ancient angel-like beings who control the destiny of every being in the verse with their threads. Their Fate Manipulation and Sagume’s Causality Manipulation would be naturally clashing if these two were to be in the same universe so a fight would likely be inevitable. The Fates in God of War have a Tremendous speed advantage over Sagume, being well into the septillions of times light speed, however are not quite as raw powerful or durable. Sagume actually should be able to naturally resist the fate manipulation of the Fates, thanks to her own Causality manipulation, Absolute plane true self, and most of all, her Probability manipulation resistance, a trait that allowed another Lunarian, Yorihime, to defeat the vampire, Remilia Scarlet, despite her Also having potent Fate Manipulation. This is certainly something that would surprise the Fates, and I believe Sagume would be able to defeat them using her Various other powers and hax.

In the Animaniacs verse, Sagume would be essentially unmatched in terms of raw stats, with even the Warner’s Reality Warping feats like capturing the entire universe in a jar being just overpowered by her raw strength and speed. That being said, The Warner’s and other various cartoon characters like Slappy, have a massive grab bag of hax and abilities that would allow them to compete, including a slew of dangerous metafictional hax that would allow them to attack and potentially destroy her true form. The Warner’s likely would be able to resist her Causality Hax due to their ability to manipulate Metafictional time, and also funny enough because Yakko is amazing at getting people to say whatever he wants them too. They can also MK arch several other powers she has including manipulating reality, putting things into stasis, and duplicating themselves. I think if the Animaniacs Verse teamed up against Sagume she’d have little chance. But she also has the potential to one-shot people with her stats if she is super tactical about it.

Lastly let's discuss my Favorite verse, Skullgirls. The only real comparison to make here is between Sagume and the Goddess Trinity. The Goddess Trinity in some ways are like the Billy and Mandy gods here, being Platonic Concepts, and having infinite stats with their full power. While Sagume certainly has a more powerful Avatar than they do, she couldn’t hope to match the power of their true forms, which stretch across the infinite multiverse. Sagume has some great powers to use in battling these gods, like her ability to freeze them in stasis which isn’t technically space time manipulation, and they wouldn’t have resistance too. She could also use her Causality Manipulation to simply stop Skullgirls from occurring ever again, just by talking about how they always come back. She can also reach them with her dimensional travel, and hit them with her attacks. That being said, despite being conceptual beings, Venus and Aeon are both clearly able to see and affect the Absolute Plane, meaning they could easily and permanently kill her by destroying her true form if she's not careful.