My condolences to all sumireko fans for what I’m about to say
Day 1: Sumireko Usami
This is the only character I actively dislike in all of touhou. The first issue with sumireko is her personality. I get the fact that she’s supposed to be a cringy teen, but she honestly is way too overdone in that aspect. It could have been something we could have related to easily, where she’s kinda like how you were as a teen, but instead it feels very forced and not very natural as a character. She basically feels like if you took an anime phase teen and cranked it up to 11, instead of a more normal teen with a healthy amount of eclectic nerdiness, which I think could work better and accomplish what I think would make her more tolerable.
Secondly, her specific character interactions feel very fake. First things first, most of the characters she interacted with are the incident resolvers, yukari, and mokou. Each of these interactions besides yukari boil down to the gensokyo native treating sumireko as a basic friend, and nothing much deeper. Like, there’s no hesitancy to a human from the outside world essentially invading gensokyo, even though it’s treated as serious in every other case. Sumireko feels like a weird self insert, getting along with anybody she really meets and not having any clashes despite the entire nature of her character being a dangerous thing to gensokyo. I do like her bits with yukari though as yukari actually does treat her with caution, which is how mainly reimu should have responded to her presence.
Finally, some things I like about her. Sumireko has an excellent design, and honestly fits her type of character really well despite my dislike towards her type of character. She also has a good theme.
Overall, sumireko ends up feeling like a self insert fantasy character to me, not really meshing at all with other characters naturally and honestly holding herself back with how her character is. I feels as though she missed the mark of what a character of her nature could have been, which would be someone regarded with heavy caution to those higher up, but treated like a human to anyone not, which is why her interactions with mokou are probably second best because they make more sense character wise. I wish I could find a way to like her, but she just has so many flaws that I can’t find myself really saying much positive about her.