Reimu's Armpits

About

Reimu's Armpits, also known as Touhou Armpits, refers to a partialism towards the armpits of the main character in the Touhou Project videogame series, Reimu Hakurei. The fetish's dominating presence in Touhou fanart compared to fanart of other series made it an infamous characteristic for the Touhou fandom.

Origin

Touhou Project's iconic main character Reimu Hakurei,^[1] the shrine maiden of the Hakurei Shrine, was first introduced in the first game in the series, Highly Responsive to Prayers,^[2] which was released in 1996 for the Japanese PC-9801 platform. Initially Reimu's outfit shared its design with a traditional shrine maiden outfit (shown below, left),^[1] but her design made a change by the 6th installment in the series, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil,^[3] first released in August 2002, when the series switched to Windows. Since then Reimu's outfit is a more custom shrine maiden outfit, composed of a sleeveless red sailor fuku top alongside a pair of white detached sleeves, which leave a wide arm-gap revealing her armpits and the side of her sarashi bra (shown below, middle & right).^[4]

Spread

Reimu has remained one of the Touhou Series' main characters since the first installment in the series, and thus has become one of the series' most well known and iconic characters. Due to Touhou's large fandom, Reimu is often seen as the catalyst for the rise in popularity of the armpit fetish in anime fandoms; although the partialism is still commonly associated with the Touhou fandom. On Google Trends, the search trends for both "reimu" and "armpit porn" started around the same period and have both been gradually growing since.

On the online image boards Danbooru^[5] and Gelbooru,^[6] searching for the combined tags of "hakurei_reimu" and "armpits" yields respectively over 1,800 and 5,700 images, taking up roughly a third of content when searching for "touhou" and "armpits". On January 5th, 2015, the Facebook page Reimu's Delicious Armpits launched,^[7] which lists itself as a religious organisation and managed to gather over 5,200 likes in the next 9 months. The Uncyclopedia page for Reimu Hakurei^[8] describes her backstory as a quest for an armpit-hair remedy.

Various Examples

External References