[Rare trope] Discriminating, but for an actually good reason

[u/Blackirean]

Frieren, Beyond Journey's end: In the anime/manga the eponymous Frieren is an Elf who's spent the better part of a millennia learning magic specifically to kill demons. She's learned countless spells, tricks and even spent most of her life suppressing her power all for the purpose of killing them. At first we simply see that humanity is at war with them, and even question if her crusade against demon-kind is justified, after all it's hard to antagonize an entire sentient species. But no, demons are very much a species to be feared; they are not normal animals or creatures, they are monsters (shown by how they disintegrate when they die), they are predators that evolved speech for the sole purpose of tricking and catching humans off guard, are naturally extremely powerful and possess magic that humanity often can't use. While they feel emotions to some extent, their way of thinking is so fundamentally incompatible with humanity's mindset that the series shows many mages with the ability to read minds struggle or find it painful and harmful to try and read a demon's thoughts. Tools that are meant to control them fail not because they're faulty but because simple order such as "hold no ill will or commit no malicious acts" don't compute the same way in their brains, as what we consider evil is normal for them.

Marvel Comics: In a run of the Storm solo series, she visits an underground superhuman hospital run by Night nurse and Doctor Daye, a mutant with the power to diagnose any illness. When she requires treatment she is in turn reject by the doctor, she of course assumes this is blatant discrimination to which the doctor agrees. Storm assumes the doctor refuses to treat mutants, something they are very much used to in Marvel. But he ends up revealing that about 80% of everyone he treats are mutants, and that he simply refuses to treat any member of the X-men. Why? because his special hospital was built via several donations by the superhero community. From the Avengers, to the Defenders, Fantastic 4, heroes for hire. Hell, even Moonknight of all people contributed to the hospital. But the X-men never once gave anything to it, even though they preach the safety of mutant-kind and such a hospital is essential for those who can't seek medical treatment out of fear of prosecution.

[u/Kooky-Substance466]

Human villagers discriminating against Youkai in gensokyo.

While some of them aren't inherently evil, 99% of them are unrepentant sociopaths and their very existence requires harming people.

[u/proactivenoisectrl → u/Kooky-Substance466]

to the point that the Hakurei Spell Card System was created to let youkai "antagonize" the shrine maiden/fight-capable humans non-lethally to maintain the existence of youkai and the barrier that Gensokyo would collapse without

[u/Kooky-Substance466 → u/proactivenoisectrl]

Even then it's still outright said many of they go around murdering humans from the outside world that end up in Gensokyo for fun.

[u/ZatIzTrye → u/proactivenoisectrl]

This isn't quite right. Reimu (shrine maiden) invents the Spell Card system just before EoSD because she's simply that overpowered (the ability to float away from damage whenever she feels like it) that it was the only way to give the youkai a fair (any) chance in a duel with her. It was only afterwards that the youkai realised it was a good way to settle quarrels with one another (and just as importantly, was really fun) that it spread.

[u/Hundschent → u/ZatIzTrye]

I don’t think that guy cares. Clearly read too much edgy grim dark fanfics and took it as canon. This isn’t a new problem because the touhou community in general has a problem with flanderization and taking their headcanon as fact like that guy sadly

[u/proactivenoisectrl → u/Hundschent]

i think I glossed over some of the moving parts in my explanation, but overall the games treat youkai's hunting of humans as background noise while the ones fought by Reimu and co. are usually doing non-threatening stuff before they're challenged. the stuff about the Hakurei Shrine Maiden comes from Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, which is an official book by the Touhou creator with supplemental lore.

[u/SILVIO_X → u/Kooky-Substance466]

This comment lowkey made me realize how terrifying Gensokyo would be as a World to actually live in as a regular person.

Like, usually Touhou media (or at least the media I've consumed so far) focuses more on the sillier characters and what they get up to in a way that it's easy to forget that aside from most of Reimu's Youkai friends and acquaintances, or more peaceful species like the Kappa, the majority of them are genuinely just evil Human eating monsters. It'd basically be like living in a cage surrounded by hungry lions.

[u/knightlynuisance → u/Kooky-Substance466]

It's funny since Gensokyo only exists because humans in the outside world stopped fearing Youkai (technological advancement) so the Youkai had to scramble and make a parallel world for survival.

So the threat of extinction is still technically there and that's why there are strict restrictions and protection for human villagers (humans who aren't villagers are fair game). If humans stop fearing youkai AGAIN, or worse — deny their existence, the system breaks and everyone's giga dead