Reimu Hakurei | Touhou

Reimu is defined as unusually easygoing, lacking any sense of danger, and being carefree. She is described as simpleminded, always showing her true feelings and acting on whatever ideas she thinks at the top of her head. However, ZUN has also said that nobody except her can know what is in her head, and thus how she is depicted varies depending on the perspective, be it human, fairy, or youkai. She can also be emotional and noisy, and her presence is well known wherever she is, but she can also merge into her surroundings quite easily when necessary.

She is portrayed as someone simple who passes her days sweeping the shrine grounds, drinking green tea and lazing about; to the point that Kasen Ibaraki thought she lacked training to be the Hakurei shrine maiden and made her train to be more disciplined, something that only worked for a couple of days due to her easygoing personality. However, Kasen states that despite Reimu being "a little unreliable and a little slovenly", she still performs her duties, doing enough to be befit the title of Hakurei shrine maiden.

On the other hand, she is someone with an intuition when it comes to incidents, usually rushing to solve them and not letting anybody get in her way and waste her time. This leads to some people she confronts to think that she has an “indescribable intimidating aura”. This is backed up by her innate abilities, powerful enough to beat her opponents without her being worried of training often, to the contrary of Marisa Kirisame's.

Her straightforward and open personality makes her being liked by both youkai and humans, but she herself considers only few people her friends (like Marisa Kirisame) and she maintains a more strict stand against youkai due to her being human and the Hakurei shrine maiden. As she attracts the people she interacts with and she deals more with not humans than humans, her shrine gets more youkai visitors than human. Reimu tries to revert this and get more human followers and donations through various schemes, but they usually end up not working due to how simple and flawed were or because they were a product of a burst of her emotional side, like in Wild and Horned Hermit. In other occasions, those only end up attracting more youkai instead.

Although she says it is her job to exterminate youkai, she has worked with them in multiple occasions, such as during the incident in Subterranean Animism. She can be seen drinking and hanging out with youkai that invite themselves to the many flower viewings she hosts at the Hakurei Shrine, and collaborating with kappa with business at her shrine festivals. She even offered the three fairies to drink with her after reprimanding them for trashing her shrine, and later gave them several tasks to help clean the shrine. Toyosatomimi no Miko theorizes she only says it is her job to exterminate youkai as a way to say that she wants to maintain Gensokyo's equilibrium, something Yukari Yakumo and others remind her of when she gets too carried out dealing with youkai. Her friendliness with youkai did not stop Eiki Shiki, Yamaxanadu from saying that she exterminated youkai without reason, and that she slacks in basic shrine maiden activities like communicating with her own god.