The problems of modern Touhou and how to solve them (+ some info about doujin scene)

[vanyk]

I think we should have a good talk about this topic.
I have had a lot of thinking about this topic for a long time. Recent twits by nmlgc and aggressive2hu inspired me to do more research to finally build a full picture.
I understood that we should act now until it is too late.
The more info I found for this post, the worse the situation became. And it is not just about Touhou, problems are much more serious, but mostly I will talk about Touhou because I really love Touhou and I hope to change situation for better at least for Touhou.
The goal of this post is not to bring hate towards anybody in the fandom or ZUN, but to help people understand the roots of the problems to resolve them.

CAUTION!! CAUTION!! CAUTION!!
If you still want to believe that there are no serious problems in Touhou fandom, and still want to believe in Touhou and doujin magic, well this post may bring you down.
You have been warned.
CAUTION!! CAUTION!! CAUTION!!

Before we start, I hope to see criticism which will explain where I am right and where I am wrong, because this topic is rarely discussed.
Thank you.

Have you noticed that something is not right? Have you noticed that there are much less new Touhou fangames, doujinshi and doujin music than for example 8 years ago? Have you noticed that a lot of new fan content is nearly unnoticed? Have you noticed that fandom is not united and split? Have you noticed that last Touhou games are rushed and story is less well-written?

Doujin events examples:

Spoiler

 

Hakudenkai:

2022:
91 games
By Westerners and Chinese: at least 26 (28,6%)
Irony, most of STGs are by Westerners 

2023:
22 games
By Westerners and Chinese: 11 (50% !!!)

 

I suppose that everyone noticed at least some of those problems but I am surprised that nearly nobody tried to analyse why these have happened. Well, there are two main causes of the problems: the fandom and the franchise itself.

Fandom:

Spoiler

Let's begin with the fandom. Why I call it a fandom but not a community? Well, there is one reason:

there are Touhou fans, but there is no community.

And it is not like old conflict between "primaries" and "secondaries", the problem is much more serious. The fandom is divided in small little circles and cliques which rarely interact with each other. And each of them has its own vision of Touhou. We can easily separate each circle:

• /r/touhou which are mostly into fanarts, memes, comics and doujinshi. You can rarely find there talks about lore, games and even music. (/r/2hujerk/ is similar community but with much more NSFW)
• Moriya Shrine has also it is own circle and I don't think I need to describe it. The only thing I want to notice is that there are also several other Pirate circles.
• Touhou-YouTubers (the big ones). Now we see at least the second big circle (the previous one was GensoBoiz). They are mostly into animations and games and sometimes Touhou related discussions.
• Lunatic shmup fans. They mostly play original Touhou games, mostly 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15. When they beat Touhou lunatics or LN or LNN they mostly move to other more difficult shmups. Sometimes they can touch Touhou fangames.
• Touhou fighting fans. They mostly play Soku or AoCF. They sometimes play Touhou shmups for fan. They can also move to other fightings.
• Lore dens. There are several of them (for example by TheOVJM (old fan), by GensouChronicle and by Mad_Dog_of_Fujiwara) and they rarely interact with each one. Mostly into lore. Most of them will defend ZUN by any cost and they mostly like the changes in modern Touhou lore. The others scold ZUN for retcons and poor writing.
• Translators. There are 2 types of them. The first ones understand that they are just part of Touhou fandom, which tries to make the fandom better. The second ones think they are the most important part in fandom. Those ones create a lot of drama (gensokyo.org, wiki-thcrap (2013-2014), wiki (2022), thcrap (2023)). The translators are also divided into small circles (there are groups which can translate one particular big Touhou fangame).
• Remixers are not too united, but sometimes they help each other or other circles.
• Touhou Styled music creators are somewhat a little more united than remixers, sometimes they work with fangame creators.
• Fangames (not shmup ones) creators (and fans) are also divided. Each big popular Touhou fangame has its own fan circle, but mostly fangame fans play different fangames, so they are more united.
• Shmup creators. There are several groups of them. One of them is on Bullet Hell Engines server, another one on Shrines and Youkai server, there are also some other groups. Some of those groups publish their works, others prefer not to share them (no matter how good are they). Yes, this also leads to division of the community.
• Modders (they are still somewhat alive) also have their own circle but it is not big.
• Artists mostly work individually, but sometimes they make collabs or work with other circles (mostly fangames creators and sometimes Touhou styled music creators).

And those is not full list (I didn't included anything about Len'en, but surprisingly Len'en fans are much more united than Touhou fans (because they understand that without them Len'en will die). There is even a Touhou circle on scratch.mit.edu). What you should understand is that all those circles have their own histories, memes, local important figures, maybe fan characters, etc. And each of them has their view on Touhou. And they rarely interact with each other or even know about each over. And what is worse each drama makes the fandom even more divided.
One of the big examples of such division is that Touhou shmup creators and fans are more and more divided from other groups. Have you heard about Concealed the Conclusion, The Last Comer, Book of Star Mythology, or more modern Hollow Song of Bird, Wonderful Waking World, Dream Logical World? I think most of fans have heard at least about some of them. And what about new ones: Abyss Soul Lotus, Little Doll Queen, Treasure Castle Labyrinth (game)? Do you see? I am not talking about the modding circle because I don't think that most Touhou fans can name at least 5 game changing mods (which also shows how they are divided from other groups). Or Touhou Styled music is still not that popular (well, their situation is a little bit better, because Empyreal Garden of Amusements became somewhat well-known).

What I described above is not the whole picture. There are some (sadly not that many) fans who participates in several circles at the same time, or unite in circles of fans who are interested in different parts of fandom (tails41yoshi / IrisDescent, InceRabbit, LoafOfChihuahua, etc). But what about most of fandom? It has one big problem:

The fandom knows nearly nothing about itself.

Why it happens? Because of drama, excessive gatekeeping and wanting to be closed from others.
Drama: because hating each other cannot make you united. 
Excessive gatekeeping: this can scare the ones who want to know more about Touhou and fandom, but still have to make the step further (for example that leads to division of /r/touhou from other parts of fandom, because their rules do not help (you know what I mean) and other groups rarely help new fans from there). On this site the situation is better, because most people who visit it already know what they want, but sadly this is not the first site most new fans visit. The current gatekeeping strategy is bad and must be changed.
Wanting to be closed from others: if you don't share your works with others nobody will know about them.

There is also another reason I didn't mentioned it but its roots leads to the earlier processes of fandom division (which began in early 2010s). Back then one of the most important sites were Maidens of the Kaleidoscope, gensokyo.org and Eientei Forums (and even back then there were dramas between them). But what is important those were main sites where you could share your works and everyone could see it. But then Touhou fans became more decentralize and moved to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, etc. The big Touhou related sites became less and less used, especially when Discord became popular. Different circles moved to different sites or chats. And what nowadays may see new Touhou fancontent creators? They want to create new content but they cannot expect that they will be noticed and will be able to get big popularity. They have to do something big (Artificial Dream in Arcadia) or shocking/horny/R18 (Hero of Ice Fairy (not a perfect example, but I think you got what I meant)) or meme (Fumo Racing). But even those don't always help.

What all of these problems result into? A lot of fans remain "secondaries" (because nearly nobody helps them to make the next step), creators lose interest in Touhou and move to other franchises.

How we can solve those problems?
Nearly impossible solution: most of fandom (at least creators) should forget about their conflicts and became united. They should create site/page/group there they and new creators could publish their works.
More realistic solution: there should be groups who would collect content from different parts of fandom and collect it in one place. (This site is a good place, but DMCA drama, and not everyone (Copyright Crusaders) want to stop their conflicts with Moriya Shrine).

But there are other problems that may make people haters of not just fandom, but of Touhou itself.

Franchise:

Spoiler

Do you remember that Touhou is a series of doujin games? Yes? Now you can forget about it, because Touhou now (at least since 2014) is

a commercial franchise based on doujin games.

ZUN started less and less care about games quality and they start to become more broken and more easier (the only exception is LoLK and this game managed to bring some interest but this game also has its problems). Around this time some doujin circles started to move to other franchises (we will talk about it a little bit later). The big ones mostly remained and they are mostly ZUN supporters.
But what is most important he became a friend of Ruw ( https://www.shrinemaiden.org/forum/index.php/topic,14315.0.html ). The one who helped to slowly move from doujin scene to commercial side. What it leads to? Steam and Nintendo releases, big circles became more commercial, collabs with Cave, Muse Dash and Neptunia. Ruw also control most of communication with ZUN, but works ineffective ( https://www.bilibili.com/read/cv3550512/ + another drama). In april 2020 Ruw began an "anti-fandom coup" when he prohibited to use a drawing of ZUN (not real photo or image) where he said that he supports secondary works (sources: https://t.bilibili.com/382144693689904067 https://pincong.rocks/question/24317 ).
The funniest thing here is reaction of THBWiki (+ comments here: https://thwiki.cc/Ruw ), but at the same time they forget that they are part of the problem.
These bring us to nowadays when we still have conflicts because of DMCA drama...
After all of these I want to ask a question: do you want to create Touhou fancontent now?
To make it even worse ZUN himself prohibits crowdfunding (not without reason) and Ruw prohibits to do once-paid mobile games, only free-to-play ones, what results in gachas.

You may think that ZUN does not know about the problems. But he knows about them, he sometimes get direct messages from fans, messages from BeatMARIO, he saw the UDoALG tournament. He knows about the problems but he still thinks that everything is fine. And as he earns money from new games he will continue to think that problems are not that bad. He also gets nearly no direct criticism.

And ZUN already had a chance for changes for good side: UM. This game got a lot of attention from older fans, because stages (especially Extra) were better than in HSiFS and WBaWC, it felt like a wind of change (important note, not for everyone, because of scoring, broken cards and replays, lack of graze and other strange changes). But it seems like ZUN thought that the main reason why people liked UM is the card system, so now we have it everywhere.

Those are the reasons why some people hate ZUN and say that he created a cult. Haters also often say that Touhou is just a little part of doujin scene (keeping in mind that Touhou on Comikets never took more than 8% of places (but if you compare with others it is still a lot)), and if ZUN stopped working on Touhou it would disappear and nobody would notice. And as sad as it sounds in somewhat they are right. And we have already seen a really good example:

Len'en Project.

Jinx really managed to do nearly everything what Touhou haters says about Touhou. He created outstanding BPoHC, there were a lot of fans who made fan content, but Jinx decided that he wanted to make gacha (nobody asked for it) himself, so he spent at least 6 years to close it in a year after release. He spent 7 years on nothing... not really, he also retconed canon. And what we have in result? Fandom is half dead, GML is discontinued, and there are still people who continue to donate him on FANBOX and watch his streams. There are even fanatics who still say that Len'en is better than Touhou but they do not see that Jinx and ZUN have similar problems. The only difference is that all of these Jinx does himself and faster, while ZUN does it via other people (like Ruw).
And do you know what? Len'en fandom has still a glimmer of hope, because there are a lot of people who understand these problems, they understand that they cannot expect Jinx to do all the work and they try to revive Len'en themselves. There are still Len'en remixers, fanartists, Misremembered Memories was actually good, there are good VR fangames by Ayana Gaming. They continue to do it because they love Len'en.

So what can we do? There are two solutions:
1. Persuade ZUN. ZUN should stop working with Ruw and other people who has great influence on him (maybe even BeatMARIO and other doujin circles leaders), he should forget about his purse and begin to work. There are two ways for him to restore reputation: 1. create another IN (to get interest from old fans and hardcore players) 2. create another BPoHC (to get even more love from casual fans, but old fans may not understand this). In each cases he should do something that is even greater than those two games. Also he should stop doing strange retcons (because CoLA 37 is... something). But I do not know how to make him do it.

2. Take everything in our hands. There are two ways: 1. make Touhou fandom greater ourselves and do not care about ZUN, then, well, we can face Ruw and some fanatics who will defend him no matter what. 2. Create not just another Touhou, but a series which can offer something that even Touhou cannot offer for doujin sphere, but nowadays it would be hard to get attention.

But what I can say for sure if this topic is unnoticed and left undiscussed we won't be able to change the situation for better.
I thought that Touhou was an islet of safety in current sea of crisis of mass culture, but alas it is already under the water.

But wait, let's be clever and take a step further (unlike those haters): what about non-Touhou doujin scene, what is happening there? (Spoiler: the situation is similar there):

Spoiler

Well we can just watch the maps of recent Comikets we can see that gachas and VTubers take more and more parts of it

C100:

Spoiler

C101:

Spoiler

 

C102 + statistics:

Spoiler

 

C103 + some statistics (wow, Touhou is still top 6...): 

Spoiler

 

Do you see the problem? No? Well, Touhou 18.5 100BM / HBM may explain (I don't think that even ZUN realized the next symbolism he put in this game):

Companies realized how to sell doujin (black markets), and most people (like Marisa) are not against this.

And now I want to ask people (especially in Japan) who saw the commercialization of Touhou and hated it, because it lost "doujiness": what have you done to save the non-Touhou doujin sphere from commercialization? Now companies (like Nexon which created Blue Archive) encourage doujin, so the companies get nearly free advertisement. And the worst thing that gacha games (one of problems of modern mass culture, because these games are purposefully created just to milk money from players) mostly use such tactics.

Mainstream doujin is already being non-directly commercialized by companies.

ZUN finally met a serious concurrent, which uses the same tactics ZUN uses, but he still doesn't (want to) see it. He is already losing to it. And now I realized another (unlikely) way for ZUN to restore reputation: he should forget about money, stop working with Ruw and others, ban all Touhou gachas, begin to make good games, remove strange restrictions and revolt against all of these (now you understand why this is nearly impossible).

Does that mean we should give up on doujin? Not at all! There are still new hidden gems (which need more love) and there is a great legacy. And this may be said about Touhou. There are also new hidden gems (Treasure Castle Labyrinth, Empyreal Garden of Amusements, Artificial Dream in Arcadia, etc) and Touhou has great legacy too. But Touhou fans and doujin fans must see the problems and we all must realize:

we are sinking in the same boat (no matter you like it or not).

Hate to each other won't save this situation, it will become only worse. Not only just Touhou, the whole doujin scene has serious problems. And we should take the situation in our hands, until it is too late. Otherwise won't be surprised when on C150 at least half of places will be hold by gachas, game-services and maybe even something worse (maybe play-to-earn will become a popular thing, for example something like NFT (I just want to remind that gamers hated loot boxes when they appeared, what about now?)), but I am afraid this may happen much earlier. And then Comiket (and maybe other smaller doujin events) will just become a place where big companies will purposefully get more advertisement for free, so they can milk more money from more fans. If you call Touhou a sect, then gachas are even more a sect, because Touhou fans (at least the ones who do not play gachas) at least do not lose/spend money, while gacha fans do (and money creates even stronger connections to the games, because you do not want to lose something for which you have paid).

 

But everything is not lost! We can change the situation for better if we will stop being scattered and will work together. The worst thing now is just giving up.

 

Thank you for reading this. I would be really glad to receive criticism, corrections and proposals. I know this topic is controversial, but I think that it must be discussed. I just want Touhou fandom to become better. If you have any good ideas how to change the whole situation for better feel free to share them. Also feel free to share this post.

There are also some other related thoughts about this topic:

Spoiler

PS:
Why we must act now?
Because the worst thing can happen now is losing Chinese fandom. Western fandom is passive and divided, Japanese one is nearly lost, the only remained one is Chinese.

The unreal ideal thing ZUN can do is turning Touhou into real folklore, when nearly all restriction will be removed he will remain as formal owner and face of Touhou, just to resolve some really strange incidents (like with Yukkuri) and help fans. He can continue doing games and albums, which would be considered as canon. In the short-run he may lose some money but in long-run he will get much more money and a lot of love. Alas, I don't think he would ever do something like this.

PPS:
You may ask: how many people know about these problems?
In Western fandom not that many.
In Chinese a lot because these problems limit them.
In Japanese fandom nearly no one. If they find out about them they mostly move to over series or become haters.

PPPS:
I didn't know where to put the next observation, but I think it is important, so I will put it here
A lot of fans (and sadly content makers) forget that Touhou is not just games, music, lore or characters. Touhou is the combination of all of these. So when people try to defend UDoALG saying that yes, gameplay is bad, but story is very good, I see that people do not understand that simple idea. Creators of most iconic fangames understood it and that is we love them (I am looking at you RE: TLC).

PPPPS:
I read some more twits of aggressive2hu and died from cringe. Again "secondaries" are blamed. I want to settle the matter once and for all. This term exist just to blame somebody in problems without analyzing them (because this is much easier not to think). There are always people who only watch anime pictures and maybe read doujinshi / listen to music. But that is just part of newcomers (small one). A lot of newcomers try to understand who are the characters, what happens in lore, etc. But a lot of them are afraid to play games as they have a reputation of hard ones. Why? Because they have little experience with such games, they often see "Ez Modo?" memes, but normal is hard for them, nearly nobody helps them to do next step. You may say that Touhou games difficulty is not for everyone, but then I will ask you why there are a lot of Geometry Dash fans and Celeste fans? Maybe it would be better to represent Touhou games difficulty not as something that is impossible, but as something what you can beat, wouldn't it?
For some reason Chinese fans understand this so they created Barrage Musical ~ Basic Danmaku Tutorial ~. You have much more experience, but I have not seen any danmakufu or other scripts who will help newcomers just to play and make them stop fearing of bullets. Only recently The Danmaku Gameplay Wiki was created, just in time!

PPPPPS:
My opinion about Blue Archive?
It is a successful gacha game with strong base, which creators realized why Touhou was successful. From what I know they also control and monitor what doujin circles create (some people consider this as advantage because they say there is less trash content (I have not checked it)).
For me this game is just another "Raid Shadow Legends" (the core gameplay is similar), but with much more fan service and moe sci-fi schoolgirls (not my thing at all). But I understand why there are a lot of fans: there are a lot of Japanese fans who like such concepts, they make fanworks (they have nearly no restrictions), Japanese and Western fans see them, BA gets more fans, cycle repeats. The problem is that it is gacha, and this shows other gacha developers that they can also do this.

PPPPPPS:
You may ask: OK, but what have I done to make the situation better?
Well, I am working on making a list of Touhou fancontent creators (mostly YouTube) and sites for more than a year (it already has more than 14000 links), maybe I will publish it soon.

Afterwords:
If after reading this post you want to hate ZUN or anybody else then I think you didn't understand this post. This post shows that hate didn't change the situation for better and only made it worse.

We don't need to hate,
We need to act.
For the fans who are
Still with us.

[Burukyu]

estuve aquí yay

 

[Yuuri]

ngl lwk was starting to think touhou is dying 

[suyu_]

i'm impressed with your analysis. Well, I understand the pessimism and all of the unfortunate situations, but I still believe that touhou fandom have not yet fallen. I can't be considered an avid touhou fan (i entered the fandom 1 year and a half ago) but i guess we still have a chance, but, knowing how things happen, it's very unlikely that it'll occur (at least based on the fandom actions themselves, cited by you). Anyway, great point being brought here (i'm sure most people won't even read the first lines) and thanks for making me(us) aware of the whole thing.

 

and also, for some reason it hadn't yet sunk in for me that we are considered the black sheep of the fandom

[kymoh]

You've... scrambled my brain. I don't know what to say.

At first I just want to get clarification on your main points, because honestly, your post is huge.

Is this interpretation correct?

 

-Problem1:

        Bigger websites (discord, facebook, etc.) get more popular -> fans leave main touhou websites -> fans are in smaller divided circles (ex: discord servers) -> more divide/drama

-Problem2:

        Touhou getting enfranchised -> lower effort games -> more negativity towards the series

-Outcome:

        Combining outcomes of problems 1 & 2 -> harder for newcomers to get in -> less fans -> entire fanbase begins to degrade (fanworks and events)

-Solution:

        Everybody going back to centralized touhou websites OR creating a huge website list containing all fan circles

 

I'm really not too sure if I understood everything. Please let me know if I misunderstood anything.

[Funny Joke Here]

3 hours ago, vanyk said:

1. Persuade ZUN.

That would be near impossible. Most Fandom/Community/Whatever attempts at making a company (although you can hardly call Team Shanghai Alice a "company" as it is just one person, but I didn't have any other term to use here) notice them fail.One example I can think of is #Savetf2, which ended with TF2 team responding with a tweet and then returning to radio silence. Although because we aren't dealing with an AAA company here, we have higher chances of well.... I guess you can say "speaking up"? However the issue is that we probably would need at least a pretty sizeable minority with us and a way of persuading and forcing ZUN to stop working with Ruw, however the second part would be much easier to deal with.

Other than that I'm also quite pessmistic towards other solutions, however I don't know why as I can't really explain it. It might just be a gut-feeling though.

 

Also I apologize if I misunderstood something or didn't read something.

Edited April 21 by Funny Joke Here

[vanyk]

22 minutes ago, suyu_ said:

i'm impressed with your analysis. Well, I understand the pessimism and all of the unfortunate situations, but I still believe that touhou fandom have not yet fallen. I can't be considered an avid touhou fan (i entered the fandom 1 year and a half ago) but i guess we still have a chance, but, knowing how things happen, it's very unlikely that it'll occur (at least based on the fandom actions themselves, cited by you). Anyway, great point being brought here (i'm sure most people won't even read the first lines) and thanks for making me(us) aware of the whole thing.

Thank you for your reply. Yes, Touhou fandom has not fallen yet, and the more people will be aware of those problems the more chances we have to make Touhou fandom blooming again.

28 minutes ago, suyu_ said:

and also, for some reason it hadn't yet sunk in for me that we are considered the black sheep of the fandom

Sadly, yes. Because this is a pirate site, and after DMCA /r/touhou and Touhou Wiki decided to support Ruw's decision. There is even a group who wrote doujin circles to help them with DMCA. They even created hakureishrine.org (it is just redirect to Steam, and yes they still pay for this domain just for joke).

 

6 minutes ago, kymoh said:

You've... scrambled my brain. I don't know what to say.

At first I just want to get clarification on your main points, because honestly, your post is huge.

Thank you too, for your reply.

6 minutes ago, kymoh said:

Bigger websites (discord, facebook, etc.) get more popular -> fans leave main touhou websites -> fans are in smaller divided circles (ex: discord servers) -> more divide/drama

You understood it correctly. Just one more detail, there were dramas between main Touhou websites even between main websites.

12 minutes ago, kymoh said:

Touhou getting enfranchised -> lower effort games -> more negativity towards the series

Not only that but also some strange limitations from ZUN and Ruw.

13 minutes ago, kymoh said:

Combining outcomes of problems 1 & 2 -> harder for newcomers to get in -> less fans -> entire fanbase begins to degrade (fanworks and events)

You understood it correctly.

14 minutes ago, kymoh said:

Everybody going back to centralized touhou websites OR creating a huge website list containing all fan circles

Somewhat yes. The first solution also include forgetting about dramas at least between creators, so they could work together. Those are just my proposals and they maybe not ideal. I want to bring up this topic for discussion to find the best solution from realistic ones.

 

10 minutes ago, Funny Joke Here said:

That would be near impossible. Most Fandom/Community/Whatever attempts at making a company (although you can hardly call Team Shanghai Alice a "company" as it is just one person, but I didn't have any other term to use here) notice them fail.One example I can think of is #Savetf2, which ended with TF2 team responding with a tweet and then returning to radio silence. Although because we aren't dealing with an AAA company here, we have higher chances of well.... I guess you can say "speaking up"? However the issue is that we probably would need at least a pretty sizeable minority with us and a way of persuading and forcing ZUN to stop working with Ruw, however the second part would be much easier to deal with.

Thank you for your reply. I also think that persuading ZUN now is nearly impossible. Touhou is mostly made for Japanese fans and ZUN mostly listen only to them, so without their help it would be impossible to do it.

13 minutes ago, Funny Joke Here said:

Other than that I'm also quite pessmistic towards other solutions, however I don' know why as I can't really explain it. It might just be a gut-feeling though.

I understand it, but I don't have better solutions for now, I am sorry.

[CountVonNumenor]

It's been a long time since I have last been truly active on this forum, but I am greatly impressed to see again big threads, with a lot of interesting stuff to read and research put into it. This thread actually reminds me of something I wrote at the end of 2022, when I was a about halfway into my journey for getting into Touhou (link below, along with some bonuses). I would like to reply to multiple of the points made, but that would take me about an hour, so I will try get back to this later (it's already late in the night for me). However, you have earned my respect.

 

The thread I originally mentioned:

 

Bonus threads of potential interest (chronologically, by release date):

(a personal topic of interest back then)

(from the era of "Count reviews stuff")

(another topic of personal interest back then; oh, how the fate has turned since...)

 

(and a thread that is still going, albeit by me reviving it every once in a while; provides good example of evolving perception on a topic by regularly covering it and noticing patterns of approach and way to present the issue)

 

Alright, I will try to come back eventually with the promised reply. Until then, enjoy the lecture =) 

 

Edit: I forgot to add one thread that did waves back in the day, both here on the Moriya Shrine forum and on r/touhou, due to how dense I used to be in trying to understand why something was as appealing and prevalent as it is (and I still do not fully know too, especially as I dropped the consumption of such stuff for good, and for my own good) 

 

Edited April 21 by CountVonNumenor

[Reitisen]

Mmmm, this topic has been something of a long time brewing, hasn't it?

1.) General groundworks, fanbase fragmentation

Spoiler

First off, uniting the fans is generally hard, if not impossible. As you said, we are made up of many circles that consist of many different goals and alignments alongside different languages that see things very differently. This sort of bloating into many different groups is partly due to how long Touhou has gone on for and what kind of goal most people saw Touhou as. (Len'en included.)

It is not the fault of the fans; as you said, most, if not all, Touhou fans have come into contact with Touhou either through piracy sites such as this site or media that contains Touhou (Doujins, videos, music, and art). This, alongside the inherent age of the Touhou series, is something not much experienced with most games due to most of them corroding from a focused goal or the creators themselves losing interest, which fans themselves have to make up for what they see as the main draw of Touhou. (which is probably why such elitist culture exists and why we are here now.) Kind of ironic when ZUN himself hated the fact that back then SHMUPS had tons of bullets https://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Embodiment_of_Scarlet_Devil/Afterword
As translated directly:

Quote

However, to narrow the scope to only danmaku shmups, I'm feeling a bit dissatisfied with the direction that it's currently headed. The main issues are the rapid inflation of difficulty, games that have only a lot of bullets, effects that are fancy and beautiful, but are not easy on the eyes; and games with new systems that don't require dodging bullets. That is my opinion.

Many of them are usually fun to play as games, but even though that might be fine as it is, in some instances it might give the impression that "Dodging bullets is not fun; of course there are going to be a lot of bullets in an shmup." If they don't try to find dodging bullets fun, why don't they try to reconsider why they would play a shmup if the enemies' shots were gone?

Set aside the communications, if such collaboration between many parts of the fandom could accept differences and make up a whole community. There remains one key issue for these communities: the drive to continue being part of that community. Which is why this fanbase has drifted into many groups spread across many major and minor sites across many nationalities. People aren't going to agree to remain one one site for everything as more people = more complicated issues. For example, some people had an issue with an Helldivers 2 Discord server which mostly had some genuine fans but had problems with the moderation of a person. Another would be how people would run such a site for the collective whole, as many people have different interpretations of rules, you would need to exact rules while making sure to not become something like Reddit and control the moderation team (something that would require a well-meaning moderation team while making sure they don't abuse powers), while also making an incentive for people to continue being on that site. There are many more as you have provided.

2.) ZUN himself and franchising

Spoiler

There is something most people forget about ZUN, he himself is kind of old, around 47 as of time of writing (he has a family too!). His motivation to continue creating the games comes from the inherent continued support of fans while keeping it to his own way. That itself doesn't hold up well as most big creators of certain franchises have expanded upon their popularity to create studios and multiple series based off of their popular IP. This is something ZUN seems to not really want as it seems he intends his games to be his personal diary, but from events that have occurred, he has made agreements with franchising Touhou to allow Gacha games to be made. I mean it literally as he did show up in a TLW stream. It is as you said, it seems he never really cared about the quality of the games that he allows licensing to, yet I find it ironic when he himself hated the idea of AI creating garbage when TLW exists to shove garbage down the throats of many fans in exchange for a crappy gacha game that isn't even good in gameplay and continues to peddle alternate skins of an already power crept game with meat walls as an excuse to continue the farce. This, and your mention of other issues leads me to believe he is extremely blind or he knows he is allowing this type of content to exist.

 

3.) Doesn't he only interact with his JP fans?

Spoiler

Tough question, short answer probably not, long answer no. 
He knows that he western fanbase exists, (heck there is even a video of him recently trying to interact with some of the major sites from the west) 

I feel like probably this interaction is due to his local interaction with mostly JP friends and y'know, he doesn't know how to speak English, but keep in mind he has had some interaction with other English fans such as Toby Fox who has been kind of interacting a lot more with the JP space who has had a hand in the Pokemon music and as of recently, that music video. (you know what I mean with the Flandre Undertale thing) This might be an outlier, but who knows as ZUN's life is mostly seen interacting with his JP friends who have made works based off of Touhou in his streams that he usually does from time to time. (We don't really know if he has more people who come from the West and knows how to contact him personally as a friend) His own work mostly comes from interactions in both real life and what he thinks Touhou should be, so I do think that there is a possibility for some interaction, but only very strong goals with simple messages that have enough attention might grab the attention of ZUN from one of his English speaking friends to make it that way. So uh, impossible unless you know of somebody who knows ZUN who wants to bring up this issue and actually say this kind of issue to ZUN without the kind of negatives of criticism.
set aside that, I think this is mostly due to how most people see Touhou as a Japan thing as most of the Touhou Fans exist within Japan and the region surrounding it. This kind of stigmata isn't going to change, not in the future, nor near future. As most from the West see the focus of many JP companies advertising only to JP fans who are quite normalized to the idea of Gacha as you have mentioned with BA being kind of the new JP hot topic Gacha game in the comic market. That aside, the decrease from Reitaisai seems alarming, but gonna ask since I can't seem to find the website holding that information. 

Where exactly did you find these tables of attendance?

It seems Google can't seem to find this information (probably due to how crap it is at finding stuff) and I really want to know just to make sure this information comes from a solid source and also add to the database of important sites that I have not cataloged for information. 

I'm gonna stop here for now and let this thread build up. I'm interested in seeing how this develops as it has been some time since something like this captured my attention.

Edited April 22 by Reitisen

[vanyk]

4 hours ago, CountVonNumenor said:

It's been a long time since I have last been truly active on this forum, but I am greatly impressed to see again big threads, with a lot of interesting stuff to read and research put into it. This thread actually reminds me of something I wrote at the end of 2022, when I was a about halfway into my journey for getting into Touhou (link below, along with some bonuses). I would like to reply to multiple of the points made, but that would take me about an hour, so I will try get back to this later (it's already late in the night for me). However, you have earned my respect.

Thank you for your reply. I am grad you liked this post and and I would be grad for your analysis.

I have read most of your threads before I created an account here. You really made great analysis there.

 

4 hours ago, Reitisen said:

First off, uniting the fans is generally hard, if not impossible. As you said, we are made up of many circles that consist of many different goals and alignments alongside different languages that see things very differently. This sort of bloating into many different groups is partly due to how long Touhou has gone on for and what kind of goal most people saw Touhou as. (Len'en included.)

Thank you for your reply. I agree that uniting all the fans nearly impossible now. So I purposed a little more realistic solutuon (only unite creators). I didn't thought about a language factor, a really good point (but from what I know that is not that big problem in other fandoms.

 

4 hours ago, Reitisen said:

It is not the fault of the fans; as you said, most, if not all, Touhou fans have come into contact with Touhou either through piracy sites such as this site or media that contains Touhou (Doujins, videos, music, and art). This, alongside the inherent age of the Touhou series, is something not much experienced with most games due to most of them corroding from a focused goal or the creators themselves losing interest, which fans themselves have to make up for what they see as the main draw of Touhou.

Mostly agree. I hope correctly understood the second part. I don't think the age is not a serious problem I think, because if the series is really good there would be fans even after 50 years. But yes, newer Touhou games are very different from older ones (not everyone likes it, but for me it is okey if they are made well).

4 hours ago, Reitisen said:

Kind of ironic when ZUN himself hated the fact that back then SHMUPS had tons of bullets

Also kind of ironic that ZUN wanted to create a shmup for PC98 which had way more bullets than Caves shmups.

4 hours ago, Reitisen said:

Set aside the communications, if such collaboration between many parts of the fandom could accept differences and make up a whole community. There remains one key issue for these communities: the drive to continue being part of that community. Which is why this fanbase has drifted into many groups spread across many major and minor sites across many nationalities. People aren't going to agree to remain one one site for everything as more people = more complicated issues. For example, some people had an issue with an Helldivers 2 Discord server which mostly had some genuine fans but had problems with the moderation of a person. Another would be how people would run such a site for the collective whole, as many people have different interpretations of rules, you would need to exact rules while making sure to not become something like Reddit and control the moderation team (something that would require a well-meaning moderation team while making sure they don't abuse powers), while also making an incentive for people to continue being on that site. There are many more as you have provided.

Agree with everything.

5 hours ago, Reitisen said:

There is something most people forget about ZUN, he himself is kind of old, around 47 as of time of writing (he has a family too!). His motivation to continue creating the games comes from the inherent continued support of fans while keeping it to his own way. That itself doesn't hold up well as most big creators of certain franchises have expanded upon their popularity to create studios and multiple series based off of their popular IP.

Agree with everything.

 

5 hours ago, Reitisen said:

This is something ZUN seems to not really want as it seems he intends his games to be his personal diary, but from events that have occurred, he has made agreements with franchising Touhou to allow Gacha games to be made. I mean it literally as he did show up in a TLW stream. It is as you said, it seems he never really cared about the quality of the games that he allows licensing to, yet I find it ironic when he himself hated the idea of AI creating garbage when TLW exists to shove garbage down the throats of many fans in exchange for a crappy gacha game that isn't even good in gameplay and continues to peddle alternate skins of an already power crept game with meat walls as an excuse to continue the farce. This, and your mention of other issues leads me to believe he is extremely blind or he knows he is allowing this type of content to exist.

Yes, it is a big problem. That is one of the main reasons why fans leave the fandom.

 

5 hours ago, Reitisen said:

Tough question, short answer probably not, long answer no. 
He knows that he western fanbase exists, (heck there is even a video of him recently trying to interact with some of the major sites from the west) 

Yes, you are right. He also knows about Chinese community, because he visited China and met Touhou fans there. (Am I the only one who has strange feelings about this video?

 

5 hours ago, Reitisen said:

I feel like probably this interaction is due to his local interaction with mostly JP friends and y'know, he doesn't know how to speak English, but keep in mind he has had some interaction with other English fans such as Toby Fox who has been kind of interacting a lot more with the JP space who has had a hand in the Pokemon music and as of recently, that music video. (you know what I mean with the Flandre Undertale thing) This might be an outlier, but who knows as ZUN's life is mostly seen interacting with his JP friends who have made works based off of Touhou in his streams that he usually does from time to time. (We don't really know if he has more people who come from the West and knows how to contact him personally as a friend) His own work mostly comes from interactions in both real life and what he thinks Touhou should be, so I do think that there is a possibility for some interaction, but only very strong goals with simple messages that have enough attention might grab the attention of ZUN from one of his English speaking friends to make it that way. So uh, impossible unless you know of somebody who knows ZUN who wants to bring up this issue and actually say this kind of issue to ZUN without the kind of negatives of criticism.
set aside that, I think this is mostly due to how most people see Touhou as a Japan thing as most of the Touhou Fans exist within Japan and the region surrounding it.

Agree with all.

5 hours ago, Reitisen said:

the focus of many JP companies advertising only to JP fans who are quite normalized to the idea of Gacha as you have mentioned with BA being kind of the new JP hot topic Gacha game in the comic market.

And that is a problem that they are that used to gachas.

 

5 hours ago, Reitisen said:

Where exactly did you find these tables of attendance?

I thought that was obvious: mostly thwiki.cc

Comiket: https://thwiki.cc/Comic_Market

Reitaisai: https://thwiki.cc/Reitaisai

Kouroumu: https://thwiki.cc/东方红楼梦

Meikasai: https://thwiki.cc/东方名华祭

Autumn Reitaisai: https://thwiki.cc/博丽神社秋季例大祭

Hakudenkai 2022: https://extra.hakudenkai.games

Hakudenkai 2023: https://hakudenkai.games/

 

Again, thank you for your interesting thoughts.

[Banana Man 4577]

Its like you said, we're past the golden age of touhou. We are no longer in a time where touhou was as internet culturally relevant anymore. That unfortunately happens to a lot of series that are really popular on the internet. However I think we are far from dead, I think right now we are in a time where Touhou is giving rise to successors but it isn't being shown to the public more because its successors are more popular and good for them.

To me, the touhou community is like the Classic Doom Community, even though its golden age has long past its community is still thriving.  There are still people out there creating WAD's for Classic Doom and just like how people are still creating things for touhou. Both of these series still have boost of popularity with My house for Doom and Luna Nights for touhou (That was the game that got me into the franchise in the first place).

We are just passing the torch to a new generation and as far as I see it, this new generation is doing well at keeping it lit.

[vanyk]

3 hours ago, Banana Man 4577 said:

Its like you said, we're past the golden age of touhou. We are no longer in a time where touhou was as internet culturally relevant anymore. That unfortunately happens to a lot of series that are really popular on the internet. However I think we are far from dead, I think right now we are in a time where Touhou is giving rise to successors but it isn't being shown to the public more because its successors are more popular and good for them.

To me, the touhou community is like the Classic Doom Community, even though its golden age has long past its community is still thriving.  There are still people out there creating WAD's for Classic Doom and just like how people are still creating things for touhou. Both of these series still have boost of popularity with My house for Doom and Luna Nights for touhou (That was the game that got me into the franchise in the first place).

We are just passing the torch to a new generation and as far as I see it, this new generation is doing well at keeping it lit.

Thank you for your reply. Mostly agree with you. I understand that each series has its rises and falls, and that we probably will never have the second golden age (still hoping for seeing the silver age). Touhou is far from death now, but the problem that Touhou is slowly losing its main Japanese fanbase.

I wonder if there are a lot of successors? I can only name Len'en, Undertale and BA.

I thought about comparing Touhou and Doom community. From what I know, there are still new records in old games, hardcore fans still are trying to beat the impossible challenges, Classic Doom community creates around 30 WADs a week, while Chinese LusSTG community creates around 15 scripts a week. But the problem here is that John Romero and other developers don't impose new strange restrictions, while ZUN and Ruw do.

Thank you for your interesting thoughts.

[Ken Hisuag]

On 4/21/2024 at 10:53 AM, vanyk said:

We need to act.

Counter Point: Is the state of the fandom at any time, past current or future, necessarily concerning? What is the actual impact on you or me if this state of affairs continues or gets "worse?"

I've been around a while now, and I've seen many fluctuations in the little "circle" we have here. I don't always appreciate them, but they don't bother me overly much; ultimately, my life is not going to be effected by what's happening here. Touhou is the reason I came here, but it isn't really the reason I'm still here now, and it was never going to be. My "About Me" page is forever invisible (why does this exist I don't understand it's been years), but if y'all could see it you'd see a description of what I believe defined my priorities in regard to my interactions:

Bible believer
Music enthusiast
Amateur meme propagator

That's me (although I may not live up to the last one anymore), and whatever happens to Touhou and its fandom isn't going to change that.

I get the impression you want something out of the fandom that you don't believe you can get in its current state. What is it?

[vanyk]

56 minutes ago, Ken Hisuag said:

Counter Point: Is the state of the fandom at any time, past current or future, necessarily concerning? What is the actual impact on you or me if this state of affairs continues or gets "worse?"

I've been around a while now, and I've seen many fluctuations in the little "circle" we have here. I don't always appreciate them, but they don't bother me overly much; ultimately, my life is not going to be effected by what's happening here. Touhou is the reason I came here, but it isn't really the reason I'm still here now, and it was never going to be. My "About Me" page is forever invisible (why does this exist I don't understand it's been years), but if y'all could see it you'd see a description of what I believe defined my priorities in regard to my interactions:

Bible believer
Music enthusiast
Amateur meme propagator

That's me (although I may not live up to the last one anymore), and whatever happens to Touhou and its fandom isn't going to change that.

Thank you for your opinion. I am grad to see criticism of my post.

I understand that we may not to care about the state of Touhou and just watch what will happen next. I understand that internet and fandoms are just part (a small one) of our real lives. I understand that if something bad happens to franchise we can move to next one. I understand that this site is not that big and not many people visit forums here.

But for some reason Touhou became something important for me. And it would be sad for me if this series would die. I am a little guy, and literally noname outside of this forum. I cannot do anything big alone, but I thought that doing a small step for changing the situation for better is better than doing nothing at lot. I hope that this discussion won't just stay in this "little circle" and would go upper (but for now it is just hope).

1 hour ago, Ken Hisuag said:

I get the impression you want something out of the fandom that you don't believe you can get in its current state. What is it?

Yes, I understand that I cannot change the situation alone greatly. I made some purposes which aren't too realistic, the others are somewhat more achievable. 

What is it?
I still cannot describe it. Maybe a hope that after this little step there would be more bigger steps. Maybe stupidity. Maybe I am just overthinking everything. Who knows?

 

And again, thank you for your reply, I really appreciate it.

[CountVonNumenor]

On 4/22/2024 at 7:40 AM, vanyk said:

Thank you for your reply. I am grad you liked this post and and I would be grad for your analysis.

I have read most of your threads before I created an account here. You really made great analysis there.

Still open to conversation in any of these suggested threads...