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do you think the touhou community should stay small?

I think anyone who has a smidgen of interest in touhou and touhou-adjacent media is a fan. I think what's small is the danmaku/fan danmaku community for touhou.

Also I find it obnoxious that some fans gatekeep by saying that you need to 1cc the game to be a fan. Absolutely retarded thing to say.
 
Oh my god — I didn't expect to see this question even at Moriya Shrine. Over the past few years I've seen so many similar threads on Baidu Tieba (China's Reddit) that it's become visually exhausting.


To get to the conclusion first: whatever measures Touhou fans try to take to preserve the “purity” of the Touhou community, that is simply impossible. I believe this conclusion would hold true in the West as well. The niche character of the Touhou fandom and the loss of its supposed purity are not only inevitable, they are the natural outcome in accordance with the laws of cultural development. This change is not a tragedy; it is the natural maturation of a creative cultural organism.


First, I never considered the Touhou community to be small. Some people deliberately downplay Touhou’s historical position within the doujin scene, but just yesterday someone in China counted 4.35 million Touhou videos on YouTube. You could argue that most of those videos target the Japanese Touhou community, but the principal foundation of the Touhou doujin empire — doujin music is knows no national borders.


I don’t know exactly how Touhou has developed in the West, but in China it has already formed a complete ecosystem with comprehensive coverage across platforms such as Bilibili, QQ, and NetEase Cloud Music.


Moreover, with the revolutionary shift in distribution methods — viral platforms led by TikTok — a vast amount of Touhou content has long since broken through insular boundaries. From games to music, manga, and merchandise, the Touhou IP has been deeply integrated into the ACG (anime–comic–game) industry chain and has become an iconic symbol of otaku culture.


Face the fact: Generation Alpha clearly shows strong interest in Touhou. Compared with Generation Z, Generation Alpha has more channels to access the communities they want to explore, they mature earlier, and they possess higher purchasing power. In Japan especially, many Touhou fans who are still in elementary school are already producing doujin artwork.


Touhou’s appeal lies precisely in its openness and inclusivity. If a community becomes stagnant, accepts no newcomers, and lets its discourse be monopolized by long-time insiders, that is a truly alarming development — it means the community has lost its vitality.
 
不人气的大狸子 said:
Oh my god — I didn't expect to see this question even at Moriya Shrine. Over the past few years I've seen so many similar threads on Baidu Tieba (China's Reddit) that it's become visually exhausting.


To get to the conclusion first: whatever measures Touhou fans try to take to preserve the “purity” of the Touhou community, that is simply impossible. I believe this conclusion would hold true in the West as well. The niche character of the Touhou fandom and the loss of its supposed purity are not only inevitable, they are the natural outcome in accordance with the laws of cultural development. This change is not a tragedy; it is the natural maturation of a creative cultural organism.


First, I never considered the Touhou community to be small. Some people deliberately downplay Touhou’s historical position within the doujin scene, but just yesterday someone in China counted 4.35 million Touhou videos on YouTube. You could argue that most of those videos target the Japanese Touhou community, but the principal foundation of the Touhou doujin empire — doujin music is knows no national borders.


I don’t know exactly how Touhou has developed in the West, but in China it has already formed a complete ecosystem with comprehensive coverage across platforms such as Bilibili, QQ, and NetEase Cloud Music.


Moreover, with the revolutionary shift in distribution methods — viral platforms led by TikTok — a vast amount of Touhou content has long since broken through insular boundaries. From games to music, manga, and merchandise, the Touhou IP has been deeply integrated into the ACG (anime–comic–game) industry chain and has become an iconic symbol of otaku culture.


Face the fact: Generation Alpha clearly shows strong interest in Touhou. Compared with Generation Z, Generation Alpha has more channels to access the communities they want to explore, they mature earlier, and they possess higher purchasing power. In Japan especially, many Touhou fans who are still in elementary school are already producing doujin artwork.


Touhou’s appeal lies precisely in its openness and inclusivity. If a community becomes stagnant, accepts no newcomers, and lets its discourse be monopolized by long-time insiders, that is a truly alarming development — it means the community has lost its vitality.
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This is why you the G.O.A.T man.
 
Here are my two cents: I don't think that fandoms are inherently toxic or fun but instead it's the individual persons you see and/or interact with that decide whether the fandom experience is toxic or not. If the individual persons you see and/or interact with are toxic then the fandom experience will of course be toxic. If the individual persons you see and/or interact with are fun however then the fandom experience will of course be fun. Lumping an entire group of people as toxic is frankly incredibly rude. If you don't want fandoms to be toxic I'd suggest to just ignore the bad apples and instead focus on the fresh apples and support their work. You're giving the toxic fans power by engaging with them. Even if your efforts don't drastically change the fandom at least your experience will be fun, no? Also, to answer the question: I don't think size matters much so long as there is enough activity, fun and balanced growth in the fandom. Not too many people leaving the fandom and enough people joining the fandom. If I got anything wrong in my post please feel free to correct me.
 
不人气的大狸子 said:
Face the fact: Generation Alpha clearly shows strong interest in Touhou. Compared with Generation Z, Generation Alpha has more channels to access the communities they want to explore, they mature earlier, and they possess higher purchasing power. In Japan especially, many Touhou fans who are still in elementary school are already producing doujin artwork.
Click to expand...
Common Generation Alpha W
 
Buwako said:
its not THAT small, but its not really big enough to where a decent amount of people can recgonize what it is or to the point where you can consider it mainstream. do you think it should stay as a niche series with a little community or should it gain more popularity to where more people will recgonize it and more people are fans of it?
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idk the touhou community is already enormous lol

have you seen their creative output?
 
Buwako said:
sorry, let me rephrase that: should touhou become more mainstream outside of japan? i guess i should've specified more, since it is one of the most popular things in japan.

it could just be where i live, but touhou is practically nonexistent in my area. i dont think even the anime kids know its existence, despite all the popular memes coming from it. the one and only time i have ever been lucky to find touhou merch was at a japanese store that was selling random items from japan and they happened to have those touhou keychains a company was selling. as far as im concerned, they got rid of them within a couple of weeks. every time i have asked people if they knew what touhou was irl, they say they dont. almost every time i tried asking a friend to try touhou, they tell me that they dont like bullet hell. sure, you can find people from the west who know about touhou online, but to me its more meaningful to talk about your favorite interests in person with friends who like the same thing instead of through a screen. not that im saying i dont like talking about touhou online, but online can only be so much.

i dont think touhou is big in the west, but that doesnt mean theres not fans of it.
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Ideally, yes, in the sense that no one should feel as alone in their interest as you've described. But we can't really force that situation to change from the outside. There's no marketing campaign that will install Comiket equivalents across the West. What is happening, slowly, is that fan games on Steam and local conventions are starting to crank that missing infrastructure from the ground up. And if the franchise grows, it grows. The fear of "bad apples" or fandom toxicity (at least from what i've seen in the first page) isn't really a reason to resist that every community has its difficult people regardless of size, and hell, Touhou has survived plenty. The real question is whether the spaces that emerge will be ones where someone like you, who wants to talk about it in person, can actually find their people.
 
Looking back at it, i've come to the conclusion that touhou really is not worth it. You'd have a more respectful handling of your time and energy getting into the things that touhou takes from than rationalize the fact that you like a series that people only mention for the image. I look back at old fangames from the "golden age" (circa 2005 - 2015) and wonder if the series didn't go the way of pandering to the lowest common denominator that don't even like japanese media. There's nothing to look forward to in terms of official stuff anyways so...
 
Maybe something will grow for the people who still want it, but for me? That's pretty much it. I got into Touhou around 2020 or something, and somewhere along the way I just stopped keeping up with the new releases, since it became more of a stress than actual enjoyment. I look at media of it here and there, but I started poking around for something else in the meantime.

And what happened? I joined an even worse fandom by any normal standard. Mostly dead, a bunch of controversies in the past, lame creator, et cetera. Unlike Touhou, I can actually just appreciate the games like they're brand new, y'know? I've also been doing stuff for the fandom, which I never did before other than managing blogs. It's weirdly nice, having a space that's quiet. Nobody's out here turning what you love into the same five jokes for people who couldn't care less.
 
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As you can see on the chart, this data irrefutably proves that the Touhou fandom is less degenerate when it's bigger. If you think otherwise, that's only because you're nostalgic for a past that didn't really happen.
Idkism said:
I look back at old fangames from the "golden age" (circa 2005 - 2015) and wonder if the series didn't go the way of pandering to the lowest common denominator that don't even like japanese media.
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Why is that time called the golden age? Are the pre-Steam fan games really that much better than the modern ones?
 
sumwun said:
As you can see on the chart, this data irrefutably proves that the Touhou fandom is less degenerate when it's bigger. If you think otherwise, that's only because you're nostalgic for a past that didn't really happen.
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That's because it's a overused joke like the rest of the infamous flanderizations.
 
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