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My Little Pony is the West's Touhou

Spongelash

Spongelash

Touhou Traveler
One of the aspects of Touhou that most entrances me is its cultural impact. It's sprawling collection of fan works, the physical fan community forming around conventions and physical products, how it has rooted itself into the internet... many other media franchises have similarities with Touhou culturally but very few I think manage to reach the whole breadth that Touhou does just as a single setting.

While pondering this I was wondering if the west had any communities which existed as an equivalent to the Touhou community. Thinking it through, I disqualified this or that franchise for missing this or that element until I landed on a true contender: My Little Pony.

It is sort of a funny comparison at first but if you are at all familiar with both franchises the similarities might start popping out at you immediately. When considering this, I am mostly going to be speaking about the My Little Pony fanbase in its prime. Also, I was never a part of this fanbase, so forgive any mistakes I might make if you are more familiar.
  • Passionate Fan Communities: Both franchises have or had what I would describe as cult communities. They both consist of the kind of settings which some people choose to order their whole personas around, at least online. People's profile pictures or names will reference either series, whether or not the site that profile is on relates to the franchise. Popular memes are converted into versions using either setting. There are enough fan spaces that people can spend whole days just interacting with other fans of the setting. Even without an interest you'll be exposed to it every once and a while because of their fanbase's prevalence.

  • Fan Work Volume: We in the Touhou community are very familiar with the large amount of folks who have never actually interacted with any official Touhou content, and I'd venture to say that while it isn't true to the same extent with MLP conditions exist for it to be just as prevalent. These conditions being the prevalence and popularity of fan works as alternative ways to dive into the content. YouTube is the biggest source of this interaction at least for Touhou, and similarly especially in its prime you will see MLP also making an incredibly strong presence there. Fan songs, animations, stories... MLP exists in every possible category just as Touhou does. Games as well. When I speak about people who know about the franchise without interacting with the official media, for MLP, I'd be one of them: I'm a fan of the HOI4 mod Equestria at War primarily.

  • The Physical Community: This is where I think both franchises separate themselves from other competitors. Reading the first two points you may find yourself thinking of plenty of other franchises and communities that fit the same criteria, but where I think the difference is really made is when a setting can support a dedicated physical fan community. Touhou started entwined with physical meet-ups, of course, but it eventually spiraled into having its own physical events entirely dedicated to it, like Reitaisai. The MLP community similarly was able to host many dedicated physical events, with the most notable probably being BronyCon. And when talking about physical media, while Touhou certainly has the edge I believe due to the culture of physical media that existed in Japan at least near the beginning, at BronyCon you would also find many physical productions of MLP fan works, even including written media such as fan fiction prints.

  • The Character Focus: I didn't want to leave this point out. I'd say that the knowledge of Touhou characters far outweighs general knowledge of Touhou plots or even the setting of Gensokyo as a whole, and I'd also argue that MLP had the same effect. Both series have characters with distinctive obvious designs and characters with clear appealing archetypes (or at least turned into clear appealing archetypes by fans). As such you have people identifying or obsessing over single characters even apart from the media that they appear in.
As I mentioned in my list, I think that there are many franchises which achieve multiple of these points, but I'd argue that most only obtain a couple of them and usually to a lesser extent than Touhou or MLP. The physical community is a big gate; there are a lot of media companies that can support a physical community, thinking of events like BlizzCon, and certainly many interest groups that can support physical communities, thinking of the many ComicCons, but very few individual settings that can support a dedicated physical group.

What do you folks think? Do you also see the cultural similarities I mentioned, or am I totally off-base? And, thinking of western franchises, do you have any other proposals for those creations that match the impact of Touhou?
 
The only main thing I really know about MLP is of course with Friendship is Magic. My sister begged me to start watching it with her a couple years ago and I so I did. Though it took us probably about half a year to finish it. It was pretty good at the least (but some episodes were better than others).
Anyway, I don't know much about the overall MLP fandom (as aside to some extent with Touhou, I generally don't interact with fandoms much), but I suppose I might know enough to agree with you about how MLP has a very established fandom much like Touhou. But other series I would say have had largely the same impact are ones such as Star Wars, Star Trek, the Marvel and DC superhero comics, alongside others. Of course, those are much older than Touhou's own existence.
 
It also has groomers, so i guess everything can be the western equivalent of touhou
 
SateriCat17 said:
The only main thing I really know about MLP is of course with Friendship is Magic. My sister begged me to start watching it with her a couple years ago and I so I did. Though it took us probably about half a year to finish it. It was pretty good at the least (but some episodes were better than others).
Anyway, I don't know much about the overall MLP fandom (as aside to some extent with Touhou, I generally don't interact with fandoms much), but I suppose I might know enough to agree with you about how MLP has a very established fandom much like Touhou. But other series I would say have had largely the same impact are ones such as Star Wars, Star Trek, the Marvel and DC superhero comics, alongside others. Of course, those are much older than Touhou's own existence.
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I get what you mean about Star Wars. Now that I'm thinking about it, I think an additional spirit towards what I was talking about in the main post is almost about the fan base outsizing its original work. When I think of the breadth of creations withing Touhou and MLP it seems that they almost form their own space and really could exist even if their originators died. With something like Star Wars, it always feels that the official creation massively outsizes any dedicated fanbase, and really content creation is more corporatized in general such that plenty of works that would otherwise have been fan creations were instead legally entwined with Star Wars as a trade mark.

I don't know enough of Star Trek to write for it, so I'll take your word.

I think that Marvel and DC can be debatable. I guess it depends if you think of them as single settings, which I suppose they really are, though with the amount of reboots and different universes it is hard for me to think of them that way. In that sense I suppose I should say that I was specifically talking about Gen 4 of MLP, because I would consider the other generations as other settings.

So I see what you mean. I think that out of the ones that you mentioned, Marvel and DC are the best fits for what I am talking about. Additionally I think that you've helped me discover that another part of the spirit is the relationship and size between fan works and the original work, and how much it feels like fans have ownership over the ideas.
 
I think this is a genuinely strong comparison, especially if we are talking about the MLP fandom at its peak rather than comparing the two original works themselves.

The similarities you listed are real: both fandoms became identity-based communities rather than ordinary groups of consumers. People could enter through music, animation, memes, fan fiction, games, or even mods without first engaging with the official source material. Both also developed enough creative output and social infrastructure that a fan could spend most of their online life inside the fandom. The existence of dedicated conventions and physical fan productions is especially important, because many large online fandoms never develop that kind of independent offline ecosystem.

I would only add one major distinction: MLP and Touhou reached similar-looking fandom cultures through very different structures.

MLP is fundamentally a corporate media franchise whose fan culture grew far beyond the audience and uses originally intended by the rights holder. Touhou, by contrast, was born inside Japanese doujin culture. Its original works, distribution history, conventions, derivative-work guidelines, music culture, and fan economy have been intertwined with fan creation from the beginning.

Because of that, I would say that MLP may be the closest Western equivalent to the Touhou fandom, but not necessarily to Touhou’s underlying creative system.

Touhou is not only a franchise with a huge fandom. It also functions as a shared creative platform. Fan creators are able to produce and sell music, games, books, animation, and physical works within a relatively stable and widely understood framework. The boundary between “the audience” and “the creators” is unusually weak. Many important people in the community are not merely famous fans, but musicians, artists, game developers, translators, archivists, and convention organizers.

There is also a difference in longevity. Brony culture seems closely associated with a particular generation of the internet and with the peak years of Friendship Is Magic. Touhou has certainly experienced rises and declines in popularity, but it has repeatedly adapted to new platforms and generations. It moved from Japanese doujin events and bulletin boards to Nico Nico, YouTube, Steam, Bilibili, social media, global meme culture, and local fan conventions in many countries.

In fact, I've been trying to find out who the "Western Touhou" is. Before I fully understood the MLP craze in the West, I always thought this niche belonged to Undertale. After all, Undertale is like a Touhou clone in many ways, although it lacks large-scale offline events, and its characters are difficult to completely separate from the original storyline.

If I had a few more options, I would also consider Homestuck, Sonic, Warhammer 40k, FNAF, and Minecraft as strong contenders.

MLP may still be the best overall comparison because it combines character attachment, fan music, animation, fiction, memes, conventions, and physical fan culture in one place.

So my conclusion would be: MLP was probably the closest Western parallel to Touhou as a fandom experience, especially at its peak. But Touhou remains unusual because the fan community is not merely attached to the work; fan creation is part of the work’s historical and institutional foundation.

In other words, MLP became a fan-created cultural world around a commercial franchise, while Touhou developed as a creator-centered cultural world from within doujin culture itself.
 
I don't really know much about MLP fanbase besides the song discord and these misandrist ragebaiters on tiktok having one of the characters on pfp
 
不人气的大狸子 said:
I think this is a genuinely strong comparison, especially if we are talking about the MLP fandom at its peak rather than comparing the two original works themselves.

...

So my conclusion would be: MLP was probably the closest Western parallel to Touhou as a fandom experience, especially at its peak. But Touhou remains unusual because the fan community is not merely attached to the work; fan creation is part of the work’s historical and institutional foundation.

In other words, MLP became a fan-created cultural world around a commercial franchise, while Touhou developed as a creator-centered cultural world from within doujin culture itself.
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I generally agree with your criticisms. Of course, no one can deny that the MLP fandom as it was got stunted by the actual end of Gen 4 and as such will never really get the lengthy cultural development that Touhou has. Remnants of the fanbase still exist here and there and I don't think it will disappear for a long time, but it can't compare to a series which is still in active development and has been for so long.

As for how the fan works relate to the official works, you are correct that there is an inherent difference between the corporate treatment of MLP and the more indie treatment of Touhou, like I touched on a bit in my third point. I would say that many MLP fans simply ignored the legal implications and made and sold their media and products anyways and really the decreased volume in comparison to Touhou is probably more caused by that earlier fact of less development and also just the undeveloped base of professional fan development in America, but I wouldn't deny that the corporate structuring of most franchises has a big effect on the lack of that base.

I thought of some of those franchises you listed as well. I think Homestuck is a really good mention! It falls short of having its own real notable conventions but had such a presence at multi-fandom cons that it almost makes it there. I think that maybe it was still a bit too niche in its own time but certainly the fanbase it did have was very dedicated. Warhammer 40k could probably be a good contender too, really, especially if you consider Adepticon or tournaments to be types of conventions for 40K. Minecraft is a really weird one... I guess you are right that it fits most of the things that I noted about Touhou, but for such different reasons that to make the comparison feels wrong somehow. Mostly because the "characters" that got people so attached to Minecraft were real people rather than fictional elements. I considered Undertale, and TF2 really, but disqualified them for the same reason that you noted. They are similar in how the fandom treats them, but don't have the impact as of yet I was looking for.

Thanks for your thoughts! It seems that you really understood what I was writing, and brought up some strong contenders. I agree with your ultimate conclusion.
 
MonkeGaming67 said:
no it's not bro that's TF2 or STALKER. TF2 is ingrained in the internet culture of every gaming community west of Poland and STALKER is the same but for the post-Soviet sphere.
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Yes, I considered this, but I think that TF2 is missing out on the physical community. TF2 certainly makes a fair representation at various multi-fandom cons but there is no "TF2-con" as it is. TF2 also has a character-focused fandom that creates a good many works but given that the origins of Touhou itself are inseparable from physical conventions I don't think it is ignorable that TF2 is lacking in that aspect.

As for STALKER, well, it certainly has a cult following, but just in terms of scale or media-production I would contend that it doesn't compare at all. Not too character focused, certainly little in terms of physical presence, and what fan work media does that community really have that has broken out? Cheeki breeki remixes?
 
Spongelash said:
Yes, I considered this, but I think that TF2 is missing out on the physical community. TF2 certainly makes a fair representation at various multi-fandom cons but there is no "TF2-con" as it is. TF2 also has a character-focused fandom that creates a good many works but given that the origins of Touhou itself are inseparable from physical conventions I don't think it is ignorable that TF2 is lacking in that aspect.

As for STALKER, well, it certainly has a cult following, but just in terms of scale or media-production I would contend that it doesn't compare at all. Not too character focused, certainly little in terms of physical presence, and what fan work media does that community really have that has broken out? Cheeki breeki remixes?
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Stalker probably has a shit ton of other fanworks but they're only in Russian and on websites that haven't been touched since 2010
 
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