SoundOfRayne

Actually, I had the same experience when I picked up Azure Reflections, the side-scrolling STG fangame. Cirno was the third playable character in it, and throughout my playthrough, I couldn't get my mind off of her very distinct voice. I knew I'd heard it from somewhere, but I put my finger on it. Then I made it to the credits and found out that she was voiced by Yuka Iguchi. For the record, if you haven't played Azure Reflections to hear it for yourself, I strongly encourage looking up a playthrough to hear her voice. It's fantastic casting, and I consider her voice to be the canon Cirno voice. Yuka's got a lot of VA roles under her belt, but I knew her specifically because she played my favorite character, Hinata Miyake, from my favorite anime, A Place Further than the Universe. After finding that, I also found out that she voiced Tewi in A Summer Day's Dream. Much less interesting, but it also showed me that Reimu there was played by Mai Nakahara, who plays Nagisa Furukawa in my second favorite anime, Clannad. So yeah. It was cool to see that everything related to Japan does eventually come around to Touhou if you look hard enough. Oh, and @CountVonNumenor, you probably noticed, but in Azure Reflections, Rina Satou does reprise her role as Reimu there too. It wasn't shown in the list you provided, but I figured you'd appreciate it.

Well, this is it. Made to California mostly unscathed, and all that's left to do now is go to bed and wait for morning. Getting to sleep is gonna be the hard part. I can't wait for tomorrow to come! @PriestOfPain and any other Shrinies who just didn't post anything, I'm looking forward to getting together and meeting with other Touhou fans. Everything's looked promising. I'm hoping it'll all be worth it! As for everyone who couldn't make it, I hope you'll look forward to whenever I get around to making a thread about it and my experiences. I'll be sure to get lots of pictures to share. I don't think the US has had a dedicated large-scale Touhou convention since TouhouCon in 2015, so keep your fingers crossed it's a success so we can see more of them!

Title pretty much says it all. TouhouFest begins tomorrow, and my flight is only a few hours away. Money's saved. Costume's ready. Luggage is not even close to packed. Fear of flying: not resolved. Let's do this. I'm looking forward to coming back to share photos and whatnot with the friends I've made here who I know aren't able to make it, but I'm curious if there're any other Shrinies here who'll also be attending.

I dunno how confidently I can call this a "renaissance," since 2023 hasn't had nearly the amount of content that 2022 gave us. At least, not yet. I can at least say that 2022 was an awesome year to be a Touhou fan. So many new faces in the animation sphere that technically existed before 2022 really had their time to take off. I wanna think that MTB's reanimation of We Are Japanese Goblin in late 2021 played a big part in that. It'd been a while since Touhou had made any big waves outside of its own community, so I'd like to think the overwhelming amount of attention it brought to Touhou from all over the internet helped give these up and coming creators their audience. I'd say it's too soon to call it a renaissance, but it is still indicative of Touhou's longevity. All the creators we already love are still going strong, and new ones are starting to pop up. Touhou sure isn't going to be going anywhere anytime soon. And yes, as a certified Seki-stan, Akatsuki Records did a great job stroking my ego as all these people are coming out of the woodworks to find that I was right the whole time.

I'm just gonna go ahead and shoot down this line of thinking immediately, and loudly for everyone in the back: Yes, you can be a Touhou fan and not play the games. Touhou Project is more than just a few space shooters. You've got fangames that cover pretty much every genre imaginable, tons of printworks (both official and doujin), full-blown anime made by some seriously dedicated fans, on top of the years and years worth of fan art and fan music. That is Touhou Project. Sorry if that's not exactly what your post was trying to ask about, but considering the fact that gatekeeping is a real thing, I don't want to leave any ambiguity on this. There is nothing wrong with deciding that the games aren't really your thing and just enjoying Touhou for the stuff you actually like. I wouldn't blame you in the slightest for not being "interested" in the shoot-em-up games. I also had a time when I was getting into Touhou, so I tried the official games, and I did have a good time with them. I had fun. A lot of fun, even. It was during a time when I specifically wanted to play something simple and arcade-y and I didn't mind that I was going through the same motions over and over again to try and get a little further than before. But, my tastes changed over time. I wanted to try something new, and moving from Touhou 7 to Touhou 8 isn't gonna give me that new experience I was craving. Now I only go back to them every now and then when I find myself in that certain "Touhou" kind of mood, and there's nothing wrong with that. So no, don't feel like playing the official games is some kind of necessity for keeping your membership card. If you feel like picking them back up, do it. And if you don't, then don't. The important thing is making sure you're enjoying yourself in whatever area of the fandom you're spending your time with.

Reading this post and subsequently checking out a few of the Hungarian Folk Tales leaves me feeling pretty bittersweet. I always find hearing stories from people about the kinds of media they grew up with and were inspired by fascinating because, well, I don't have many memories from my childhood that I feel that kind of strong connection to. That's not to say I didn't watch any cartoons growing or didn't enjoy them- I certainly did- but I don't think I can speak about any of them with the same reverence that I hear about from YouTubers I enjoy watching about childhood media like Steve Reviews, Defunctland, or Jordan Fringe. And that's a shame, since it's only after growing up that I've started taking more interest in the passionate workings behind children's media. As for the Hungarian Folk Tales themselves, I watched about 5-6 of them at random from the channel list. They're insanely charming. Even though I know if animations like this aired on satellite or cable television in the States they'd be laughed off the air, there's just an awkward earnestness about these shorts that makes it easy to overlook the clearly limited production in their animation and voicework. A couple of things surprised me about them that set them apart from the kind of cartoons I grew up with. The first being a lack of adaptation. Most cartoons based on stories, folklore, nursery rhymes, or the like re-frame their narratives into (for the time) modern day settings. It's done to try and connect to viewers better, since as long as the tone and message of the narrative was maintained, the setting could be largely interchangeable. Not these shorts, though. These are about as direct an adaptation as I could imagine. Speaking of tones and messages though, can we just appreciate the casual cruelty these folk tales have? Call it a symptom of growing up under Disney-fication, but the cartoons I watched when I was young typically reserved mentions of violence and death for major narrative purposes; noble sacrifices from heroes or the defeat of a truly evil villain. And then I watch First the Dance, then the Feast, and after the kings are forcibly stripped of their authority, they're casually pushed into a giant pot of beans and drown in it, and the people keep eating from that same pot. It's so morbid, and the folktale just doesn't give it any weight at all. And it's not even the only one. The Miraculous Bird, the beloved family pet crow is just unceremoniously axed and cooked when a wanderer throws down some money for its meat. Brother Fox, the wolf character is beaten within an inch of his life by an angry mob and literally "barely survived." And the tale just goes on like, "Yep. Tuesdays sure do be like that, huh?" Honestly, I found it hilarious. I ended up really enjoying watching these, and I'll probably come back to check out a few more as I get time for it. As for my favorite I've seen, I'll give it to The Diligent Girl and the Lazy Girl. Straightforward as it is, I like stories that clearly want to pass good values to their viewers, and the message of "treat others well, and you'll be treated well in kind" is a pretty universal one I can get behind. It might not be the most entertaining, but I genuinely liked it.

I'll be honest: Hearing someone passionately celebrate Valentine's Day is a little... unsettling? Like, here in America, Valentine's Day really does just amount to either "buy a gift for your significant other" Day or "enjoy acknowledging the fact that you're single" Day. In either case, any historical or moral significance this holiday should've had has long been forgotten by the general public. It's a strange feeling, but it is nice to know that the holiday is appreciated and appreciated well by a few people out there, even if I'm not one of them. Not that knowing any better really changes how I actually go about my day. My day has been spent doing as I would any other day; cooking, going to work, doing my assignments, MAKING MY GLORIOUS RETURN TO THE FORUMS, but with the added benefit that some people may end their brief conversations with me with a "Happy Valentine's Day." But only some.

I've been keeping quiet on this topic for a while, mainly because I could never quite get my thoughts in order on it. Hell, I'm not even convinced I have them in order now. The main issue I have with trying to answer this kind of question is: "Yeah, obviously there are people exhibit bad behavior who are also big fans of anime, but how much of that bad behavior is anime's 'fault?' And if it's not anime's fault, than whose is it? The viewer? The community? Something else entirely? Or all of the above?" I wish I had a conclusion for that, but I don't, so in no particular order, here are my thoughts relevant to the thread. So, I think we can all agree that imitating media is generally not a smart idea. Media is filtered and polished and crafted to form and support a narrative, and reality just isn't like that. That's not to say that media doesn't portray reality, but it's never a perfect reflection and it never will be. And as such, mimicking any piece of media and expecting the results to turn up like that media had is astronomically stupid. And the thing is, this isn't exclusive to anime. One of my favorite examples of my friend-and-flatmate being just the dumbest thing alive happened a couple of years back. I wasn't present for this, so I have to go off of recounting. He was in a group call with a bunch of friends, and as a gesture of camaraderie, he told one of his lady-friends in the group that "she's his bitch." He was absolutely dumbfounded why the entire group call turned on him and collectively agreed that that wasn't cool. And when I asked him what could possibly convince him to say something so fantastically stupid, the answer exceeded even my expectations. See, in chick-flick films, it's not uncommon to have a group of women get together and call each other "bitchezzz" in their stereotypical valley-girl accent as light jabs to affirm their tight friendship, and he believed he could do the same and expected to receive a glorious Yas Queen! reception, completely oblivious of just how different the two scenarios are. My brain couldn't fathom the thought process needed to get to that point. Sure, the incident didn't leave a negative impact on their friendship. She understood that he didn't mean any offense by it, but still had to dress him down and tell him he can't just do that. It highlights my point: dude watches movies, thinks that what he watches indicates how he can behave, and reality steps in and says "No, it doesn't go down like that." One of the things about anime that really sucks is how people perceive it. Specifically, this really dumb narrative that anime is this "more mature" alternative to watching cartoons. And on a surface level, there's some truth to that. Anime is no stranger to showing gratuitous amounts of violent and sexual material that would never get greenlit for production here in the States. Most anime, just by nature of what they decide to put onscreen, would heavily straddle the line between PG-13 and R ratings. But all of that violence and blood and sex don't actually make anime a more mature story; it has basically no impact on how the story or characters are written. Most anime are pretty simple stories once you've broken them down; they just have a lot of flair given to them that you don't see as much of in other animation. Some people look up to anime for being more "mature" when it really isn't. This one's personal, but I absolutely h a t e how much anime treats its own viewers like complete losers. Seriously, how did get to a point in society where everyone can collectively pan HBO's Velma for cynically insulting its own audience, but anime can frequently write the most unpleasant, grotesque depictions of anime fans and their culture and people are like "omg it me frfr"? And this goes both ways. Anime fans should not be celebrating being depicted as human waste. Not only is it not a good look for them to people outside of anime, but I'd wager it paints a picture for those anime fans on what being an anime fan should be like, and that's awful. The Isekai genre is particularly nasty about this, as its very premise tells the audience, "Hey, see this absolute fuckin' waste of life who does nothing but play video games, watch anime, and buy merchandise that definitely isn't you? Wouldn't it be cool if, instead of expanding and improving their current life, they were instead given a new one where their decisions or lack thereof actually put them at the top of the food chain?" One of my favorite manga and anime, Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku completely does away with this and has all of its main characters be stable, working adults leading fulfilling, albeit eccentric, lives. It was genuinely moving to have an anime tell me that I can still enjoy the things I love and be passionate about them, and also be a functioning adult. And it still gets to be funny and poke fun at the less appealing aspects of otaku culture without coming across as completely dismissing it. This one's a personal pet theory of mine, but I'm convinced that "anime" and "the internet" are a match made in hell. Anime is centered heavily around melodrama; emotions are presented at fever-pitch to really hit viewers with raw feelings right where it hurts. And I love it for it. It's fun to watch. But if anyone's every actually talked to someone who tries to get melodramatic like an anime would, you know they're some of the most insufferable people to ever exist. And where can you go to find people who get tons of attention and clout for being loud, hyperreactive, and overly emotional? Yeah. I wanna be harder on the kids and teens who treat anime like it's some perfect representation of Japan for being stupid, because it is genuinely stupid to think any piece of media is wholely representative of where it came from. But it's hard to really be upset about it from the outside because that kind of half-heartedness is pretty universal. The Dunning-Kruger Effect wouldn't be a thing if there was only one notable example of it. I get it. You watch anime, and you pick up little bits and pieces of info about Japanese culture and language from it, and you start thinking you're some sort of expert because you technically know more than nothing. It's obnoxious to be sure, but that's nothing unique to anime, and anyone with half a functioning brain and/or access to Google can very quickly dismantle any drivel they decide to pass off as fact. I do wanna close out my thoughts on a hopeful note, though. See, anime's gotten exponentially more popular and widespread through the last decade or so. It may be bold to say so, but I think that if it hasn't already become so, anime is only a few degrees off from being mainstream. And anime fans will likely disagree with that sentiment, since otaku and weebs have gotten pretty comfortable with this stigma that they're perpetually ostracized, but we're getting close to the point where saying you watch anime will be as innocuous as saying you go out to the movies. More importantly, adults who watch anime will be having children who watch anime. Anime will stop being this weird generational gap where fans insist that all these old people just don't understand, because they will. And parents will actually be in a good position to talk to their kids about anime, and their respective good and bad takeaways. Hopefully a lot of that bad behavior we see from anime fans will die down as everyone collectively gets more informed about it. Maybe that's being too optimistic, but I'd like to imagine a coming generation where anime is as normalized a hobby as, say, being a comic book fan post-Marvel's MCU.

Things here have certainly been in a lull recently, at least compared to the end of last year. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm a full-time worker and a full-time student, so when classes opened up in January, the amount of time I've had to put into the forum plummeted. I know a lot of other members here are students as well, so I can imagine that they're having scheduling troubles as well. It doesn't help that forums encourage long, thought-out discussions over the brief, snappy postings you'd find on, say, the Discord server. At least for me, posting here is a pretty substantial time investment. As for a question: What made you want to join the Shrine?

The games themselves weren't updated, but the download link for them had to be changed. March 2022 was when MoriyaShrine was hit by a DMCA complaint from ZUN's lawyer. The previous download links had to be taken down, and were eventually replaced. Details on the incident and how it went down can be found in this thread:

Isn't that fixers are supporting the right for women to look pretty in a different way or... I don't get it if you don't mind explaining to me your point I think I know what they're getting at. Yes, people want to support the right for women to look beautiful in different, more progressive ways. To illustrate my point, I'm gonna put this in the context of body positivity; y'know, "Big people are beautiful too." That kind of thing. So, the idea behind body positivity is a very well-meaning gesture: People shouldn't feel like they are excluded from being attractive if they don't conform to a traditional image of beauty; in this case, being thin. Body positivity is all about making the discussion and expression of beauty more inclusive. But, for a small but loud minority of people, that's not what this movement means to them. It's not about progressive and traditional ideas of beauty coexisting and intermixing with each other; it's about progressive ideas replacing traditional ones. "Out with the old. In with the new." Big isn't just beautiful. Big is in, and by extension, thin is out. It's a clear corruption of what the original message was supposed to be, but if you think on it, you can kinda see how someone who approaches this topic with a lot of hostility would come to that conclusion. That's what SasaMisa's trying to describe. Whatever kind of "female form" they're trying to describe is super vague. It could be anything: body positivity, gender neutrality, natural beauty vs. beauty products, who knows? But the idea is still there: They found someone or some group of people trying to push for some progressive vision by outright rejecting and discrediting whatever kind of "female form" they happen to like. But just like SasaMisa says, if woman have the right to choose a progressive type of beauty, they have to retain the right to choose traditional beauty too. Otherwise, it stops being a choice. Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder just how many other heated debates get to be where they are because of this "corruption of ideals." Inclusivity should be strove for, but if the way to way to make it happen is to just boot out what once was because "Mom says it's my turn to define beauty," then of course there'll never be a healthy way to resolve it.

Funny, I have the same reaction to Imperishable Night, even though I only picked that one up a few months back. At least I can beat PCB, though... I love how, with just one look at this, I immediately knew Dark Fox (aka Jinx Izayoi) was gonna be a part of this. I also found a fair number of fancomics through fandubs like this one. It's gotten to the point where I'm just 100% willing to accept a headcanon where all Touhou characters have male voices, except Rinnosuke, and Patchouli is Solid Snake. Yeah, I saw that thread and looked a little into that. It's a real shame that she just up and left like that; her art was really nice. If I felt I had something more meaningful to say than "That sucks," I woulda commented on it. I just hope she's alright. Last time I read up on a story about an artist vanishing after being publicly lambasted, it was because she attempted suicide. Not matter which side you're on in whether it's a good thing for artists to take liberties in redesigning established characters, no one deserves that. SHOW ME WHAT PASSES FOR [culture] AMONG YOUR MISBEGOTTEN KIND ...was the first thing I thought of when I looked their work up. Gott damn, man, no subtlety with your preferences, huh? I like it, though. I like seeing a little more mature take on a lot of these characters. Good middle ground between being overly-cute and overly-sexy. Also, this Banki. I like this Banki. ...Y'know, in retrospect, I don't know what I else I could've expected to happen when I looked Innocent Key up. I could've stopped at the Sakuya one. Sure, I didn't like it, but... "Ehh, this sure does look like something from 13 years ago, huh?" So what do I do? I keep digging. It's not good, but it could always be worse. And then I find Holy Water Festival... It got worse. Now I'm here, bitter and angry at the world. Just... Fuck.

Happy New Year! Hope it's been good for you so far! So, over the last year, you've talked a lot about pieces of Touhou media you've gotten into. Some you've made posts about, and some not. (Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on Hifuu Club Activity Record, by the way.) Anyways, what I wanted to ask is "If you had to choose a favorite piece of Touhou media, official or unofficial, what would it be?" Artwork, music, video, animation, game; the sky's the limit. Just something that you'll always hold near and dear to your heart from Touhou Project. And, if you're feeling spicy for it, how about the flip-side: "What piece of Touhou media do you loathe the most?" It's not enough to simply not be memorable, no; something that left a permanent scar on your soul and you hate acknowledging its existence. And, uhhh... Even though it goes against the original purpose of the thread, if you have any questions for us too, feel free to ask back. I definitely won't be making an AMA of my own, and I'd take any incentive to overcome my "one-post-per-thread" habit I'm trying to break this year.

Wouldn't you know it, not even a day later, and the album gets posted to the site to download. If you still want to support them financially, I'd still recommend purchasing the album. I haven't seen anything about a Patreon for them. But there's no telling when or if that digital release is going to happen, so consider this an option if you want to be able to access the album until then.

After a bit of searching, I wasn't able to find any site where you could buy the album digitally, but I did find some tweets from one of the members. It's all in Japanese, so I needed to send through Google translate, but it was saying that they're "considering a digital release" and they'll let people know when anything comes of it. These tweets are only a few days old, so I'd recommend keeping a close watch on it. Here's the Twitter for the member in question: https://twitter.com/kyuhojimae