On Man-eating: Does it "Fit" in Touhou?

[Spongelash]

I'm gonna be honest dude, I'm not sure where this comes from either and heard this in a youtube video. But to clarify, by "outsiders" I meant people from outside world who spawned in. And if I remembered correctly, villagers are only protected when they are within the village, but not outside of it.

Lol hey I don't blame you, a lot of what people think of Gensokyo is this mishmash of different things that has been written about it read through other people's summaries. Maybe while I keep working my way through all the official Touhou media I'll be able to source this idea myself. Even with what I've read I see things developing in that direction so it's very believable to me it is in there somewhere.

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Looking back, I should've used Lucky Star as an example. It's one of the best in it's subgenre, and yet as a story, it doesn't have any narrative depth, thought-provoking messages, or anything else that snobs like. The trashy manga I mentioned wasn't really outstanding even in it's niche.

Ah ha, that's a bit of a different question. I haven't watched Lucky Star but I've seen Nichijou and I imagine it's a similar concept.

You can still do the same comparisons I made out above. I think that everything I said about comparing something to Blood Meridian would probably be true when compared to something like Lucky Star.

But that doesn't do Lucky Star justice, does it? Lucky Star is probably funnier than Blood Meridian in a more casual format. Lucky Star probably has cuter characters than Blood Meridian does.

Above I wrote that elements like the writing don't make up an equal part of the whole work across every work. Well, similarly, not every piece of writing should be judged equally across all works. Genre and intention needs to be taken into account, because one piece of writing can't do everything, right? Haven't I spent all this time making the point that Touhou is trying to do two different things and they don't work together?

So when it comes to a comparison like you are bringing up here between Lucky Star and Blood Meridian, we could try to compare them, but we don't really learn much about either work in that case because they have entirely different goals. (I assume) Lucky Star succeeds at creating casual comedy between cute and sweet characters and Blood Meridian succeeds at making one ponder fundamental questions about humanity and the motivations of people.

When comparing things that are so different, using such an unspecific word like "better" or "worse" in an unspecific category like "writing" becomes less useful. It's important that these words are used to help get a message across in a succinct way, and when they start introducing more questions than giving answers we should probably discard them.

But, obviously that doesn't make them harmful in every case. Consider Lucky Star specifically against a scale of other comedy animes and we can start using these words again because we should all have some general idea of what they would mean.

So I guess that my overall idea is that sometimes it is better to look at things on many sub-scales, rather than think of some giant overall scale that is the perfect judge of both Lucky Star and Blood Meridian, right? In this case, if someone used "good" or "bad" with Lucky Star, you can probably assume they are comparing it to other comedy animes, and if someone uses the same for Blood Meridian, you can probably assume they are comparing it to other more serious novel-type writing.