Why gatekeeping?

[buskerdog]

"Okina in a wheelchair" seems to be a rather common meme in the community, and one other example of flanderization.

Wheelchair Okina is canon.

 

[CountVonNumenor]

Wheelchair Okina is canon.

oh wait, I think that appeared in one of the manga, right? However, the flanderization is not really as much about the wheelchair itself as it is about depicting Okina as disabled physically challenged (sorry, we need to use non-offensive words nowadays, or at least that is what my English teacher taught us )

 

[CountVonNumenor]

Hello to Moriya Shrine members, I've registered an account to post in this thread in particular. Why am I compelled to do so here where I have no idea how many will read it or care? No idea, maybe it's just cause the anonymity that comes with being on a new account makes it easier to express myself, as I know my words can only be judged by themselves due to lack of a personal context hah.

First of all, welcome to the Shrine! Anyone is welcome, and even if you will stay more with us or leave, we'd be happy to have you around. Any opinion is precious, so why not further contribute to the discussions. You will surely find something to enjoy, and if not, you can also create a thread of your own if there's anything you'd like to share. 

 

I've been an avid Touhou enjoyer since around 2011-2012

Nice to have someone with so many years of experiencing the fandom in here. Judging by the date, I guess you have caught the final days of the "Touhou golden age", correct? These many years of being a part of the fandom would surely bring a great contribution in many of the ongoing threads, as they revolve around the fandom and fan creations.

 

I believe the word "gatekeeping" gets a bad rep, as it's often (as I've seen in this thread also) conflated with "elitism".

That's quite a fair judge to make. It's not very clear anymore where to draw the line between keeping a community healthy and just outright elitism. Especially in recent years. 

 

I'd much rather Touhou had some sort of normie filter for lack of a better term so that this entire thing would be a non-concern, but the nature of the Touhou scene in general makes that sort of impossible.

In a way, it was bound to happen. Given the extreme liberties given by ZUN in terms of fan creation (probably the weirdest, or at least most liberal out of any franchise I have been a fan of until now), it helped a lot in spreading the word of Touhou. Had it not been for this, Touhou more than likely would have remained a rather unknown Shmup game, caught in an already niche genre. And with this liberty of creation, exposure comes. And with exposure, you will have different kinds of people coming in.


 

But the point I'm (hopefully competently??) trying to make here is that gatekeeping in the context of maintaining standards for a level of discussion and behavior (rather than keeping a community somehow "pure" as some people within the screenshots would want) is not only acceptable, but the ideal we should strive for.

Of course. As I was trying to point out in the opening of this thread, there is a difference between trying to keep a level of decency and good conducts among the fans of your series, and just being an outright elitist trying to shove put anyone who enjoys that series for something different ("oh, you like the series because you enjoy the design and backstory of the characters, but you are not a Shmup enjoyer? Go play the games or gtfo"). Also apparently reading the official manga or the volumes of the Gensokyo Chronicles or the Aya article collections (Bohemian Archive and Alternative Facts in Eastern Utopia) does not make you a fan. But I digressed.

 

This is very long and rambly and it's late at night and I'm not even sure how well I got my point across?????? Uhhh be passionate about what you enjoy and uh continue to create good fan content. Annoying people can be annoying and inevitably will be but don't let that become the status quo and stay consistent and principled regarding everything.

 No problem if the text is long. Personally, I actually like reading long texts, especially if they catch my interest. Anyway, I hope you will stick around, and you are absolutely welcome to further contribute on this forum whenever you feel as such. If not, it was nice to have you around, even if just for this sole contribution. 


 

 

[emperortoehoe]

I think that the Touhou fandom is kinda screwed over in a lot of ways, and if we don't gatekeep I get to laugh at more lost wallet fans so I don't care too much either way as long as they don't ruin the series for me(only ZUN gets to do that)

 

[ACE_DEUCE]

Nice to have someone with so many years of experiencing the fandom in here. Judging by the date, I guess you have caught the final days of the "Touhou golden age", correct? These many years of being a part of the fandom would surely bring a great contribution in many of the ongoing threads, as they revolve around the fandom and fan creations.

Do all of the old heads just lurk until it's convenient not to? Haha. Well I don't know about "golden age" but to stay on-topic and re-assert what I've said, I did catch the tail end of a couple of other things. Namely, I'm sure if you search far back enough on message boards you'll find people expressing the same elitist sentiments seen showcased in the screenshots here when Touhou was experiencing a boom in popularity as a result of McRoll. Now, that was a bit before my time (and I didn't really interact too much with the community for a little bit anyway) but you could still see some edgy teenagers LARPing while going "omg guys flandre is literally me" and generally lacking any actual vested interest even though they were trying to butt in. Did they ruin the community like the doomsayers anticipated? No, and I don't think they ever had the potential to. At worst if nobody kept them in check they might've given the fandom a bad rep for like a year or two before half of them would've actually become real fans and the other half would've grown out of it. But what I'm trying to say that when it came down to it people would firmly tell these guys to fuck off when they started being annoying even at the risk of being rude and potentially driving away a future fan or two, and my only worry is that due to several factors (ironically fear of being labeled a gatekeeper which now carries a very negative connotation is often one of them, but from what I've seen there is a whole myriad of issues with many people who moderate internet communities nowadays) there might end up being too much lenience in this regard should such booms in popularity transpire again (arguably they are but I don't fancy giving myself headaches by reading twitter threads about child-grooming fumo scalpers so the exact scope is fuzzy to me). Not the end of the world in any case, nothing stops you from having fun with the people you enjoy talking to but it very much pains me to see normal reasonable individuals driven away from interacting with people (or even worse the art as a whole) cause a fandom is seen as loud and annoying due to bad actors (be they the majority or not), and they have better things to do than making an active effort to seek out places to hold normal civil discourse.

This is really long again but I hope it's more articulate cause I'm not as tired this time around  :SaguDown:

In a way, it was bound to happen. Given the extreme liberties given by ZUN in terms of fan creation (probably the weirdest, or at least most liberal out of any franchise I have been a fan of until now), it helped a lot in spreading the word of Touhou. Had it not been for this, Touhou more than likely would have remained a rather unknown Shmup game, caught in an already niche genre. And with this liberty of creation, exposure comes. And with exposure, you will have different kinds of people coming in.

Yea. It's just that a part of me sort of regrets how people don't side-eye you for playing games with anime girls in them anymore, haha. I distinctly remember having a few buddies over to play some co-op games and stuff and I eventually fired up IaMP. We had fun but I could tell they thought it was real weird. They were video game nerds too, it's just that if you were someone who wasn't super into the fighting game scene (which was most people cause there had to be local tournaments and stuff otherwise it was difficult to get into), when you thought of "fighting game" you probably thought of Mortal Kombat/Tekken/MvC. But if you look at it now, the biggest fighting games are Guilty Gear, DBFZ etc. and even AoCF is known among some prominent commentators (though there's nobody to fund tournaments), this of course applying to other mediums as well. The zeitgeist giveth and it taketh away I suppose.

No problem if the text is long. Personally, I actually like reading long texts, especially if they catch my interest. Anyway, I hope you will stick around, and you are absolutely welcome to further contribute on this forum whenever you feel as such. If not, it was nice to have you around, even if just for this sole contribution. 

I appreciate that, might pop in from time to time if there's an interesting thread as this seems to be a place that's maintained genuine passion for Touhou, reminds me somewhat of the way MoTK was a while back (or the parts I lurked at least? Heard they have a discord now but I wouldn't know much about it, the forums seem barren). I'm a tad busy so don't set very high expectations though ahaha.

 

[Gou the frog]

Oh, I'm a bit late to the party. Most of the discussion is almost done. My take,

Gatekeeping? Yeah, it's not going to work on any community. As all of you stated above letting people enjoy what they want, assuming It's not dangerous or bringing harm to other people.

Just an old buddy I used to have a strong, petty hate towards, but now I am more chill about it. Haven't seen him in quite a while appearing in my YouTube community feed, actually...

I've met him a couple of time in the past few months, Haven't seen him either, wonder what's he preparing? Perhaps a nuclear fusion. Who knows? I've confronted him a few times but it seems my efforts were in vain.

He's most likely a troll even stated in his description. Probably wants to light a fuse in the fandom while holding a popcorn on his hand with a troll face on.

My experience with bullet hell isn't the smoothest either. Does that mean I'm not a "true" Touhou fan? Of course not, everyone has a different thing to like about Touhou, be it character, music, lore, or fanworks and even shoot 'em ups. 

The topic about fumos and poster of fumo are already covered, but in my opinion, they can show off the fumos and make videos about them. After all, some people enjoy this kind of stuff. Doesn't have to "gatekeep" them either. 

As TheM3ds stated:

should've also added that I'm not entirely against the idea of gatekeeping, hell if there's no other option or if things go from 0 to 100 real fast then I'd say yeah, I don't see why not. I just meant to say that I hate it when fans gatekeep for their own pity reasons, so they can keep-out all the "fake fans" while guarding their own turf for their own selfish gain alone, trust me you'd hate to see this happen often in other fandoms (as if it hasn't already happened before...)

There're rare times when gatekeeping is necessary. In this situation however, the "fans" likes to gatekeep to satisfy their own needs. Reddit and Twitter or sometime Youtube have the most obscure thing posted about everything including Touhou. As, they often are a good material to discuss about. (There might be more train wreaks coming soon steadily)

With that said, There're bad apples (No Pun Intended) in every community, even if we give 'em hate. They're not going away anytime soon. Waiting once in a while is a very good solution. (paying them no mind could also work)

 

[CountVonNumenor]

I think that the Touhou fandom is kinda screwed over in a lot of ways

Besides the influx of new people coming from gacha and other "non-conventional" sources, what would be the ways you are referring to?
 

I've met him a couple of time in the past few months, Haven't seen him either, wonder what's he preparing? Perhaps a nuclear fusion. Who knows? I've confronted him a few times but it seems my efforts were in vain.

Yeah, would be funny to see his next move. And if it is a nuke, I wonder if it's gonna be a tactical nuke, just on a specific topic, or will go for indiscriminate destruction of anything on his way. Anyway, we are quite possibly dealing with a troll, but a troll looking to exploit some general frustration existing among some of the fans, and which might explode by itself if anything happens. 

in my opinion, they can show off the fumos and make videos about them

I will admit. I am guilty of watching Yumemey and his/her Fumo videos. And even more guilty that I actually enjoyed them. I would say that I appreciate the creator might actually be creating some of them by themselves, especially for the more custom ones not part of main production.
 

(There might be more train wreaks coming soon steadily)

As stated earlier, I really wonder what will be the next thing to trigger a large scale controversy in the fandom. The DMCA thing has been surprisingly silent (maybe because all platforms with big Touhou communities also tried keep it silenced while bashing Moriya). I mean I think that even the Fumo sale fiasco from last year has triggered a bigger controversy than losing the main source for free (and illegal) downloads of any official materials. But as said, I really wonder what will be the next flavor of controversy. 

 

[CountVonNumenor]

Let this sink in. Process it the way you want:



New way people hear of Touhou (and think what Touhou is) that is not through the existence of the games. For some, this series is just about Fumo. Adorable plushy companions, yet almost impossible to obtain when on sale.