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Basically a continuation to this thread, but from a different angle. Shifting the focus from official material to fanon material. This started as a simple question, but now I am slowly losing the flare to write it. However, I will try end it with whatever I can still salvage out of my mind. So, let's start. Why are Touhou fans so horny? Looking online, old discussions have always placed Touhou as number #2 or #3 online in terms of the amount of questionable or explicit content. And a good chunk of it seems to be coming from Japan alone. The brief discussion with SasaMisa and Turbonator in general chat served a warmup for what will be going on here. As i was saying. This whole idea to question bugged me since a few days ago. A simple walk through Twitter took me down a whole rabbit whole of questionable and explicit content based on a single artist's retweets. Basically, from a single person, you could end up creating an entire network of artists, most of them from JP. Before I am fully losing coherence, I will just expose my points as a series of ideas: I guess "porn/sex sells" like the saying has always been - I was told by a friend I would be extremely surprised how much an artist can win out of two things: porn/hentai and furry art why is there so much questionable and explicit material about child-looking characters? (not just in Touhou, but as a question in general) - I am sorry to put it so bluntly, but if Danbooru for example was to add a couple new tags, those two would be "child porn" and "fetish" why are we craving such kind of content so much? what is the appeal to such content? why is this so much of a Japan associated thing? At least from my perspective as a European, that sort of thing is utterly bizarre. If a convention or any sort of event was taking place here, with public of all ages, selling smut of any kind would have turned into a public outrage. However, when it comes to stuff like Comiket et al, it seems lie you can very easily sell such content, together with the whole concept of having doujins fully dedicated to just drawing hentai of that subject out of any franchise online, how did Touhou gain so much popularity in terms of such content? is it just because of the almost total freedom ZUN has given in terms of fan materials? did you ever had that kind of weird moment and sensation when discovering a piece of fanart you like and and is perfectly SFW actually has am NSFW version too? it feels very odd if you ask me, especially if you were only used to the safe one, and it was something you really liked despite not having a clear source for the claim Touhou is in top 3 when it comes to the amount of smut material dedicated to any franchise, i do have a source for something else - apparently, Touhou fan art is the one the gave birth to "Ahegaokin" (and more or less the meme too) through a Patchouli image; at least that is what Know Your Meme says going from memes to stats, I have alt least two sources - one for which I need to credit @Tenkko and one I found by chance; it comes in regards to the the amount of Touhou fan content that goes into the unsafe area on both Pixiv and the more infamous R34 (wish we also had a Danbooru/Gelbooru stat, as you could find a lot more there too) (possibly severely outdated) R34 stats from last year in regards to Touhou content (no PC-98 stats though) Also the Pixiv stats as offered by Tenkko + a few comments on my side Also finally, there is this little thing (I cannot believe I had to rely on XE3G weeb for the info, despite how much I hate him as the creator of the "I want mommy" meme format and basically a huge liar). This is, at least from reading the comments, what happens when you let a hentai doujin try to do a safe-for-work project (game is Touhou Shoujo - Tale of Beautiful Memories) The comments, knowing this dude and the kind of audience he brings in, are not so much of a surprise. Honestly, I am not so sure why I am bothering so much anymore. I only end up looking like a failed crusader trying to have a failed fight against something I cannot defeat. But I think the simples thing would just be to sit down, relax and embrace the fandom with whatever it brings in, safe or not, in good or poor taste. But I am still curious though. It is almost pathological for me to ask questions about stuff I do not understand or might have a different opinion about. So yeah, this is the new direction in which the original thread is going. Since this is also basically some sort of fanservice, just of the more innuendo type.

Tom and Jerry, you mean remilia and clownpiece.

Alright, so since my last visit here a lot of interesting points have been brought up. The whole liberty in the creation of Touhou fan content is almost incredible, especially when compared to other series I am familiar with. The only odd part about ZUN being OK with his property being used by fans for smut is that I was once told that he sees the characters as basically his children. But I will get back later to the artistic value of this. Personally, I did not join for that either. But I accept its existence. And I think at times it is alright. Initially, i was just so much of an anti-horny as you. But since Touhou, I think I can split my stance on NSFW into 2 eras: pre-Danbooru and post-Danbooru. That is when I became more accepting of this sort of art, and when I created my set of principles to guide after for not falling into the way of the "coomer". Also yeah, there is quite a difference between cute/attractive/sexy and full-on NSFW. I mena I am 20, but only way too late did some mental process start developing for me (some I should have perhaps already gone through). But like you said. I am not angry or outraged by that game. I just think it is funny when someone who dedicated his work to NSFW content is trying to do a family-friendly product. As I was saying last night, I read a bit about those two people. What they are standing for seems like an extremely noble cause. Also, I did not know Japan is going through such a bad period in regards to copyright laws. There are still some areas in the world that are safe from most of the nonsense going on in the West, and I would say Romania is still one of them. I have never heard of Vee. Could you please give me some details about him? Especially if it is related to Romania, I would definitely love to see the point of view of that person. In my case, even if I follow Political Science in college, I am ironically quite apolitical myself too. I did not go voting yet (even if there was just 1 major electoral campaign since I turned 18), and pretty much hate all the parties equally (so I cannot be biased in favor of one of them). Which traits i think might be useful for a future scientist or other profession that needs a degree of unbias (at least if we go by the principles expressed by Max Weber himself). I have never officially admitted to be Agnostic (perhaps I'm still in denial), especially since no matter how much I would disagree with the promoted values, I still follow them to some degree almost automatically. Also, please keep in mind that in Romania, until a few years ago, Orthodox religious classes were a mandatory course in public education here. The course was known generically as "Religious Education" with the focus of "studying Christianity and the other religions of the world", but it regularly turned into "why Orthodoxy is the superior religion even among Christian branches" and "why Christianity is the superior religion and all other systems of belief are bad". And I had to go through this for 12 years of my life as a child, especially at the age when a child is easiest to be modelled mentally. Speaking of the woodblock prints. It is ironic how apparently even in the early Middle Ages, Europeans seemed to be much less prude than we are nowadays. yes, in that period stereotypically seem as fanatically religious. I wonder what created such a switch in mentality to have brought us in our state of thinking. Wait, early Comiket was more popular among women than men? That is something I really did not know. So I knew something about that. Thank you for the reminder. Also I guess attracting someone to the religion could have been done through different means, seduction included if Ii got the logic right? Interesting point. From what I managed to understand out of art history, it is that Western artists have sough to represent as faithfully as possible the reality around them. Ironically, we did have an artistic movement known as "Symbolism" going against the trends of Romanticism, Naturalism and Parnasianism, but it was more about explaining the world through symbols (also a lot of depressing literature if you are reading the poems of Romanian writer George Bacovia). This is basically a different way of saying "go touch grass". This is awesome to see some additional stats, and thank you for them. I admit, I did fail to bring a better image of the larger situation, but I worked with what I had available at the time a count of all Touhou NSFW art on Rule34 until June last year a chart made by our friend Tenkkko about the number of images related to a Touhou character as a whole vs how many of these images are under the R18 tag I have a few questions and notices: I have never checked the e-hentai website (I am honestly feeling way too ashamed to now I scrolled through such a source even if I had to do it for actual research). For the Gelbooru part, have you also added the "Questionable" label? Because from experience, the "Explicit" label only seemed to be used for images depicting intercourse (so no images of just half naked or full nude 2hus). Also Danbooru seems very weird nowadays, especially as the labels seem to have been changed to things like "General" and "Sensitive" instead of the old "Safe" and "Questionable". In the case of Rule34, if only 1.4% of the content is tagged as "Touhou", then where did the reputation of Touhou being among the most depicted things on that website come from? Same question for Pixiv as in the case of Rule34 - where did that popular idea of how much Touhou smut there is come from? And this is something I am wondering. Where did their whole different attitude towards such topics generally seen as taboo come from? For someone like me who loves history and want to study the sociological aspects of a society and its way of thinking, there are so man intriguing things in this story. Again, I will be honest. I would be a hypocrite if I said I hate this kind of art. In a way, there is something I can appreciate it for, and like I said in the opening post, I have a few self-imposed ideas to guide myself after in enjoying this kind of material. I tend to think erotic/pornographic material is usually devoid of any substance, only good for creating some short-terms pleasure. At least based on experience with the western idea of such materials (there are very much just the porn without any essence, without any thought-provoking ideas and concept, only there for a quick ride). I do not know how true this is, but perhaps we have a wrong understanding about what sort of media we are facing? But I can see what you mean through the idea of media being much more than what it seems. I guess there is just a difference between something done in good taste and something done just for the sake of it and in a cheap manner? For example this image. Even if it is tame, it still has a seductive charm to it. And I like it a lot: Art by Kagari Sato https://twitter.com/kagari_gogo1109/status/1373623211783450624/photo/3 (Twitter decided this is sensitive content and put it under spoiler) As for the "oh no sex" part. I live in a country where it is still heavily promoted the idea you have to remain a virgin until marriage. And what if I will never get married? Will I just die a virgin? All to me seems like a very flawed way of thinking, still connected to a piece of paper written 2000 years ago, yet still by some as if it was the holiest of things and the end of the world if you stray from its values. Pretty much. Confirmation bias strikes again, no matter what domain it is. Everyone tries to justify their point even if it means brushing off information they might find inconvenient for their cause. Alright, now that things seem to be settled for the time, part 2 of the question. We have gone through the creations themselves. The more philosophical question remains to be answered - why do people crave such kind of content? This is where the "thirst" part comes into play. Yes, we do have a lot of NSFW art. But since there is so much of it, it also means there is a high demand for such content. Where does this demand come from? To me, it is funny how many times I get into a discussion started by an image of a Touhou girl drawn to be atractive, or with little/revealing clothes. Some people are joking, others seem to be unironical in their demands to [REDACTED] the 2hus. Basically the kind of people you would tell to go touch grass (or get a girlfriend as said in the postcard of Tubonator). And a bit of a bonus: Long ago, I had with a friend from Ukraine a discussion in regards to tastes and art. Like where do you draw the line between an artistic nude and straight up porn. I know some draw such materials in order to make anatomic studies, and choose a Touhou character simply out of convenience. Others might be inclined to draw a nude for the sake of art, avoiding the provocative or erotic elements. And then the final category, the ones drawing nude in the purpose of creating smut. Anyway, our discussion started with me being too shy to draw a naked subject, and was looking to be given ideas how to overcome such a problem. And on the way, we ended up discussing the difference between porn and art. Here is an extract on how it went: Meanwhile, this is me being too shy to go beyond this level when it comes to study art Alright, this has been a long reply. Time to see your opinions on the matter, especially since it looks like I accidentally dumped in a lot of stuff again.

Regarding the argument over lolis in this thread: Getting back on topic, other than the obvious sentiment most people in this thread have agreed with regarding freedom of derivative content, there's a few more factors that I personally believe have played into this. First of all, the data regarding NSFW Touhou art in general (as the OP only breaks it down by character) is roughly as follows: 4% of galleries submitted to e-hentai have at least some art featuring Touhou characters (not a very good representation as a gallery will count here even if there's only one or two images with Touhou characters in them) 3% of all images with an explicit rating submitted to Gelbooru are tagged with "touhou" 1.4% of all images submitted to Rule34 are tagged with "touhou" While the data on this isn't quite clear, compared to the total number of Pixiv submissions, Touhou accounts for 2.4% and Touhou works rated R18 account for 0.2%; do keep in mind that this also takes into account non-NSFW art as there's no data on how many works submitted to Pixiv are rated R18 These are still pretty big numbers when looking at it comparatively, but maybe not as big as someone might think so I thought it would be good to express this data here. But anyways, the fact is that the Japanese cultural framework around sex and sexual expression is so radically different not just from most western countries, but from most countries period. I'm sure many people here have seen the "It's called hentai, and it's art" meme at some point, but the thing about that is that from a Japanese point of view, there's a lot of truth to that statement. Now, obviously, being a sex pest should be enough to get you ostracized from just about any social circle, but merely creating pornographic depictions of fictional characters is (at the very least within otaku circles, where Touhou is most prominent) typically not seen as any different to just creating regular derivative work. Sadly I'm not nearly educated enough to accurately explain the social and historical factors that contribute this, so this surface level analysis will have to do. Another thing is that the number of male Comiket attendees (no data for Reitaisai but intuition leads me to believe that this should be the case there as well if it already wasn't before) has been steadily increasing since the dawn of the century, with men potentially even making up the majority as of a few years ago (or at the very least it being somewhat even compared to the previous overwhelming female majority). And the thing about Touhou is that it has at least one female character that appeals to any kind of moe you can think of. This then encourages doujin artists who focus on making doujins for men (i.e. mostly other men, and those doujins mostly focus on the female characters so as to allow the male reader to self-insert) to enter the Touhou space because not only does it provide you with already finished characters that appeal to whatever archetype you want, thus sparing you the need to come up with an original setting or plot, but is also very immediately recognizable. This also means you'll likely make more money, as you don't have to worry about competition too much due to most people sticking exclusively to hentai works featuring only a few select characters that they like (though that's a secondary factor I'd assume since doujin culture is never about the money first). And all of this not even considering the guys who already like Touhou and are making doujins of it right out of the gate. Though all in all I personally see no issue regarding any of this, if anyone's actually upset by the mere fact that NSFW fan content exists (which is like, come on man you're on the internet) they can always just, y'know, not look at it. I will say one thing though, and that's that some of the most entertaining and thought-provoking media I've experienced falls into this category, be it erotic doujin manga or visual novels with sex scenes or anything in between, so it's definitely not worth avoiding something just because of "oh no sex".

Lax regulations, big cast, girls, etc. Keep in mind this happens with literally every piece of media that exists and will exist though. Personally I used to be very anti-horny few years ago but as the years passed I just, whatever. Hell yeah booba. Also like I said in another thread big distinction between cute and/or sexy, and nsfw. The art in that fangame is just so overdone that it loops back to being funny for me honestly.

There is a lot you guys have discussed already but I'll just share my thoughts as well. I agree with Darksymphony777 on the reason for the high amount of NSFW content. This is probably due to the fact that nearly anyone can use the property as they wish. The japanese law also contributes a lot and I understand SasaMisa to an extent too. Personally, I'm not interested in any of that stuff. I'm enjoying touhou for the music and cool characters. I think my enjoyment would die if I decided to focus on the NSFW content. However, that shouldn't mean no one is allowed to check that stuff given how much there is.

I like to bring up the point again that ZUN is lax on the property which could account for a lot of porn. If the creator has no problem with people using his character so it'll be safe to do well anything with them

Fascinating stuff. Even at 5% of all the stuff on a platform being Touhou, that is still quite a large percentage knowing how many anime, games, manga and other franchises and fandoms are there. Definitely. Sometimes, people are joking when they see Yuuka art and write that they want to be stepped on by her or make jokes about the "delicious buns/boobs of Sanae" (literally, Sanae is very much known in fandom as "Reimu but with boobs", "Reimu but fanservice material" or "doujin fam" - my opening post goes into possible explanations for why some of the 2hus are more popular in terms of questionable and explicit material) but in other situation I wonder how much of it is a joke, and how much is legit people getting horny over a JPEG. And I feel the horny has intensified quite a bit this year (and perhaps since last year because Lost Word/gacha is now a thing associated with the name of Touhou), especially since January and the rise of this meme format. I am also guilty of watching the OG post, and thought it will be just a meme staying associated with one channel, and which would die quickly. However, I was not expecting it to become so widespread, and still be alive after 5 months on so many channels. And this was such a thing in the western fandom that it made me for a while question the quality of the western fandom (and if overall we are not just a bunch of horny guys salivating after some art made in Japan). The original "I want mommy/I want milk" meme as created by XE3G weeb: I honestly wonder if the whole feeling of horny has always been a problem, only started to manifest after the lockdown(s) of 2020, or the cause is something completely different. Mice anecdote. It reminds me quite a bit of the classic stereotype in regards to Japan and why their population is decreasing. At least according to American memes, the cause for this decrease in population is not aging population, not the fact we are talking about an island with little natural resources of its own but 80 million citizens (Tokyo alone has a greater population than Romania at 37 million for the entire metropolitan area - twice the population of Romania actually) nor overworking which might reduce the stimuli for establishing a family (also the rise in the hikkikomori phenomenon), but the fact Japanese prefer to pleasure themselves with some hentai or a body pillow instead of meeting men/women. I am sorry for having to be so blunt, but this is basically what comes to my ears all the time (Romania is a country that sucks in quite a bit of American pop culture, even if still in small dose and with a great delay especially when coming to trends). Americans an be quite stupid and stereotypical at times. Just as I've watched that video. I like his way of presenting things, and indeed does make use of Romanian anecdotes. In the case of the video you provided a link for, I actually recognized the story about the peasant and boyar he was talking about, as i think it was the story related to Moș Ion Roată, a Moldavian peasant from the middle of the 19th century, and which was illustrated by Romanian literature as an example of the peasantry of the era in contact with the changing times. But yeah Romanian TVee seems quite like a nice guy.

Romanian tvee is a commentary YouTuber from Romania. https://youtu.be/P14P5-YTvlQ This is the video I know of him about Funny how most of this conversation about hentai being called art stemmed from artist ZONE stating that hentai is art as his character zone-tan became the mascot of hentai as a whole to the point where she's actually referenced in other properties like skullgirls

For Gelbooru, if you account for questionable posts as well, it's bumped up to around 5%. As for R34, the data I have is based on rule34.xxx, which has no "sort by popularity" option for tags. Taking a look at R34 Paheal, it does indeed show that Touhou is the second most popular tag in terms of intellectual property, only lagging behind My Little Pony. Despite this, however, it still only accounts for around 2% of posts, which goes to show how wide of a net Rule34 really casts. Given this, I'd say it's safe to assume that even on the other website it's also among the biggest tags despite the low share. As for Pixiv, I personally have no clue. It probably comes down to the fact that until recently, you couldn't search for tags in english on that website, and people would just commonly underestimate how much of an absolute colossus Pixiv actually is (as of 2020 it was 100 million submissions and counting, so currently it's entirely possible that Pixiv holds the equivalent of 20 Danboorus, likely much more if you count the fact a single submission can hold several images, sometimes dozens per submission). I'm fairly certain that anyone that is comfortable enough to share such thoughts in a public space is a porn addict and would behave this way regarding other fictional characters or real-life actresses even if they had never found Touhou. This is why I never participate in these massive internet arguments. Too often you will find yourself saying "dude I'm on your side but please stop being such an idiot". I am reminded of an anecdote; two men in Japan are on a bus (one is a foreign anthropologist conducting interviews for a research paper and the other is going to a convention -- I don't recall if he's just an attendee or part of the management) discussing visual novels which have loli characters as romance options. Another man on the bus overhears their conversation and visibly becomes a little bit agitated. Does he walk over to them and start to explain to them how horrible they are as people or loudly yell so that everyone can hear about how disgusting these two are (things that too often happen online)? No, he just says to himself "For the sake of Japan's future, I hope this bus crashes." and leaves it at that. Sometimes I wish more people could stop being self-righteous no matter what side they're on and at the very least banter properly if a civil discussion isn't on the table.

I think this point stems from the fact that historically, western art was very realistic and very much an "at face value" experience, symbolism taking the backseat most times. So now when the same idea of realism is brought to that, it isn't that much of a surprise why people think what they do. Related image