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There's a game out in the world called Shadowrun. Its a fantasy-cyberpunk tabletop role-playing game. In my own opinion, its kind of dumb and crap. I mean, the map of America has only one faction based on a fantasy race besides humans. But I was invited to a Shadowrun game. And seeing as I have no ideas, I decided to play as a Touhou character and see if anyone catches the references. But, I have a little problem. One I would like the advice of the loremasters of the Shrine with. My Idea Flandre de Bourgogne or as she prefers 'DJ Flan' is a young aspiring urban artist. She makes a decent living on personalized artwork, playing music at various clubs and has a good following for her graffiti artwork. She has a cozy basement apartment she keeps stuffed with her artwork and exploding toys. That said, she is a solitary figure with an odd sense of mannerisms. Being an elf, she is long-lived, and often grows bored. Trying to coerce strangers into children's card games to show her skill. "If you win, we get to be friends. If I win, I get to shoot you. With THIS gun!" is a favorite introduction of hers. She isn't completely isolated. She has an older sister who is head of the police force. Her sister Emilia is also a vampire, a family tradition provided when a family member proves themselves. Not that DJ Flan cares about that. She has a couple other friends, such as her family bodyguard who tutored her as a child, the neighboring rich family's delinquent daughter as well as a minor street gang called the Misty Fairies. She's not into Shadowrunning (imagine cyberpunk crime but with magic) for the money, but to have fun, and to find her missing best friend. My Problem So as you can see, its a pretty naked allusion to Flan. With enough blatant theft that a normie with any contact with Touhou will pick up hints. Which is good, because I normally don't associate Shadowrun with fun, while I usually associate Touhou with fun after I stop dying. The problem is Shadowrun is a game. And like most games, it has pesky things like 'rules'. Which mean I won't be able to play a goddess of destruction who is a master of danmaku, can split into four, and fights so well with a spear it only shows up on the box art and as a card. Instead, I need to choose a class or 'archetype' which will let me play out my fantasy of making obscure references to a Japanese video game older than the game master. Which is fine. Except I can't decide which set of skills to give my Not Flan. I won't bore you all with a breakdown of all the classes archetypes, but will give bullet-points on my ideas. Which basically amount to 'smacky Flan, shooty Flan, explody Flan'. I want to hear from you all, which 'feels' the most Flan, so I can stop being indecisive and get this ready by next month. Adepts: Adepts are wizards if they went to the gym instead. They use magic to buff their feeble noodle arms, making them masters of melee combat. Its also the most broken class in 6e. Which means Laevateinn is on the table, but danmaku is mostly out of reach. Which doesn't feel quite right. Combat Mage: Mages come in two flavors. Mind control/spirit summoning demigods and deadweight. That said, standard combat magic is sometimes useful, and it means danmaku is an option. Not to mention the rarity of standard mage players in the setting might make her stand out more. Thinking of focusing on explosives if I go this route, and may be able to arrange Four of a Kind with some work. Street Samurai: More or less the Terminator. They focus on melee or gun combat. If I go this route, I'll probably give her a pair of SMGs for the Danmaku spray, maybe with some explosives for that creative burst. So yeah, that's it. I'm indecisive about a roleplaying game I don't care for and want to post low-tier Flan memes. Help me become Flan, but in the future.

This is surely a nice topic to revive my forum activity. So far i agree with the points made here and kudos Vanyk, for having the data that shows the decrease of interest in Touhou and bringing this topic up. Something to have in mind is that circumstances are constantly changing, the world is not the same in 2008 than in 2024. The pandemic really hit Touhou hard, you can see that the decrease in popularity, at least with in-person events, got accelerated due to the restrictions and the economic stagnation we have been going through since 2020. Now, Touhou is far from being in a bad spot, it just needs to adapt to the new times we are living in and that has to do with passing the torch to the new generation (basically what Banana Man said). It's very unlikely that Touhou will ever die completely, it's too big to die. Games are in a general state of crisis in the 2020s. The new generation of consoles (outside the Switch) got few sales, PC games are more exigent and buggier than ever and mobile games spiraled down into becoming cash cows. Control over creativity has been removed from the hands of creators and placed on the hands of executives and business man who don't understand what the people want, or the executives try too hard to appeal with fan service (what happened to Star Wars). This is also why AI is getting so much funding, the capitalistic world is playing too hard into the "save costs at all costs" game. You can see the problem in action with the very recent Helldivers 2 controversy (TLDR, Sony is forcing people to create Playstation accounts to continue playing, against the devs' wishes and the players). Another problem that hits Touhou very hard is that the principal computing device got shifted away from the PC, now the dominant force is the Phone. And this combines with phone games turning into cash cows (Lost Word and the Gachapocalypse with things like Genshin Impact, for example). The dominance of the phone also brought in a change of how people approach computers and how Big Tech design the user experience. Back in Touhou's Golden Age, the focus of the internet was on forums, personal websites and it was overall a more intimate and slower feeling experience, the internet itself was Indie. Nowadays, thanks to the centralization that Big Tech accomplished and the discovering of the scrolling format, the focus was shifted to fast paced content and dopamine hits. It was a recipe for disaster, to say the least. The Touhou community got fragmented into tons of niches, but the platforms got united in a single place and the shift was changed into an addiction of consumerism from a more relaxed, "everyone is involved" enjoyment of the franchise. Everything is a lot more capitalistic nowadays. For example, a new person who is getting into Touhou is a lot more likely to stumble across Lost Word, the Reddit or the music in YouTube. These platforms encourage a passive involvement of the franchise, promoting the idea of consuming content instead of enjoying creations. Discovering things is hard and becoming an active part of the community is even harder. All of this relates deeply to the Dead Internet Theory. What this theory states is that Internet activity is more and more driven by Bot/AI activity and a focus on the TikTok-like algorithmic addiction based content made to be consumed. In reality, people activity is higher than ever, the problem is that it's passive or hidden from search engines in places like Discord. This is encouraged specially by Reddit and Twitter. Since Twitter got rebranded, bot activity soared very high. Reddit got the API changes controversy and other small changes to the platform made it much harder to navigate, content quality decreased drastically and a trend i have been noticing is that Reddit is more focused on this new brand of entertainment. And all of this leads us to... Mature content. Touhou has always been about mature content, writing this i even found some mature Winamp skins from January 2008... There have been animated videos about Yukari doing nefarious things (look up Border of Ecstasy if you are brave). I was chatting with CountVonNumenor before writing this and he provided me with these statistics that highlight what percentage of artwork in art websites is mature and safe for work: The problem is, mature content is now trying to be the main focus of the franchise. It's only thing that kept consistent activity since the Golden Age. Memories of Phantasm is drowning any interesting things it brings to the table in gigantic boobs. Same thing with Lost Word (im not even counting how disgusting Gacha games are due to producing gambling addictions and sexualizing woman), social media is also promoting Mature Touhou like crazy! The past months i browsed the Touhou Reddit (r/touhou), and it followed this recipe: 1) Enter Reddit, get recommended only the NSFW Touhou posts 2) A little more scrolling and i get the same posts again, but this time in the r/2hujerk reddit, with the title "Outjerked once again by the main sub" 3) Repeat Twitter is worse, you can follow someone because they draw cool fanart, but then they also like to retweet mature content or you get shoved the political agenda of choice. Reddit depends more on what is the subreddit's style, but Twitter has no salvation and that phenomenon is universal. And it doesn't end here, if you enter a website dedicated to fanart, like Pixiv, chances are you are going to get drowned in mature content. It's worse if you go into a more niche website like the boorus. Even if you use the "hide 18+ content" you still get mature content, it's infuriating to me. It's very hard to be a Touhou fan when the first thing someone getting into the franchise sees is Lost Word's ooga woogas or the 100th time post of Sakuya's feet this week, let's not even get started on people drawing absolutely disgusting artwork worthy of prison time of my favorite character, Sumireko Usami. And due to the nature of social media, you can't escape it without detaching yourself from more public community endeavors. What's worse is that Count already tried to discuss this problem in r/touhou and he already described the horny tactics in Memories of Phantasm. Only to get some attention, but just to get the "nice wall of text you got there" response and a repost over to r/copypasta (a place where memorable texts are placed and then shared into infinity because someone finds them funny.) His OG post: https://www.reddit.com/r/touhou/comments/w25e90/why_is_touhou_so_popular_in_terms_of_mature/ The Copypasta repost: https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/w26pfx/why_is_touhou_so_popular_in_terms_of_mature/ Another thing i want to briefly mention is that ZUN has a part of the blame of the state of the community. Since Violet Detector, the game's quality decreased or has stayed stagnant, on par with the quality of games from the early 2000s. ZUN's extremely indie approach of doing 90% of the work is hitting a wall. You can feel he is getting more busy, with less and less results. It took 8 years for another Hifuu Club Album (and a disappointing one in my opinion), the gameplay of the bullet hells didn't reinvent itself enough (cards are cool but the mechanic has been abused to death in 18.5 and 19) and he is burning himself out. The programming of 16.5 and 19 is especially bad and his game engine is Windows only (even if the bullet hell games can work well on consoles). Another funny thing is that he just doesn't place Touhou 06-08 on Steam, encouraging the piracy of the franchise as those 3 are the biggest games by far and it ends up encouraging the piracy of games that ARE available at Steam (not judging those who pirate, i'm siding with the enterprise here). He also allowed things like Lost Word to happen. In my opinion, the best way to revive Touhou is that ZUN lets his ego rest for a bit and that he changes his role into more of a "General Touhou Supervisor" and that he fully embraces the fact that it's a franchise now. Make a new multi-platform bullet hell engine, Touhou 06-08 remakes, expand Shanghai Alice into a real game studio, add more finality to the Hifuu Club story-line, official anime, etc. I think it's the best way for ZUN to control the enterprise growth of Touhou, while keeping control of the essence. Now that i highlighted some of the problems i see in Touhou, what are the solutions i can think of? Well, i don't have one for the mature content, as the people seem to be brainwashed into liking that sort of stuff dominating the community... It's even stranger because even if Pokémon has more mature works than Touhou percentage wise, it's a lot less ingrained in the culture of the community and you can totally avoid it, something very hard on Touhou's case. I will just briefly mention the state of other older franchises, Godzilla and Sailor Moon to get an understanding by comparison. Godzilla has seen a renaissance of activity in the community since the 2014 American movie, with tons of high quality fan creations (fan 3D animations, creepypastas/analog horror, amazing drawings, healthy discussion in the community's places and the reddit is a pretty chill and welcoming place). Godzilla is in a righteous cycle of original creations giving the community inspiration for fan-works that drive the sales of original creations further. Thankfully monsters avoid most of the mature content, so it ends up being a healthy dose. Sailor Moon is not that popular nowadays, the anime remake and movies helped (Crystal) but the community is very welcoming and you get a fair share of fan creations (an old competitive game gaining attention, healthy discussion of the anime & manga in the Reddit, etc.). Mature content is also a lot less prevalent here. Well, the main problem i see with Touhou is that there is no "central" place for the community to enjoy things. The closest things, Reddit & Twitter, are infested with mature content and are hard to navigate for stuff that's worthy of your time without wasting a huge amount of your day in there or getting flooded by Tech Bro selling Chimatacoins or whatever. The forums approach works really well with Touhou, allowing the prolonged survival of important posts, giving everyone a fair chance of contributing. Now, because everyone wants power and the compartmentalization of the community has some benefits, i think it's impossible to create "The Place". But you know what we can do? A landing page that lists everything important in the community. Official links, fangames, music circles, etc. For example, finding the steam page of the Touhou games is pretty hard for people not versed in Japanese, but if there was a list easier to navigate than Touhou Wiki, it would be very easy. I am currently in the process of creating this list, once i have enough things gathered i will make a post in the forum promoting this idea. It will only be successful if the community cares, but i have high hopes for it, stay tuned.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dCNK4AVdwxE

lots of people here rn woohoo

It seems slightly better than staar. The subjects we got depended on grade level and a lot of questions had double answers in which both were correct but one was 'slightly' better. The one thing I couldn't stand is being in the same classroom from 8-3 without being able to talk or do anything. There's genuine merit behind them, its basically a mass assessment to see what needs to be worked on in the future. It's just a matter of how the school wants to go about it. Telpas was a waste of time for all of us taking it. Basically if you were identified as an ell or bilingual student you're forced to take it from k-12th grade regardless of how proficient you get in English. Its just generic essays, speaking, and listening tests that don't do much for you. Again its there for a good reason but it overstays its welcome.

from satan's twitter account (666 faith!!)

what's the name of the sun dude music from this game?

Hello everyone, I am somewhat back, soon I will make a few posts. So, I listened to Taboo Japan Disentanglement. This was an awesome album, which really gives hope. The story is okay. I can only hope that the OST of the next game would be as good as TJD or even better. The only thing that makes me sad that it seems like CC are active again and and help to send DMCAs to channels who upload music from TJD. ParseePaseo got banned by YouTube, Monkybiten had to delete all videos with songs from TJD, kurayamanawa hid all videos with songs from TJD. The upload by Linny surprisingly is still on YouTube. What is happening with the rating of TJD on DoujinStyle?

I forgot to say that I am currently playing Zelda botw

just started listening to visual kei music, anyone who does it too?

it's already may huh... time flies

screw it i'm gonna say it bucket game. /s

in california, we have things called elpacs and caasps, which both run the tests. the whole test system worked like sh_t and the questions are either stupid or confusing. however, this year they were surprisingly easy and short. finished both in a day

My high school years were awful. 0/10. My happiest moments were walking with my dog. I eventually left and went to college however, and had a completely inverted experience. Everyone knew who I was, even if they had never seen me, I was one of the lead figures of my fraternity, and had more friends than I could count. I even was nominated for student body president, even if I only found out after the election. Life gets better. Keep your chin up, and focus on being your best You. Bad times pass, but good times keep you going long after they're gone.

dont watch kill la kill in skool

I generally don't think of my school that well, mostly because of my classmates and because of some other factors. There's also this one story I remember from primary school but I think it sounds like something out of r/stories or whatever.

we slaves

Its like you said, we're past the golden age of touhou. We are no longer in a time where touhou was as internet culturally relevant anymore. That unfortunately happens to a lot of series that are really popular on the internet. However I think we are far from dead, I think right now we are in a time where Touhou is giving rise to successors but it isn't being shown to the public more because its successors are more popular and good for them. To me, the touhou community is like the Classic Doom Community, even though its golden age has long past its community is still thriving. There are still people out there creating WAD's for Classic Doom and just like how people are still creating things for touhou. Both of these series still have boost of popularity with My house for Doom and Luna Nights for touhou (That was the game that got me into the franchise in the first place). We are just passing the torch to a new generation and as far as I see it, this new generation is doing well at keeping it lit.

Mmmm, this topic has been something of a long time brewing, hasn't it? 1.) General groundworks, fanbase fragmentation 2.) ZUN himself and franchising 3.) Doesn't he only interact with his JP fans? I'm gonna stop here for now and let this thread build up. I'm interested in seeing how this develops as it has been some time since something like this captured my attention.

Schaiße, I have completely forgotten about watching and making the review for the final episode... I sure do have enough unfinished business.