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Thank you for your reply. I am sorry for lumping you in the rest of "the Touhou hater circle". I respect everything you made for Western Touhou fandom. I wish good luck with your ReC98 project. I agree with some of their points, too. But only some of their points are strong, but some of their points (as you showed later) are quite strange. I don't really like the way how they convey information (but this may be only my problem). Many regular fans don't notice problems or they think that they are insignificant, that is why their points are weak. The points of "the Touhou hater circle" are stronger because they know that there are problems, but the problem is what to do next with this information. That is another reason why I don't fully agree with them, because I prefer to find a way how to use information. If you can improve their culture of discussion then I am with you. For me Touhou is not only about official works but main part of Touhou are also derivative works. Each new official work just fuels Touhou fan scene give more material for it, brings interest back. One of the reasons why lore and story is very far from perfect and really vague is to give more material for different interpretations which leads to more ideas for fanworks. Touhou could not exist as we know if there were not a lot of fanworks. I know that for Western fans guidelines may be not that good (I read spaztron64's post), but for Japanese fans they are still good. I research Touhou and doujin because I want to understand the background behind all of these to see what lessons we can learn from all of these. + I get fun from this, really. That is what I do in my free time (if I have some). I still like Touhou, I wouldn't do it if I didn't like it. I understand I see. For me Touhou is still more about hobby and I don't think about getting money for my activities. We see this problem from different points. About lunatic players for example this... wait they deleted it. About lore fans there is a lore den in local community in my country which acts like this. If we will take what Westerners call anime then yes, "Touhou is anime". About doujin somewhat agree. Because even for the ones who participate in this activities it is hard to give strict definition for it (but I have seen doujin books, which tried to give a definition) About points in definition you gave: 1. No (especially nowadays), because there were doujin(-like) events in Korea, China and Taiwan even in 2000s. 2-6. Agree. 7. Somewhat agree, but doesn't it happen with any other subculture (even with Western game and movie industries)? And yes, piracy greatly helped Touhou to get popularity outside Japan. And why are you so obsessed with piracy? Only because we are on a piracy site? 8. Physical stores are a way for circles to actually earn money if they want. They existed at least since 1990s. 9. It is a strange point because there have been paid Touhou items on digital stores at least since the beginning of 2010 (there may be earlier items, I didn't do a deep dive). About person-to-person nature agree. About "doujin spirit" (which is much more vague than doujin), from your side a big part of doujin scene (I am not talking about Touhou) don't have "doujin spirit" because a lot of doujin circles sell their items on physical or digital stores. We might stop use the term doujin and say that doujin and indie are the same thing, but there are still a lot of differences. Cultural differences are obvious, what is not obvious: doujin circles and indie studios are different entities from economical side and legal side (still there is no strict legal definition for doujin) (from legal side parody doujin works don't violate copyrights while parody indie works do (actually it is more complicated), that is why Japanese people say that Nintendo is kind to doujin (again actually it is more complicated), to indie... I think you know yourself). It would be great to reduce differences between doujin and indie, but it is hard to do it. Somewhat agree, but the border between them is vague. For now I will just say that a *thing* that is unacceptable for most of doujin scene (remember drama around Comiket at the beginning of September this year) and the *thing* Cannonball is criticized for (I am not about gacha here) actually happened in 2007 on Reitaisai (and happened many times later). Before that there were some contracts which led to this *thing*. And ZUN allowed that to happen. Anyway, I will cover this in more details later. About core series, it is hard to change it directly (even though you even said one of ways how to do it because even people not from Japan (not only Toby Fox) do it to influence ZUN's opinion. Why not to use this information?). + many (not all) recent commercial things are organised and made by semi-officials and some doujin event organisers, they got licenses which allow them to do it and ZUN just allows this to happen. About fanworks it is complicated. From one side I like old formula "any Touhou work can be sold", but at the same time I don't really like aggressive commercialization like gacha fangames. No he didn't say anything about it on interviews (but there were some ZUN's tweets about this topic), but we can see actual consequences of this. He was against the *thing* during an incident which happened in 2018 (a hint: THBWiki has info about the beginning of this incident), but ZUN allowed that *thing* to happen with limitations. But after 3 years (2021) fans organised another similar *thing* without those limitations and ZUN had no problems with that (+ he had no problems when semi-officials did something similar in 2020). + It is interesting who actually organised that collab (they are somewhat related to the story I mentioned above). I see. This discussion was really interesting, thank you for your replies.

hi i started join to find some very friendly friend cuz i have hard time speaking with someone who i never know and i'm a introvert one so i sometimes feel embarrassed to starting a conservation before someone speak to me first.

I think we should have a good talk about this topic. I have had a lot of thinking about this topic for a long time. Recent twits by nmlgc and aggressive2hu inspired me to do more research to finally build a full picture. I understood that we should act now until it is too late. The more info I found for this post, the worse the situation became. And it is not just about Touhou, problems are much more serious, but mostly I will talk about Touhou because I really love Touhou and I hope to change situation for better at least for Touhou. The goal of this post is not to bring hate towards anybody in the fandom or ZUN, but to help people understand the roots of the problems to resolve them. CAUTION!! CAUTION!! CAUTION!! If you still want to believe that there are no serious problems in Touhou fandom, and still want to believe in Touhou and doujin magic, well this post may bring you down. You have been warned. CAUTION!! CAUTION!! CAUTION!! Before we start, I hope to see criticism which will explain where I am right and where I am wrong, because this topic is rarely discussed. Thank you. Have you noticed that something is not right? Have you noticed that there are much less new Touhou fangames, doujinshi and doujin music than for example 8 years ago? Have you noticed that a lot of new fan content is nearly unnoticed? Have you noticed that fandom is not united and split? Have you noticed that last Touhou games are rushed and story is less well-written? Doujin events examples: I suppose that everyone noticed at least some of those problems but I am surprised that nearly nobody tried to analyse why these have happened. Well, there are two main causes of the problems: the fandom and the franchise itself. Fandom: But there are other problems that may make people haters of not just fandom, but of Touhou itself. Franchise: But what I can say for sure if this topic is unnoticed and left undiscussed we won't be able to change the situation for better. I thought that Touhou was an islet of safety in current sea of crisis of mass culture, but alas it is already under the water. But wait, let's be clever and take a step further (unlike those haters): what about non-Touhou doujin scene, what is happening there? (Spoiler: the situation is similar there): But everything is not lost! We can change the situation for better if we will stop being scattered and will work together. The worst thing now is just giving up. Thank you for reading this. I would be really glad to receive criticism, corrections and proposals. I know this topic is controversial, but I think that it must be discussed. I just want Touhou fandom to become better. If you have any good ideas how to change the whole situation for better feel free to share them. Also feel free to share this post. There are also some other related thoughts about this topic: Afterwords: If after reading this post you want to hate ZUN or anybody else then I think you didn't understand this post. This post shows that hate didn't change the situation for better and only made it worse. We don't need to hate, We need to act. For the fans who are Still with us.

Hi. Good to hear about that. I hope you will get an answer soon. Thank you for info. Added.

Greetings. First off.... Don't try to deny it. You have wasted a perfect opportunity to troll Yumetou: after a very close vote where we had to break the tie with luck, now everyone voted for the same thing. Everyone, except you who wanted to be SO different. Bah, we have more pressing matters now. So, turns out Oscar can't read Japanese (how could have I forgotten this simple fact). Gathering books/text left by the fortune teller might be useless after all. And turns out I was right about Agappa being scared of "eyes", too bad it was useless to Oscar, as he still don't understand what scared her exactly. Our options now, going to the study would probably be useless, unless the fortune teller had some plan/formula written down (Oscar can't read them, but if he left only a few behind it can be manageable). The storeroom could contained potential cursed artifact, but since there currently does seem to be any danger Oscar can go (he can run if things go south). Regrouping is also an option, but it hasn't been that long since the group entered the building, so checking up on them won't be of much use (unless Oscar is worried about them). I'll go with the storage room for now, to explore the place a little more until Oscar find something more promising, or runs into something dangerous, or half of Team9 does something stupid. Bullet hell aren't that bad difficulty wise. Don't let the Lunatic gameplay scares you from trying the game, that's what difficulty levels are for (It's like rhythm games. Nobody's born a pro, so there's no shame playing lower difficulty first, then increasing it if you enjoy the challenge). Bullet hell is a very unique genre that I recommend anyone to try at least once (especially Touhou fans so that they at least experienced the game that spawn character/lore/music they are so fond of. Demo are available for the latest games, so money isn't an excuse, and a full game last ~30-40m so time isn't an excuse either). The goal of the game and the controls are extremely simple compared to more modern game, so it's very quick to learn how to play those (just make sure to read up the short introduction that's on this site to learn the basics). It's not for everyone, so no big deal if you don't like it, but it's an experience that deserve to be tried.

Hi! I have very little information at the moment, but I might be able to get my hands on AoRY 0.05 soon. I contacted the author and am still waiting for an answer. Right now I can only tell you a little about Magical Moon Story. This game was discussed in this post on the shrinemaiden forum: https://www.shrinemaiden.org/forum/index.php?topic=17233.0 I also seem to have found the developer's channel and Twitter: https://www.youtube.com/user/2010gaje https://x.com/EternalUltima That's all for now. I'll tell you about AoRY 0.05 soon.

A Master of Lunatic then, safe to say that's almost just as impressive as a Jedi, for someone like me, Touhou main games are a distant reality, bullet hell is probably beyond my mortal self. From now on, Master Green, this puny human will pay close attention to your wise teachings. It is actually easier than you think, before Yummy Toes, my plans for our alliance were superficial and because of this I mostly planned to do my own thing but after I experienced the Yummy Toes, I could see that your person is truly charismatic, to the point I had to make a solemn oath of eternal friendship. Speaking seriously now, I'm always up for a little debate even if I don't linger much around, if you feel like your choice is optimal then by all means, I'm ready to read your opinion and back you up, this is partly of the reason why I always explain here why I decided on a certain option. With this in mind, I hope that not only Ki-moon <- (Ally), but everyone else who disagrees with my decision to feel free to point it out and try to convince me otherwise, be warned though that Ally -> (Kim Moh) will take priority due to a previously established alliance. Heya, it's nice to know that you are probably enjoying this little pastime as much as I am, feel free to stick around and/or send us your thoughts whenever you want. Have fun lurking around Jimmyqx! Yume, no worries, but I do hope you are not overworking yourself lately, feel free to take a rest if you feel like you need it, many of us are probably going to suffer from withdrawal but I think we can manage. Also, regarding your schedule issues, I advise you to act more like me, if you haven't noticed yet, I always review on Sundays despite being around sometimes on Wednesdays, this commitment is essential to aid you in keeping your schedule organized, even now, I reply to you on a Sunday... WAIT, it's past midnight? Meaning that it's Monday already? What about my Sunday only reviews? Was it all a LIE??? See? Even I, the scheduled one, can fail sometimes... Now, I can finally get to the chapter, sometimes, I waste so much time greeting everyone that I even forget what I just read some moments ago, thankfully, I can ALT + Tab my way to the chapter easily. And it seems that Agappa was only scared about the door after all, or not, that hair is ominous as it can be and I'm almost sure that Ozzy is close to turn into a special grade curse from that hair alone. For this reason, maybe going after the little shrine would be a good option? If it's a benevolent thing then perhaps a little bit of guidance should help to sustain what little remains of Oscar's sanity. As for the other options, I'm sure that Cirno and Wriggle should be able to find any item that our old senpai might have left behind in the storeroom, the office would be a good idea if Ozzy was literate but that's beyond his skills for now. When we are done here, a visit to Suzunaan should be our main priority, on the other hand, what are the chances of a grown ass man enrolling into Keine's school?

katayoku no tori is a good song and you should listen to it

Tsukumogami Meaning 'Haunted Tools', this name is somewhat misleading as these Yokai may not be tools as Westerners think of them. They are lesser Youkai who usually appear after an item has reached 100 years of age, or has received significant neglect. The traits of a Tsukumogami vary from item to item affected. They are generally a minor Youkai, and seldom do more than try to frighten humans. Though some more powerful spirits sometimes disguise themselves as these benign entities to seem harmless. Examples Elsewhere: Bakezori (Straw Sandals) Biwabokuboku (Biwa, or stringed instrument) Chochin Obake (Paper Lantern) Hone Karakasa (Skeleton Umbrella) Kameosa (Earthware Jars) Karakasa Obake (Umbrella) Kotofurunushi (Koto, a kind of stringed instrument) Mokumokukuren (Paper Doors and Windows) Shami Choro (Shamisen, a kind of stringed insturment) Ungaikyō (Mirrors) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Moments like this made Oscar question how he had gotten to this point. His mind went over the past two days, flitting over each individual choice. And how it lead to him scaling an abandoned—possibly cursed—house to search for clues. To a cryptic poem. Recited by the weirdo grasping at his leg. Deep breaths Oscar. Deep breaths. “Agappa,” He said, willing the full extent of his patience into place. Part of his mind pretending Agappa was younger than she was. “Use your words. What is wrong? Tell me.” Nervously, she just extended her hand, pointing again. It was a moment or two more before she managed a word. “Eyes.” “Eyes?” “Eyes.” “Where?” “Shōji.” “What the hell is Shoji?” Her hand thrust again to the door with its faded paper. The small and torn paper sagging. He took a slow breath. His hands giving up on freeing himself to instead rest on her shoulders. Her arms clung unnaturally tight to his leg. He took another slow breath. “Okay, Agappa. There are no eyes there—” “There are.” “—But if there were, we have two options. We can stand here where they can stare at us, or pass them so they can’t. We can only pick one. Which do you want?” “Go back.” “They’ll still be staring at us then, which puts us back at our choice. Which do you want to do?” Agappa was still for a moment. The only sound she made was a low whimper. Before she slowly let go. Still clinging to Oscar’s pant leg. He tried to ignore it as he led her forward. Agappa couldn’t even look up, trying to wrap herself in his cloak as best she could. Oscar set a slow pace. Letting Agappa follow along as best she could with her eyes welled shut. It was slow going, but the only way they were getting inside. As he approached, he could see inside the dingy room were all manner of books and scrolls. Lining shelves set in place. Facing the yellowed paper of the windows was a European model of the solar system. Its many round rings were well maintained, and may have served as a reasonable display at a modern school, were it not for the fact the earth sat at the center of the cosmos. Oscar’s eyes roamed over the scrolls. Then glanced down at the girl pressing her face to his side. It was then he realized just how pointless this expedition was. The chances any of the books here were written in English were almost certainly none. Any that were here would be written in Japanese and who knew what else. And while Agappa, Wriggle and Cir...Agappa and Wriggle could almost certainly read them for him, he doubted Agappa would tear her face from his side long enough to read. With little other option, he began to idly glance over the books and scrolls. Trying to pick out any which might help him. It was hard going, eventually he just resorted to picking out the most worn or valuable looking options and tucking them under his arm. It was as he opened yet another book with a dingy cover, that the page fluttered open. A piece of folded paper emerged, something written upon it. Raising it to his face, the corner slipped free. Letting him see the contents. It was a lock of dark hair. Tied with a red and white bow. Oscar managed to stifle his disgust as he discarded the item back onto the ground. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= With a collection of books under his arm, the rest of the home is yours to explore. Where to next? = The Fortune Teller seemed to be a busy guy. That means there's probably a storehouse on the bottom floor we can check. = Japanese homes are supposed to have little miniature shrines. Maybe the one here can teach us something. = There's sure to be an office or study room around here somewhere. Maybe it can tell us more. = Well, this is close enough for government work. Let's hurry to find the other two.

Back when I used Reddit I remember getting in trouble for saying I "downloaded" EOSD (From here though didn't say anything related to that, just said I downloaded it) on a post I made about the game having technical issues lmao, They really expected me to import a 20 year old game that's long out of print lol

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.

Counter Point: Is the state of the fandom at any time, past current or future, necessarily concerning? What is the actual impact on you or me if this state of affairs continues or gets "worse?" I've been around a while now, and I've seen many fluctuations in the little "circle" we have here. I don't always appreciate them, but they don't bother me overly much; ultimately, my life is not going to be effected by what's happening here. Touhou is the reason I came here, but it isn't really the reason I'm still here now, and it was never going to be. My "About Me" page is forever invisible (why does this exist I don't understand it's been years), but if y'all could see it you'd see a description of what I believe defined my priorities in regard to my interactions: Bible believer Music enthusiast Amateur meme propagator That's me (although I may not live up to the last one anymore), and whatever happens to Touhou and its fandom isn't going to change that. I get the impression you want something out of the fandom that you don't believe you can get in its current state. What is it?

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.

You've... scrambled my brain. I don't know what to say. At first I just want to get clarification on your main points, because honestly, your post is huge. Is this interpretation correct? -Problem1: Bigger websites (discord, facebook, etc.) get more popular -> fans leave main touhou websites -> fans are in smaller divided circles (ex: discord servers) -> more divide/drama -Problem2: Touhou getting enfranchised -> lower effort games -> more negativity towards the series -Outcome: Combining outcomes of problems 1 & 2 -> harder for newcomers to get in -> less fans -> entire fanbase begins to degrade (fanworks and events) -Solution: Everybody going back to centralized touhou websites OR creating a huge website list containing all fan circles I'm really not too sure if I understood everything. Please let me know if I misunderstood anything.

Might as well respond directly here, that indirect Twitter format is too constricting anyway. First of all, as you're probably going to see from my arguments, you can't really lump me in with the rest of "the Touhou hater circle". I do share some of their opinions and support them because these viewpoints deserve more representation; the whole Touhou spectacle is in dire need of well-informed criticism and they typically have stronger arguments than regular fans. So I help them out every once in a while if they happen to misrepresent any of the few things I was involved with, or that I know more about than they do. Since they're closer to my own viewpoints, they're very appreciative of that, and they get to keep their argumentative high ground. Still, I have more differences with them than they have between each other. I do call out particularly bad and petty arguments on their side, and straight up don't care about a lot of aspects they criticize (lore, real-world politics, character designs, commercial advertising stunts, alcoholism, …). For the most part though, I prefer to keep my mouth shut about things I'm not at least somewhat sure about or invested in. Doesn't mean I agree with it. Also, I've completely stopped looking at the fanwork scene in 2011. And while I do occasionally observe from a distance what's happening in the core series, I haven't actively interacted with any of it since 2018 either. Kind of like you in a way. So you definitely know more about this than I do, not denying that. These days, I have better things to do than community research; ReC98 is the only reason I'm in this anymore, and once that business stops making money, I'm out. Completely with you on this one. ReC98 has long solved this argument for me via good old capitalism: I offer my time and skills to do Touhou-related coding and research work in exchange for money, and I'm eternally grateful for everyone who engages in this transaction because they believe it's a worthwhile investment. It's always interesting to know how my customers engage with the franchise beyond this transaction so I can somewhat tailor my product to their interests and make it even more worthwhile for them personally, but why would I judge them for it? That would be utterly self-destructive. And I don't even have to care about getting more people to play the games because my business is growing just fine. These days, the ReC98 blog drives way more engagement than the actual code because people just like reading about anything and everything hidden within these culturally significant games at the core of the spectacle. Sure, the backer list includes a fair share of gameplay people, but it's far from being the majority. If ReC98 was funded entirely by gameplay fans, it would be in a significantly different place today. You're talking to the one person who managed to monetize in-depth and highly technical game research toward an audience who doesn't play the games; of course I would agree that gatekeeping is silly. I'd even go further and say that we don't even have to care about what gatekeepers think. Because: They're driving themselves out of the market with that stance. I've been consistently selling out all my capacity anyway, whatever they're saying sure isn't hurting my bottom line, nor anyone else's. Again, I agree as well, because everybody benefits from that. I was simply theorizing why it hasn't happened so far, based on my own impressions. People are seriously using these terms in this way now? Got any quotes? But yes, the whole notion has always been there, it's invoked every time someone says "well actually, Touhou is [insert personal conviction about ZUN's main motivation]". I've long moved on to instead just saying the tongue-in-cheek "Touhou is anime" unironically; it captures the overall spectacle better than any individual element by instead referring to the biggest culture it unquestionably overlaps with. All my Touhou-related GitHub repos have the anime tag for precisely this reason. You know which other term is so overloaded as to be basically meaningless these days? "Doujin". Whenever I use the word, I'm referring to the exclusively Japanese scene of producing creative works that historically grew around physical, in-person conventions, hosted at fixed times during the year (thus implying production deadlines), where these goods are sold, from creators to fans (← real, human interaction!) thus invariably spawing a piracy scene if some of the resulting goods suddenly end up enjoying a surprising global popularity, as well as the physical stores that sell these goods after the fact. Which also happened to be the only sanctioned way of selling Touhou fanworks in the Golden Age (that thankfully neither of the two of us wants to return to). Hence, the regionally isolated, low-key, person-to-person nature is the entire point. You might copy that concept, relocate it to China, and change the operating language of your piracy scene, fair enough. (Though I'd just refer to the resulting scene as tóngrén then, just like we have a dedicated word for Korean manga.) But as soon as you add global digital distribution, or have any aspirations to grow, develop, and professionalize beyond the above constraints, you've moved past "the doujin spirit", as simple as that. The English Wikipedia page does not mention those things either. So we all might as well stop using the term entirely at that point, and instead specify more clearly which aspect of doujin-ness we're talking about in any specific instance. As far as I'm concerned, the only distinction that actually matters is whether you act as a hobbyist or a business. Every other term (including indie) is at best tribalism or PR/sympathy-fishing, and at worst upholding the silly, silly East vs. West dichotomy we're (hopefully) trying to move past here. Looking forward to your citation for precisely that date. How should it develop then? Are we talking core series or fanworks here? The core series is beyond our control and can only barely be influenced by ZUN's close friends, so that train of thought is not even worth following as far as I'm concerned. "Becoming friends with ZUN and drinking a few beers together" is how the 2010 meme about persuasion continues. I'm attributing this and other advertising stunts more to ZUN's gradually changing life situation, but who knows. Maybe there is definite proof from a ZUN interview. But until then, it's a pointless discussion about correlation and causation. aggressive2hu does, this was directed at her. Indeed, and it's tiresome to engage in this perpetual guessing game. This was also directed at aggressive2hu and "the circle"'s wishes for more quality in the core series.

we be going into gambling with this one!!!

ngl lwk was starting to think touhou is dying