ACE_DEUCE

To be fair, all of the storylines in Hisoutensoku are fairly lighthearted. Handling Meiling's story in this way makes sense cause it'd be hard to come up with a reason for her to leave her post, and having her fight a bunch of people who she has no reason to refuse entry to normally would just be confusing. I didn't really see that one as a moment of particular incompetence. Tewi had intentionally forged invitations for a huge number of rabbits, which would probably overwhelm most people. She most likely just didn't want to risk getting scolded by Sakuya/Remilia for turning away guests. (Although, it is just a gag manga with no direct writing involvement by ZUN so I don't think it makes for a very important character moment) Not only that, but it was also revealed that she often just straight up forgets to lock the gate and wouldn't notice somebody sneaking through, completely contradicting her PMiSS entry! If you told me that Mizuchi is possessing ZUN IRL and is writing these dumbfounding plot points in to feed on the resulting negative energy of Touhou fans or something, I honestly wouldn't be very skeptical.

I see, that is an entirely reasonable position to take. I agree that there's no definitive way to gauge what exactly goes on in people's heads, and I am glad you are able to approach this logically even if our opinions may differ a little bit. Well, doing some math, it would probably be the kids born somewhere between 2006-2008. Web 2.0 had existed since roughly 2004, but it wasn't until a later that the online services which parents would use to distract kids (such as video streaming) became widely used. Just give the sucker an iPad and you're good to go for several hours. And mind you, these guys were probably already in their middle developmental stages when they were given unmonitored internet access (I shudder to think what might become of the children today who are growing up with Youtube Kids, but that's an entirely different discussion). I believe one study concluded that in many western countries, the average first exposure to pornography for modern generations happened around the age of eleven, mostly on the internet. I'm no psychologist, but I also don't believe I need to be one to surmise that such a thing has the potential to warp someone's sexual development.

This specifically, in my opinion, could just be a consequence of kids raised with completely unrestricted internet access (in the time of web 2.0) hitting puberty. I'm certainly no expert, but the laissez fare attitude of millennial parents might be catching up to them through their kids' social (and in this case sexual) proclivities that have sprung up as a result of complete engrossment in digital media from a young age; the effects of which on a developing brain psychologists are still working to understand completely. I believe it's possible to disagree on something civilly. I apologize if any comment I've made had come off as passive-aggressive, as I have no intention to be hostile whatsoever.

Going on the basis that laws are created based on the cultural and moral framework of a certain group, and (as I've hopefully demonstrated with my original point) that there's no reason to believe that Japan has more pedophiles than anywhere else nor that they consider acts against children to be any less immoral somehow (to imply the latter could even be construed as somewhat offensive), taking your post at face value would then mean you agree with me that it's just a cultural difference relating to what is a viable means of artistic expression? But the post seems to be written in a disagreeing tone, so I don't believe that's the case. On the other hand, if you are denying my original point in it's entirety (even though you don't seem to be doing that either, and in any case I hope you aren't because saying that pedophilia is somehow intrinsically tied to the culture of an entire nation is a bad faith argument), it would mean that Japanese people, despite being conscientious about real child sexual abuse, still distinguish loli content as a separate moral category. Does this mean you are of the position that loli content is primarily by and for pedophiles who also fantasize about real children, but that being a pedophile isn't an issue as long as you don't actually harm any of those real children? If so, that is an opinion I can reasonably wrap my head around, but not one I entirely agree with. On the other hand if your position is that they are wrong to do so and that there is no difference in the morality of reading an issue of Comics-LO and viewing explicit material involving real-life underage individuals, then I'd have to say that such a view lacks nuance and consideration.

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.

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".