vanyk

Hello. I want to share some thoughts I have after observing Japanese Touhou community for some time. I see that a lot of non-Japanese fans do not see some things the same way as Japanese fans see it. So, I think it is important to share such notices to reduce the amount of misunderstandings.

It is important to understand that a lot of Japanese people (and ZUN) understand Copyright and respect not in the same way Western people see it, and there are a lot of misunderstandings because of that (and there may be problems because of that). That leads to a big number of unspoken rules (except official guideline) which most Japanese fans understand, but Western fans do not know about them. Examples:
1. Raising money before work's release (for example crowdfunding) is still a no-no in doujin sphere even now. It somewhat changed after COVID (because some doujin circles and even doujin events realized that they need to find a way to survive), so it is not that big no-no now. What about Touhou? In 2014 and 2015 there were 2 attempts to make fan content with crowdfunding. What important to note that many Japanese fans weren't supporting them (especially after ZUN's interview in 2014 (after first attempt) and Ruw's comments in 2015 (during the second one)). For a long time nobody attempted to do it again but after COVID some big circles contacted ZUN directly and he allowed them to do the crowdfunding campaigns. After that ZUN changed this unspoken rule to actual rule: crowdfunding is not very welcome, but if you really want to do it, you need to get ZUN's allowance.
2. If you want to make a new strong, solid or big (and the border of this is very vague) fanwork based on another (fan)work (for example fan album), you cannot steal art and music from the original work (examples: a lot of unreleased scripts (a few examples) (a lot of them were unreleased because of that), TCL, RE: TLC)
3. Most unofficial uploads of official Touhou music and arranges (and doujinshi and paid fan games download links) on Youtube or other sites are considered as piracy (you should ask for allowance from doujin circles, or they may DMCA you (a lot of content from Youtube disappeared because of that (some of them, they uploaded vocal arranges of Touhou songs))) (Also, Japanese fans were surprised when ZUN said that he listened to them to refresh his memory of some his old works (first of all they were surprised that ZUN cannot remember everything, next they were surprised that ZUN listen to pirate uploads of his music)).

Also about AI. There is no strict unspoken rule about that. I have covered that before, TL;DR: ZUN don't like AI, but you can use it in your fanworks (even for doujin events). But a lot of Japanese fans don't really like AI.

Also there may be some more unspoken rules I don't know or I have forgot about.

For a lot of Western fans such unspoken rules are strange and weird, they are not in the guideline, but for many Japanese fans such rules are natural. There are also some other strange official limitations (thanks to Ruw, and maybe ZUN), but they are well-known for fan content creators because they are in guideline.