#Touhou discussion

[solrin]

You know, I feel like there's a lot of people who like Mizuchi and how she was introduced but those same people didn't like how powerful antagonists were introduced previously in the Touhou series. This confounds me. And not just because I think the writing in CDS/FDS is pretty weak. It's not the first time an incredibly devious and powerful antagonist appeared from literally nowhere, but for some reason this one is.... okay? When Okina was introduced that was somehow less acceptable even though she's like infinitely more interesting (so far) than Mizuchi?

[yoku-yukihime]

"Such a sweet, tormented soul... Please tell your princess all your woes one more time..."

[son1c]

finally realized what shadow's doom wings remind me of. it's flandre scarlet

[crimsonbits]

God I love them so much. Aquatic little freaklets. Tech bro society of flesh-eating water hobbits. They're like if autism was a species trait. They need to be blown up and also they mean the world to me.

[incorrect-touhous-2]

Niche post time!

There’s a lot to be said about fan flanderization and fanon in the touhou community but my biggest bug is eiki. They did my girl eiki so wrong, she’s not this angry tsundere loli who sends people to the depths of hell for the slightest thing, she’s not even short!

She’s so interesting as a character because as the judge of good and evil, her ability is white and black judgement, she’s blunt and dosent sugar coat things, yet she often tries to help people change for the better. She often works through her breaks to give people advice, yet she’s described as patient and polite during lectures.

Her ability boils down things to eliminate grayness and cast judgment upon someone, but she also works to eliminate that grayness and lighten someone’s sentence, (even often going to warn a person directly sometimes) yet her method of doing this is blunt and direct, which is why most tend to avoid her lectures.

It’s worth noting that she’s a non human character judging human esk characters, like yokai. In her lore, it’s depicted that she was originally a statue that came to life after gaining enough devotion and only went up from there, which gives her the benefit of having an unbiased perspective, but also brings the con of not really knowing how to interact with human esk creatures due to being a statue, no wonder she’s so blunt and can come across as rude.

That isn’t to say she’s without flaws, she can be mean and unnecessary at times, even annoying, she’s judgmental (yknow, judge.) and very hard to approach. but it’s at least good to know where’s she’s coming from

And then there’s fanon eiki. That ignores all this and just depicts her as an angry shorty who hates people and only works, no breaks. And will hit you.

[patchoulii-2hu-144p]

what's the cannon difficulty of the touhou games?

[reimu-enjoyer]

i have lead a very peaceful nearly 3 months on here with no fandom discourse so please do Not Engage with twitter weirdos coming on here and shitting their pants at a touhou ship thank u .

[lesbianlongsword]

I think it's really funny that there's a guy on AO3 who did as much painstaking research on Imperishable Night as they possibly could to make their erotic IN lesbian sex-themed fanfic as lore accurate as humanly possible. I honestly gotta respect the dedication, because there was definitely some lore they put on the notes of the fic that I didn't know until then LOL

[alangdorf]

Yayyyyy Mitori my beloved!! Also Takane’s theme has been the sleeper hit of Unconnected Marketeers for me. And also Nitori’s there. Due to there being Three of Them and just personal motivation weirdness this took like a whole week and I didn’t have the energy to do much personal interpretation of their outfits & hair like ppl often do when drawing Touhou characters; followed the reference too closely on that as usual. But fun fact about turtles! I had trouble finding much documentation on this, but [some?] turtles have a dark line across their eyes that helps them see better horizontally and their eyes turn so that the line is always parallel to the horizon

[headinabox]

i got touhou lostword and i love how the beginning is like the player character is female. you cannot change this.

[eizneckam]

the only touhou character who's allowed to act moe is sanae. anyone else doing it is illegal

[warmcoals]

no you see, the reimari method of justice is actually totally ideal. basically, gensokyo is a crazy tgirl commune, so there's gonna be some bullshit going down at any time. and there's no remediating or talking thru something like "my soulmate sister disappeared forever but now she's back in yandere mode" or "the animal mafias are all in heat at the same time". so the two most confident, tired, and poly girls in the place are tasked with indiscriminately exploding everyone and anyone they see, including each other. like these messy girls will try to talk ideology or riddles and every time reimari respond "i wasnt listening just die for a second" and then they shoot a laser and then woman moment has passed! plus the sloppiest makeouts always happen after combat so they are doing the girlies a favor. anti-carceral, direct action defenders of t4t

[yoku-yukihime]

Choke on it.

[raymoo--hackery]

it's very nice seeing another person who dislikes these pure sex ships that just disregard the actual characters

i'm too much of a coward to express it myself, but thank you, you're fighting the good fight for us aces

Be the change you want to see in the world!

That’s basically my motto and why I talk so directly about so many topics (also probably why I land myself in so many disagreements lol)

The reason I ship is for the full scope of the relationship, so I’m really not a fan of stuff that’s just boiled down to the most basic surface level shit at all

It can be fun to explore these things, but even then it takes more than just “haha funny nerd sex”

Anytime you explore a pairing of characters, I think it’s important to really delve into the dynamics of the relationship and extrapolate from their canon personalities.

Feels like so many people miss that, and it kinda sucks 💀

It’s not even like I hate sex jokes, people just don’t know how to make them funny 💀💀💀

[greed-the-dorkalicious]

It's lowkey really funny the number of people who have been reading my post giving a detailed breakdown as to what eurobeat is and isn't and then reblogging it like "That's right! That's why (insert song that definitely isn't eurobeat) is eurobeat btw" or "So if it's in DDR it's not eurobeat it's eurodance" some other wildly inaccurate statement. I forgive you guys but if you say that eurobeat is exclusively from the Initial D soundtrack or Initial D fan songs I'm going to run you over with MY fast car

[askdacast]

Just re-read Symposium of Post-Mysticism. Man, it's such a weirdly timeless book, and equally insightful no matter whether you read it as a simple lore book or purposeful commentary on real life.

Also, Miko is really mean, and Kanako is really sassy. Poor Byakuren.

The only thing I ever had complaints about - and still do - is how the three big leaders define religion. Both Miko and Byakuren define it as a philosophy, whereas Kanako defines it as a system of understanding the world with its own internal rules, much like science and magic/the occult. Kanako gets it closer than the other two imo, but all three focus on the idea of religion as being an individual pursuit, rather than also being a system that creates and structures cultures. Which is ironic, considering how much Kanako keeps talking about the transactional relationship between humans and gods, and how all three keep talking about how their presence determines the fate of humans, youkai and Gensokyo!

ZUN is both a STEM guy at heart and as far as everyone knows non-religious, but he always has a lot to say about our modern world's relationship with the unknown and the supernatural, and that's what makes Touhou so strangely insightful. Nevertheless, the dichotomy between the individual and the collective in what constitutes religious practice is a very modern idea, and equally reflective of the new ideals of contemporary society. It feels a lot like SoPM is just as reflective of ZUN's (and our own) modern ideas of what religion means to us, or what the supernatural means to us now in an age of rationalism. I could be talking nonsense here, given that I'm not the Japanese-born person making video games about Japanese culture (and come to think of it ZUN is not wrong in describing general trends regarding the supernatural in Japan). But it still seems like ZUN/Kanako almost underestimate the power of belief in people when they mention humans' wish for the supernatural despite no longer "believing" in them. New religions/cults exist, and are powerful. Belief itself is no longer a straight dichotomy of "I believe/don't believe this is real," especially not with youkai and other supernatural creatures which have created such popular followings and ways of consumption.

Or, you know, the three leaders were purposely written to be arrogant and not really understanding humans. That's also a running gag in the text.