#zun

[y2kneko]

[anueutsuho]

[mayumijoutouguu]

ZUN's art is wonderfully unique and charming and its like. if you come at it i'll kill you but. the whiplash for anyone just getting into touhou seeing the source material for the first time is never not funny

[prokopetz]

I think people sometimes give ZUN too much credit for being cool with alternative takes on his characters. Like, from his perspective, your fan-favourite blorbo is some random asshole who appears exactly once as the stage 3 boss of a game that came out 17 years ago and has fewer than a dozen lines dialogue across the entire franchise. He's fine with however you want to interpret the character because the sum total of the characterisation he actually established for her is that she has a cool hat.

[sylvysprit]

U.N. Owen Was Her? (Undefined Fantastic Object Style) Arranged by Princess Sylvysprit Original composed by ZUN Read more:

First of all, i wish you happy holidays and a happy new year! U.N. Owen Was Her was the song that got me into Touhou in the first place, so i have always loved the song a lot, and it's true that there are a lot of arranges of it already, but i felt like i could bring something new to the table by playing around with what the song could be molded into, just like i did in 2018 for Cirno's theme for Cirno Day, i wanted to experiment with how Flandre's theme could be changed to be new and fresh, yet while still being recogniseable and familiar, so i wanted to aim for a Touhou 12-ish inspired style, focussing on some of my favourite elements from that game's music, such as the jazz elements like the progressive time signatures, abundance of key changes, and a bigger emphasis on instruments like the hybrid saw and reed romance on the SD-90, in a way, the saw waves here serves kind of like a replacement for Flandre's usual square waves, which is a bit of a metaphor for the arrange as a whole; a new and different take on Flandre's theme, but also trying to respect the nostalgia and uniqueness of what made UFO's music feel fun and memorable. There are a lot of references and leitmotifs hidden thorough the arrange, can you find them all? The production of this arrangement was done primarily live on my Twitch channel, if you'd like to see future streams, consider following me there: https://www.twitch.tv/sylvysprit The VOD of this music stream is available to watch, if you are interested in seeing my work process, feel free to watch it on my VOD archive channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBrZE... The art in the thumbnail was drawn by me, if you like my art, consider checking out my Tumblr art account, or my Twitter art account Tumblr art account: https://www.tumblr.com/sylvyspritart Twitter art account: https://twitter.com/sylvyspritart I'm currently composing for a lot of indie games! Some of these developers allow me to share music early, if you are interested in helping me pay the rent and food, and if you'd like to hear some of my music early, consider supporting me on Patreon on the music tier: https://www.patreon.com/sylvysprit If you have read this far, then thank you! Not many people actually read the description, so i'm glad that you do that! Have a very nice day, and the best of luck with everything you may be struggling with, you can do it!

[k-u-z-u]

[touhoufigureposts]

[fidgetysnatcher]

Your daily ZUN Tenshi appreciation

[kokokulto]

scarlet sisters. 🍰🍓✨

[beaniebabysnails]

scarlet moon

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[michaelmac6072]

Something that crossed my mind when perusing the latest Touhou manga chapters is that I think ZUN often has difficulty making events flow naturally from one to another, and to cover for it, he ends up overwriting a lot of expository stuff that slows things down and takes up precious real-estate in the stories he wants to tell. It's kind of evident in the meme that most Touhou games are 4 stages of beating up randos followed by only 2 stages of people actually related to the incident, but I think a better point of comparison would between the latest chapter of CDS, where Reimu stays at Myouren temple, and the Sanae-san is On the Run doujin by WaHH artist Aya Azuma, where Sanae does the same thing. Both cover the same beats, with a shrine maiden getting an intro to the Buddhists and life at their temple, but Azmaya is able to cover a lot more ground in a lot less space than ZUN did.

More below the cut -- lots of manga pages and spoiler warnings for both comics. As a side note, I wanted to try using colored text to help break up all the black & white and make things easier to follow, but I apologize if it's distracting.

In Detective Satori, our first mention of the Myouren temple is in the end of chapter 23 as the place Reimu and presumably Satori suspect Mizuchi is at next, and so we spend the tail end of that chapter with several pages of establishing panels of the Myouren crew there before Reimu arrives confronting Kyouko, all without dialogue.

Come chapter 24, we begin with... more establishing panels of the Myouren crew doing day-to-day activities, this time accompanied by dialogue and mean-spirited titles, presumably assigned to them by either Reimu or Aya.

We don't even get to see Reimu's request to stay at the temple until page 10 of this chapter, and even then it is only indirectly through Ichirin's mention. By the time we get to Reimu on page 12, she's grouchily preparing a vegetarian meal at the temple before re-affirming to herself her desire to catch Mizuchi here -- which is something we already know from last time, about 18 total pages ago.

After this, that's the last we see of Reimu throughout the chapter - the rest is spent catching up with Aya and Marisa, which also isn't segued smoothly and instead relies on a cut to a couple pages of Kogasa's antics in the graveyard before Aya and Marisa chime in and discuss their own reasons for being there.

I could go on and post more pages from the chapter, but you get the point. The issue here is that there's no transition between these scenes -- rather than link these events together in any logical way, ZUN relies on lots of establishing material as filler to act as a buffer between separate events. You can see how it would be easy to join all this stuff together smoothly without so much establishment, which would give the meat of this thriller story some much-needed real estate. If you don't want to portray the scene where Reimu requests to stay, have ch. 24 begin with Reimu already prepping stuff at the temple, complete with the same grumblings about their lifestyle. From there, the action could driven by her interactions with some of the Buddhist crew -- not necessarily all of them, given the nature of the situation and the tension you want to preserve, but at least one or two of them. Then you can cut either cut to outside and have Aya and Marisa spy on or interrogate Kogasa, or even better, have Aya appear in a window and chat with Reimu, then you can have Marisa spot them from above and swoop in, and then they could all trade notes. Even if we are generous and give the Myouren temple the 5 pages of establishment it has at the end of chapter 23, there's no reason to do so much of it again at the start of chapter 24 and again again with Kogasa during its middle unless you're either deliberately padding things out, struggling for segues, or deliberately padding things out because you're struggling for segues.

Contrast this with Azmaya's comic. Here, the on-the-run Sanae meets Byakuren on the road after Reimu's attempts to exploit the spat between Sanae and her gods backfires. Byak good-naturedly offers her a place to stay after helping her clear up the aftermath of that.

From there, Sanae gets a crash course from Ichirin on the Buddhists' lifestyle, which she also grumbles about for the same reasons as Reimu, but comes to admire in her own way...

...before catching Ichirin and the others cheating on their discipline and storming out of the temple in betrayed frustration!

I would argue that more happens in just these 7 pages with Sanae here than in over 15 pages of CDS with Reimu. Azmaya's able to establish the Myouren temple as the next destination for Sanae in only a page or so, and the ascetic training there is conveyed efficiently in a training montage for Sanae, rather than two separate multi-page exposition scenes of the Myouren crew going through their daily routines. By the time we've reached 12 pages from the start of this chapter here -- where in CDS we were just beginning to see Reimu reacting to temple life -- Sanae's getting squabbled over by Shou as part of an effort to keep Sanae from damaging the temple's reputation.

I know CDS and this doujin have very different aims, and I know scripting a comic and handing it off to another artist leaves some artifacting that doing everything yourself does not. That said, Azmaya's comic had so much less fat on it than ZUN's, and a large part of that comes from how ZUN doesn't link events together well and so constantly re-establishes them, whereas Azmaya's events flow naturally from one another. Sanae at the was out in the village trying to gather embarrassing flyers Reimu made of her, and with Byakuren being a prominent figure there, it's highly plausible the two would meet up coincidentally. This conceit acts as a springboard for everything that happens in this chapter, whose ending in turn acts as a springboard for Shou to chase after her in the next chapter, which itself springboards into further events easily. There's a little re-establishment at the start of the chapter -- it is a serial -- but it's very casual. There's no starting and stopping like there constantly is in CDS: everything builds upon each other with grace and ease in a way that keeps the story going. And because of this constructive structure, Sanae can go through the same beats with Byakuren here that Reimu did in CDS in a much more efficient number of manga panels.

[sacrilegious-divinity]

this is probably the best marisa zun has ever drawn and i mean this genuinely (click for higher quality!)

[anueutsuho]

ZUN has two sides

[koubu6841]

DEPLOY TEWI

[toobsthetubb]