#zun cd

[touhou-memories]

ZUN music CDs - PART 2

Covers of Rainbow-Colored Septentrion and Taboo Japan Disentanglement.

Sources: 

en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/File:ZCDS-0017.jpg en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/File:TJD.png

Note: Rainbow-Colored Septentrion was originally distributed without a cover.

PART 1: /post/172390771519/.

[pomfey]

some older hifuu doodles because i just found out about the upcoming album and i'm so excited i'm going to explode

[pixelkip]

I find it kind of hilarious that Doremy Sweet never caused a problem in her life she's just dealing with someone else's mess every time she appears in a game. In LoLK she's either going "oh shit oh fuck you're a physical person you shouldn't be here or you might go crazy" or "sorry they're kinda making me do this. Actually I don't care go to the moon or something". Not to mention having to make a fake capital for them. And in aocf she's just trying to round up the mess that Rich Bitch Supreme caused her!! She just politely explains exactly what's going on to anyone confused and is only a little snide about everyone contributing to making her job hell. Except for yukari, bc she tears her a new one the second yukari decides to get all high and mighty thinking she's allowed to interfere with her work. It is not very often someone gets to put YUKARI FUCKING YAKUMO in her place. And she gives Reisen a chance to vent her frustrations in the process bc she's cool like that. Oh and ig in 16.5 she has to babysit a feral teenager. Again. Idk I think we focus too much on "lol look how fucked up it is that x touhou girl did y" we don't focus enough on the silly little guys who are just trying to help. I can excuse the sweet sleep pillow shenanigans and general smugness bc she has gone through enough and totally deserves to be Like That. At this point if she DID instigate an incident I'd say let her. This post was not supposed to be this long what the fuck happened. I love doremy so much.

[petchypeach]

I have so many thoughts and possible headcanons after the new hifuu cd. Lots of amazing drawing ideas too!! I’ve been feeling a little burnt out recently, but I think this really reignited some of my passion ❤️

Looking forward to tmw when I have the day off work and I can get started on them.

[sukimas]

the girls in magical astronomy talking about going on the moon tour next fall completely unawares that the upcoming year will contain a free trip to space:

[anonumber123]

brooooooo i really wish i could listen to the newest hifuu club album cause i was looking at people's reactions on twitter, and EVERYONE was really hyping it up and going off about how the songs were really really good, and EVEN SAYING THAT THIS IS LITERALLY HIS BEST ALBUM??? LIKE??

[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.

[anueutsuho]

OKUU AND ORIN HAVE NEVER CANONICALLY INTERACTED ONSCREEN SINCE SUBTERANNEAN ANIMISM

[moonsidesong]

god tiny shangri-la is so good. thankyou zun for music

[touhou-memories]

New ZUN music CD

Taboo Japan Disentanglement is coming out tomorrow at Reitaisai: https://touhou-project.news/news/11618/.

I'd wait a while before having these on tumblr, at least to see if they get copyright striked on youtube. For the same reason Rainbow-Colored Septentrion isn't posted yet.

[amemenojaku]

I went to the yomiuriland touhou collab yesterday and the imperishable night exhibit today 🙈

the collab was alright, there isn't much besides food and some cute pictures here and there but I didn't have big expectations to begin with so that's okay. they played some of zun's music (including the new hifuu cd) on the speakers, felt a bit surreal queuing for normal theme park rides with necrofantasia in the background 😂 I really liked how they displayed fanarts from an earlier illustration contest for kids too, it was super cute.

the imperishable night exhibit was quite good! really pretty art from both official artists (I've always been a big fan of aki eda and I was just SO so happy to see their reimu again...) and some big name fanartists, some cosplay, cute interview with kiisan/zun's wife (and other people but I didn't care that much lol) and then zun himself on in, lolk, the moon in touhou lore and print works related to it, and a little corner with some of zun's original sketches (mostly in characters but there was other stuff like td and print works and seihou. would've liked to see lolk sketches too since they kinda sorta included it in the exhibit though). I really wish that last corner had been bigger actually... apparently the overall exhibit was smaller and had less content than previous years' but I didn't go to those so I can't compare. it was fun though. very happy with getting more reimu swag for my reimu shrine 😎

[diosakuu]

i saw someone in bluesky calling comiket (a.k.a comic market, a doujinshi fair that happens two times a year in Japan) a BLACK MARKET OF DISTURBING DRAWINGS.

be fucking fr..........

comiket is kind of iconic in my opinion. it's literally where ZUN (the guy who created Touhou Project, a HUGE doujin / game series) sold his CDs (such as Dolls in Pseudo Paradise, for example). you see thousands of doujin works there. it's like they're indie creators...

[drestlemare]

So rather than "relative psychology", which was already kind of hard to understand

We have something closer to Psychiatric Relativity?

Relativity is in reference to the theory of gravity applied to other physical phenomena, and psychiatry is the study of the medical practice on mental health - distinct from psychology in that it deals with medication and medical intervention in addition to therapy.

Taken literally, this is implied to describe a direct link between the two, as if in this future, scientific theory includes the human mind as a physical property - something that directly affects reality as much as time and space itself - and that there is a practice specific to medically treating it in the context of the laws of physics.

Does it mean they use the theory of relativity to augment psychiatric practice? Or does it mean psychiatry - and the human mind - is a medium used to interact with relativity? I think one is way more interesting than the other, and is even more exactly in line with who Merry is.

we as touhou fans need to consider that merry's major is actually "relativistic psychology" and we need to spend more time trying to figure out what the fuck that means

[sukimas]

hmmmm. hmm. i wonder just what pattern that is on the cover of renko's newest notebook.

[originspeed]

ZUN just announced a new Hifuu Club CD and I can't help but notice that on the cover Maribel's hat now has a red ribbon... just like a certain someone... Necro Fantasia also appears as a song on the track... hmmmm...

[kozachenko]

Some thoughts on some of the newest CDS chapters below the read more tag for spoiler's sake, since I have read the newest one and have some thoughts

As flawed as Cheating Detective Satori is, one thing I will give it is how it shows the reactions of the spirits and Youkai living in Former Hell to the whole "sealing it up" thing. While I was initially annoyed about the whole "sealing former Hell" thing, I feel like the newer chapters have kinda made the whole thing make more sense, especially in the newest one where Parsee mentions how in the case of a vengeful spirit making too much trouble, Former Hell is just gonna seal right back up and become Hell again, which is a system that has been around since Former Hell was established. I think what this little addition does well is that in retrospect it makes the whole decision of sealing up Former Hell make a bit more sense. Also, the mystery that the latest chapter left off with (Parsee's realization that Former Hell must have been sealed from the outside) is really interesting, and had that bit of realization not been included by Parsee, it probably would've been a major plot hole that Parsee's tunnel also got plugged up when the whole system was made years ago when Former Hell was first established. Also, would Parsee know who Mizuchi is? Or have at least heard of her? Or is Mizuchi kind of treated like an SCP in Former Hell and is kept a secret from everyone else, even though in the earliest chapters of CDS, Satori mentions that Mizuchi has been a bit of a problem before, and Yuugi also knows her sooooo is this a writing mistake or intentional? Although there are a lot of vengeful spirits in Former Hell so knowing who each and every single one is is probably giving the denizens of Former Hell a bit too much credit lol. But still, Mizuchi seems to maybe be a more well known vengeful spirit so I'm still a bit confused on that, or maybe it could just be as simple as Parsee having never met Mizuchi when counseling vengeful spirits.

Maybe certain people aren't allowed to even see Mizuchi since they could be prime targets for her to possess people and escape. Which could also be related to the reason why she escaped in the first place, maybe she possessed someone with a grudge against Reimu or anyone in the Hakurei bloodline and used them to get out of Former Hell?

Also, when you think about that and the fact that Zanmu is the one who proposed the move, it gave me the headcanon that Zanmu also put that system in place since she wouldn't just leave it carelessly unattended. Since it's in her character to think ahead and meticulously plan things, why wouldn't she put this safety measure in place?

Utsuho and Koishi were also really good in this chapter, and Utsuho's title is so fucking good, I love it. Koishi also trying to get the other vengeful spirits to chill out is also a fun detail. Her point about the vengeful spirits not even being allowed to leave regardless is also something interesting to think about. Though it is explained in the manga that the vengeful spirits just needed a reason to attack, the idea of someone getting mad about the loss of a freedom that they would normally never use is very interesting to me.

When the manga is finished I'm most likely gonna do a full review on it, since my last one had way too much swearing and I was also really tired and wanted to sleep and I am just overall not happy with it. Plus, the manga seems like it's starting to get better, and with ZUN himself saying that he's aware of the criticism towards CDS, I'm gonna stay optimistic with this manga. Also, it would be really interesting to see how the people in New Hell react to the restoration of Former Hell, especially Zanmu due to how important she is in the actual creation of Former Hell, although a small part of me thinks that she would just go, "not my Hell, not my problem" and leave it at that, the other part of me thinks that would maybe be a little out of character for her. Like, I don't think she'd be panicking, but at the same time she's not gonna treat it like a non-issue. Though that could just be me since I like Zanmu a lot lol.

All in all, just a lot to think about with this new chapter.