Hourai NEETwork

As C74 is drawing near, I decided to write a little post about Touhou.

Actually this post was originally written in French for an important French blog which offered to its reader to publish their own articles so I decided to make one about what I consider as one of the most important and my favorite phenomemenon from Japan of these last years. My objective was to promote Touhou among my fellow French anime lovers because I had the impression that Touhou was still relatively unknow in France (does someone speak Finnish/Russian/Swedish? What does touhou mean in these languages?). This one will be mostly the same but with some additions and cuts here and there.

I don’t consider myself as a Touhou expert, just a Touhou enthusiast but I’ll try to do my best to describe how I’ve seen the expansion of this franchise and its ever growing fanbase over the three last years.

Now, let’s get down to some serious business.

I already wrote an ugly chunk of text about the franchise but it was too focused on the gameplay analysis without really talking about the Touhou universe or the phenomemenon itself.
Let’s start from the beginning: actually let’s skip the PC-98 period, I don’t think that many people outside Japan had the chance to own one. Here we are mid-2002, a doujin circle known as Team Shanghai Alice, with only one member: the infamous alcoholic ZUN, releases Embodiment of Scarlet Devil which marks the debut of the Touhou movement but it was still limited to Japan at that time.

It will take some time for Touhou to make a breakthrough outside Japan, the musics remixes coupled with youtube videos were the main vectors of this growth of popularity with the IOSYS works as the spearhead, the series was already popular before IOSYS but they gave a significant boost. Some may not know but they may have already been exposed to some Touhou-related stuff by youtube videos or flash animations, Marisa stole the precious thing is arguably the most popular :

What really makes Touhou stand out is its large, active and very creative fanbase, almost 900 doujin circles for this Comiket is quite a feat and there’s even Touhou only events; e.g: the Flowering Night concert or conventions like the Reitaisai which knew some overcrowding problems this year. Let’s not forget that it all started with a doujin game, this particular status allowed people to re-use ZUN’s creations more freely and easily than with studios works. Through all the fans contributions, Gensokyo and its inhabitants gained depth and development although some had drastic changes to their personality and sometimes the resulting character is more popular than the original; Alice Margatroid is the very example of this concept: in the doujins Alice is often depicted as a sensitive and fragile girl whereas she’s quite cold and provokes the player but the fans mostly remember the former one and tend to forget the later. Another example is how some characters become jokes chars, the most representatives cases are Cirno a.k.a. ⑨ which became a synonym for idiot and Hong Meiling whose real name has been replaced by China or Chuugoku.

As a yuri lover I couldn’t ignore all these doujins (and I’m not only referring to hentai ones) and I really enjoyed reading them: it’s nice to see the cast redrawn by talentuous artists, can’t say that ZUN draws well… heh, and having gaining personality and particular traits without departing from the original source. As one may expect, the doujins features a lot of romance between the characters, and mostly yuri since the only three male chars aren’t really good romance material (unless you’re into turtles or ghosts that look like your grand father) except for Rinnosuke but he’s often depicted as a pervert going around in fundoshi; pairings are often made among the girls based on their relationship with each others in the game, some may conflict with others: Marisa x Alice, Marisa x Patchouli and Marisa x Reimu for example and because of the nature of the fanon, it’s up to each fan to choose which one he likes the best.

New characters were also introduced in Gensokyo,

• Meimu Yakumo: a youkai that Yukari found and thought that she resembles Reimu so she dressed her as a black miko just to annoy Reimu and taught her some boundary control and exorcism spells.
• Ronald McDonald: the famous clown made his debut with a U.N. Owen Was Her? cover which made him quite popular among the fans, some of them will even include him in their videos and depict him as one of the most powerful being in Gensokyo.
• The yukkuris: a meme coming from 2ch where a user tried to make a Shift JIS art of Reimu and Marisa but failed miserably but another user found it funny and made this picture. Since then the yukkuris multiplied faster than rabbits, invading doujins, videos and other fanmade stuff while repeating endlessly their motto “Yukkuri shiteitte ne!” (roughly translated as “Take it easy!”). You can check the yukkuris wiki page to see how popular they became, to be honest I find them creepy ;_;.

One can’t write about Touhou without mentioning the music, a fellow blogger made an interesting post about this, because I don’t want to repeat what has already been said I’ll keep it short. Sheba put up a nice list (Demetori <3), my personal recommandations would be Alstroemeria Records, Soul Holic, Everfades, =Neutral=, Cytokine, Seaside, Sekken-ya, Cool&Create who offered us Help ME ERINNNNNNNN which was used in the Kumikyoku, TAMusic famous for their wonderful Okkusenman cover and Liverne. I just listed some groups I like, there’s still have and endless list of albums for me to listen to and it keeps growing everyday…

Random musics, I should add more but damn lazy.

• Phantom Ensemble the Prismriver sisters theme, one of my favorites track so far
• Necrofantasia Yukari Yakumo’s theme, easily one of the most popular track which get a shitload of remixes including the very … special Yukarin Fantasia, the wonderful Liverne cover, some IOSYS songs, namely Border of Death and the more recent and parodic Border of Extacy. International edition bonus: A very beautiful video using a Sound Holic remix.
• U.N. Owen was her? a reference to the Agatha Christie book for Flandre Scarlet’s theme, here’s some remixes, one by TAMusic and a piano only version.
• Locked Girl Patchouli’s theme which got a nice remix in Scarlet Weather Rhapsody and a very nice song performed by Cool&Create.
  

For fighting games lovers, ZUN and Tasogare Frontier collaborations, who made the excellentEternal Fighter Zero and Higurashi Daybreak, gave birth to Immaterial and Missing Power and Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, two fighting games with a gameplay giving this danmaku feeling from the original shmups.

Let’s start with IaMP which never really got attention, mostly because of its not very beginner-friendly learning curve and graphics although it boasts a very rich gameplay, solid mechhanics and offers something really different. Definitely one of the best doujin fighters available, high level tournaments are still taking place on a regular basis like the Tohgeki (not related to the “real” Tougeki except for the silly pun on the name). If you’re interested the people from Mizuumi made a very good tutorial.

Scarlet Weather Rhapsody is more beginner friendly and has a native netplay which made him more popular than his predecessor but some of its mechanics weren’t welcomed well by IaMP veterans who prefered to ignore it and go back to IaMP. I must say that the wrongblock thingie and some weathers just piss me off but I still like it even if it doesn’t reach IaMP’s technical level, SWR is still a fine game.

Besides ZUN’s “official” games and collaborations with Tasofro, there’s also a great numbers of doujin games based on the Touhou universe, some of them are really fun to play like PatchCon Defend the Library! by the same Tasogare Frontier (although this time it wasn’t an official collaboration) who also made Super Marisa Land, a Mario clone and MegaMari a Rockman/Megaman clone. People who played the excellent Sengoku Rance by Alicesoft may enjoy Sengoku Gensokyo which is based on it, add to this Touhou Soccer for the Captain Tsubasa NES/SNES games fans. There are, of course, fanmade danmaku set in Gensokyo, some of them like Concealed the Conclusion are a script for the danmaku maker Touhou Danmakufu, because I never tried it myself I can’t really say if it’s good or not. Finally let’s not forget the infamous April’s Fool of this year which made many fans cried and rage all over the world on this very day.

Finally one of the best part of Touhou is the HUGE number of videos you can find on youtube or nicovideo, ranging from MAD Movies to Manzai comedy clips (loved the voice acting for most of the chars, only Remilia doesn’t really compute) passing by music clips and very random stuff, just go to youtube or nico and use the magic keywords and enjoy. One may ask why there isn’t a Touhou anime yet, for our (the fandom) sake please don’t, because ZUN is a perfectionist he would want to oversee the production but that’s too much work for him, the chances we’re getting an anime are quite low (and not taking into account the legal stuff) but sometimes we’re provided with very nice videos like this one:

And Internation Edition bonus, another nice video which also made me drool:

Touhou is arguably one of the most successful and popular franchise of these last years, having proved that it wasn’t just a fad and will last for some time, as long as ZUN will continue to release new games (as I’m writing, 1 hour before Saturday C74 starts… can’t wait for SA) while drinking beer and as long as the fandom will continue to share their talents through their works the franchise isn’t likely die before years unless something bad happen or maybe that the fans will get tired of this faster than expected. For the time being let’s continue to enjoy all the creatives works that are released each day, rave over the releases annoucement for each conventions, getting hyped while watching the Flowering Night concert, read doujins as yuri lovers’ guilty pleasures and get frustrated by the shooters. Speaking of the shooters, it’s worth noting that a large part of the fanbase never actually played the original games.

I think that nobody expected Touhou to become one of the most popular franchise ever.

tl;dr why does one like Touhou:

• Shmups / Danmakus
• Yuri
• Cute girls
• DFCs
• The musics
• Stupid flash animations / videos
• Fighting games
• Vampires, rabbits, maids, mikos, witches, etc etc
• Reading doujins
• Reading H-doujins
• Losing your time on nico nico/youtube
• Alcohol
• Memes
• … armpits?
• … futa?
• … fudonshi?
• … Zun’s art?
• … other things?

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 16th, 2008 at 3:04 am and is filed under Japanese Culture, Subculture, Touhou.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.