/jp/ - Otaku Culture

See topic.

>>19758823
All he has to do is avoid flying black balls of darkness, completely open and defenseless sleeping youkai lying out in the middle of the road, swarms of fairies, and if he's in the bamboo forest, Tewi.

>>19505615
I don't think Touhou fans are as bad as people make them out to be. I think /jp/ culture is just making Touhou fans look worse as a whole than they actually are to some extent. Sure, there's a lot of fetishy people only there for the porn, but I still think Touhou, just by the fact that it is less accessible than, say, anime, to the (western) masses make an overall more quiet, less powerlevel-y audience. In pictures of cringy weeaboos, how often are Touhou fans lumped in there? The type of people you see on "weeaboo cringe compilation 6" are usually fujoshits and random teens who think they're ninjas from Naruto.

>>19507115
I would like to make a couple of points against this argument. My first point is that there is no true equivalent to "doujin culture" in the West in general. As a consequence, there is less of an incentive to produce fan content. The thought process among many potential western fan content producers may go something like this: "Japan produces so many fanworks for Touhou, why should I bother trying?" As >>19507115 pointed out, Comiket is a massive incentive for doujin circles in Japan to continue expanding and producing content, because it provides an opportunity for up-and-coming artists to profit from fanworks from core content such as Touhou Project, etc.

The second is that Touhou fans are not as concentrated in the West as they are in Japan. Touhou is something of an anomaly in terms of large internet fanbases/subcultures: all the games are free and more or less easily accessible. So is a massive quantity of art available through Pixiv and the boorus and a massive quantity of fangames available through Touhou fansites like Moriya Shrine. My point is that Touhou is a free product, consumers of Touhou works do not need to pay to access the content. As a consequence, or perhaps even as a cause, ZUN has zero marketing budget. He has no intention to localize Touhou and spread both the work itself and the profits he receives from the work by hiring a team of localizers and advertisers. The bottom line is that Touhou is a Japanese game. The only reason western fans know the semantical content expressed in the language of Touhou is either if they know Japanese (very unlikely) or if they read one of the many, many fan translators of Touhou official and fan work.

Essentially, the Western fanbase is far smaller and far less tightly-knit than the Japanese fanbase and as a consequence of there being little Western equivalent to doujin culture, there is far less fan content as a whole.