Goyavoyage's den

What is Touhou? (long version)

Preliminary note: this post was primarily written on cohost as an improvised addition to Februaryuri 2024, an attempt for me to write reviews of yuri mangas I liked throughout the month of February. It started as a silly joke about the fact that we had a February 29th that month and I wanted to celebrate with a Touhou hijack, and it sprawled into a big explanation of what is Touhou, and why its yuri vibes are so prominent.

Most of what is below is therefore technically a repost, bar a few rewordings; and this element of context may explain the focus of some of its sections on yuri. Still, as I am reposting it outside of cohost, I thought it better to make it a full-fledged post outside of the aforementioned Februaryuri, so that it can serve as a big introduction to Touhou as a franchise for people interested.

(edit: I also found another longform explanation here recently, if you are interested in reading someone else's words on everything Touhou. It's a really great and pretty comprehensive read.)

One of the latest panels of the latest chapter of the Touhou manga Visionary Fairies in Shrine. A warm room full of fairies welcome the two protagonists to a big banquet.

What is Touhou? (tl;dr)

Read a different explanation of it here! Or watch a few efficients videos about it here (2min) or here (8min)!

Touhou is a fictional series spread over various media that is, basically, about a (big) bunch of girl-shaped youkai that fight each other for petty reasons using colorful projectiles. With more than 150 characters, 99% of them girls, its yuri potential is giganormous, and it's just a treasure trove of all kinds of ships, both canon and fanon.
Moreover, the license has a particularly flexible approach to fanworks, to the interpretations of canon, and to the nature of the relationships it shows, which makes it ripe with potential.
(Youkai are Japanese supernatural creatures. In Touhou, the denomination is extended to Western supernatural creatures, like a vampire or a fairy; and to gods.)

And so I thought I'd talk about all this here (see also: a shorter version I wrote recently for this blog, if you prefer). Also it may explain why I'm going to post about it often. Below: a lot of sections. Feel free to browse them. Your main takeaway is probably the latest one, which lists concrete ways to get into this.

What makes Touhou so unique?

Honestly, there are a lot of different reasons:

  1. It's basically all made by one single person, Jun'ya Ota, more commonly known under his pseudonym ZUN. Ok, I'm exaggerating a little: some spin-off fighting games are co-developped with a team; and the mangas are illustrated by other people, though he does the writing. But the base games? He does everything. Music, graphics, code, story, all of it. And this also holds for a decent amount of spin-offs. And he is also the single person behind basically anything canon in written form. And he has acts as a very thorough director of everything else.
  2. Its most well-known media form, the videogames, is a series with more than 30 entries - among them 19 main titles, lasting since 1995, with the most recent released last year.
  3. The videogames are of the bullet hell genre, with an accent on colorful and extremely pretty patterns instead of a sheer barrage of projectiles, which is also justified in the lore. They are known to be hard to newcomers (though not that hard in the context of the bullet hell genre), with difficulty levels ranging from Easy to Lunatic and the Easy mode being already tough.
  4. ZUN started this game series because he was a self-taught musician who wanted to make music for videogames, and ended up starting his own series to showcase his music. Said music is renowned, with some very distinctive elements, and has been remixed by fans into basically any existing genre.
  5. ZUN has a very lenient approach to fan-creation, authorizing broadly any derivative work that doesn't directly steal the games' assets. Making money off Touhou fanworks is also authorized as long as you're not a big company profiting off of this.
  6. As such, the fandom created so many things. So. many. things. This includes music remixes as mentioned before, but there are also fan mangas, fan videos, fan animation projects, fanfics, fangames in all genres... I will not get into the details here because that would deserve its own post; but you need to know that some of these fan creations have truly permeated the Internet - spawning reprises themselves, as they have existed for such a long Internet-time - and have become their own mean of entry into the Touhou rabbit hole.
  7. Finally, almost all of the characters are girls, Because. They're all kinds of characters, and (up to some epsilon) none of them is sexualized anywhere in canon.

How do I get into Touhou?

There are a few videos or articles that try to answer this question, and I recommend them if you want other suggestions on that. The simple answer is probably this, though: through osmosis.

Indeed, it's not only the fan creations that are impossibly numerous... the canon is, too. There are not only 32 games, but also at least 9 manga series, 2 series of short stories, 1 novel, 6 compendiums of information written intradiegetically... This can be dizzying at first, and it gives no clear point of entry to the series, but there is some fascinating quality to that: you don't need to read everything to get the characters. I haven't yet myself, and that's ok! Most of the characters are loosely defined anyway, and a lot of the information we have on them is given through the lens of other characters (in-universe newspaper articles or grimoires...) that are, by definition, very flexible in their interpretation. Of course, all this is mainly considered canon, but honestly? If you play fast and loose with it, we welcome you with open arms, too.

I want to elaborate on the "no clear point of entry" thing. I've heard recently, and I think it's a good analogy, that Touhou functions a lot like a cartoon series with all its episodes with the same template. You don't have a clear episode 1: it always assumes the audience kinda knows the characters, or will be able to infer stuff about them and roll with it. In any given piece of media of Touhou canon, you have little establishing stuff: your knowledge of the characters is honed through the repetitive formula and seeing said characters going through their shenanigans.

So, yeah. Osmosis is the key.
But having no clear entry point also makes the canon approachable through any mean. You don't have to be good at the video games, for instance, or even to like them. You can vibe to the music, and since a lot of said music are character themes, you can start by learning about a character through her theme. Or you can find artworks and become fascinated by a pairing or some specific character design, and get to know the corresponding character piece by piece, layer by layer, as you encounter her more and more.
Overall, this is a fascinating approach to worldbuilding and the flexibility of interpretation: the multitude of characters are often layered throughout their canon appearances, and yet it's ok if you're just hooked by one of these facets and build your understanding of that character from that - or even from how you feel about her, with no additional knowledge except osmosis. People have been doing that with some characters for decades (hi, Flandre Scarlet) and no one stopped them.

So. The yuri elements. Tell me more about that.

Touhou not only has a fascinating approach to the way it builds its canon. It has also a fascinating approach to the way it is queer.

Indeed, it is, to some extent, only subtextually queer. But it's not made to be bait, because the notion of queerbaiting doesn't make much sense for this series at this point - ZUN would have nothing to gain to have two characters acting really gay in a random late chapter of one of the mangas - this is just there because. I can't exactly speak for him, but the general vibe is that there's just this general background radiation lesbianism to the series, because. ZUN probably isn't really interested in writing romance; but that doesn't stop him from promoting wlw fanworks in partly-canon publications - he doesn't shy away from acknowledging them, either.

And gosh, some elements of canon have such heavy lesbian vibes - like, it's text at this point. I should repost one of these days something I wrote on cohost about the explicit gayness of some of the first speaking lines of the protagonist. Some other well-known instances include the deuteragonist attacking the protagonist with a pattern called "Love Sign" that is a giant rainbow laser, while shouting "This attack is for you!"; or one of them saying "The moon is beautiful, isn't is?" to the protagonist. There are even some clear lesbian crush elements between two antagonists in the latest video game released as of writing this, Touhou 19.
Other inclusive elements of canon include one almost-textually canonically trans woman; and a canonically disabled character using a wheelchair among the creators of the little universe where Touhou happens. And don't get me started on how Touhou handles gender in fascinating ways; one of these days I will also add to this blog a few ressources on the topic.

Three child-looking fairies sleeping in the same bed, from the manga Strange and Bright Nature Deity.

One additional thing I'd really want to make a post about one of these days is how the series, with the way it does not make its romantic undertones front and center, actually increases its queerness: there are so many readings that can be done of them. There's so much room for asexual relationships, aromantic queerplatonic relationships, found family... In the end, the world of Touhou is a particularly fitting universe to use as a sandbox to play dolls however you want, extrapolating from basic character templates, and with always more canon iceberg to dig from if you want to. It's really, really great.
And, you know, there's such a joy to see pictures like the ones I chose to illustrate this post, for instance. They carry so many different interpretations to the dynamics shown; and so many relationships in Touhou are just like that: flexible and open to any way you wish to see them, and always a bit queer.

Ok, yeah! At this point you may be wondering about the actual story!

What is the basic story?

Credit where credit is due, I've read this summary of Touhou by rabbiteclair so much, and sent it to people so many times, that I'm unable to write anything very different from it. My paraphrasing that follows isn't intentional at all as I didn't reread the aforementioned post before writing, but I can obviously tell it's Very Much here.

As it often is with supernatural creatures, a youkai's survival depends on humans believing in them and/or fearing them. And in the Touhou lore, at some point in history as we know it, some particularly powerful youkai got worried that the fear in the supernatural was waning. As a consequence, they cut out part of Japan from the rest of the world and from its usual common sense, creating a tiny pocket world called Gensokyo (literally "the Land of Illusions"), and put a human village in there. This way, no matter how the Outside World would fare, they would always have a little village of people scared by youkai, and so their existence would not be in danger anymore.

There is, however, a careful balance to strike to maintain such a survival project afloat. Its goal is to save youkai of all kinds, but the more youkai it attracts, the more they're at risk of getting at war with each other, even (and more often than not) for very petty reasons. Or sometimes they're just prone to mischief or to delusions of grandeur. It often has Consequences, because they all have absurd powers. And the more it escalates, the more the one human village that maintains their existence is at risk.
... And yet a youkai's role is also to scare humans, and you can't exactly expect them to sit still!

So to maintain that balance, one human is imbued with power: the Hakurei shrine maiden. She lives in a shinto shrine isolated from the village, and she is tasked to kick youkai butt when they're doing things that are too fishy or too dangerous, while letting them do youkai stuff the rest of the time.
Also, to prevent things from getting out of hand, some fighting rules have been set in place: if two people with supernatural powers fight, the winner is the one overcoming the other not with their most powerful attacks, but with their most beautiful ones. This is why almost all the characters in the series use fancy colored bullets flowing in complicated patterns.
As all the youkai have a basic notion of preserving Gensokyo, they all abide to this rule (or, well, almost all the time).

As such, Touhou tells various stories happening in this little world of Gensokyo: some about world-threatening incidents, some about just drinking sake with friends while watching the cherry blossoms, and every kind of hijinks in between.

Can you give me an overview of some of the media?

A decent amount of the stories are told through video games, the primary medium of the series. These almost always follow this pattern: a youkai is misbehaving and things are going wrong; and so you set out, either as Reimu, the current Hakurei shrine maiden, or as a human interested in whatever is happening (either because they have some personal involvement in the matter, or because they're here to loot stuff), to give them a good lesson.
This is where the waves and waves of bullets that seem overwhelming when you start playing happen, if you've ever seen what playing Touhou looked like.
Anyway, the ongoing incident usually ends with said powerful youkai changing their ways and coming the next day to drink tea or booze with you.

If the videogames are where most of the big stuff happens, it would be wildly incomplete to summarize Touhou with that. Because there are a lot of other media to it! This includes, but is not limited to:

And I'm skipping a lot here that can't be summarized as easily!

Where do I start, concretely?

Options include:

There's always a bit of adaptation to the universe at first, but hopefully one of these multiple works, or simple Internet osmosis, may make you curious enough about this little jewel of fiction.
Or, you know, if you're French-speaking and really want an exhaustive study of the entire series, here is a eight and a half hours video about it.

#cohost #touhou #yuri