What is Touhou? (short version)
This blog will inevitably talk a lot about Touhou Project. Though I will soon port to it a longer explanation I wrote on cohost at the end February 2024 that I used as inspiration to write this shorter one, I thought I needed to at least have one very brief version ready to introduce it to readers who may stumble upon this and be completely puzzled.
So! Key facts:
Touhou Project, often abridged Touhou, is a Japanese multimedia series, primarily of video games but which also spans mangas, encyclopedias, novels and novellas, music CDs, and more.
It is all made mostly by one single person (except some art and code on spinoffs games, and illustration/manga art), called ZUN. This includes music, writing, coding, art, all of it.
ZUN began creating the first game in 1995, and the series is still very much ongoing to this day, reaching more than 30 games and more than 20 pieces of canon reading material in 2024. And yes, he still scenarizes it all.
The games are of the bullet hell genre, which means characters will shoot deadly bullets at you and you try to dodge them. It's scary for newcomers, but the series is well-known for its particularly artistic use of its bullet patterns in the broader genre. Touhou's music, too, is renowned and has a rather distinctive style.
ZUN has a very friendly approach to fan content, meaning that Touhou spawned literal decades of fan content of all sorts, and some of it deeply permeated Internet culture. The first exposure of many to the series happens unknowingly. Also as a result you can now search for "touhou music [your favorite music genre here]" and find things suiting almost any taste.
With this massive size of both canon and fanon, and the episodic way most of the canon is written, there is no common entry point to the series. You mostly discover things through osmosis and your own dive into the series, bit by bit. It doesn't even have to be through the video games - it can be the mangas, the music, fanworks, anything.
And finally, with new characters introduced every game, there are over 150 characters in the series, some of them one-note and others absurdly important to the lore, but almost all of them with their specific musical theme(s). And possibly most importantly: 99% of them are girls. At some point the series reached a critical mass of all characters being girls for no reason, and ZUN felt he couldn't really turn back.
As an important addition because I see you worry just as I used to, none of them is sexualized in any way, compared to what one could sadly expect of franchises with important rosters of girls (or what some corners of the Internet could make you think about Touhou).
In canon, these characters are multifaceted people, developped through an entire franchise for some, who simply happen to all be girls. This has absolutely no bearing on who they can be. Honestly, the sheer breadth of their personalities and relationships keeps being a breath of fresh air every time I return to reading canon material.
The last key element of context is probably that the series is, to put it roughly, about supernatural creatures (youkai) and humans living in a sealed fantasy land called Gensokyo, and their funny antics - notably as they fight and solve most of their disagreements through ritualized projectile battles called danmaku, but also as they chill and drink together.
And that's it, for the gist of it.
I hope you can join us in Gensokyo. It's a beautiful place, with fantastic characters of all kinds, a charming specific humor with some occasional social commentary sneaked in, lots of room for gender and queer readings, and overall somewhere you can really feel at ease.
To me at least, it is home.
