I'm a Spanish speaker from a Spanish-speaking country, but around a decade ago I completely stopped interacting with Spanish-speaking Touhou fans -- unless we're interacting in person, I'm very happy to interact with anyone in person if they're respectful and fun. Is this because I'm a self-hating latina who despises her own people and idolizes the ways of The First World?
The short answer is: no, I'd love to have more Spanish-speaking th friends. I mostly don't interact with that side of the fandom because they are, by some unfathomable miracle, more misogynistic and racist than the rest.
Look, I like my good share of USAmerican generic slop. I love Lady Gaga in her USAmerican flag bikini (that was her best era.) Yasss Queen! I loved USAmerican cartoons as a kid to the point of obsession. But: I like Touhou because it's Japanese. The characters and the setting are so distinctly and unapologetically Japanese!!! Most of them are based on Japanese mythology and legend. The protagonist is a shrine maiden from a Shinto shrine, a Japanese religion, and yes, the deuteragonist has a stereotipical western witch outfit, and a plausibly western name (if you stress the "ri" like in mah-REE-sah, you're pronouncing it wrong -- I did it too!) but she's so, so Japanese. But what about Merry, Alice, Patchouli, the Scarlet sisters, and anyone who has an English name? You will find NO characters that behave and think exactly like a modern USAmerican in this category, because the author is a Japanese man who seems to have limited contact with the US of A. They aren't white women in the same way that we understand a "white woman" to be. By white woman you and I are imagining a modern citizen of the US that has a certain set of characteristics and behaviors... that none of the Touhou characters have.
Wait, you have to picture them saying those lines in a thick Japanese accent:
The short answer is: no, I'd love to have more Spanish-speaking th friends. I mostly don't interact with that side of the fandom because they are, by some unfathomable miracle, more misogynistic and racist than the rest.
After exclusively interacting with the English-speaking fandom for almost a decade, I've come to appreciate its own set of problems. Thankfully most people are cool and decent (I'm pretending the lolicunny1488s of the world don't exist for this exercise) and there are plenty of LGBT yuri fans who produce beautiful works. I'm very thankful for that, to me it is truly the best place to be. I always have someone who is gushing about Futojiko or AriYui on my TL and I wouldn't have it any other way.
But there's something extremely Irksome that I cannot stop ignoring, it's present even in groups where the purpose is to try to engage with Touhou seriously, and it's this: the refusal of people to engage with Touhou as a fundamentally Japanese piece of media.
Basically I have to endure people's stupid ass USAmerican AU fanworks/discussions about these mostly Japanese women (and the western ones are so Japanified, too!) I remember there was this popular artist c 2011 who published a Homestuck-ish Touhou tumblr comic and their explanation of the setting was something like "[the Myouren temple characters] are enrolled at a boarding school in Texas..." -- THAT's what every parody of Touhou characters where they talk like gringo discord users being Playfully Rude to each other looks and sounds like to me. That's not Touhou anymore. To me any "what irrelevant midwestern fast food chain would your favorite Touhou girl prefer" discussion is like a coffee shop AU: it's generic slop.
Basically I have to endure people's stupid ass USAmerican AU fanworks/discussions about these mostly Japanese women (and the western ones are so Japanified, too!) I remember there was this popular artist c 2011 who published a Homestuck-ish Touhou tumblr comic and their explanation of the setting was something like "[the Myouren temple characters] are enrolled at a boarding school in Texas..." -- THAT's what every parody of Touhou characters where they talk like gringo discord users being Playfully Rude to each other looks and sounds like to me. That's not Touhou anymore. To me any "what irrelevant midwestern fast food chain would your favorite Touhou girl prefer" discussion is like a coffee shop AU: it's generic slop.
Look, I like my good share of USAmerican generic slop. I love Lady Gaga in her USAmerican flag bikini (that was her best era.) Yasss Queen! I loved USAmerican cartoons as a kid to the point of obsession. But: I like Touhou because it's Japanese. The characters and the setting are so distinctly and unapologetically Japanese!!! Most of them are based on Japanese mythology and legend. The protagonist is a shrine maiden from a Shinto shrine, a Japanese religion, and yes, the deuteragonist has a stereotipical western witch outfit, and a plausibly western name (if you stress the "ri" like in mah-REE-sah, you're pronouncing it wrong -- I did it too!) but she's so, so Japanese. But what about Merry, Alice, Patchouli, the Scarlet sisters, and anyone who has an English name? You will find NO characters that behave and think exactly like a modern USAmerican in this category, because the author is a Japanese man who seems to have limited contact with the US of A. They aren't white women in the same way that we understand a "white woman" to be. By white woman you and I are imagining a modern citizen of the US that has a certain set of characteristics and behaviors... that none of the Touhou characters have.
And you know why this annoying thing is so prevailing? It's because USAmericans refuse to engage seriously with anything outside their culture. It's just like seeing those Korean manhwa set in the US with all their blonde, blue-eyed characters that have scenes of coworkers throwing parties at Not Korean BBQ places after work. I'm not even USAmerican and I know they would never do this, with coworkers of all people! You see the issue? Even one of my favorite manhwa, I Love Amy, has this obvious Korean Sheen. There's something about it that gives away the fact that the author is not fluent in the culture of the US. USAmericans love to make fun of those gringo caricatures in Japanese media with their hilaaaariousss Engrish and whatnot, and then turn around and give the same treatment to Japanese characters. Their characterizations look just as silly.
The other day someone asked a very innocent question in a server: what kind of literature would the Touhou characters of one's preference like? The answers ejemplified this phenomenon perfectly because NO ONE who participated in the discussion could name a single Japanese book that wasn't, like... Astroboy. I pointed this out and got a "well, we're not Japanese, so we don't know any Japanese books." Therefore, their mental models of the Touhou characters weren't even familiar with them either.
I suspect, then, that we're not interested in the same thing.
Aren't fans... curious? If you're so fascinated by this Japanese thing, don't you feel the slightest inclination to research the culture that birthed it? Gensokyo is a unique setting delineated by a very specific historical era that is very different from ours. It's even different from modern Japan.
ZUN has this running gag where he inserts things that are taken for common knowledge by most people these days and inserts them into this wonderland that still functions with Japanese values and practices from over a century ago. Do the people who live in such a place interact with them in the same way we would?
The results are obviously very funny. Even Kosuzu, one of the few Touhou characters who can understand English, has ZERO contextual knowledge that could allow her to be fluent in a culture that is totally foreign and distant to her.
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| Pictured: Two Japanese girls trying to approach a western practice in a Japanese way, the only way they've ever known. |
Wait, you have to picture them saying those lines in a thick Japanese accent:
We also get this gag with Rinnosuke. What can you say about things and how can you interact with them if only you get a sense of what they're good for, but not the context about what they really are and how they're used today?
ZUN even has Akyuu spell it out: the people of Gensokyo are so unique, they do not understand things the way modern Japanese people do because they lack the conceptual frameworks to do so. Their interests and tastes are not the same, because in order to appreciate a cultural product, you must be familiar with its context, and the context (in this case a fantastical context where magic is real) determines what people find interesting. So extrapolate what the case would be for the rest of humans that exist -- the degrees of difference would be larger.
Anyway. I suspect this never ever crosses some people's minds and that's why we get... What we get in this fandom. People can't even get the character's casual rudeness right. Accuse me of being a gatekeeper and an elitist because I am; I'm sooooooo sorry for liking a Japanese thing for being Japanese and wanting to know about Japanese culture in order to Enjoy it More. I WON'T let people enjoy things: they should get their heads out of their asses and think for a second -- imagine what someone who is NOT like them would be like, what they'd say or do.
I'm in the process of learning Japanese. The fan works in Japanese obviously respect them as Japanese characters. #NotAllFics, though, there's some Serious garbage too, but at least I don't feel like I'm looking at a random online multiplayer game with Touhou skins. ALSO! I'm not saying "wow Japanese people are so Unique and Untranslatable!" No, no, no, I'm merely saying that they're different and these differences are interesting and those are some of the differences I like and appreciate in Touhou.
Questions like "what irrelevant midwestern fast food chain would your favorite Touhou girl prefer" would be so much more interesting if people imagined these situations with Japanese women embedded in a rural Japanese village of the 19th century where youkai and magic are real. Sadly we will get a very me & the group chat responses because the world, to some people, is intelligible only if it's about me, me, ME!
