thoughts and updates
touhou tribulations - august 23rd 2025
the past month has been very hectic and stressful. on one hand, I'm shocked it's been 2 months since I came home from Offkai Expo - on the other hand, I still feel like I'm playing catch up with it all. this touhou deep dive probably started with the itchio purge, when itchio came under fire from payment processors and as a result had to delist large quantities of games to comply. like many people, I began mass downloading my itch library, grabbing a bunch of stuff I'd overlooked previously. I ended up finding a few touhou games in it, such as the BLM collection of touhou game jam games. after that, I started looking through the touhou tag on itchio. and then, dlsite....
in all honesty, I've never played a mainline touhou game. I still haven't. I've had some familiarity with touhou over the years but never directly engaged with it until I played mystia's izakaya, which seems to be the gateway for a lot of newer touhou fans. I love the variety of the games, how the characters lend well to most any medium and genre. plus it's all cute girls.
I feel its the diversity of mechanics, stories, and of course, situations, that have allowed touhou to have such a staying power rather than an inherent feature of its share-alike sort of "license". it's not so much that people can do what they want with the girls within reason - it's that they want to, that they want to see reimu struggling in a simulation rpg or cirno defeating rumia in a rougelite. the license is, at least in my opinion, the icing on the cake, the vehicle that allows them to do this and go through with it to the extent that they do, but it's the love of the characters and world that creates the original interest. fandom has always stretched the boundaries of copyright law and making fangames is nothing new, so nothing really stops anyone from putting reimu in a game on itchio, but the license is what helps move that forward. the love of the craft is what keeps us going and what inspires us to create more and I love to see that.
I've always called myself bad at danmaku, but I think I'm getting better at them slowly. would I stand a chance in a ZUN one? hahahah........
d.gray-man doujinshi - august 21st 2025
somehow this night I ended up down a rabbit hole of scouring old twitter accounts, jp yahoo listings, and dusty fc2 sites looking through old DGM circles. as always, one of my objectives was trying to find one of my holy grail games, Secret Garden, but I was also just browsing the doujinshi culture from years and years prior. aside from games, I do own doujinshi works (artbooks, anthologies, even a light novel or two) for a variety of fandoms. naturally, that includes DGM.
it occured to me at some point, scrolling through a publisher's extensive list of the DGM doujinshi they had published 20 years ago, how funny it was that I was so invested in the doujinshi of 20 years ago for DGM, despite my obsession with the series being for the later content - namely, characters only actually given character in volumes 20+ from just the past 10 years. if you know then you know what I'm talking about, as my favorite character is the main villain who doesn't become a fleshed out character for a long, long time. I definitely still love the early parts of the series, as it was one of the shounen I watched in middle school, but it has an unending staying power in my brain because of the later parts of the manga (and because it's still releasing).
so, it's a bit funny to me that, despite frequent mischaracterizations and situations unaided by forsight from 2005, I still love to see the hundreds of doujinshi created for DGM and read them. my favorite characters, and by proxy, my favorite characterizations and plot points will never come up in these older doujinshi and in most doujin for DGM in general, but that's fine with me (though I would die for an older style doujin of a certain purple-haired crybaby...). it's astounding to me just how many anthology doujinshi series were created for it, with titles ranging from D-Mission to D.Cross to D+Bible and more... the amount of doujin created for DGM has definitely decreased over the years, which is a bit sad to see, but it's also the natural flow of things given the long stretches of hiatus the manga has gone on and how it hasn't had a new anime in almost a decade despite having more that could easily be a 1 or 2 cour (but most likely won't due to health concerns for the mangaka).
one of the artists I have several doujinshi of is Mikuge, who primarily does yullen works (I could make a whole post on how I don't really ship anyone in DGM, I'm just here to see other people's interpretations and have fun) and is incredibly prolific, with over 100+ doujinshi credited to them (both self published and assisted / contributed to). most of their original printed works are the tall and thin doujinshi, usually around 16-30 pages, but even that must have taken so much time and dedication. it's these aspects of fandom that are a bit awe-inspiring to me, the ways we can dedicate ourselves to something and hone our craft while sharing what we love to others...
