According to a recent post on Music Machinery, the artist on Last.fm with the highest plays-per-listener ratio, which the blogger dubs the “passion index,” is Team Shanghai Alice. Some of you may recognize TSA as the one-man development studio (he also goes by “ZUN”) behind the ridiculously popular Touhou Project doujinsoft series. Or if you’re not yet acquainted with this particular cult phenomenon, hit the jump to learn more.
For the uninitiated (i.e. fortunate) few among you who’ve never heard of the Touhou games, it’s a danmaku (aka “curtain fire” or “bullet hell”) shmup series that’s characterized by masochistic difficulty, intricate piano-heavy soundtracks, and of course underage girls in frilly dresses. It’s developed an enormous fanbase in Japan that rivals that of many of the most popular commercial game franchises, as evidenced by the literally hundreds, if not thousands, of remixes, videos, and pieces of fanart released every year. Furthermore, some of these fan works have themselves spawned memes, resulting in scores of other offshoots of their own. If your mind hasn’t exploded yet from the sheer amount of meta-recursion involved, you can check out a couple of the more popular videos to come out of Touhou fandom below.
And then your mind will explode.
Tags: Last.fm, McDonalds, Music Machinery, Ronald McDonald, Team Shanghai Alice, Touhou, ZUN
Hehe. ZUN. He’s releasing like, 30 CDs of the 60 that are being released at Comiket 76. Anyway, that first video is pretty neat, like the video. Also, the whole Ronald McDonald thing in Japan is pretty creepy. Seen a ton of these kinds of videos. Check out the Earthbound one for maximum weirdness.
There is nothing wrong with Touhou. I’m a huge fan myself. I don’t particularly listen to the myriads of fan arranged albums that come out at each Comiket and other events, but I’m a huge fan of the games and the original soundtracks.
[...] C76 we can expect an unhealthy dose of Touhou doujin, as if we didn’t have enough of arrangements from an already mediocre source, and [...]
Underage? What, are you implying the girls are sexualized? That’s about as accurate as saying Mass Effect is a porno rape game. It’s absolutely untrue in the Touhou franchise. The skimpiest you can get is one of the characters whose in a maid outfit, but still everyone wears those victorian-style bloomers making panty shots only the works of fan-artists(which there are lots of).
For the record, it’s mostly the art style that makes the characters slightly Super-Deformed, but moreso in the fighters Immaterial & Missing Power and Scarlet Weather Rhapsody.
In fact, many of the characters only LOOK human, they’re personalizations of various Japanese monsters(Youkai, Yuki-onna, Oni, etc.)
Lastly: Touhou is Cute, not Pedo.
P.S.
SAY TOUHOU’S MUSIC IS MEDIOCRE ONE MORE TIME! I DOUBLE DARE YOU, M-F-ER!
Someone’s a little too defensive of their hobby.
Enjoy your Touhou, Tye. The rest of us at OSV just can’t get into it.