Anyone stumbling into this site might start by having a look at my about page, at which point they'd see that I express a fondness for the Touhou Project. I am, after all, a mod (got promoted from janitor at some point, btw) on THP dot moe, the premiere destination for Touhou fiction. However, a second look might make them then wonder: Where in the heck are all the posts about the 2hus if you like them so much?
This is something I often feel a bit unsatisfied over, myself. Indeed, I can't offer a very good answer to any question about it. I could distill it down to a glib and unhelpful 'life is complicated', but that wouldn't be worth making a post about. I could also just make yet another blog post where I wallow in my mental illness and absolve myself of any responsibility for my actions. Neither of those is a particularly good option, so I think what I'd like to do is talk a little bit about what I'd ideally do with this site and my view on fandom. Much of this is coming straight from my chocolate factory, so don't expect any of it to be consistent, coherent, or that reflective of how I act or think. This is my little echo chamber, so I'll make as much useless noise as I want ;-)
So, the site. I've made some posts before about things like this in very sweeping terms. I've even made a kind of new year's resolution type cringe post where I stated my hopes and dreams for the year. Well, this isn't going to be much less cringe, but I guess I'm going to step a little bit backwards and reveal a little of the sort of thinking that's gone into this site over the past couple of months. I'll start by saying that I want this site to be more than just a blog. That's a weird thing to say, considering all personal sites, whether or not they take on the exact format, end up being somewhere between a blog and scrapbook of personal fixations. And I suppose anything would, naturally, end up reflecting my personal biases; I wouldn't even try to hide it! Still, there's a noisy, 2hu-loving part of me that wants to show more love of 2hu on here.
What does that even mean? In my case, something I've had a little bit of a hard-on for over the years is people generally missing the bigger picture with Touhou. Whether that's viewing things through a (usually) Western-tinged lens or going off of questionable secondhand information, I always find it a bit irksome. People are, of course, welcome to interpret things however they wish. The thing is, though, that I do feel the result is often not that relevant to the Touhou Project in terms of its spirit or background. The series is very Japanese-coded, for all sorts of implications that come with that hyphenated adjective. As such, something I'd like to do with this site is start including material that gives my personal understanding of a lot of things relevant to Japanese culture, religion, history, and so forth, as relevant to Touhou. I'd particularly like to get into the sorts of misconceptions that often come up around those topics, even from people who are nominally familiar with Japan on some level.
Another part of all of this is that I'm perpetually grumpy about the big wiki, a topic I've pointedly avoided for the most part here. First off, I think centralised repositories of knowledge are ass. Secondly, when they rely on user participation, the quality of everything is as high as the users and how much the moderation can ass themselves to moderate. (Side note: This isn't specific to that wiki; it's a problem with nearly all wikis, as I see it. Look at your average Fandom wiki and despair.) I feel like general caches of knowledge becoming few and far between on internet as information becomes lost in the sludge channels of so-called 'social' media and diluted by lazily tended repositories. It's fine to navigate to the wiki and see a bunch of collected information about the games, books, and so on, sure. What isn't fine is the amount of cruft that's collected over the years. Pages for earlier games and characters from them often still have less-than-ideal translations and bits of questionable information inserted years ago by even more questionable fans. People like me who can read Japanese and who largely just want to find source material are fine. Everyone else seems kind of screwed, though.
That in mind, I'd like to have a few collections of pages of my own where I talk about the things that matter in terms of official media. Some of that means personally produced translations that I feel are more accurate or more reflective of the spirit of the text, adding in a bit of the understanding we've gleaned over the years with this series. Also, as something I find missing from the wiki and other places, overviews and summaries of the official media are a pretty big priority for this effort. Besides that, I'd like to comment on the official media and get into how it reflects things about doujin culture, otaku culture, and various other ideas in the real world as I understand them. Character profiles and personal analyses of the many characters would also be a goal. Honestly, there's so much regarding the cultural background of the series that I'd like to get into that doesn't seem to be that well documented. At the very least, it seems lost in the morass of social networking posts and Discord noise. Besides that, as this is my space to speak, I'd like to speak without getting into stupid arguments over it. You don't have to agree with me, but you do have little choice but to listen or leave.
Great, you might think, but why am I not doing any of this right now? Indeed, theoretical person, that is a very apt question. I could be spending the time I'm using typing this up at an obscene hour of the morning instead working on that! That said, I don't feel like it's that easy. First off, there are bottlenecks to be found in how this very site is run. I've detailed that in another post, so I won't repeat myself in full, but the gist is that my setup isn't that conducive to anything besides a simple blog. To do anything that isn't that, I'll need to set up something better, and I don't intend on using a heavy-duty content management system. This means that I have to figure out some degree of PHP to roll my own infrastructure, as ideal solutions don't seem to independently exist. There is also a sense of a vanity project tied up in it, wanting the satisfaction of a hand-crafted solution to a problem, an element that can't be ignored. Second off, doing any of the above-named stuff requires a great deal of time spent researching and planning out what I'd actually say. As yet, I have no real idea where to start or what in particular I'd most want to cover, to give some idea how nascent this whole endeavour is. I've mostly spent the past years thinking about this in very general terms, sometimes running off towards efforts that partly reflect the intentions, only to find I wasn't quite aiming at anything that useful.
And here I'll get into my view on fandom: The biggest reason I haven't done all of that neat shit is that I'm too busy trying to write 2hu fiction! That is to say that I feel that efforts spent on Touhou are best aimed at producing fan works. Does saying that sort of fly in the face of what I've said before? Do I have immense trouble even doing that? Haven't I spent a lot of time whinging about my troubles in doing so? Yes, yes, and yes. That said, it all comes down to a simple opinion of mine that conversations about the thing I like are boring. I could sit around and endlessly discuss how I think Hatate is a smelly NEET with people — or I could just write a story about Hatate and exploring her smelly NEETness. In that sense, I feel that fan works constitute a sort of attempt at conversation in and of themselves. Their creators are blasting out their own views into the greater cognitive space of people who notionally like the same thing. Of course, there are a lot of issues that come into play when you consider sticky questions of how much people actually like that thing versus some other impulses, but I'm not going to get into that one here. I really just mean to brush on the idea that fan works are, in my view, the best use of my energy and time at the moment. It really is mostly a cope. If I weren't such a broken mess, surely, I'd be able to do both at the same time. Sadly, that isn't the case.
The upshot of all this is that I am expending effort where I can to write. I'm even doing my best to get back to previous self-imposed commitments, though I can't offer any assurances that anything will go anywhere soon. Still, I'm trying to engage in something creative, and I see that as the true foundation of being a fan. In some ways, that can end up being more performative than meaningful, but people sitting around circlejerking on Discord are far more performative on average. Just like the thing you like; if you want to express it, rather than wearing it as a fashionable badge, make something out of it. Simple as.