Okay, more than anything, what I don't get is how it's apparently very popular on a predominantly Western website. Maybe it's big in Japan, but as far as I know it's a game series that isn't a Visual Novel, that hasn't be translated, with neither a manga or anime adaptations. What the hell gives?
cloaknblade said: Okay, more than anything, what I don't get is how it's apparently very popular on a predominantly Western website. Maybe it's big in Japan, but as far as I know it's a game series that isn't a Visual Novel, that hasn't be translated, with neither a manga or anime adaptations. What the hell gives?
The shooter series has translated patches, and there's a massive fan community where many aspects of characters are basically okayed by the creator. The music's catchy, the characters are cute and have personality
Most of the art on Danbooru comes from the websites of Japanese artists in doujin culture. The most popular copyrights on the site (Haruhi, Nanoha, Fate/Stay Night, etc) usually developed a fanbase here before they were ever licensed. Many, many pictures on this site have translations of the Japanese text on them, submitted by the userbase. Danbooru is a website dedicated to doujin culture and caters almost exclusively to things that emerged from the Japanese anime/manga/gaming world. And, Touhou is hugely popular there. It's not selection bias that there's 40,000 things in the Touhou tag. That's just how much Touhou stuff Japan is putting out. There's also 5000-something Vocaloid pictures, and there's certainly no "western" vocaloid. So, "what the hell gives" is: this is what we're interested in and this is what Danbooru is about.
Westerners use Danbooru is what I meant. If you're using it to find Japanese Fanart or CG-sets or whatever, you're probably not Japanese/asian.
And Touhou is absolutely huge compared to everything else on this site, which I find very odd since I hadn't even heard a hint of it elsewhere, and considering that it seems to be based on a very simple game with cute characters. I guess it grabbed a fanbase and avalaunched from there for whatever reason. Kind of like Star Wars or Harry Potter.
Touhou is a pretty niche thing among those who love stuff that come outta Japan, but I'm surprised you haven't heard of it still. Haven't been to 4chan? Anyways, fans of Touhou provided many ways to latch on to it, be it the games, the doujins, the music, the videos, and the wide cast of characters that fans have modified in their own way to produce an attractive... well, something like a "franchise" except it isn't.
Oh, and for the record, I'm an asian, and not every asian knows Japanese. Danbooru is a great English-speaking community, so lots of people besides Westerners use this. Of course, I have no idea what the breakdown is, but that isn't important.
cloaknblade said: And Touhou is absolutely huge compared to everything else on this site, which I find very odd since I hadn't even heard a hint of it elsewhere, and considering that it seems to be based on a very simple game with cute characters. I guess it grabbed a fanbase and avalaunched from there for whatever reason. Kind of like Star Wars or Harry Potter.
Touhou is a huge mystery. It's basically popular because it has a lot of fans (kinda like Paris Hilton of doujin games). There's nothing special about it besides the staggering richness of the supporting materials provided by the fans. It's a reason to get into Touhou _now_ (like, I haven't played any of the games through, but I have several Touhou-related feeds in my RSS reader), but it doesn't explain how it got there. I guess just a historical coincidence.
part of it is Zun himself publishing some fan materials himself, and he's very friendly in the regard of fan material and memes (he has at least once turned a fanon joke to canon... (9), anyone?)
