- Joined
- Feb 4, 2024
Buddy, Touhou is literally the ground zero for the entire thing, at least the explosion in autistic MTFs. People say Tumblr, but Tumblr provided the post-hoc justifications rather than feeding the base phenomenon.
Understanding this requires understanding the anglophone internet and its relationship to Japan as of about ~15 years ago, so I don't blame zoomers too much for not getting it. You need to understand a few things. First, the modern ecosystem for bringing niche Japanese shit over to the western internet did not exist. Second, the ecosystem was built by a very small, strange and distinct group that both had very little overlap with normgroid dubbed anime / pokemon fans AND had an antagonistic relationship with the Japanese companies whose copyright they violated. Third, this ecosystem was focused on 4chan. 4chan exists because these exact people were pushed off of Something Awful dot com. 4chan was started basically an SA offsite where goons could indulge weird Japanese shit not tolerated by the main site. Side note, but SA is literally where we get the word 'troon' from. Users of the SA forums were called 'goons', and so 'trans goons' were called 'troons.'
People who want to immerse themselves in an alien culture are usually not happy with their positions in their home culture. The internet allows this to get weird. It's perfectly possible to become literate in Japanese without ever going there or having extended contact with Japanese speakers. Not that I would know...
Exercise: Go to https://boards.4chan.org/jp/ right now and browse a bit. This board has changed culturally less than any other 4chan board. The only real shakeup has been the invasion of vtubers. Try and understand the mindset of a person that uses this board.
To be fair to Touhou, it was one part of a larger phenomenon of people bringing over niche, and often weird/unsettling shit. You have all the weird porn, obviously, but there's some other stuff that's quite interesting in hindsight. The late 2000s saw the popularity of a genre of anime called at the time 'cute girls doing cute things' or CGDCT aka moeshit. These shows are not funny, not dramatic, not erotic, they are shows about teenage girls where literally nothing happens. Hidamari Sketch is probably what I would say is the best example of that phenomenon. There's a few other things that raise eyebrows like kigurumi.
To now go in on Touhou, it has two things that really make it stick out. First, its fanbase, including the Japanese one, has always been known for being quite deranged and antisocial. Second, it's literally fucking synonymous with hentai. It has been the top tag on every fucking Japanese erotic art aggregator for years and years and never shown any sign of slowing down or had any challenger. A not insigificant amount of Touhou fans, in fact maybe even the majority, interact with it primarily through porn. And well, anime porn is the primary pathway.
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