however I am curious on hearing more details about the Kancolle stuff since I wasn't around in the community when that happened
Okay, so the Touhou-Kancolle rivalry goes back all the way to when Idolmaster Cinderella girls released in 2011. After that, as I@mas as a whole is at its peak in 2013, it attracts lots of Touhou turncoats, where these artists then start selling new I@mas doujins up and front in Reitaisai and other Touhou events while not selling any new Touhou doujins. This angered the significant number of Touhou fans in Japan, where while there's no rule selling non-Touhou stuffs in these events, it feels discourteous at best.
This
manga shows how him, a douijn artist being inquisitioned for I@mas doujins and almost getting caught. (Similar things with turncoats selling non-touhou douijins in Touhou events also happened when K-on and Madoka released, but not to this scale.)
So when Kantai Collection, the first Military Otaku Waifu series released in 2013, it blew up in popularity amongst otakus after the mangaka of Hellsing tweeted about it, with bunch of Touhou fanartists jumping ship and once again, releasing Boathead stuffs at Touhou cons. One of the most notable artists you might know is, Carcharias, author of "Tojiko will not talk" who got huge backlash for doing the aforementioned, which is probably the main reason why the doujin isn't (or is it?) finished to this day, with the artist disappearing from the internet
since 2019.
Getting back to the general 2hu v. Botefecka conflict, on the same year of 2013 Touhou antis would start brigading the Touhou community on the Japanese 4chan, saying things like "Kancolle has dethroned Touhou, this is the end for ZUN". So Touhou fans would retaliate like making a blacklist of authors that
jumped ship to BoteWaifuWarcrimeDefender (more on this later) . This is where most Touhou fans think the term "Touhou Police" originated, but as you see in that aforementioned pixiv manga, it was all the way back in I@mas boom.
You can also see the similar things happened when Love Live blew up also in the 2010s, where lots of I@mas fans defected to Love Live, spawning lots of vengeful I@mas loyalists as a result. (although you can say the I@mas fandom got the last laugh seeing how Gakumas is currently hugely popular in Japan while Link Like Love Live is dead in the ditch). And Botegurl fans, mostly in Japan (and whatever few there are in the west), also had to taste the bitterness of treachery themselves when Azur Lane released in 2017, which also happens to be globally popular starkly unlike Botefecka.
And now more than 10 years later...
Remember how I said "whatever few there are in the west"? One of the reason almost nobody outside Japan knows about the boats n' hoes vs. 2hu drama is because Kancolle has ONLY ever released in Japan, and it's run by DMM which gives overseas fan headaches from having to navigate around proxies to play the game. So much for gatekeeping. And unlike Touhou, Kancolle never really had any nijisousakus that became larger than itself and let it spread to the western space.
Also getting back to BoteWaifuWarcrimeDefender, the game’s narrative is basically Imperial Japan apology/revisionism.
This video explains it in more detail, but to sum it up, the story of the game is not so subtly depicting the Japanese navy's desperate state during ww2, with the villain Abyssals all but representing the allied forces. As the comment sums it up: "Teenage girls fighting for the Confederacy and winning the Battle of Gettysburg." Like, more than 70% of Kancolle
controversy page in namuwiki is regarding alt-right, the Pacific Wars, and Japanese war crimes.
And the devs staunchly keeping the game Japanese-only...only furthers the xenophobic undertones. Like at least for Touhou, even if ZUN isn't bothering to localize the games, at least the general community acknowledges the western fanbase, seeing how Touhou Garakuta has an English version.
And Kancolle nowadays is seen as this owacon by the general Otakus, with them going “
it’s still around?” when they see Kancolle stuff in Japanese conventions. Almost all western twitter discussions regarding Kancolle is almost exclusively on Kancolle vs. Azur Lane, which should tell you enough on how little there is to talk about for Kancolle itself.
Like this delusional guy was saying back in 2015
that Touhou will decline while Kancolle has a bright future ahead of it, but namuwiki once again notes how Kancolle fell off in the 2020s and hasn't gotten back up, with the Kancolle reddit mirroring that sentiment. At least Touhou's current popularity status is debatable, what with all the recline jokes.
Steel yourself, Blue Archive, because since your release on 2021 and boom in 2023 (2013), you WILL meet the same fate.
