Methods, Caveats, Goals, and Additional Remarks
While it is trivially easy to exhibit good examples of Touhou fan creations, and it is also not hard see that Touhou is in fact very popular, it is much more difficult to isolate the factors behind how exactly Touhou gained such a large fanbase. For instance, I can look at the number of views on a Touhou-related music video, but it's still unclear from that number how exactly to reason about the effect of that video in bringing potential new fans to the franchise.
As an attempt to remedy this difficulty, I obtained some numbers regarding downloads of games and translation patches from Moriya Shrine, which makes a repository of both official and unofficial Touhou games easily available for the overseas community, and from a developer behind thcrap, a source of translation patches for Touhou games.
I also queried the fanbase more directly by posting a brief survey on the Touhou subsection of the discussion forum Reddit, in which I ask about users' involvement with the community and about how they became involved with the fanbase, and in particular if fan creations played a part. The survey eventually amassed a sample size of 112. Since this was a survey conducted over the Internet, the results are of course not completely reliable. Moreover, because Reddit is a primarily English-language forum, I don't pretend that my survey results are representative of the fanbase as a whole; as I discuss in more detail in the Appendix, the cultures of English and Japanese Touhou discussion forums differ wildly. However I do think that my Reddit survey results are at least a decent proxy for the non-Japanese community. I will refer back to this survey with some frequency throughout my argument.
However, my collection of evidence is not in any way perfect, due to the great difficulty of obtaining reliable concrete evidence about how exactly the Touhou fanbase grows. Therefore, I must admit that some pieces of my argument will unfortunately be short, tenuous, and/or indirect. There is a great deal of further work to be done in obtaining better evidence to reason from, whether from conducting more extensive surveys or by other means.
One more remark: I will mostly embed any relevant videos using the YouTube version, for the viewer's convenience; I can't easily embed Nico Nico Douga videos, and viewing videos on Nico Nico Douga requires an account signup. However, most of the videos that I embed throughout this website were originally uploaded to Nico Nico Douga and later re-uploaded to YouTube. In addition, it's certainly not necessary to watch any of the embedded videos in their entirety.
Finally, although this project is primarily argumentative in nature, throughout the website I will also endeavor to give a brief overview of the Touhou franchise to the unfamiliar reader, with the hope that perhaps I may even cause a few more people to become interested in Touhou as a result of this work.
With that, one may head to any of the Music, Fan Games, or Translations tabs. In each tab I argue that the respective element of the fandom has played a role in getting new fans into the Touhou community.
As an attempt to remedy this difficulty, I obtained some numbers regarding downloads of games and translation patches from Moriya Shrine, which makes a repository of both official and unofficial Touhou games easily available for the overseas community, and from a developer behind thcrap, a source of translation patches for Touhou games.
I also queried the fanbase more directly by posting a brief survey on the Touhou subsection of the discussion forum Reddit, in which I ask about users' involvement with the community and about how they became involved with the fanbase, and in particular if fan creations played a part. The survey eventually amassed a sample size of 112. Since this was a survey conducted over the Internet, the results are of course not completely reliable. Moreover, because Reddit is a primarily English-language forum, I don't pretend that my survey results are representative of the fanbase as a whole; as I discuss in more detail in the Appendix, the cultures of English and Japanese Touhou discussion forums differ wildly. However I do think that my Reddit survey results are at least a decent proxy for the non-Japanese community. I will refer back to this survey with some frequency throughout my argument.
However, my collection of evidence is not in any way perfect, due to the great difficulty of obtaining reliable concrete evidence about how exactly the Touhou fanbase grows. Therefore, I must admit that some pieces of my argument will unfortunately be short, tenuous, and/or indirect. There is a great deal of further work to be done in obtaining better evidence to reason from, whether from conducting more extensive surveys or by other means.
One more remark: I will mostly embed any relevant videos using the YouTube version, for the viewer's convenience; I can't easily embed Nico Nico Douga videos, and viewing videos on Nico Nico Douga requires an account signup. However, most of the videos that I embed throughout this website were originally uploaded to Nico Nico Douga and later re-uploaded to YouTube. In addition, it's certainly not necessary to watch any of the embedded videos in their entirety.
Finally, although this project is primarily argumentative in nature, throughout the website I will also endeavor to give a brief overview of the Touhou franchise to the unfamiliar reader, with the hope that perhaps I may even cause a few more people to become interested in Touhou as a result of this work.
With that, one may head to any of the Music, Fan Games, or Translations tabs. In each tab I argue that the respective element of the fandom has played a role in getting new fans into the Touhou community.