Touhou Rant [Unfinished - REALLY unfinished]

Hey guys, got another thing that’s been on my mind today. This sort of thing just kinda happens when I’m listening to music, and usually I don’t talk about it because I figure nobody will be interested. However, today, I think it might at least be worthwhile to develop and delve deeper into this thought process (just gonna call it that because I don’t really know what to call it otherwise… brainstorm, perhaps?).
Today’s thought process was about just how terrible and yet brilliant a character designer ZUN is. Well, I think just about everyone knows that ZUN is bad. We’ve all seen that one image, and as far as I know, everyone agrees with it. I’m also friends with a group of people who have described Touhou designs as being very similar, pretty much the same girl with some different features and some random fetish thrown in. I can see where this comes from, but I don’t think that it’s really accurate. Or, at least, the fetish part of it isn’t completely accurate. I think this is more of an issue with more recent (Unidentified Fantastic Object plus) titles, and even then, I’m not 100% sure where that comes from. The connections I do notice are older, such as vore with Yuyuko, the whole schoolgirl outfit with Udonge, or miko outfits with Reimu, and these I’m fairly sure are just a coincidence, even if it’s a really common one.
However, the fetish aspect of it is pretty unimportant. I find the claim that every Touhou is essentially the same to be of more importance, because that’s a problem you never want to have. Ever. In anything. A character should always be different, able to stand out from the others, and unless you have something amazing in mind (like that one girl from Clannad), you should avoid making them samey and forgettable. Of course, I’m preaching to the choir there, it’s not like we never knew that. I bring this up because ZUN’s characters are almost ridiculously similar like this. I am aware that he’s talked about how he doesn’t like drawing guys, or boobs for that matter. While it does have some relevancy, since it essentially means all of his characters look like little girls, I’m going to ignore that to focus on some other examples of sameness. For one, they have very similar body shapes. I see little variation in height or width, and they seem to only come in three sizes: fairy, little girl, and bigger little girl. Their faces are also very similar; I honestly believe that, if you could, you could probably just swap around the hair on their heads, and it’d be hard to tell if they put on wigs or if they decided to wear everyone else’s clothes.
This is reinforced by the sprite work in various Touhou spinoffs, such as Megamari. However, I’m mainly going to focus on what are perhaps the biggest spinoffs of the series – the fighting games. Before getting into this, I’d like to say that there is much more of an attempt to make the characters look and act differently in these games. I really do like Alphes’ art style. However, I feel like his versions of the characters only help to highlight the similarities in their designs. The main thing that separates characters in the fighters is their moveset – otherwise, they generally seem to look like the same person, but doing different animations and wearing different costumes. There are characters that don’t quite look the same, like Patchouli, but the main thing that separates her is her having a different skin color from the rest. Comparatively, in a fighting game like Street Fighter, designs are very different, even in the case of the shotos, which are famously similar. It’s hard to mix up Ryu for Ken, or Gouken for Akuma, or… well, you get the idea.
A big part of this is that, in Street Fighter, there is a pretty big difference not only between physical design, but also personality. We all know what sort of people Ryu, Ken, and Akuma are, and this helps keep them as separate characters, even if they have similar clothes and move lists. However, Touhou is a little lacking in this department. I’m not saying that all of the personalities of the cast is the same, as that’s not really true. But they could be much better developed. Looking at the Touhou Wiki to make sure that I don’t make an idiot of myself, I noticed that the Wiki portrays the cast as being much more unique than they actually are. I don’t think that’s intentional, but I wonder if anyone else has noticed that they all seem to involve some very common personality type, thrown in with a random quirk, and in the cases of the more important bosses, you get a quick glance over their backstory. I think the previously mentioned claims of Touhou characters all being different fetishes comes into play here. It really does feel like he was being incredibly safe with many of them, strictly using what he knows people already like. He also keeps them incredibly vague, perhaps because the fanon loves to switch around their personalities to suit whatever need be. Most of the time, this is only small changes, but in some cases, it can be a total overhaul. Alice is a major example of this. On the Wiki, it simply notes that “She's a magician known primarily for her skillful use of dolls as well as being a loner”. Of course, it does extend past this, but it’s enough for the common fanfiction writer, or Deviantart user, or even Pixiv user. Alice gets a very feminine personality in the fanon, which is completely different from what she actually is. Maybe the reason why the wiki has the only note on her personality being that she’s a loner is that even they’re not totally sure.
The similarity in design extends past the games as well, even into the fan art. Many a time I have seen an image where the artist has simply reversed their costumes, and yet I have a hard time figuring out who they are without looking at the tags (or knowing that they normally do that with Marisa and Reimu). Using that as a half-assed attempt at a segway, I’d like to switch focus, to another part of the series’ designs that bothers me – ZUN’s reliance on the fanbase. Yes, I mean reliance. We’re all familiar with how bad an artist he is. He’s so bad that he actually relies on his fans to do the job of making actually decent drawings for his characters. Many, many fanarts are created each day for the series, even now, and just about all of them are of a higher degree of quality than the game’s official art. To make it worse, he doesn’t even draw them anymore, and to be fair, while I do miss his old bad art, it saddens me that it’s still not of a particularly high caliber. And I don’t buy the excuse of the series essentially being a doujin. It’s become almost a mainstream game, the only thing preventing it from attaining this being ZUN himself.
Now granted, I’ve heard he has said that he prefers to program and compose, and that’s just fine. I love the games themselves, and he’s still one of my favorite musical artists. However, in the same breath, he also apparently said he prefers actually designing the characters and their danmaku. People love the games, and they love the characters, and so does he from the sounds of it. So why not put just a little more effort into making them look nice, or making them more unique, or not making them look like he stole a bunch of dolls from a kid’s toy chest and then started playing pretend? To be honest, I’m not sure. I’m not exactly a grade A character designer either. With that being said, though, I love character design, and not only do I want to improve myself and become capable of creating good, memorable characters, I want to be able to see more good, memorable characters from others. I don’t think ZUN is quite as into the character design aspect as what I read seems to say he is. Maybe terrible was the wrong word to describe his design, but it’s still very very bad.
Which brings me to the second part of my original statement – that ZUN is a brilliant character designer. I know I have spent the last six or so paragraphs explaining why I think he’s bad at it, but I also can’t help but see something brilliant in all of this. That spark of brilliance is in something I mentioned before – his overeliance on fans. ZUN is able to rely on his fans because they love his series, they love his characters, they love his games. They want to make something better out of it, something that they all can like and enjoy together. And I’m pretty sure he understands this very, very well. I doubt he somehow missed the tons of fan art on all sorts of art sites, or the remixes of his own music – Touhou must be the single video game series with the largest number of unofficial arranges, I swear – and fan videos are quite popular. Examples like the Bad Apple!! shadow art PV, which managed to make it onto news channels, come to mind in this regard. The fanbase is very strong, and as long as they love their series, they will do whatever it takes to make it look like the coolest thing possible. So why even bother putting the effort that many other video game companies put into their designs? It’s this understanding of his fans and what they like that I see the brilliance in, and to a certain degree, even respect him for figuring this out. That doesn’t stop me from still hoping that there will be an improvement in the series.
On the subject of ZUN not wanting to let Touhou become a mainstream game, he had said that cost was the main reason that he didn’t want to do such a thing. And I can understand why this would be a big reason. However, something that I have speculated is that another reason to this is that, if he went mainstream, he would end up being criticized by all sorts of people – video game reviewers, even more players, maybe even more mainstream media. While it’s purely my opinion, and I don’t really have any facts to prove this, I don’t think this is entirely off either.