YMMV / Touhou Project

aka: Touhou

YMMV pages for specific games:

• Touhou Reiiden ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers
• Touhou Fuumaroku ~ the Story of Eastern Wonderland
• Touhou Yumejikuu ~ Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream
• Touhou Gensokyo ~ Lotus Land Story
• Touhou Kaikidan ~ Mystic Square
• Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil
• Touhou Youyoumu ~ Perfect Cherry Blossom
• Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night
• Touhou Kaeidzuka ~ Phantasmagoria of Flower View
• Touhou Bunkachou ~ Shoot the Bullet
• Touhou Fuujinroku ~ Mountain of Faith
• Touhou Hisouten ~ Scarlet Weather Rhapsody
• Touhou Chireiden ~ Subterranean Animism
• Touhou Seirensen ~ Undefined Fantastic Object
• Touhou Hisoutensoku ~ Choudokyuu Ginyoru no Nazo o Oe
• Yousei Daisensou ~ Touhou Sangetsusei
• Touhou Shinreibyou ~ Ten Desires
• Touhou Shinkirou ~ Hopeless Masquerade
• Touhou Kishinjou ~ Double Dealing Character
• Danmaku Amanojaku ~ Impossible Spell Card
• Touhou Shinpiroku ~ Urban Legend in Limbo
• Touhou Kanjuden ~ Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom
• Touhou Hyouibana ~ Antinomy of Common Flowers
• Touhou Tenkuushou ~ Hidden Star in Four Seasons
• Hifuu Nightmare Diary ~ Violet Detector
• Touhou Kikeijuu ~ Wily Beast and Weakest Creature
• Touhou Gouyoku Ibun ~ Sunken Fossil World
• Touhou Kouryuudou ~ Unconnected Marketeers
• Black Market of Bulletphilia ~ 100th Black Market
• Touhou Juuouen ~ Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost

Other YMMV:

Examples that pertain to the story, Fanon, fandom, or other non-gameplay elements

A-E

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Since 80-90% of material related to the series is fan-created, this happens quite a bit. We have a forum thread dedicated to collecting them. There are so many, it's become commonplace to consider each artist's interpretation as its own self-contained fan canon, not affecting the others, so that fans get to enjoy each interpretation for its own merits.
• Americans Hate Tingle: In Japan, Reimu is consistently the most popular character in the series by titanic margins, but in the West, her Good is Not Nice tendencies render her a Base-Breaking Character (where she is "merely" top 10).
• Angst Dissonance: Parsee's entire existence revolves around her being miserable. This is played for laughs, especially by the fandom.
• Angst? What Angst?: There are a fair number of characters with grim or even tragic histories, and hints that a few others have their troubled sides, but very little angst occurs onscreen (with a few exceptions, mostly involving Mokou), and the tone of the series tends towards carefree.
• Awesome Ego: A number of characters are beloved not just in spite of their arrogance, but because of it. Cirno probably tops the list, but honorable mentions include Remilia and Miko.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Cirno. She became overwhelmingly popular, which eventually led to a large backlash of people who got sick of seeing her absolutely everywhere. Nowadays half of the fandom still loves her, while the other half considers her overrated and wishes she would just go die in a hole somewhere.
  • The same applies to Flandre Scarlet, with some people appreciating her sudden return to prominence in the 2020s, while other people feel this just gives Embodiment of Scarlet Devil fans even more of an excuse to shove her into fanworks at the expense of less-popular characters.
  • Sanae. Some like that she is a potential Foil for Reimu, a recent Gensokyo newcomer with connections with the outside world, and her increasingly eccentric behavior throughout the games. While detractors dislike that she is very similar to Reimu in appearance and job, her constant appearances during the Windows Two era, especially since many believe she replaced fan favorite Sakuya (despite the latter actually having more appearances and having been retired as a playable character for a while before Sanae took the third heroine position), and her focus in fan-art and works as well. This is a bit alleviated by not appearing in games between Ten Desires and Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom, with mostly positive response about her reappearance in the latter (it helps that she appeared alongside Youmu and Reisen as playables respectively). It died down even more after Sanae skipped out on 16 and 17 only to appear alongside Sakuya in Unconnected Marketeers.
  • Reimu herself. Some believe her blunt, slothful, apathetic personality makes her a more interesting hero. Others believe she takes things too far. This seems to be primarily a Western thing, as in Japan she's one of the most popular characters in the series and a consistent back-to-back winner of the Character Popularity Poll (when other characters don't get a relevance bump from a recent game, at least).
  • Mizuchi. To some, she's a brilliant Knight of Cerebus who has brought real, genuinely deadly stakes to the table, given her ability to do lasting harm to youkai and her cunning proving sufficient to evade even the likes of Yukari. To others, she's a boring Invincible Villain with Player Character-tier Plot Armor who has suffered essentially zero setbacks since her introduction, and has repeatedly danced out of Satori and Reimu's grasp almost to the point of parody - some in this group even go so far as to say Mizuchi should join the Fortune Teller in the Killed Off for Real bin once she's finally defeated. And a third group believes that Mizuchi has great potential as a character, but this potential has been utterly hamstrung by the painfully glacial story pace of Foul Detective Satori, which is not helped by the feeling that her multiple escapes from Reimu and Satori are more easily attributable to Idiot Ball shenanigans or Plot Armor-induced luck than true cunning on her part. Lastly, some people dislike her simply for the Bait-and-Switch where the story seemed to hint the Big Bad would be Mima, only for it to turn out to be this new character instead.
• Broken Base: The fandom will never stop arguing as to what's canon, whether Touhou is canonically grimdark or not, or over popular interpretations, especially in regards to new changes to Nitori and others in Hopeless Masquerade.
  • The Phantasmagoria games can probably cause an even bigger rift in the fandom than Ten Desires. Some say it's the best thing ever happening in the series and want more versus shooters in the series, others shudder at the possibility every time a new game is announced.
  • Yukkuris. Some people love them and consider them to be just as much a part of Gensokyo as the girls themselves, while others despise them and think that they're the worst thing that the fanbase has ever produced.
  • The Touhou fanbase has a considerable and long-standing divide between those who are only here for the shmups themselves and couldn't care less about the lore or fan works, and those who are here for the exact opposite reasons (including those who are only into Touhou for the fanworks). The shmup-focused fans frown upon fanwork- and lore-focused "secondary" fans because of how vocal some of those fans can be and and how Touhou fan culture can sometimes be so displaced from the shmup fanbase that Touhou discussion in a shmup-focused community that doesn't stick to gameplay talk can feel like it is derailing from the main topic of shmups. The story- and fanwork-focused side considers the games to be unfun, excessively difficult exercises in masochism and shmup fans to be elitists who try to dictate who counts as a "real" fan of Touhou; if these lore-focused fans do play the games, they tend to stick to the Fighting Game spinoffs for having what they find to be more familiar gameplay.
  • Alternative Facts in Eastern Utopia has also split the fanbase on a few things, including it being illustrated by fan artists with a couple of panty shots of Aya, and having an article with Miko giving a speech that heavily references modern American politics. There is one camp that finds these moments hilarious and argue that because the book is written from Aya's biased and highly suspect perspective it is fine, while detractors argue that such things shouldn't be a part of Touhou canon and even go so far as to claim Fanon Discontinuity.
• Common Knowledge: There's probably enough of this in the fandom (and a lot of it perpetuated on this very wiki) to warrant the creation of a new page, but some the most egregious examples include:
  • Every single game ends with the protagonists having tea with the final boss, right? Nope. Touhou Gensokyo ~ Lotus Land Story is the only game in the series to feature a tea party ending, and it was only between Reimu and Marisa (the Player Characters). Drinking parties, however, have happened much more frequently. Tea however is Reimu's Trademark Favourite Food.
  • It's often believed that Gensokyo is a full-blown World of Jerkass, with every one of the girls being a violent Jerkass with zero actual morals. This however mostly stems from Early-Installment Weirdness, as the early games (specifically the PC-98 games and the original Windows trilogy) were much more of a Gag Series rife with Comedic Sociopathy. After the Soft Reboot and a mild case of Cerebus Syndrome, this largely dropped off, and while there are a lot of morally dubious and downright unpleasant personalities in the series (such as Mystia being a con artist or Koishi's effective lack of Ego making her act on a weird mixture of social norms and primal desires without any sort of filter), quite a few are shown to be entirely pleasant and good-natured (Mokou has no reason to escort people out of Bamboo Forest of the Lost, but she does it anyway), with Reimu being at worst a very flawed Jerk with a Heart of Gold.
  • There's a misconception that in the PC-98 Era, many fights were to the death. This mostly comes from the fact that the Spell Card rules, which enforce Non-Lethal Warfare, didn't exist yet, and that most characters from those games were only seen in their debut game then never again, and only four characters reappeared in Windows. However, in the PC-98 games, just like in Windows, bosses have more dialogue after being defeated, as well as some bosses showing up in the endings. Part of the confusion also comes from Yuuka playfully giving death threats to other characters, but she only does it to mess with people, as her "victims" are shown to be alive after the fight just like with any other character (as well as the rather ambiguous dialogue that Mima has with Mai and Yuki about a place of eternal rest). On the other hand, Reimu's scenario in fourth game has her seal away Orange, which given her reaction doesn't seem to be an exactly more pleasant alternative to actual death.
  • Reimu's literal Plot Armor and, by extension, the idea that the Spell Card Rules were at least partially implemented because, if she died, then the Great Hakurei Barrier would come undone and Gensokyo would suffer a sudden existence failure are entirely ideas that the fandom made up. The fact of the matter is that, ever since Silent Sinner in Blue, it's been impressed that Reimu is frightfully expendable, entirely replaceable, and the authorities of the realm, like the local judge of the dead, are more concerned with how to the spin the story in the eventuality of her death while on duty rather than her death in itself.
  • It's widely believed that Flandre's common characterization in fan works as a Creepy Child with Ax-Crazy tendencies is Outdated by Canon, and that Touhou Chireikiden ~ Foul Detective Satori and Touhou Gouyoku Ibun ~ Sunken Fossil World show that she's just an innocent little girl with a sarcastic streak who stays in the basement voluntarily despite how easy it would be to break out. Except it doesn't really. Flandre is shown throughout both works to be a violently sociopathic Blood Knight with a considerable Lack of Empathy, doing things like complimenting Sakuya when she thinks the latter attempted to murder Patchoulli, violently strangle Meiling while Laughing Mad, and outright declare herself a god of destruction. What the manga and game actually did change was making Flandre less innocent; while popular Fanon portrayed her as unaware of how destructive she was, Foul Detective Satori makes it clear she's fully aware of her destructive capabilities, and that the only reason she doesn't just break out of her imprisonment is because all of her needs are attended to inside (rather than to protect Gensokyo from herself as fans often believe).
  • It's often believed that The Shinigami's Rowing Her Boat as Usual, The Gensokyo of Humans, and other manga not written by ZUN that're serialized on Comicwalker are Doujinshi. They're actually fully official, licensed manga which have tankabon sold in stores and on official platforms like Amazon, and are fully approved by ZUN, with the aforementioned Shinigami even including the official canon epilogue of Touhou Ibarakasen ~ Wild and Horned Hermit in its volume release. They just aren't official canon due to not being written by ZUN himself, and him allowing creators creative freedom for their interpretations of the Touhou world.
  • Despite what many fans believe, Rinnosuke was not Marisa's Honorary Uncle when she was growing up. It's actually stated in the same chapter of Curiosities of Lotus Asia where their relationship is first established that he had already left the Kirisame shop and opened Kourindou by the time Marisa was born, and the two rarely if ever spoke on the times he visited. Their being close acquaintances only started after Marisa had already run away from home.
  • The term "incident" is often misused to refer to the plot of any game in the series, despite it having an actual definition as given by Reimu's article in Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, with the events of some games not qualifying as incidents as a result. Specifically, an incident is an event that 1) affects Gensokyo at large, and 2) is of unknown cause at the time it occurs. To give two examples: the events of Undefined Fantastic Object are not an incident, as while the flying objects are initially of unknown origin, neither said objects nor the Palanquin Ship's trip to Makai actually affect Gensokyo in any meaningful way; meanwhile, Yousei Daisensou ~ Touhou Sangetsusei meets neither condition, as it's just a personal quarrel between a few fairies for clearly-defined reasons.
  • Despite the Memetic Mutation, Cirno is not an idiot (ZUN has even explicitly stated he somewhat regrets labelling her as such in PoFV's manual) - in fact, she's one of the few fairies that has shown literacy, basic mathematic abilities, and ability to remember things long-term; what she is is be very confident of her strength and only sometimes does she realize that she might actually be in danger. She's very strong for a mere fairy- in the ninth game, the local judge of dead warned her that her recent antics could possibly push her beyond being merely a fairy (plus in her game although Marisa was clearly holding back, she was still surprised by how much effort she had to put in while fighting Cirno). The real issue is simply that a lot of characters in Gensokyo are even stronger.
  • "Men don't exist in Gensokyo." While it's true that the majority of the cast is female, there have been many male characters that have appeared in numerous print works, such as Rinnosuke. Men also make appearance in games such as the Human Village background in Hopeless Masquerade, or as bosses such as Unzan or Shingyoku. Men do exist, they're just not given much focus.
• Contested Sequel: Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom. Some fans appreciate the addition of Pointdevice Mode, but others point out that ZUN seems to have used this as an excuse to create over-the-top enemy attacks.
• Continuity Lockout: This wasn't much of a problem during the PC-98 era and the first few games of the Windows era, since the plots of those games were largely self-contained. However, after Mountain of Faith the Continuity Creep starts to take place, and now it's much more difficult for newcomers to understand what's going on since from that point on each game builds upon the previous one. Comments by ZUN suggest that he feels a certain level of inaccessibility is core to the Touhou experience. The various manga spinoffs and Universe Compendiums don't really help either, since all the manga series assume that one is already familiar with the games and their lore and the Universe Compendiums have some Unreliable Narration at work. The closest to a possible entry point in the series could be Forbidden Scrollery, if only because the main character doesn't know much about the setting either. Even then, that manga is chock full of unclear situations. That said, there are many who play Touhou games just for fun Bullet Hell action and don't mind starting with the latest game and ignoring the plot.
• Covered Up: While Ran's theme, Necro-Fantasy, came first and Yukari's theme, Necrofantasia, was meant as a re-arrange, the latter is vastly more popular, and Ran's become more associated with Charming Domination (her stage theme) instead. To a certain degree, some fan remixes and covers of the themes and leitmotifs are so memetically popular they overshadow their origins.
• Creator Worship: ZUN, who is worshipped by fans as the father of the series, and has even had fanart drawn of him, rarely without him holding a beer mug or can in his hand. Any time he makes an appearance at Fan Conventions in the US, fans joke about going drinking with him.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • In Imperishable Night, Reimu gives us a line that would be creepy if anyone else was saying it.
    Reimu: "Annoying rabbit! Shut up or we'll peel your skin off!"^NoteThe old translations would have the ending be "shoot your clothes off", so it's a choice of picking your poison.
  • Kosuzu finding an outside world article about ebola? Not funny. Kosuzu thinking that ebola is a kind of youkai? Hilarious.
• Designated Hero:
  • Canonically, Reimu tends to be more... cavalier than one might hope from the hero.
  • Marisa is not really any better either, though she has the benefit of not being as rude as Reimu and not being expected to be heroic unlike her shrine maiden friend.
  • And depending on who you ask, Sanae was falling into this since Undefined Fantastic Object due to Flanderization of her interest in "Youkai Extermination" and other ditzy tendencies.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Neurodivergent fans frequently interpret Reimu Hakurei as autistic. This stems from a combination of her portrayals in the games and officially-sanctioned spinoff manga. Among other things, she displays idiosyncratic thought patterns and assumes that other people think and act the way she does, she rigidly sticks to her routines and openly desires predictability in life, she's honest to a fault and is a Bad Liar, and she's capable of losing her good mood at the slightest setback, with the results paralleling meltdowns and/or shutdowns. In addition, her habit of stretching and bending her arms behind her head is typically interpreted as a stim, her love of reading and alcohol are often viewed as special interests, and her tendency to go on long-winded lectures about things she likes come off to neurodivergent fans as infodumping.
• Die for Our Ship: Extremely rare, but it does exist. Some Mamizou x Kosuzu shippers portray Akyuu as either an anti-youkai bitch with an Entitled to Have You attitude toward Kosuzu, or a jerk who completely rejects Kosuzu's love, so Mamizou can comes in as a Knight in Shining Armor and wipe away Kosuzu's tears.
• Discredited Meme:
  • Any meme having to do with Sakuya and pad[ded breast]s is heading this way, given how old the meme is combined with the overuse.
  • Calling Aya and the main game playable characters other than Reimu and Marisa "ZUN's girlfriends" or outright sluts because ZUN gave them their share of spotlight got really old after said characters built up substantial fanbases on their own and the games' rosters became more varied over time. It's also considered to be rather disrespectful towards ZUN himself, since he's now married and has children. Nowadays, as it's mostly used out of spite towards the characters, it's considered unfunny and frowned upon. ^note Except the rare cases where it's used in a respectful manner - such as the Anime Week Atlanta Q&A Panel, where ZUN got jokingly asked which would be the two characters that he would most prefer to be trapped in a hot spring with - to which he responded that it would be Reimu and Marisa.
  • McRolled was responsible for boosting the popularity of Flandre Scarlet, her theme, and the series in general, but now it's barely relevant to the Touhou fan community. The irritation caused by the popularity of McRolled seeping into that of "U.N. Owen Was Her?" didn't help its case.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Many fans don't consider the shooting games bad, but they are designed by a man who thinks if you beat his games after only 20 hours of trying, it's too easy, so the difficulty can turn them off. To them, it's more fun to indulge in the characters, the lore, the connections to various East Asian mythologies, and the massive universe of fanworks surrounding those elements. Additionally, some fans who do play the games prefer the fighting game spinoffs. This is a major reason why Touhou is generally not a Gateway Series to other scrolling shooter series, and why the general shoot-em-up community, which believes in the opposite, tends to have beefs with the Touhou community.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Mima has become this amongst the PC-98 games. Fans wanted her to return to the windows games after so many years.
  • Shinki is probably the second most popular PC-98 only character, mostly due to Epileptic Trees about her relationship with Alice. (Being a goddess of demons and having a Sakuya-like maid doesn't hurt either.)
  • Alice herself as she's one of the few to return in Windows games, and between her dolls, her rather normal looks (which stand out), and Ship Tease with Marisa.
  • Flandre, despite only appearing in a few games, is even more popular than her more prominent sister Remilia.
  • Hong Meiling, Cirno, and Sanae all got primary roles in Hisoutensoku because of their popularity with the fans.
    • Hoo boy, Cirno. Despite originating as a mere stage 2 boss, her Boisterous Weakling Large Ham status made her surprisingly popular with the fanbase, though her fame really exploded in Phantasmagoria of Flower View where ZUN himself turned her into a memetic juggernaut with the infamous "⑨ - Baka" in the instruction manual. To this day, Cirno is one of the most popular minor characters in the series, continues appearing in the games semi-regularly as either a minor foe or even a playable character, and has had a spinoff title centered entirely on her.
  • Merlin's Game-Breaking Bug has led to her becoming the most popular of the sisters, exemplified by being the only one of the three to make the character filter in FanFiction.Net's Touhou section.
  • Lunasa's gloomy manner and responsible mindset has caused her to be popular among fanartists, even more so than Merlin in spite of that bug and her status as "the stacked sister".
  • Yamame, despite not being outright popular herself, does have a fair number of fans and appearances in fan works because she belongs to a group of very popular characters ^note discussed in this video.. It helps that she is a good-natured person.
  • That said, the Dark Horse character of Subterranean Animism is, without a doubt, Koishi, who not only is regularily featured in the top 3 in character popularity polls, but even managed to beat both Marisa and Reimu for the top spot during the THwiki's 11th character popularity poll.
  • Chen has become a beloved character on 4chan, mainly thanks to bkub's offbeat comics.
  • Since the full release of Ten Desires, Futo has been gaining quite a bit of popularity too, due to her fish out of water tendencies, and being smugly cute.
  • With the full release of Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom, a few of the characters introduced have quickly become likable. Most notably Clownpiece, due to her iconic American-flag-inspired clothing, and being a fairy that's actually very powerful, both in-story and in game.
  • Judging from the 2016 popularity poll, it seems safe to assume that the fortune teller has gained a following. Despite being a One-Shot Character character that got Killed Off for Real, he ended up 77th place, putting him above both the Aki sisters, Yamame and Ichirin.
  • On the 2017 Touhou Wiki popularity poll, the first 17 spots are occupied by various recurring playable characters and antagonists. The 18th is occupied by Momiji Inubashiri, a stage 4 midboss in Mountain Of Faith with her only other appearances being in spinoffs and supplementary materials. She doesn't even have an official character portrait, and yet she outranks series mainstays like Yuuka Kazami and Patchouli Knowledge.
  • On the 2018 Touhou Wiki popularity poll, Shion Yorigami hit 15th place, which is a surprise given how Antinomy of Common Flowers was just recently released at the time. It's more surprising that she hit the top twenty while her younger sister Jo'on Yorigami was in 54th place, making this a rare case of siblings in a series being far apart in the polls as opposed to close together.
  • Practically overnight after the full version of Wily Beast and Weakest Creature was released, Saki Kurokoma became a literal ensemble darkhorse (since she's a kurokoma, a type of black winged horse). Her explosive popularity is mostly attributed to her cowboy-inspired design; the sheer absurdity of a cowgirl Touhou made people doubt she was real at first, and tons of "howdy" and "yeehaw" related memes sprung up around her. Her cowgirl design also made her very popular amongst Americans, especially in places like Texas.
• Epileptic Trees: A lot of them.
  • The lightning connecting the five eyes of YuugenMagan forms the vague shape of a woman. Who is this woman? The real "brain" of YuugenMagan? Someone else, controlling it? Maybe the eyes themselves are generating it, as a humanoid avatar of their collective consciousness? Or is it just a coincidence?
  • Elis. No one is really certain what she is. Vampiress? Magician? Demoness? The stages preceding her have "Oriental Magician" as their background music... which is otherwise associated with Marisa.
  • Mima's and Marisa's relationship. There's debate as to whether Mima's her teacher or mother or what. She is generally agreed to have taught Marisa some of her spells, since they have some shared or similar attacks.
  • Konngara is sometimes thought to be an Oni, as she has (what seems to be) a horn, and drinks sake while fighting, like Yuugi would do later in the series. At the same time, she lacks feet and there seems to be blood dripping from the base of her horn as though it were a spike through her forehead, so other fans suggest she might be a ghost. But wait! Her boss title is "Astral Knight", so perhaps she is some sort of alien! And yet some other information points to the fact that she may be a yaksha.
    • Making the situation even harder to decipher is the fact she's based on the faithful Kongara-douji, an embodiment of obedience, making it very hard to decipher just why she's in a run-down shrine in hell.
  • Fans are divided on whether Rika and Rikako from Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream are the same person or not. Both are more scientifically-minded than most Gensoukyou residents.
  • Kurumi may be related to the Scarlet sisters. Her boss theme is called "Scarlet Symphony ~ Scarlet Phoneme".
  • The nature of danmaku battles in the PC-98 games, with some assuming they were lethal battles.
  • The relationship between Alice and Shinki (similar to Marisa and Mima above). For that matter, any attempt to reconcile Windows Alice with her PC-98 appearance.
  • Eirin's character profile says she was surprised to see Sakuya in Imperishable Night, but never explains why. Fanon has explored several possible connections between them, including Sakuya being a Lunarian, Eirin having made her Luna Dial, or the two characters being related in some way. There's also a lot of speculation about how and why Sakuya became Remilia's servant.
  • Reisen's ears have what look like buttons at their base, which led to speculation that she wears fake ears. However, in Silent Sinner in Blue, the other rabbits in the Lunar Defense Corps have the same buttons too, except for Reisen II, their new recruit. Perhaps the buttons are rank insignia of some kind?
  • A popular fan theory has Maribel and Yukari Yakumo being the same person. The basic idea is that when Maribel sleeps, she dreams she is Yukari. And when Yukari sleeps, she dreams she is Maribel. It doesn't help matters that they look very similar. Or that both have boundary-related powers. There may be some evidence suggesting she is Yukari's past time-displaced self. Although Maribel is from the future, Perfect Memento in Strict Sense mentions that a note she wrote was found in Gensokyo several centuries in the past. Another common association is with Marisa, again because they have similar appearances and in this case similar first names as well.
  • Fandom has taken to associating Renko with Reimu the same way they do Maribel with Yukari. If Renko and Maribel were Trapped in the Past, perhaps Maribel became Yukari and Renko was the founder of the lineage of Hakurei Mikos.
  • Her name, title, and the fact she has a shackle with a broken chain around her left arm, have all fueled speculations that Kasen Ibara is one of the four Devas of the Mountain - specifically Suika's daughter / lover, if you go by the original legend. Japanese mythology, which ZUN takes great liberties with anyway, does include oni hermits. And that's before you get to her mysterious relationship with the Hakurei Shrine or the thing with her right arm. This ultimately ends up being true as not only is Kasen an oni, but she even introduces herself as being one of the Four Devas to Reimu after regaining her arm.

F

• Fan Myopia: Part of this stems from the sheer volume of fan material. Of course, most of the fan material comes from Japan — where Touhou actually is that well-known. This is perhaps why "What anime is this?" is a major Fandom-Enraging Misconception.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception:
  • Asking "What anime is this?" will lead to a lot of groans since Touhou is a video game series that (currently) has no official anime. Mistaking any of the Fanime for an official Touhou anime will get similar groans.
  • Assuming that "U.N. Owen Was Her?" is officially named "McRolled" or that it originates from the video of the same name. It's also not Death Waltz by John Stump.
  • It is for the best to not call Yuuka's Phantasmagoria theme song as "Tiny Little Adamantium", "Omae wa mo", or anything you might have known from social media, for its official name is "Gensokyo Past and Present ~ Flower Land". Also, it is not wise to mention Shinabayan or anyone else as the writer of the song, for it was written by ZUN. While appreciating cover song and meme is generally acceptable in Touhou fandom, giving the artistic credit to the wrong person is completely a different thing.
  • Calling Sakuya as "Sakura" or "Sayaka".
  • Fans of the PC-98 Era can be ticked off by people (especially fellow Touhou fans) claiming that the PC-98 games aren't canon. They will readily correct you that they are canon, only barring any details that contradict with the Windows games. Part of the misconception comes from the fact that after the Soft Reboot in Windows, the canonicity of the PC-98 games spent years going through Flip-Flop of God before finally settling in 2013, and that only four out of the PC-98 cast (two of those being the series protagonists) reappear in the Windows games.
  • Given the enormous amount of fanworks, it is really easy for people to mistake Fanon for canon and vice-versa, which can tick off certain fans.
  • Assuming that Koishi Komeiji's Last Word (I'm Going to Call You Now, So Answer the Phone!) in Urban Legend in Limbo is inspired by or a ripoff from Chara and their genocide tendencies is a good way to tick off Touhou fans because of how untrue it is. Koishi Komeiji debuted in Subterranean Animism (2008) and Urban Legend in Limbo was released in May 10th 2015, while Undertale was released in September 15th 2015. Furthermore, Toby Fox (creator of Undertale) said in an interview that Undertale's bullet dodging system is inspired from Touhou, not the other way around.
  • Assuming that Touhou is a Hentai series because of the amount of explicit fanworks will get you laughed at because of how devoid of Fanservice the official works are.
  • Mistaking the franchise for Toho (the studio that created Godzilla) will go as well as mistaking Avatar: The Last Airbender for James Cameron's Avatar.
  • If you are an active content creator in Doujin circle, writing Touhou Doujin where Marisa refers to herself with the masculine pronoun "ore" will immediately get you dismissed as a non-fan who's just using Touhou characters to boost your own popularity. ^note While Marisa's speech pattern is rather blunt and boyish, she still uses the standard mildly-feminine pronoun watashi.
• Fanwork-Only Fans: The "mainline" games are Bullet Hell shooters that require a significant amount of both concentration and dexterity, and used to be hard to find legally (this is still the case for the first three Windows games, which is a problem because First Installment Wins). However, the amount of fan media like fan videos, fan art, Touhou Fan Music and fangames in all kinds of genres (plus the memes) has made the series have an incredible and enduring online presence since the early 2000s. Tellingly, videos like "Bad Apple!!", "Marisa Stole the Precious Thing", and "Cirno's Perfect Math Class" have millions of views on YouTube, while let's plays for the series tend to be in the "lower-thousands" of views. Even among fans who are devoted enough to answer a survey it appears that roughly 40% of them haven't played any of the games.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Many fans of the shmup genre frown upon Touhou and its fanbase, especially Touhou fans who don't play the games and instead indulge in its lore and non-game fan-produced material, labeling them as "secondaries" who shouldn't call themselves true Touhou fans. Although, it's rare to see a Touhou fan be dismissive of fans of the genre.
  • In the Pixiv community, there's a rivalry between Touhou fanartists and KanColle fanartists. If you happen to be a Kancolle fanartist who once drew Touhou fanart a lot, be prepared to have several zealous Touhou fanartists accusing you for abandoning Touhou fanart and switching sides to drawing only Kancolle fanart. Ironically, ZUN has said that he thinks Touhou and Kancolle go well together.
  • Another one exists with fans of arcade Rhythm Game players who feel that Touhou arranges being in rhythm games is overexposure. It would be easier to count how many currently-serviced rhythm games, particularly arcade games of Japanese origin, don't have Touhou arranges.
• Fan Nickname:
  • General - Touhou/2hu are often used as general nouns for Touhou characters, e.g. "If a touhou loses her hat, she will die", with the plural forms being touhous/2hus. Spinning off that, newhu is used for recently introduced characters.
  • Alice - Alice Megatron is the result of her full name Alice Margatroid being misread, thus making her the leader of the Deceptions.
  • Cirno - ⑨ (pronounced "Nineball").
    • The spellcard "Icicle Fall" - Icicle Fail. On Easy difficulty, the pattern for it has a blatant blindspot right in front of her.^note This is not the case on Normal, where the spellcard has a five-bullet spread that prevents players from safely standing in front of her, and the spellcard is outright replaced with "Hailstorm" on Hard and Lunatic.
    • Cirno shows up with a dark tan in Hidden Star in Four Seasons. The fandom responded with nicknames like "Gravure Cirno", "Alolan Cirno", "Shiny Cirno", "Chocolate Ice Cream" or "🅱️irno" (the latter, from the tendency of Los Angeles street gang Bloods to replace the letter C with a B with the intent of deleting the rival Crips from the alphabet, which has itself become an internet meme)
  • Hong Meiling - China is so widespread that even ZUN has admitted to using it. Before that it was Kurenai Misuzu, the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese characters that make up her name. An ongoing debate over whether her name was supposed to use the Chinese or Japanese pronunciation was, in fact, the source of the "China" nickname, which was offered as a compromise because being Chinese was her main identifying trait anyway. It's used less and less often these days now that Meiling has more to her character than being Chinese.
    • Part of the origin of her nickname was that it was a joke on how Chinese things are unreliable, referencing her exaggerated napping status. Part of the reason it's being used less is because many fans don't care for that treatment of her.
    • This nickname is so strongly associated with her that "China" redirects to her page on the Touhou wiki.
  • Sakuya - PAD-Chou/Pad Chief. Fans noticed her bust size change considerably between her character art in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil and Immaterial and Missing Power. While this is probably because the former's art was done by ZUN, who many believe simply isn't good enough at perspective to draw breasts, the tongue-in-cheek fan theory that she started padding her bra in the interim between the two games. Fanon has it that mentioning such in her presence is a good way to wind up knifed to death. She's also called Sakuya Brando due to her similarities to Dio Brando. This really says it all.
  • Reimu - Raymoo, Armpit Miko, The Red-White, et cetera.
  • Yuuka - Japanese fans often call her Yuukarin as a take on Yukari's Yukarin. Yuuka can also be romanized as Yuka, though, so the distinction is often lost in English. She's also sometimes called Ultimate Sadistic Creature, or USC for short, due to some of her lines suggesting that she enjoys dealing out violence. Youkai Moe^note A pun: the literal meaning of moe is "budding", and she's a flower youkai is sometimes used with her.
  • Kogasa - 2nd or New Youkai Moe, after her similar appearance to Yuuka^note Namely the fact that both of them have a parasol as a defining trait.
  • Merlin - Merupo^note a combination of her name and "nurupo", short for "null pointer exception" (a programming term), in reference to her occasionally buggy behaviour in Perfect Cherry Blossom, also known as ξ・∀・
  • Lunasa - Luna-nee, reflecting her "responsible oldest sister" position among them.
  • Youmu - Referred to as Myon among Japanese fandom due to a quote of hers from Perfect Cherry Blossom. Western fandom has applied this specifically as a nickname for her ghost half. Also, "Ghost 2B", due to Yorha 2B from NieR: Automata looking pretty much like an upgraded Youmu.
  • Ran - Suppa-Tenko, translated as "Naked Heaven-Fox", from an infamous fan-comic. Because of this, some fan works often humorously portray her as a streaker.
  • Yukari - Yukarin, also Sukima ("gap"), in reference to how her powers manifest, and Babaa ("old hag") in reference to her extreme age. This would be 1300 years old minimum, as she created Gensokyo and is thus one of the oldest characters in a series filled with centuries-old characters.
  • Suika - Watermelon. Her name is a homophone for the Japanese word for the fruit. It is rumoured that the origin of watermelon is related to Suika as well.
  • Reisen's bullets were probably just intended to look like they're glowing, but the fact that most of them in Imperishable Night are colored white caused some fans to speculate that they're suppositories. The name stuck, due in no small part to another flash by IOSYS, so some call her "Suppository".
  • Kaguya - NEET. In Fanon, Mokou also uses this as an insult, although Kaguya has taken to rebutting by calling her a hobo. Also Teruyo, an intentional misreading of the kanji that make up her name. Naturally, it gets more use in Japan than the western world.
  • Aya - "Slut", or "ZUN's girlfriend". Detractors of her Creator's Pet tendencies sometimes jokingly suggest that she seduced ZUN to secure her spot in nearly every Touhou game after her debut, not to mention those spotlight-grabbing Gaiden Games and her generally high power level. It also doesn't help that ZUN once wore an outfit matching hers.◊ It has fallen out of use these days for the most part, due to more characters being introduced that have taken prominence over her. Not to mention those nicknames would be at least as derogatory to ZUN himself, with him having a wife and children now.
  • Eiki - Yamada, a pun about her position as Yama ("Yama da" meaning "it's the Yama") and the common Japanese surname Yamada.
  • Komachi - Komachichi, a Pixiv-made nickname referencing her two most noticeable traits.
  • Kanako - Guncannon, because of a spell card of hers that attaches pillars to her shoulders. Kanako's breasts, due to their large size in most fan depictions, have a Fan Nickname of their own: "Mountains of Faith".
  • Patchouli - Sometimes nicknamed Patchy among western fans. She's called Mukyuu among eastern fans, this nickname comes from her moaning from Immaterial and Missing Power when she's defeated in Marisa's Story Mode.
  • Suwako - Western fans often call her Suwacko or Swackers, while her nice hat is known as Pyonta. Also "Kero-chan" (Froggy), derived from her Native God "Kero-chan Braves the Wind and Rain" spell card.
  • Iku - 193 (ichi kyuu san -> Iku-san). This occasionally leads to crossovers with Kamen Rider Kiva, where IXA is read similarly.
  • Tenshi - Chiquita Dragonforce, Peaches and Momoko due to the fruit in her hat. Tenko, an alternate reading of the kanji in her name, is both used as a nickname for her and as a means for linking her to Ran's Suppa-Tenko meme. The Hispanic fandom also calls her "Chile-tan" due to the earthquake she caused in Hisoutensoku.
  • Kisume - Bucket Ranka, because of her resemblance to a certain Macross Frontier character. Otherwise, she's known as Bucket Loli.
  • Parsee - Known in some circles as "Cave Alice," for her visual similarity to Alice Margatroid and for... well, living underground.
  • Utsuho - Chernobyl-tan, due to her nuclear fusion powers; Bahamuko, from Bahamut of Final Fantasy fame due to her spell cards titled "Mega Flare" and "Giga Flare"; Onric or "⑥", due to being similar, yet opposite to Cirno; and finally Deep Crow. Many use the in-game nickname Okuu.
  • Ichirin - Due to the way Unzan supports her in combat like a Stand, a noticeable number of fans have begun calling her Ichirin Kujo. Cue the fist-versus-knife-fight with Sakuya. Less flatteringly, she's also called Unzan's Hitbox^note after an awkward comment by ZUN in an interview, saying that Ichirin only existed so Unzan would have a hitbox.
  • Byakuren - Youkai Jesus, Youchrist, Gensokyo Gandhi, Suigintouhou and The Anti-Marisa, because she is a magician and is an opponent who pillages patterns from Shinki, Yukari, Yuyuko and Marisa herself.
  • Nue - U.F. Owen, due to her supposed similarities to Flandre and her UFO-themed spell cards.
  • Unnamed Giant Catfish - Primeus, in a reference to a M.U.G.E.N joke character of that name made by Ricepigeon, to the point that some people actually think that's its name. People later took to calling it Namazu, which is just the name of its species. This is somewhat justified by the fact that it is referred to as "namazu" in the game's files.
  • Reisen II or Rei'sen, for the moon rabbit introduced in SSiB, to differentiate her from Reisen Udongein Inaba.
  • Yorihime - Moonbitch, as popularized by her detractors, though her name being hard to remember didn't help her. Both Watatsukis together (or, more rarely, all Lunarians) can also be referred to as "the moonbitches", but the singular "Moonbitch" seems to be Yorihime.
  • Wakasagihime - Waggysaggy, a deliberate misspelling of her name.
  • Momiji - awoo~, a Western memetic shorthand for the character after fanart of the White Wolf Tengu howling was posted on 4chan one day in response to a request to "post the awoo one".
    • It sometimes gets extended to other lupine/canine characters too, like Kagerou or Kyouko.
    • "Momizi" was once common in the Western fanbase, after a mistranslation in certain early English patches of Mountain of Faith. It seems to have fallen out of use due to the character's Ensemble Dark Horse O.C. Stand-in status, however.
    • "MAGA-tan", coined during the 2016 US presidential elections when Trump supporters replaced her tokin hat with a "Make America Great Again" hat.
  • Several unnamed characters have officially adopted their Fan Nicknames, like Tokiko, Daiyousei and Koakuma^note Usually shortened to Dai-chan and Koa, respectively.
  • Mamizou and Nue, together, are for some reason being labeled "The Frat Boys".
  • After screenshots of Urban Legend in Limbo showed Mamizou wearing a suit for one of her attacks, this look for her quickly gained the nickname "OL^note Office Lady Mamizou" (though she's actually dressed as one of The Men in Black).
  • Junko - "0/99+", which is what the spell card counter will look like when confronting her, as it can take over 99 tries in Pointdevice Mode to capture a spell card even once.
  • Some fans, either having trouble remembering Yatsuhashi's name or simply seeing her as bland, refer to the sisters as "Benben and not-Benben".
  • Clownpiece - "Itpiece" or "Pennywisepiece", coined after the 2017 movie remake due to her terrifying difficulty.
  • Shion Yorigami — "Blue Mokou" or "Player 2 Mokou", due to her visual similarity to a color-swapped Mokou. Also "Venezuela-tan", due to her extremely impoverished appearance.
  • Jo'on Yorigami - The Hispanic fandom calls her "Coppel-tan" or "Elektra-tan", after two local chains of discount credit stores that are infamous for making people squander their hard-earned money through credit card debt.
  • Eika - "Rock", from the rock stacks she's associated with, or "dead baby", since that's exactly what she is, the spirit of a dead fetus.
  • Urumi - "Cow", due to her bovine characteristics, or "cow mom"/"cow milf", due to her apparent age and her stone baby.
  • Kutaka - "Chicken", because she's a goddess of wild chickens, and has chicken motifs and traits.
  • Keiki - "Cake", based off her name.
  • Tsukasa - "Sex Fox", a less-than flattering nickname given because of how drastically high the amount of NSFW or otherwise ecchi art she gets is compared to other recent characters.
  • Megumu - "Blue Aya", for the same reasons as Shion above, substituting Aya for Mokou.
  • Biten - "Goku", due to both being inspired by the same fictional character, Sun Wukong from Journey to the West.
  • Kasen - "Lewd Pink". Ever since her debut back in 2010, Kasen has held the record of having the most NSFW art on Pixiv out of any Touhou character, so fans tend to jokingly refer to her as such. It also tends to describe how she's often represented in said NSFW works.
    • Miyoi Okunoda, due to her also having pink hair and being second place behind Kasen on Pixiv's NSFW category is also often referred to by the same nickname.
  • Fans of other shoot em ups tend to refer to Fanwork-Only Fans of the series as "secondaries", and always in a derisive tone.
  • The series' main trumpet soundfont (known as "Romantic Tp" on the Edirol SD-90) is often called the "ZUNpet".
• Fanon: Touhou basically runs on fanon, with enough sheer fan material in it to make the average fan's head explode. Some of it has even been actually adopted into the canon by the author.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • Contrary to popular belief, there is no official word declaring the PC-98 games as non-canon. However, with the differences in settings and all the Fridge Logic involved in the transition, many fans prefer to think of them as part of a separate universe from the Windows games.
  • Borderline case for Silent Sinner in Blue. Mainly for introducing two characters who defeated popular characters in ways that can be described as Deus ex Machina at best or outright cheating at worst.
  • There's also disagreement within the fandom over how much Inaba of the Moon and Inaba of the Earth counts. It's the only official Touhou production that wasn't actually written by ZUN himself, and some of the characterization differs from his - especially since it's a gag series that plays fast and loose with such things to begin with.
  • Likewise, a part of the fandom postulates that Reisen's Extra Stage story from PS4 version of Urban Legend in Limbo should be considered non-canon, as it's the only official content that requires a console to access and the extra stage itself is mostly filled with joke spell cards and only serves as a short preview for the incident in Antinomy of Common Flowers. It helps that Iruka Unabara of Tasogare Frontier claims that the PC version tells the complete story of Urban Legend in Limbo.
  • Taken up to eleven with fans who don't acknowledge any material other than the games as Canon (and may even disregard the non-integer games, such as the fighters). Presumably this happens due to said side materials having wildly different ways of depicting the characters, the setting, relationships or any combination thereof. Then the Logical Extreme happens with people who basically loop back and believe only in Fanon material of their own choosing to the disregard of everything else. By virtue of the staggering amounts of said Touhou fanon existing, this is actually much easier than it might sound.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: There's a danbooru pool titled "Hecatia's Weird Fashion Sense" devoted to mocking Hecatia's funny t-shirt and multicolored plaid skirt. It's an in-universe example too with some of the characters commenting on her weird clothes.
• First Installment Wins: This applies on the Windows era games, where Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, Perfect Cherry Blossom and Imperishable Night and their casts usually have much, much larger fanbases than the later games. While some characters from later games were able to intermingle with early-Windows characters, the top 30 still skews towards characters from these games, and characters from Ten Desires and beyond struggle to compete with older ones.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • The Touhou fandom gets along extremely well with the Vocaloid fandom (and by extension the Project SEKAI fandom as a Vocaloid game) due to the creators of the Vocaloid's offering the same amount of creative freedom for fan content as ZUN does for his own creations leading to a bit of cross-over particularly with fans of the Cryptonloids.
  • There's also a bit of cross-over with the Team Fortress 2 fandom.
  • There is also a good overlap with the KanColle fandom, due to both series taking elements of Japanese history and making anthromorphic personifications out of them.
  • Touhou fans and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fans also tend to find company in one another, due to the fact that ZUN himself is a big JoJo fan and has referenced the series on numerous occasions in the Touhou games.
  • Touhou fans also happen to be on good terms with Armored Core, largely owed to Cirno's nickname matching up with the Armored Core games' resident That One Boss, Nineball. And yes, there's been fanart.
  • In a sense, this series is well liked by fans of YTPMV sources such as The Man Your Man Could Smell Like commercials with Terry Crews and Jack Black's appearance on Sesame Street due to the series' music being popular sources to remix.
  • Touhou fans tend to get along quite well with fans of the Fate franchise, picturing what Servants Touhou characters would summon or redesigning the Touhou girls into Servants themselves.

G-M

• Gateway Series: Humorously, the franchise has been credited for getting people into anime back in the early days of the internet despite not having an official anime adaptation. This is mostly due to the assumption that any character drawn in an anime art style is from an anime, as well as the explosive popularity of "Bad Apple", which was frequently assumed to be an anime opening.
• Genius Bonus: Many spell cards are named after obscurities related to science, literature, folklore, and the like.
  • Mokou's boss music, "Reach for the Moon, Immortal Smoke", is a reference to "the smoke that rises to the moon even to this day" of Mt. Fuji, which the Hourai Elixir was thrown into at the end of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.
  • Kaguya's third card from Shoot the Bullet references the seamless ceiling of the Kinkaku-ji temple... though whether it's truly seamless or not is disputed, as it has been burned in a fire.
  • Kasen's default stance in Urban Legend in Limbo is the crane stance following in on her animal themed motif.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • While the whole series is still wildly popular in Japan, it's also popular in (of all places) in China and Taiwan, despite, at least in the Chinese case, the whole franchise being about mostly Japanese creatures^note This is at least mitigated by the fact that Chinese mythology had something similar to the concept of youkai. It's also popular in the English-speaking world and also mildly popular in the Spanish-speaking world, mainly Spain and Mexico. Reportedly, ZUN is surprised by the size of its western fanbase. It's large enough to spawn a Touhou-themed Fan Convention in California.
  • Though Marisa is very popular in general, often comfortably in second place in Japanese polls, she is extremely popular in the American fandom, where polling shows she resides year after year in first place, often by as big a margin as Reimu gets in Japan (sometimes more than 2nd and 3rd combined). This is likely because she has a western-seeming name, her outfit is that of a stereotypical western witch, she has a boisterous can-do attitude, she's likable and becomes friends with everyone, she refuses to let the world pass her by, and she has pulled herself up from her own bootstraps to become powerful enough to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Reimu. She is also willing to "appropriate" ideas from other powerful magicians, similar to how America itself is an amalgamation of multiple races, cultures, and creeds. These are all traits that Americans would call uniquely American. Or maybe because she's funny.
  • Clownpiece is another character widely beloved by the American fanbase, due to being a fairy that wears the American flag as her clothes, and a complete badass that throws moons at her enemies.
  • Kaguya is much more popular in Chinese Fandom than in Japan, constantly ranking in the top 20 most popular characters there. It helps that the popular joke that Kaguya is a NEET is not as big in China compared to in Japan.
• Growing the Beard: In two ways, namely the gameplay and the story.
  • The games themselves grew, starting roughly with the fourth game and then again with the sixth, into the game series we know today.
  • The story has evolved a lot from its initial outings with the somewhat Excuse Plot of the earlier games to the somewhat more central but still largely self-contained plots starting with the Windows reboot. Then it grew again starting with Mountain of Faith where it evolved into whole connected arcs.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Byakuren often got saddled with the nickname "Touhou Jesus" and variants. Come a certain fangame, and we're given the ACTUAL Jesus Christ as a Touhou.
  • Fans commonly depict Cirno as being used as makeshift air conditioning. In Visionary Fairies in Shrine, Reimu has been letting Clownpiece stay under the shrine because her hellfires provide heating.
  • In 2009, there was an infamous graphic mod for Subterranean Animism and Mountain of Faith that replaced all the bullets, as well as point items and the player's hitbox, with black squares^note done by just laying black boxes over the entire graphical sheets, ending as you would expect it to. Come Hidden Star in Four Seasons, and Okina's "Black Snowman"/"Snowman of Abnormal Snowfall" attack winds up utilizing initially-black bullets... ending as you would expect it to.
  • Diamond in the Rough, a Touhou fanwork initially released in 2012, featured an Ordinary High-School Student who wanted to be special as the main character, and described the consequences of his journey of discovery in the process. Urban Legend in Limbo, released in 2015, featured Sumireko Usami, who is also an Ordinary High-School Student whose actions caused problems for Gensokyo.
    • This is doubly amusing, as Mokou, portrayed in Diamond in the Rough as completely apathetic to Brolli's cause by the end of the series, is instead one of Sumireko's closest friends in Gensokyo. Yukari, ironically, the agent for Brolli's appearance in Gensokyo, is actually surprisingly uninvolved when it comes to Sumireko.
  • Since Double Dealing Character was released, artists often depict Raiko and the Tsukumo sisters as a rival band to the Prismriver sisters. In Alternative Facts in Eastern Utopia, Raiko joined the Prismriver sisters as their fourth member.
  • The fangame Gensokyo no Nazo (based on Atlantis no Nazo) focuses on mysterious doors that have appeared all throughout Gensokyo. This game was released in 2012, making the inclusion of teleporting doors as a plot element in Hidden Star in Four Seasons rather amusing by comparison.
• Hype Backlash:
  • A majority of shoot-em-up fans, who feel that Touhou has driven attention away from other shmups, particularly those with more mechanical visual styles. An additional source of frustration for shmup fans is that the lore, characters, and fan works are far, far more popular than the games themselves, to the point where many Touhou fans have little to no experience with playing them; in contrast, most shmup fans see plots as only existing to give nominal reasons to shoot things, not helped by most shooters having little in the way of lore to begin with.
  • Non-shmup fans, who are utterly baffled by the popularity of a simple shmup series and really don't dig Moe, Animesque fanart, or the Improbably Female Cast.
  • People who discover Touhou through the fandom and then get frustrated to the point of ragequit by the Bullet Hell genre.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: The fact that fan works and characters draw in many fans, who have never played the games themselves, doesn't sit well with a lot of people.
• It Was His Sled:
  • The most likely thing you will hear about the Fortune Teller upon bringing him up is that he was Killed Off for Real by Reimu.
  • This doesn't apply to Kasen's actual identity, as an interview from ZUN reveals that it is meant to be obvious throughout Wild and Horned Hermit. On the other hand, the flood of fanart of the Walking Spoiler that is Kasen's sentient arm and her Obviously Evil oni form (which reveals that she found her arm again and, with Status Quo Is God being in effect, changes back) are probably less intended.
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • A number of fans don't really play the games so much as read doujinshi or indulge in character fanart.
  • Some part of the audience is here for its soundtrack.
• LGBT Fanbase: Touhou Project has attracted a large following of lesbians and other LGBTQ+ women, mostly due to the massive amounts of Les Yay present in both the series proper and the fandom. The fact that almost all of the characters are female and many are conventionally attractive (especially in fanart) definitely helps.
• Love to Hate: Seija. What's not to love-to-hate... she is a Commander Contrarian who uses others to achieve her ends while screwing them over, to begin with. Love to Hate is also something implied by her nature: her feeling is always opposed to that of others, so she falls into self-loathing when she makes people happy and actually prefers it when no one likes her.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Yukari Yakumo, the enigmatic youkai of Boundaries and the single most well-informed person in all of Gensokyo, is the closest thing hero Reimu has to an employer, but also deftly manipulates the setting's various powers, both established and emergent, to ensure its continued stability. Having once led a failed invasion on the Moon to implicitly teach the youkai a lesson about expansionism, Yukari opts to instill fear of the unknown on the Lunarian exiles when they decide to live as humans, faithful to the philosophy on the human-youkai relationship; she does so by setting up a convoluted Kansas City Shuffle that ultimately leaves Eirin wondering how Yukari got her hands on a Lunarian wine bottle. Much later, she coerces Reimu into letting Kosuzu Motoori into her circle of confidantes to keep The Masquerade up and prevent the bookworm from eventually becoming a youkai—by first possessing her with a demonic scroll, of course. Cunning and manipulative when she does bother to stay awake, Yukari cultivates the image of being fickle, whimsical and lying, all while omitting her more charitable moments, in order to make everyone fear her.
  • Okina Matara is the mastermind behind the sixteenth game's unusual flow of seasons, using her ability to pour energy into anything through their backs as a show of power to remind everyone that she exists, as well as to replace her unwitting servants. In Visionary Fairies in Shrine, she turns a large number of fairies into stone cherries in order to draw out Hell's intentions, eventually getting a hold of one of their fairies and ordering the latter to come back to Hell's bigshots and tell of Okina's existence, effectively setting herself up as Gensokyo's deterrent against intruders. In Violet Detector, she messes around with a human from the Outside World, Sumireko Usami, by splitting the latter's consciousness and body, then giving the body to a dream soul and convincing that soul that it's the real Sumireko; Okina only reveals the trick when the fake meets the real deal, and promptly strips the fake of its borrowed powers to make the duel fair. With the potential to remake Gensokyo from the ground up with her powers, Okina consistently makes her ends meet without ever truly giving away her entire hand, reinforcing Gensokyo's mysticism and safety from outside forces in the process.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Cirno. She's the strongest AND a genius! Some of this seems to be finding its way into canon lately.
  • Minamitsu Murasa. She's either CAPTAIN MINAMITSU MOTHERFUCKING MURASA, or she's Popeye's daughter.
  • Eiki Shiki, YAMAXANADU, mostly due to doujinshi artist bkub's comics. (Such portrayals include a Gundam and Batman.)
  • Yuuka Kazami, known as the "Ultimate Sadistic Creature" on pixiv.
  • ZUN himself, who can apparently beat his own games while shitfaced.
  • Reisen. As a veteran of the Lunar War and the only character to use (fictional) guns, fans will often portray her as a grizzled soldier proficent in all manner of modern firearms. There's even a pool for it on Danbooru: Touhou - Udonge The War Veteran
  • Sometimes fans will remember that Reimu has canonically beaten everybody in Gensokyo, and will depict her utterly trouncing anyone who wishes to fight her with minimal effort. Lest we forget her infamous spell card, Hax Sign 'Burn Everything'.
  • Mima is a canonical badass, having been a Final Boss and a playable character that went up against Shinki, but when she appears in fandom, her power is almost always turned up to eleven, turning her into a force of truly epic proportions even by Gensokyan standards. One of the standout examples is her Twilight Spark attack, which actually originates from Touhou Soccer, but may as well be canon as far as the fandom is concerned.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Kaguya Houraisan. In canon, she's an immortal lunar princess with powerful time-warping abilities, and actually one of the harder bosses in higher difficulties. In fanon, she's a NEET who can't do anything but "HELP ME, EIRIN!!", though most works portray Mokou as losing to her more often than not.
  • Alice Margatroid: in canon, a calm, stoic woman who prefers being alone. In fanon, is turned into a creepy loser idiot yandere for the same reasons.
  • Remilia Scarlet: in canon, she's a powerful vampiress. In fanon, well, the fact that she has a specific pose for cowering (the Charisma Guard/Charisma Break) should tell you all you need to know. It's her low blocking animation from the fighting games.
  • Oddly enough, Cirno finds herself both in the Memetic Badass (above) and Memetic Loser situation. You have those who portray her as much more powerful and competent than she normally is, those who portray her as a complete idiot and utterly worthless, and then you have those who wish both of those factions would just shut the hell up about her.
  • Reimu, who's pretty much going to be in perpetual poverty thanks to the utter lack of donations to her shrine.
  • Reisen is another example of being both a Memetic Badass and a Memetic Loser. If she's not an unstoppable gunslinger, she's just a useless little bunny, only good for her sex appeal, and The Chew Toy to the entirety of Eientei (especially Tewi and Eirin). Occasionally she's even depicted as The Stoner.
• Memetic Mutation: Many, MANY examples, a few of which have become actual canon.
  • Fountain of Memes: Spawned an absolutely incredible amount of memes and in-jokes for a single series. IOSYS remixes in particular have a tendency to spawn more.
  • Watch It for the Meme: Touhou as a whole can claim any number of new fans drawn in by its loads and loads of memes. In fact, because of all the memes, a great number of fans were drawn to the series because of the all-encompassing fandom itself. This odd cycle of fans being attracted to the ever-growing fandom has been described as a "bizarre ouroboros" or a "positive feedback loop".
• Memetic Psychopath:
  • Sakuya Izayoi is often depicted in fandom as bringing stabby murder upon anyone who makes remarks about her breast size or even so much as says "pads", even not in the context of breast pads, even though in canon her breast size is never, ever brought up.
  • Of all characters, Rumia, despite being a very unintelligent Warm-Up Boss whose powers only work against her, is the most common youkai to be depicted as an actual human-eating monster. This likely comes from a combination of her sinister sounding powers, her status as one of the only youkai to (unsuccessfully) hunt humans, and influence from the ever popular Fanon concept of EX-Rumia.
• Memetic Troll: All three of which have "God Damn It (character)!" pools on Danbooru:
  • Yukari Yakumo is portrayed in fanworks as an incredible troll, ranging from simple tricks with her gaps to pulling elaborate schemes just to piss someone (usually Reimu) off. In canon, she does do strange things and have an odd nature, but generally has a good reason for what she does.
  • Tewi Inaba probably doesn't count on the basis that this is entirely canon for her.
  • Seija Kijin canonically likes pissing people off and hatches elaborate schemes to overthrow the social order. Fanworks tend to dial down the scale of what she does, resulting in this trope.
• Moe:
  • Fan depictions of the girls have a natural tendency to play up either the girls' moe-ness or badass-ness. Bonus points if they can pull off both at the same time.
  • Generally, ZUN tries not to give his characters stereotypical moe personalities, but the fandom will do so in the absence of any canon stating otherwise, such as with Koakuma and Momiji shortly after they were introduced. In the guidebooks, ZUN tends to go out of his way to Joss many of the fans' moe portrayals, most notably when Symposium of Post-Mysticism showed Kisume to be a Creepy Child.
  • Sometimes the reverse happens, such as Yuuka's picture in Perfect Memento in Strict Sense and appearance in a stage in Hopeless Masquerade (where she smiles and waves) playing up the moe rather than the vicious.
  • Kogasa is the new youkai moe~, due to the umbrella she carries (like Yuuka - the first youkai moe~), her chew toy/woobie status, and a high level combination of moe factors. This ultimately results in fanart that looks like this.

N-W

• Never Live It Down:
  • Because of "I GOT CAVED BY EX-KEINE!"^note "Caved" being used as slang for an Ass Shove, it will be a long time before Keine is taken seriously again. IOSYS effectively turning it into a Forced Meme didn't help.
  • Shou is portrayed by fans as always losing things because she lost her pagoda during the events of UFO. Ironic, considering her ability is to attract treasures...
  • Meiling and her butt monkey rendition, not at all helped by old jokes used and Tasafro's treatment of her in the few fighters she's in.
  • When Seiran was first introduced, the red stains on her mallet were assumed to be blood and the fandom immediately labelled her as Ax-Crazy because of that. Even when her profile stated that she'd been making mochi before she confronted the player characters (so the red stains probably aren't blood, especially since in the game itself the stains are actually purple), and she doesn't come off as particularly Ax-Crazy personality-wise, fans will still interpret the stains on her mallet as blood.
  • The joke that Kaguya is a NEET stems from the implication that she spent hundreds of years in her mansion without leaving, despite the fact that she does so because she is a fugitive who needs to stay hidden from the envoys of the moon. Later appearances show that Kaguya is actively looking for something new to do, often holding events and going outside to kill boredom.
  • Silent Sinner in Blue will always be known within the fandom as the infamous storyline that introduced the Watatsuki sisters, an unlikeable pair of xenophobes who were Invincible Villains on top of that. To make the matter worse, the narrative story even implied that Watatsuki sisters were not even in the wrong and they were within their rights to clap the main characters in a Curbstomp Battle manner.
• Obvious Beta: Hopeless Masquerade was likely rushed for the convention it was released in. It was playable, but there were random crashes (particularly around Koishi) and the final boss was only playable in Story Mode...probably because she had no special moves or Spellcards implemented. This was all eventually fixed with patches.
• Older Than They Think: A few music fan remixes existed at least a year before Embodiment of Scarlet Devil was announced.
• Once Original, Now Common: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil was a game designed to subvert the player's expectations, which is why a youkai with the fearsome-sounding power to "manipulate darkness" is a weak first boss. The final boss, Remilia, had also been created in that same spirit, to shock players with the revelation that the powerful vampiric mastermind behind the whole ordeal was actually a bratty child. But, as ZUN himself admitted, to someone playing the games today, the character of Remilia is nothing new by now, even though she was created back when the concept of the vampiric lolita had not yet been beaten to death, and is even credited as its main progenitor on this very wiki.
• Periphery Demographic: Touhou's primary demographic seems to be young adults, as the games are ridiculously hard and often have complex plots that would confuse or bore most children. Despite this, the series has a huge following of elementary-school-age children in its native Japan, though most of them have never played the games. In fact, ZUN once recieved heartfelt fan mail from an elementary school girl.
  • The series also has a following of mythologists and folklorists who otherwise aren't into otaku-oriented media, due to the surprising amount of Shown Their Work.
• Play-Along Meme: It's made clear from Kasen's first appearance that she is an oni disguising herself (poorly) as a hermit. Fans run with this and ask why artwork depicting her with the other oni has a hermit present, and react to depictions of her regular oni form asking things like why the oni looks like the hermit Kasen.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: While the fanbase is known for focusing much more on characters and lore than on the core games, there are a number of people who only play the games to enjoy some good Bullet Hell action. Most of these people are fans of the overall Shoot 'Em Up genre, rather than being fans of Touhou in particular.
• Pop Culture Holiday: The ninth of September (09/09) is "Cirno Day" because the date has two nines, the number associated with Cirno. Touhou fans celebrate every year with a plethora of Cirno pictures.
• Praising Shows You Don't Watch: A lot of fans admit to having played the games either for a brief period of time or not at all, instead focusing on the fan content. This is perhaps part of why the Touhou fanbase has a rivalry with the general shoot-em-up fanbase, especially shooter players who Play the Game, Skip the Story, and also why most Touhou fans don't bother to get into other shooter series.
• Recurring Fanon Character:
  • "Sendai Hakurei no Miko" is the hypothetical predecessor to Reimu created as a character for M.U.G.E.N who is typically depicted as being way more physical in her incident solving attempts than Reimu. Her relation with Reimu varies per artist, though she is usually depicted as being her mother or a mother figure.
  • Mitori Kawashiro is a fan-created Phantasm stage boss for Touhou Chireiden ~ Subterranean Animism who is an older sister to Nitori, being a half-kappa born in Hell who has the power to prohibit anything. Even though she is merely a modded character, she still has a cult following.
  • Rin Satsuki, an unused playable character from Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, tends to be the most popular character in this category. Her portrayal tends to vary from being a Remember the New Guy? type of character, to being an Unperson due to her nature of being an unused in what would’ve been her debut game and whether or not she’s vengeful due to this depending on the writer, or even just being kind of an insane, delusional weirdo.
  • Yuuto Ichika, the telekinetic magician made by a young (at the time) Touhou fan. While at creation she had been regarded with negativity over her "Bootleg Patchouli" appearance, to the point of having the nickname "Bluchouli", time and use of the character in games — courtesy of ChairGTables of Lame Dimension (with the original character creator having influence on her characterization and backstory) — has made the reception softer towards Yuuto, to the point of having some dedicated fan-art and appearing in Fan Games such as Touhou Nemuri Sekai Wonderful Waking World.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Sanae and Aya had been panned for appearing in several games that didn't have much to do with them, and being considered annoying when they did show up. Later games and print works put those appearances in context, giving them solid motives and much funnier interactions.
• Ron the Death Eater:
  • Sanae's newly discovered interest in youkai extermination (Where "extermination" really just amounts to ritualized playfighting) has led to fans taking it a bit far and giving her a sadistic streak and a fanatical zeal for it.
  • Alice, a cold but well-meaning woman, gets turned into a creepy loser who murders her lovers or love rivals often, for whatever reason.
  • Koishi isn't very malicious in canon, but is often turned into a psychotic murderer by fans who take "subconscious reading" as a very bad thing.
  • Byakuren, a Messianic Archetype, is often either depicted as a naive loony or a genocidal murderer. Or both. Mostly from suspicion that people who try to be good aren't, and further exacerbated by SoPM and the fact that she sides with youkai against humans and dodged several questions from Miko.
  • Aya gets turned into a creepy peeper and possibly molester, something she's not even close to in official works.
  • Reimu herself isn't exactly very nice in canon, but she does have genuinely sweet moments. Not that you would know this from all the Flanderization she gets in fan works.
  • Kaguya is rather friendly in canon and her treatment of Mokou is closer to a Sitcom Archnemesis than someone she really hates. In fanon, she's often turned into a flat-out Jerkass who makes Mokou's life hell For the Evulz.
  • Some fans tend to forget the "compassionate" part of Eiki's Compassionate Critic status and turn her into an Ax-Crazy lunatic who banishes people to Hell for petty reasons, when the entire reason she lectures people in canon is because she doesn't like sending people to Hell.
  • There are a few fans who believe Remilia is just a Spoiled Brat who is ungrateful for Sakuya or any of her other servants' service and locked her younger sister in the basement so she wouldn't have to deal with her. Never mind the fact that Remilia is very respectful of her staff, especially Sakuya, and that Flandre can leave the Scarlet Devil Mansion whenever she wants, but chooses to stay because she has all her needs attended for.
  • In fanon, it's common to see Yukari viewed as a Manipulative Bitch who starts conflicts just for the sake of it and goes out of her way to make life harder for Reimu, even though in canon she's helpful to Reimu more often than not and everything she does is to maintain the balance of Gensokyo's unusual ecosystem.
• The Scrappy: The Watatsuki sisters from Silent Sinner in Blue. Coming from a race of extremely xenophobic jerks who observe anything other than them as "impure", these two have the extra burden of being ungodly powerful, capable of taking the main characters on at the same time in a Curb-Stomp Battle and even outsmarting Yukari. ZUN had to concede that he would never put the two in a game because of these. And even though Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom does feature the Lunarians, the two sisters are not even mentioned in the game with the implication that they were reduced to Butt Monkeys by the real instigators of the plot by being driven off the moon by fairies.
• Scrub: Some players tend to get very irritated and jealous if you don't think the games are absolutely Nintendo Hard, more so if you mention that you can 1CC the games.
• Self-Fanservice: One important reason for Touhou's popularity is how ugly ZUN's original character illustration was earlier in the series (though his art has improved over time), inspiring legions of fan artists to improve it. As alluded to elsewhere, he seemed to have trouble drawing a girl who looks postpubescent, leaving fans to come to a consensus on what some characters should "really" look like. In a broader sense, the entire series itself has next to nothing resembling sexual or romantic content, but you would never guess that from the fandom.
• Sequel Displacement: The first five games are mostly forgotten and ignored in favor of everything that came afterwards. This is partly because the sixth game, the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, was where the series exploded in popularity, and partly because that was also when ZUN did a Soft Reboot of the series, causing most plot and lore elements from the older games to never get brought up again and only four characters (two of them being the series protagonists) to reappear in later installments.
• Shipping: A lot of it in this fandom, despite how canon works strictly adhere to No Hugging, No Kissing. While ZUN has said he doesn't mind all the shipping the fandom does, he isn't interested in participating himself since he sees the characters as his kids. See the Ho Yay page and the Touhou Wiki for full details and Portmanteau Couple Names. Commonly used Shipping Tropes include:
  • Crack Pairing:
    • Since he's almost the only straight option in Gensokyo, there are a lot of crack pairing pictures with Rinnosuke and one of the girls. Somehow, a few fans even manage to slash him despite the rather limited options. The most common person he is slashed with? ZUN.
    • Wriggle is often paired up with Yuuka, of all people. Fridge Brilliance kicks in once you realize that Yuuka's power is tied to flowers, Wriggle is a firefly, and flowers rely on insects to pollinate.
    • Mokou and Mystia, in spite of (or perhaps because of) Mokou claiming to run a yakitori stand. Though Mystia is a sparrow, not a chicken.
  • Foe Yay Shipping: Whenever two girls are shown to be antagonistic with one another they tend to be paired up rather often; e.g., Kaguya and Mokou, Byakuren and Miko, Seija and everyone, but most commonly Shinmyoumaru, etc.
  • Incest Yay Shipping: Any pair of sisters will have fanart showing them in a relationship.
  • Launcher of a Thousand Ships:
    • Marisa gets paired with Reimu, Mima, Alice, Patchouli, Flandre, Nitori, and many, many more.
    • Not to be outdone, Reimu gets it with Marisa, Yukari, Sanae, Remilia, and others herself.
    • For supporting characters:
    • Nitori gets paired with Marisa (as mentioned above) as well as Momiji, Hina, and even Eirin.
    • Yuuka gets paired with Elly, Alice, Wriggle, and Tenshi.
  • No Yay: Unless you're into giantess and/or vore, it's hard to ship Shinmyoumaru sexually with anyone due to her minimal size. It gets worse due to the implication that she's the Last of Her Kind.
  • Ship Mates: Reimu x Marisa shippers will pair up Alice and Patchouli for this reason (while Marisa/Patchouli fans would pair Reimu/Alice). See the example on the Ship Mates page for how ridiculous this can get.
  • Ships That Pass in the Night: Usually based on game locations (bosses for adjacent stages, a boss and the midboss of their stage) or possible common interests.
  • Ship-to-Ship Combat: Astonishingly averted, for a fandom with Eleventy Zillion True Pairings. Fans of "competing" ships are generally happy to coexist peacefully. (Girl on Girl Is Hot may have more than a little to do with this...)
• Signature Scene: Yukari's Barrier "Boundary of Life and Death" is this not only to this fandom, but also to the Bullet Hell genre as a whole (it's the page image in this very wiki). It's almost impossible not to come across images of it while walking around the fandom. Googling either "Touhou" or "Bullet Hell" will lead you to seeing it.
• Signature Song:
  • "U.N. Owen Was Her?", Flandre's theme, is one of the first well-known pieces from the games.
  • "Beloved Tomboyish Daughter", if only because it's the theme of Cirno, one of the most popular minor characters.
  • For the Touhou remix community, there's "Cirno's Perfect Math Class", IOSYS's arrangement of "Beloved Tomboyish Daughter" where Cirno tries to teach mathematics in her own convoluted way, and "Bad Apple!! feat. nomico" by Masayoshi Minoshima, which is best known for its silhouette music video, sheer catchiness, and appearing on damn near every modern arcade Rhythm Game.
• Spoil at Your Own Risk: ZUN specifically requested that the endings to the games not be posted on the Internet to avoid spoilers; fan sites have managed to follow this request, but once in a blue moon, the content will pop up somewhere. Generally though, if you're looking for the ending, you'll be able to find it.
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys:
  • Admitting to playing using a pad tends to elicit harassment from some players who think you should be using a keyboard instead.
  • Mocking those who play "Easy Modo" is incredibly common, including in the games themselves, and stating "it's unforgivable to play Easy Mode unless you're a grade school kid" is one of the fans' many memes. Some take it further and insist that the only difficulty mode is Lunatic. This is a symptom of the already hardcore shmup crowd.
    • How serious this in particular is depends on where you are on the internet. Here, Danbooru, or imageboards? Not so much. A shmup site? You better be able to 1cc Lunatic.
    • Ironically Easy mode isn't play tested that well compared to other difficulties, sometimes resulting in cards that are harder than other difficulties.
  • ZUN's request to not spoil the endings is taken rather seriously, and even fan wikis will not document the endings. This can be seen as a slap in the face to players who don't have the skill level to complete the games, even on Easy difficulty, with the three continues provided to them.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel:
  • People were skeptical about Urban Legend in Limbo when it was revealed to be based on the same engine as Hopeless Masquerade; however when the game was released, people were pleasantly surprised to see that controls were sharper, mechanics refined, AI improved, bugs ironed out and the story proving to be a Wham Episode.
  • As for the side materials, Grimoire of Usami is this to Grimoire of Marisa. Grimoire of Marisa is simply a collection of screenshots of the various patterns from the games, with snarky comments from Marisa. If you don't care about the games, it's pretty boring. Grimoire of Usami, on the other hand, actually has a story about Reimu's fireworks-cum-danmaku contest and provides commentaries from various characters which showcase their personalities well. Even if you don't care about the patterns, you can still enjoy the many characters present and how they interact with each other.
• Tear Jerker: Several characters like Yuyuko, Byakuren, Mokou, and the Prismriver Sisters have had tragic events in their lives, none of which are mentioned in or greatly affect the games proper.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Some fans feel this way about the bakebake, recurring ghost-like stage enemies throughout the PC-98 games, not returning in the Windows games, believing that they could have become an iconic Mascot Mook for the series in a vein similar to the slimes from Dragon Quest.
• Trans Audience Interpretation: Present for Miko, who's based on the semi-legendary Prince Shotoku, a figure remembered as male. It's popular for some to consider Miko to have presented as male during her pre-resurrection lifetime, only to be ressurected at a point where she could safely reveal herself as a woman. What that all means specifically varies, though.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Due to being a fairly minor character in a long-finished plot arc, Mokou's appearance in Urban Legend in Limbo as a playable character came right out of nowhere.
  • Out of all the characters from Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom expected to appear outside of a brief cameo in a manga series, Clownpiece was the least, but she's a major character in Visionary Fairies in Shrine.
  • Reisen:
    • She appears as a playable character in Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom. Similar to Sakuya in Double Dealing Character, no one was expecting to see Reisen again in a main game, especially since her last (and only) playable appearance in a main game was way back in Phantasmagoria of Flower View.
    • One would be forgiven if they were surprised for her return to the fighting game scene in Urban Legend in Limbo's PS4 port, since the 'aerial fighter' games so far had almost only new characters to play as apart from Reimu and Marisa.
  • Tenshi's appearance in Antinomy of Common Flowers as a playable character, as her last playable appearance apart from Hisoutensoku's multiplayer was in Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, which released more than nine years prior. Even more so was the giant catfish from Meiling's Hisoutensoku story showing up as Tenshi's final spell card in Jo'on's AoCF scenario.
  • Absolutely no one saw Yukari returning in Antinomy of Common Flowers coming. While a popular character, her last playable appearance was in Hisoutensoku, and outside of a few minor appearances in the side materials, she hasn't had much of a presence in the series itself.
  • Sakuya returning in Double Dealing Character. She was a very prominent character when the Windows era was first starting out, but just slowly started to disappear as the series continued.
  • Yuyuko being the Stage 1 boss of Ten Desires came somewhat out of left field, given that bosses are almost never reused in the mainline games.
  • Saying that it was unexpected for Cirno of all people to return in Hidden Star in Four Seasons would be an understatement. Never mind that she had a playable appearance already, but she's a minor character who just so happens to be an Ensemble Dark Horse. Your milage may very on her redesign, however.
  • It was a surprise to many when Sumireko was revealed to be the main protaganist of Violet Detector, being that she debuted in a spin-off (which are usually just one-and-done things), and it hadn't even been a full year since her reappearance in Antinomy of Common Flowers.
  • Speaking of Violet Detector, Flandre reappearing as a boss was very unexpected. Sure, she's an iconic character, but there's a canonical reason as to why she never appeared after her debut (letting a psychopath with the ability to destroy anything at will outside probably isn't a good idea). An even bigger one is in Submerged Hell of Sunken Sorrow, where Flandre not only appears, but she's a playable character with an entire story route dedicated to her.
  • Kogasa's return in Submerged Hell of Sunken Sorrow was, quite fittingly, a surprise. She only exists as a joke. The joke being that she was irrelevant to the story of every game she appeared in before then. Especially her debut in Undefined Fantastic Object, where every character played a major role in the game's plot besides her.
  • Sakuya as a playable character in Unconnected Marketeers. This is also the first game Sanae and Sakuya both appear as playable protagonists.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Koishi. In-universe, she is invisible to most people, and people forget about her as soon as she leaves their field of vision. However, in real life, Koishi is so popular that she placed 1st in THwiki's 11th character popularity poll, beating out Reimu and Marisa.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Something not readily apparent to western viewers. Byakuren was originally motivated by fear, then love (the two extremes) and used deception to make youkai and humans equal. She's an extremely lapsed Buddhist, a philosophy so foundationally opposed to extremes that it's sometimes referred to as the "Middle Way." Japanese audiences can also be critical of the western take on "equality", as opposed to equity. If you treat the strong and the weak the same way, the strong will have an advantage. Needless to say, quite a few grimdark doujinshi turn her into some sort of evil mass murderer who genocides "weak" beings.
  • The same goes for Miko and especially Seiga, who are similarly lapsed: Taoism is about letting things be, not actively meddling in everything.
  • Anyone new to Touhou series, especially western fans would find it rather difficult to see many seemingly pre-adolescence characters^note Especially Suika Ibuki and The Three Fairies of Light having party and getting wasted on high frequency. Not only most of those "seemingly pre-adolescence characters" are actually Older Than They Look, the drinking culture in Japan is also different from many countries in the west.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Meira, Wriggle and Shou are sometimes mistaken for males by the fandom. Wriggle wearing pants and a tomboyish look could easily be mistaken for a boy at first glance. In Shou's case, her masculine-sounding name and appearance didn't help things either.
• Viewer Name Confusion:
  • The final boss of the ninth game's name is listed as "Shikieiki Yamaxanadu", causing some people to think Shikieiki is her first name and Yamaxanadu is her last name. Actually, the first word is her full name in Japanese order, so her first name is Eiki and last name is Shiki. Yamaxanadu is more of her job title, as she is the yama (judge of the afterlife) responsible for Gensokyo (which has been described as a paradise like Xanadu multiple times).
  • Some Western fans of Touhou mispronounce or misspell Marisa's name like the western name Marissa (also sometimes spelled Marisa), when it's actually a Japanese name written in kanji and pronounced "Mah-ree-sa".
  • Cirno. Her name in Japanese is "chi-ru-no", so a proper English pronounciation would be "Cheer-no". However, a lot of English speakers pronounce her name as "Sir-no".
  • Joon's name is supposed to be two syllables. As in, "Jo-on". Many people say it similarly to "June", however.
• Viewer Species Confusion: Saki is a Kurokoma, a type of mythical winged horse similar to a pegasus. However, when fans (particularly Western fans who couldn't read Japanese) first found out about her, many assumed that she was a bird due to her wings.
• The Woobie: Has a page here.
• Woolseyism: Due to the nature of Japanese language, any form of translating the dialogue and such will likely run into language-based jokes and other peculiarites (though unlike most such games, the modern THCRAP patching systems allows for in-game translation notes in ZUN's games), ranging from things that manage to work out more or less the same by chance, jokes that have to be somewhat altered due to the differences in how the language works (such as how Marisa's sentence in EoSD sounds like a flower's name), all the way to things that are simply untranslateable (like how in IaMP Remilia brings up that the Japanese word for vampire, 吸血鬼, can be literally read as "blood-sucking oni"). And that's of course just the English language translations; each extra language is basically rolling against the odds extra times.

Examples in the games' gameplay

• Anticlimax Boss: The True Final Boss of Antinomy of Common Flower The dream version of Tenshi Hinanawi who wanted to Take Over the World is a massive stepdown from the Final Boss. Her spellcards are either really slow or just predictable.
  • The Overdrive difficulty introduced in Patch 1.10 added one more spellcard that averts this.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Is Marisa a Low-Tier Letdown whose narrower range of attacks make her a "hard mode" character, or is she simply Difficult, but Awesome given her speed advantage over Reimu?
  • Parsee, especially her "Green-Eyed Monster" spellcard. Is she surprisingly hard for a Stage 2 boss, or is she simply a Puzzle Boss that's still fair once figured out?
• Breather Level: While the final bosses are devastating, the final stage tends to be mercifully short, often with enemies that drop full powerups.
  • The final spellcard of Impossible Spell Card, Yukari's Casebook of Luck, Resilience, and Perserverance, while harder than average, is much, much easier than anything else stage 10 throws at you, even when going for a no-item clear.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Many fans who haven't played the PC-98 games are under the impression that there's a recurring problem of the bullets getting lost against the background, resulting in frustrating gameplay. In reality, this notion was largely sparked by one stage, Mystic Square Stage 4, which is notorious for having several instances of light blue bullets against a light blue background. Throughout the rest of PC-98, this issue is largely absent.
  • There's also the misconception that every game in the series refuses to give you the good ending or unlock the Extra Stage if you beat Easy. The games that "punish" you for playing Easy are actually in the minority, being only the fourth, sixth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth games. That may sound like a lot in a vacuum, but those are only six games in a main series of nineteen.
  • Fans often get Last Words confused with Last Spells, with fangames that misuse those terms feeding the problem. Both are terms that were coined in Imperishable Night: in that game, a Last Spell is a bonus Spell Card a boss pulls out after her usual final spell if the time point requirement is met, whereas a Last Word is an unlockable Spell Card that isn't found in the main game, instead becoming available in the Spell Practice menu once the criteria to unlock it (which are different for each Last Word) are fulfilled. Often, a fangame where a boss pulls out one more Spell Card after the fight had already seemed over refers to this as a Last Word, when the more appropriate term would be Last Spell, and this confusion has spread into the overall fanbase.
• Disappointing Last Level:
  • The general consensus is that Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom would be a much better game if Junko, the final boss, was better designed. She's themed around having Boring, but Practical attacks, and as a result, all but a few of her attacks are variations on expanding danmaku rings, which, as several big-name Touhou players have pointed out, are the easiest and quickest danmaku patterns to program. Most of them require extremely tight micrododging, which makes playing as anyone but Reimu painfully difficult and leads to a lot of clipping deaths.
  • To some fans, Okina showing up as the EX stage boss after already showing up as the final boss was a little uninspiring, and they think that her final fight would be better handled if it was someone else. It doesn't help her survival spell, the only one of HSIFS, is considered among the worst and weakest survival spells, which leads to a player good enough to get to her fight bored for the duration of it.
• Even Better Sequel: Urban Legend in Limbo is already considered a Surprisingly Improved Sequel to Hopeless Masquerade, and Antinomy of Common Flowers managed to improve it even further. Major mentions are the removal of the RNG-based Occult Ball system, and making projectiles deal Scratch Damage when blocked, so players can't just block everything. It also adds its own tag system, which doesn't rely on randomness and adds more depth to the gameplay.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The commonly used term Point of Collection, referring to the area at the top of screen where items are automatically collected in the Windows games; the official name for this mechanic is Item Get Border Line.^note However, it should be noted that name was introduced in Touhou Fuujinroku ~ Mountain of Faith, which started the trend of briefly displaying it at the beginning of a playthrough; in previous games, it had no name whatsoever. Sometimes you'll see it called the "Item Border", a shortening of the official name, but not very often.
  • Due to ZUN being somewhat infamous for constantly ending up with Game Breaking Bugs and/or Good Bad Bugs in his games, the fanbase has coined the term "ZUNgramming" to refer to Touhou glitches and other programming oversights.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Yes, a gameplay example. Some fans dislike the gameplay of the versus shmups,^note Touhou Yumejikuu ~ Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream, Touhou Kaeidzuka ~ Phantasmagoria of Flower View and Touhou Juuouen ~ Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost especially Phantasmagoria of Flower View, enough to where while they acknowledge and appreciate the story, characters and soundtrack, they pretend the games themselves don't exist and exclude them from goals and challenges such as beating every game in the series.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • Violet Detector and 100th Black Market were criticized for reusing patterns from mainline games. Double Spoiler also reused some patterns, but it got away with it by limiting it to non-Spell Cards. This was more acceptable as (1) it was done at most once per character, (2) the game took more care to select patterns that worked well with its mechanics, (3) in the mainline games, a character's non-Spell Cards are designed around a theme and will usually resemble each other anyway. On the other hand, the pattern reuse in VD and 100BM was more frequent and frequently involved Spell Cards, which came off more as ZUN cutting corners.
  • An instance of this that applies not within the official works themselves, but going from the official games to fangames. Last Spells, which are when a boss, especially the Final Boss, pulls out one more Spell Card after they had seemingly already been defeated, have become disliked among people who play Touhou fangames, despite being a concept that has also been used in the official games. The difference is that the official games have used them very sparingly (to the point that it hasn't been done at all since Touhou Hisoutensoku), as a surprise and an epic final act, while fangames do it practically all the time (to where it's easier to count fangames that don't have Last Spells), causing the audience to expect them and see them as the standard, which takes away from the intended awe and nullifies the potential surprise factor.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Marisa in Mountain of Faith. Her B-type shot has a glitch that makes it insanely powerful under the right circumstances, earning it the Fan Nickname of MarisaBugged or sometimes MarisaBroken.
  • Much less severe, but Marisa's teamup with Alice in Imperishable Night has access to another highly damaging exploit, which fans have dubbed the Malice Cannon. However, without the exploit, they have disappointing damage compared to other teams for the effort needed.
  • Reimu and Yukari's team in the same game, where they have perks of smaller hit boxes, a larger death bomb window, Reimu's homing shots that pack a stronger than usual punch, and Yukari's shot type (which has Ran locking on to an enemy and locking on, allowing the player to dodge easily while doing pretty nice damage). The only teams that can outdamage them need some skill/effort to pull off the set ups. There's good reasons why most 1cc runs are done with this team.
  • Sakuya's shot types in Perfect Cherry Blossom. First of all, Sakuya gets four bombs per life, instead of Reimu's three. Her A-type shot is a giant spread when she's unfocused, and a single-target homing shot when focused, with bombs that share the same properties. Her B-type shot, once mastered, essentially has the coverage of her A-type shot with the power of ReimuB, as well as lockable options and a bomb with a very long invincibility frame. The only downsides are Sakuya's fast focused movement speed and Merlin's opener.
  • Marisa's B type bomb in Double Dealing Character, Magic Absorber, is this due to allowing a player to farm a ridiculous amount of lives if they get the timing down for it and find the right spot. Her broken-ness increases on higher difficulty levels, due to having more material to work with. Much like her counterpart from Mountain of Faith, this one, too, has received the nickname of Marisa-Broken.
  • Sanae in Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom. She has a mix of her UFO shot types (Cobalt Spread unfocused, Sky Serpent focused, Wily Toad as bomb). Her unfocused shot has wide spread and her focused shot homes to the first enemy it sees, both which raze stage portions and are good against bosses while focusing more dodging and less on hitting the enemy. Her bomb has good duration and damage, but more importantly, it doesn't do damage right away and it has some set up time in which Sanae is invulnerable and can jump directly into the enemy danmaku, allowing her to easily get more than the 200 graze required to get life pieces.
  • Unconnected Marketeers has a couple of these thanks to the highly customizable Ability Card system. One card that was quickly found to pack quite a punch is Remilia's Vampire Fang, an Active card that attacks whatever is directly in front of the player, and chews through boss health like there's no tomorrow. You could obliterate the mid-boss and any Spell card you don't like in seconds, and you don't even forfeit the Spell bonus like you would if you'd used a bomb...which means you could also get the Dragon Pipe card, which gives you a free Life Piece each time you capture a Spell card!
    • You can even activate your bomb on the pattern prior to the Spell card - you only forfeit the Spell bonus if you start the bomb DURING the card, the game doesn't care if you carry it over from the previous pattern - and use the Vampire Fang while you're still invincible from the bomb. The bomb damage itself can be further amplified with Byakuren's card, which greatly increases bomb duration and damage...and will even shorten the Vampire Fang's cooldown period.
    • In terms of shot power, Sanae is generally thought to be the most ideal character for survival, but for scoring purposes, Sakuya is capable of capping the score display. Her bomb freezes all bullets for a time before clearing them, and Byakuren's card extends the amount of time they are frozen while also freezing new bullets that appear. You can then use the Miracle Mallet to convert all those bullets into gold items, which are worth exponentially more points the more of them you have. Just be careful with the Stage 4 boss because the Yin-Yang orbs can be frozen but not erased, causing them to clump into an un-dodge-able wall of death when time resumes.
    • Aya's card gives the player a speed boost while not shooting or focusing. Normally this is only good for Marisa since Master Spark normally slows her movement...but this card also gives you some invincibility frames when you start moving at high speed. Mash the arrow keys fast enough, or load up an auto-fire app, and you're invincible all the time.
    • The Centipede card you get from clearing the Extra Stage makes your shot stronger and stronger up to a certain point, as long as you don't take a hit or use a bomb...however, there are two cards that allow you to take hits without losing the Centipede boost. Eirin's card negates a hit in exchange for two bombs (or one if only one is left) and Shiki Eiki's card negates a hit in exchange for 200 gold. An excellent combo for anyone playing to win without taking hits or using bombs.
  • Touhou Suimusou ~ Immaterial and Missing Power grants us Patchouli Knowledge, probably the easiest character to win the game with, really only needing her projectiles and one of the supers:
    • 5A summons a ring of fireballs that home-in onto the opponent, while barely denting the spirit bar (in a game where running out of it makes the character unable to perform certain attacks). Entire characters can be shut down by spamming this and only stopping to let the bar recharge as to not break it; the very few spellcards that can't be shutdown with 5A spam are the ones that are imbalanced in favor of AI; this is where Royal Flare comes in.
    • Sun Sign "Royal Flare", one of her second signs in the game, hits all around the screen for an obscene amount of damage. Due to the way Spell Cards are declared, you can build up 9 cards on your first life and then spam Royal Flare on your second; note here that you have to die twice in order to lose a life (they have to beat both of your spell cards), so losing once per fight is practically meaningless. Even if the enemy survives those 9 Royal Flares, the Spell Card System allows you to farm for more in the same life. On top of that, where many characters need to time Spell Cards so they don't get knocked out of it, Royal Flare comes out pretty much immediately and grants invincibility for its entire duration, with its only downside being that it drains the entire spirit bar, meaning that you do have to actually to wait for another use, while dodging whatever you're up against without access to Patchouli's projectiles. Even if bosses could block during their spell cards, both grazing and blocking have a finite duration, so they would eventually fall prey on Royal Flare due to guard breaking or them just plain stop grazing out the damage. Patchouli still has Royal Flare as her spell card on subsequent fighting spin-offs for the same effect, but the new system restricts it to a maximum of 4 declarations, once per card equipped, at the highest casting cost.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • MAlice Cannon in Imperishable Night. Lasers in the earlier Touhou games were somewhat laggy in their hit Alice and Marisa rapidly, and Alice's full damage would go through, the lag on the laser covering the time as Marisa. Interestingly, without this trick the Marisa/Alice team is woefully underpowered.
  • Marisa B(ugged/roken) in Mountain of Faith. Whenever Marisa B has between 3.00 and 3.95 power, the central laser does ten times the appropriate damage value when unfocused.
  • In Subterranean Animism, Reimu C (Reimu and Aya) and Marisa B (Marisa and Patchy) can destroy the 3rd (only in the demo, she can't be destroyed in that way in the full version), 6th, and extra stage midbosses just by bombing them as they appear.
  • A lot of these bugs can be found here.
  • One particular bug in Hisoutensoku involving Sakuya's timehax can cause Utsuho's suns to grow to insane sizes.
  • In Urban Legend in Limbo, Byakuren can activate her "Brilliance of Mahavairocana" (normally a counter) spellcard by bouncing one of her vajras on her opponent. Twilight Frontier apparently knew of the bug and liked it so much they left it in.
  • In Story of Eastern Wonderland, you can shoot more danmaku if you repeatedly tap the Z button (similar to the Phantasmagoria games). This can make boss fights laughably short, especially if you're playing as Reimu-C.
• Growing the Beard:
  • Lotus Land Story, where most of the standard Touhou gameplay features were introduced.
  • Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, with the introduction of the Spell Card system.
  • Perfect Cherry Blossom, which established the groundwork for Gensokyo's worldbuilding, as well as introducing visible hitbox and streamlined danmaku patterns to be much less luck-based.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Sometimes, people who played other Shoot 'Em Up games beforehand complain that Touhou is too easy by comparison. This is especially likely with shmup players who only came for the gameplay and don't really care about the plot, lore or characters. The harder entries in the series such as UFO or LoLK tend to be spared from this complaint.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Many fans who got into Touhou through Fanon or Memetic Mutation first find the games to be stupidly hard, if not impossible, whether through watching videos of Lunatic difficulty and Extra Stage runs (which are always the most viewed videos of Touhou gameplay on any sufficiently popular video host) or trying the games themselves, getting overwhelmed by the bullet counts, and burning through all three continues before they even finish Stage 3. On Easy. And then discovering there's no save feature, so they have to start over from the beginning of the game. As a result, the series has a reputation as an exercise in sheer masochism; this is despite Touhou being easier than most arcade shoot-em-ups (including non-danmaku games), but most casual Touhou fans are generally not aware of other shmup series.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Like Violet Detector, 100th Black Market received criticism for reusing mainline games' patterns.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!:
  • A popular opinion of Ten Desires, which ZUN intentionally made easier to attract a wider audience.
  • Mostly averted. Despite each game taking on average no more than 30 minutes to complete, the series has a very big following, especially for a shmup series.
• Memetic Badass: The difficulty of the games themselves is often exaggerated and treated by those who haven't played other shmups as the pinnacle of video game difficulty and frustration, with people who are proficient at the games being told that they could theoretically dodge rainfall. While the games are by no means easy, they often have the reputation that they're the hardest in the shmup genre simply for having lots of bullets on-screen at once, despite many design decisions that make the games "hard, but fair" (older shmups are infamous amongst shmup genre fans for "sniper" attacks that are near-impossible to see coming, for punishing player deaths with severe power-down and forcing them back to checkpoints, and in general being tailor-made for coin turnover, i.e. you feed lots of money to keep playing unless you're really good, or the next player in line gets a turn).
• More Popular Spin-Off: While the series is known for its iconic mainline games, as far as playing and enjoying the games go, many fans find the fighting game spinoffs more fun due to generally being more familiar with fighting games than Bullet Hell shoot-em-ups, and because they find playing against human opponents more palatable than going up against a six-stage campaign that people who have never played other shmups before consider to be an inhuman effort.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The sound that plays when you get an extra life. (the one that plays when the video timer hits the 27 second mark)
  • The sound effect that accompanies a captured spell card (when the video timer hits 8 seconds). Or the sound of a defeated boss (when the video timer hits 22 seconds).
  • To Marisa players, the sound of a Master Spark being fired.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Nearly all of the mainline games only have three continues allowed, which turns off many people who are inexperienced with shmups. It doesn't help that ZUN discourages fans from documenting the endings of the games and most fan sites comply, which can be problematic to those who cannot complete the games even with the allotted continues.
  • The Occult Ball system in Urban Legend in Limbo versus mode. These balls will randomly appear in battles with one of seven random effects. Players then need to scramble through the battlefield to chase the ball around instead of actually fighting each other, because the ball is needed to perform each character's Occult Attacks. While this isn't a big deal for some characters, some other characters like Miko depend heavily on their Occult Attack to perform well in the fight. Also, although the six of the seven random effects of the balls appearing are pretty minor, the last one has the effect of slowing projectiles to a crawl, causing ranged battles to be all.but impossible.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Every now and then. The most notorious examples usually cited are Subterranean Animism for every normal entry before it, and Shoot the Bullet , Double Spoiler, and Violet Detector to the entire series. Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom, however, is quickly gaining notoriety for being even harder than Subterranean Animism, to the point that Save Scumming and Trial-and-Error Gameplay are the main gameplay gimmicks.
• Small Reference Pools: For the Shoot 'Em Up genre. Either this is the only shoot-em-up series most people (especially in anime-oriented communities) know, or every shoot-em-up is compared to Touhou.
• Spiritual Licensee: You could call Double Dealing Character the most popular Shinobu Yagawa game in the West.^note Shinobu Yagawa is best known for Battle Garegga, Armed Police Batrider, Ibara, and a slew of other Shoot 'Em Up games where bombing and suiciding as advanced scoring tactics as well as gratuitous quantities of extra lives are common elements. Bombing in Touhou traditionally triggers auto-pickup, and in DDC, auto-pickup rewards the player with bonuses, including point bonuses, bomb fragments (8 of which make a bomb) and life fragments (3 of which make an extra life). This leads to a cycle of bombing, then dying for more bombs, then bombing some more, getting extra lives to offset the constant dying.
• Surprise Difficulty:
  • Players familiar with fanworks come into Cirno's fight expecting it to be a joke. Then they eat icicle shotgun. And, while Icicle Fall ~ Easy deserves its memetic status, the version on normal is actually fairly nasty. It's basically the same thing, except Cirno also fires a spread of larger bullets in front of her, meaning you actually have to navigate the icicles, which is harder than you'd think. Her first nonspell is also pretty brutal and will kill you if you don't know what you're doing. In fact, after the rather pathetic Rumia, Cirno is very much a Wake-Up Call Boss.
  • Kogasa returns as UFO's Extra Stage midboss, complete with an appropriate power boost. Given that her power is to surprise people, that she comes in with onomatopoeia that says "Surprise!", and the protagonist has a surprised look on her face, this Surprise Difficulty is presumably intentional.
• That One Attack: The franchise has its own page.
• That One Boss: Enough examples for their own page
• Theme Pairing: Some fans ship Yuyuko and Kirby because they share Big Eater and Extreme Omnivore tendencies.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Most early games will show a post-game statistics screen, such as the percentage of the game completed, how many lives you lost, how many bombs you fired, how many spellcards you captured, etc. This was sadly abandoned starting from the 10th main game, Mountain of Faith.
  • Spell Practice was introduced in the 8th main game, Imperishable Night, allowing you to practice individual enemy spellcards that you've reached; to compare, Practice Start only lets you start from the beginning of any stage you've reached. For whatever reason, it was scrapped for the 10th, 11th (Subterranean Animism), and 12th (Undefined Fantastic Object) games^note the 9th game, Phantasmagoria of Flower View is a versus-style shooter unlike most other main games, but was mercifully brought back for the 13th game, Ten Desires and beyond, with the exception of Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom, which is a checkpoint-based game anyway that in Pointdevice Mode forces you to repeat the same section until you finish it on one life.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Little Girls?: The series is about little (looking) girls firing colorful dots, arrows, and lasers at each other, with almost the whole cast being some kind of Elegant Gothic Lolita (if only as far as clothes go in most cases). Except the games are one of the most famous examples of Bullet Hell, even if Cute 'em Up is in full swing. Suffice to say, despite their bright and cheery appearance the games have loads of complex characters, comparatively difficult plots, and are just Nintendo Hard throughout, so they are definitely not for little girls. Even the various manga and other literature tend to be rather dark and depressing despite their initial appearances, sometimes even going as far as being outright scary or visibly violent. That said, despite all this, the series has a large Periphery Demographic of children (both boys and girls), although many of them don't play the games. Many kids attend Reitaisei with their parents and ZUN once received a heartfelt fan letter from an elementary school girl.
• Win Back the Crowd: The series did this for the Shoot 'Em Up genre, as the genre was fading out of relevance in the late 90s and early 2000s in favor of genres with broader scopes and more fleshed-out lore. Touhou features dazzling bullet patterns with names and a strong sense of identity and characters that are each unique in their own way and give rise to the series' astronomical library of fan works and memes.

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