Needs Help: Characters.Touhou

To be frank, I really don't get the aversion for official art. Though to be honest, "inconsistent artstyle" as a problem with character pictures seems to be odd, as it seems that it is only a problem here. Like look at the character sheet for Daily Life with Monster Girl: The main monster girls have full artwork, some characters have headshots from anime reference sheet and the rest have heatshots from the manga. No one is complaining. But as soon as it is Touhou, oh, we must have a consistent artstyle. Or heck, look at Kantai Collection: there are multiple artists working on it, and it is fine.

TL:DR: Why must Touhou be the series what has an aversion forwards official art? As long as I get artwork what is as clean as it is possible to have, then I am fine.

edited 10th Aug '15 12:47:35 PM by TPPR10

Well, it can't get worse... and we do have some more people here now, so, good

Well, apparently not. Everything had remained stable for quite a long while before this.

I would never use those rude words. No need to be rude, we're all fellow posters and Touhou Fans here But...

I would, however, call that statement quite narrow-minded. There is a percentage of the Touhou Fans here on TVT who are of a differing opinion than you. They should have a right to be heard and participate in a discussion. You and me might each have wildly differing impressions of how large or small that percentage is respectively.

PC-98, yes, sadly. Windows, I agree with you, acceptable.

No. "The trend" (I assume you mean having Alphes-Style for all chars?) had always kinda been there in the Touhou Thread, among the people who were unhappy with the way things were back then (constantly changing pics from fanartists and fanworks, of massively differing quality). One person then did make the decision to change it all, yes, but if only that person had been pro-Alphes-Style, as you claim, it would have been changed back instantly after uniform disapproval from the entire thread (as, by the way, happened with your out-of-the-blue change to black-and-white). A consensus wasn't reached in the thread, as no party was found to be in a huge majority, and so it was left as is.

—-

I reiterate, however, that I do take your and TPPR's arguments about "Touhou is ATM a singular exception in all of TVT, why should it get special treatment?" seriously. It's a good argument.

edited 10th Aug '15 4:47:41 PM by FellDeedsAwake

I meant the black and white ones from before I did the change back.

In that statement I stated what I thought was logical, not my own personal opinion. I make sure to keep those separate. And like I said, what I meant was not that we shouldn't have democracy, I meant that we shouldn't have to deal with this problem since we should have had official art from the start. And if I where to include my personal opinion, my stance would still be the same but for different reasons.

It is not Alphes that is the problem, like it said, it stems much further back with the decision to use fan art to begin with.

EDIT: Also this might be unrelated but I remembered something about ZUN when it comes to his art and that is that he deliberately doesn't put much effort to the art in the games since he believes the other parts of the games should take precedence. If you look up official art of a character called Beerko you can see that ZUN does indeed have skill if he decides to do so. The reason I bring it up is that, atleast to me, using so called "better" art seems to go against ZUN's design philosophy.

Also another point I consider worth bringing up is that there seems to be some sort of double standard going on with the Alphes art as well. For example look at Maribel's old image, or better yet if we should go official, the art from HM. It seems to me to be generally agreed that the art from HM took a nosedive but no one insisted on using fanart cause hey, it's Alphes.

edited 11th Aug '15 3:39:56 AM by matteste

I'm going to move this to the Short Term Projects forum to clear it out of IP.

Ok I read up on a little thing, if we are lucky then the new magazine Strange Creators of Outer World might contain colored art of every windows character. If that is the case then perhaps that could be used for the character art. I still hold by opinion to use ZUN art but I present this as a What If?, in case it does contain art of every character. (It still is technically fan art but it is under the official label).

If that is the case, then those pics should definitely be considered. Maybe a crowner for the various options for each character, or a series of crowners since there's a lot of characters?

Ok, time for the moment of truth to see if it has any viability as a source for canon art.

EDIT:

Also if we still must insist on a fanart collection for the index (I am willing to at least budge my principles that much for simply pragmatic reasons) we now have this.

edited 15th Oct '15 12:14:46 PM by matteste

^Not anymore, someone changed it.

We thouroughly discussed it in the thread, and yeah, we decided to go with another one instead. I quite liked the EVERYONE one, but the individual chars really were too tiny.

Sigh. Shame, since the previous one was also made specifically for Touhou's 20th anniversary and made sure to absolutely everyone present. Also, has anyone found out any of the art from Strange Creators of Outer World? I want to be able to finally put this whole dilemma to rest.

edited 19th Oct '15 12:37:56 AM by matteste

Mostly, it just wasn't clear enough at wiki-size. The colours are very subdued, which usually doesn't do well with that amount of down-scaling.

From what scans I've seen so far the only characters with solo portraits in Strange Creators of Outer World are Reimu, Marisa, Sakuya and Sanae.

I don't want to just suddenly walk into the convo, but... what is the issue with ZUN art? Honestly the character section as it is right now is really hard to look at... I think ZUN art is really cute! Who cares about newcomers? Pandering to newcomers who wouldn't like the official art vs. Alphes style fanart seems kind of. Moot point, don't you think? Besides, those people only care about tits and ass (NO OFFENSE TO THOSE VOUCHING FOR ALPHES ART/FANART PLS ) you know, those people. The gross ones. People who want to get into Touhou, like, genuinely, would not even care about the art. It's one of it's charm points and I'd rather it be shown. Plus... using fanart without permission is super rude... not to mention artists delete their galleries over this. Come on, you guys.

edited 3rd Nov '15 5:32:58 PM by yuichihaga

This Like I have said before, I also don't get it why people are so against it.

Me neither. It's what's actually used in most of the games.

Hey everyone So, there's conversation in this thread again, huh? Well, I'm kinda glad. I had been planning for a while to maybe post again and ask if we're doing the ZUN Art Change or not, since it seemed like such an important and pressing issue to tackle for the ZUN-Art-Supporters... but, well, then it was left again, as it has been for so long, and the world didn't end, so I was happy to leave the issue once more.

Well, I am a bit offended I'm a supporter of the Alphes-Style-Art we have right now, but everyone in the Touhou Thread can vouch for me that I horribly hate all sexualization of Touhou chars. The Alphes Style is practically no more sexualized than the original art, btw.

Well, "people" are not that many, and have shrunk down to me as the sole Fanart-supporter here (but, to reiterate one more time, I actually like Windows-era-ZUN-art, too!)... and I admitted defeat a while ago. So, all this time, there really wasn't anything stopping you from doing the ZUN-Art-Change... I have accepted that it is the wish of the majority and also that it is more in line with the normal standards of the wiki. So, anyone who wants to do the work, go on ahead! I would still be happy if that person brought suggestions and questions here to the thread so we could decide on things, maybe about which poses to pick for a specific character, something like that. I'll be checking back here regularly.

So, again: change to ZUN-Art is OK. But! We can still continue discussing things that were/are still huge issues. Namely:

1) Using the official art from the Fighting games always, if we can: I'm not budging on this. This is a no-brainer. It looks great. We have it, so we use it. If Matt was entertaining the thought of using art from a magazine, then Fighting Game is, again, a no-brainer. Meaning: everyone from Scarlet Weather Rhapsody plus Expansion; everyone from Urban Legends in Limbo (since no one can argue that the art from Hopeless Masquerade was better).

2) PC-98: also a BIG ONE. The "art" there is just so much more horrifically bad that I can't believe the ZUN-Art-Supporters have no qualms at all about just blindly taking that instead of actually watchable pics. I completely admit that it's confusing as hell to keep fanart in there and replace it everywhere else. That is also not great. But I have no answer here. Both alternatives are bad.

3) Chars with no official art whatsoever: not that many, but it should be discussed. We either have a char without a pic among all the ZUN-Art, OR a char with suddenly a completely different style pic there (no matter if from fanart or from one of the official books, still completely different style).

edited 6th Nov '15 12:15:31 PM by FellDeedsAwake

My general suggestion is to just use official art, and if there's not official art, to just not have photos. There doesn't need to be art for everything.

I was about to say the same thing. If there is no official art, why should we have it? It just ends up being an approximation of what the fans think the characters look like. We're supposed to illustrate the actual work, not the fandom's ideas. It goes double for characters like Layla Prismriver and Youki Konpaku who don't even have designs.

I am willing to agree on these two, yes (though I do have nostalgic feelings about that Youki pic, it was one of the first I saw of Touhou when I discovered it for the first time; the coolness of that pic caught my interest)

To show the characters. Because it's the Character Page. A requirement for official art is probably nowhere in the laws of the website. It's simply common practice. I am now OK with replacing all the pics with ZUN ones, but having three non-ZUN pics (Momiji, Daiyousei and Koakuma) left on all the pages combined really wouldn't cause the apocalypse... and, btw, there is Official Art for all of those. Just not ZUN Art. But all three of◊ them have been pictured in official books and manga, so there is an official Look for them, contrary to the two above. And that Look should not be ignored when deciding whether to have a pic for them or not.

—

Thoughts on the first two points? They're the bigger ones.

edited 6th Nov '15 2:40:05 PM by FellDeedsAwake

@Fell Deeds Awake There are plenty of pages on the site that have no pictures for characters at all. Why in the world is it necessary we add fanart to this?

edited 6th Nov '15 2:35:33 PM by GM_3826

Yes, and every time it makes me sad

Oh, it's not NECESSARY. You're completely right about that But then, neither is having any pics for anyone. Or having a char page. Or having a wiki. Or being on a computer at all. Who decides what is "necessary"? I have no objective argument here I just like pics of chars. And this way, these three chars gets a pic instead of one empty void in a sea of pics.

And yes, there's art of those other characters. That doesn't make the fanart illustrate the games or manga the characters appear in.

For the two other points, well, they're just subjective opinions phrased as fact. That's no better than lying, so don't do that.

I don't have any strong opinions about which picture to use, but if a character subpage is about a certain game, doesn't it make more sense to use art from that game?

edited 6th Nov '15 2:48:00 PM by AnotherDuck

...that was harsh, it hit me pretty badly :( I'm really sorry I phrased it badly, I had no intention of ever lying or anything like that in here :( I want a nice, friendly discussion just as much as everyone else. As I said, I phrased it badly. I didn't mean "talk about my opinion!", but "Let's discuss these two issues", namely what to do with the PC-98 chars and what to do about the Fighting Game art. I just wanted your opinion on those, and I stated mine. I meant nothing bad with it :(

Well, the subpages still have the text at the top that says "this is for the chars who debuted in this game". This doesn't necessitate that the art be from that game if we have a better one from a later game.

edited 6th Nov '15 3:11:55 PM by FellDeedsAwake

Bit of a Pet Peeve; didn't mean anything personal. My point is that most of the art being better that you're talking about is just about opinions. Art from the later games is not inherently better than earlier art. Nor the other way around, for that matter. What does matter is what we want to illustrate. Do we want to illustrate where the characters came from, or where they are now?

Yes, it's the games they debuted in, which doesn't discount later appearance. However, to me that still means it makes more sense to use art from the game they debuted in. It's more in line with what the page is about, which is the first answer of the above question. Where the characters came from is the theme of the page, so I think it's more suitable to follow through on that with the character images.

Glad we cleared it up <3 Hmmm, but on the topic of "using newer pics, especially from the Fighting Games" for the chars, we two just are diametrically opposed, I guess. Just have to accept it. Would therefore like more input from more people!

But before I go to bed, one thing to think about on that topic: yes, we two will never have/create an "objective standard" on which char drawings are "better" or "prettier" than others. That's a subjective thing. But I'd argue that at some point there does begin to exist a consensus of sorts in the fandom of which pics are "preferred" if not "superior", and that these have always been the ones from the Fighting Games (excluding much of HM), or at least in general NEWER ones. Sorta-proof: consider these, please:

a) The makers of the Fighting Games chose to not just take ZUN's char drawings, but created new ones. (ZUN didn't mind)

b) As soon as a new Fighting Game came out, the char pics on our char page instantly got updated with the ones from that game. No extra discussion thread, no discussion in the Touhou Thread. It was just obvious and accepted by everyone. Looks to me like silent consensus.

c) Not just our char page does this, but so does Touhou Wiki. (Touhou Wikia does as well. (In the interest of fairness, I will admit that they do prefer NEWER ZUN-drawn char pics over the Fighting Game ones... but they also replace the older ones from the games they came from. Why would they if the new ones weren't deemed "superior" by the majority?)

edited 6th Nov '15 4:52:55 PM by FellDeedsAwake