Touhou Creator ZUN to Masses: No Touhou for You

I don't understand what he is being so uppity about. I'm interested in the Touhou world and characters, I've never been a huge fan of bullet hell type games, and by extension, the Touhou games sit on my external HD. Why exactly do I have to play a game I don't particularly enjoy to get to the story I DO enjoy? Seems he's a bit low on booze funds and is angry other circles are cashing in on his success.

And here I thought KyoAni was the world's only company that was afraid of money an success for their continued delay of Haruhi 2, but it seems ZUN also is afraid of his wallet exploding.

Seriously, what could we want more than MORE Touhou?

Although I'm hardly a hard-core fans, I do enjoy the games, but have at times found myself lost and confused about the world. The information you get in the games is rather sparce and a lot of the doujin work is out of reach for someone who's only vaguely capable in japanese... or too lazy to look for translations.

But I have to place myself somewhat critical of this; I believe instead that a lot of people who begin their exposure to Touhou through an anime will likely research the subject and come upon the games. If he's worried that fans will base their belief on canon after the anime, he's most likely aware of the pretty lacking plot in the games. And I'm pretty sure whatever happens in the anime will follow what has been made doujin way, considering there's quite a lot of ZUN-accepted fan-stuff to base it on.

And he's making a helluva lot of money without having to pay taxes, or at least so I've heard (and concluded considering rough estimates of how many games he sell counter to production "costs")

If I had to choose I'd take ZUN's works over fan created stuff based on his works anyday.

Zun is just mad that his art is shit. At least he is a good programmer.

The way I see it, it really shouldn't be a big deal at all because the official games and fan works go hand in hand. I started off with the games which eventually lead me to the fanon which in turn keeps me interested in new games and so on.

If someone new is introduced to Touhou through the Maikaze anime and ends up enjoying it, then they would most likely look on the internet to learn more about it. After all, it isn't exactly hard to use Wiki or Google.

I don't see how restricting doujin works could possibly do anything but increase attention towards the Touhou series and by extension the game series. If anything limiting exposure would stunt growth and earn fan criticism.

While commercialism has heavy drawbacks and the wanting to keep the ZUNinverse free and open for the masses of fans to have absolute creativity and free from all the commercial restrictive bullshit and a work of love, I've never understood the appeal of obscurity.

While I enjoy the games, I wouldn't know about them at all if it weren't for them being meme.
And also, restricting doujin works will only help to keep them to a spot where they're more likely to disappear off of the face of the earth. Only release 500 copies? That means one Earthquake can take the entire existence of the doujin from the face of the earth.

And we should be happy that important Seiyuus have graced this project, a doujin project, with their use.

Basically, an unoffical anime is still an anime. And using official voices just means the doujin community has been graced. So if I were ZUN, I wouldn't flip out, since the lifeblood of Touhou is that it's a non-commercial community of fan and creators with absolute non-commercial freedom. And I can only hope this anime does well and doesn't suffer from ZUN's words.

Basically, I share a bit of feeling behind ZUN's words, but I'm scared of him saying them as well. Restrict Touhou too much, and make fan creators too scared, and you'll make your own great creative force implode. I don't want any fanmaker to be discouraged from fanmaking.

"Touhou anime will attrack weaboos." about sums up ZUN's line of thoughts.

I like his thinking, I like it a lot.

The problem is that knowing the internet, some people WILL think the anime IS official, just look at animeDB, they didn't bother to put it as a "doujin anime" and it looked like official. I talked to some people over various site about Touhou and IOSYS takes spotlight and their flash vids, now what if an anime sprouted, people will think Maikaze did it etc.

Is there anything in the bottom shock-quote that's actually new? In particular, direct sales limited to event and specialty retail has been in ZUN's comment on derivative works for years.

I can sort of understand ZUN's feelings. He wants to support the doujin scene for obvious reasons, but the bigger Touhou becomes, the more he loses control of it. The series is in a weird situation.

Maybe he just wants a large slice of the pie...

A friend of mine also takes to creating RPG games on our off time. We have always done so with the intention on keeping a low profile, and having the games for the games' sake. For something we enjoy.

For that to become commercialized would take away what out original intentions were. It's not to make a quick buck. Selling it just increases it's worth in the eyes of the public, and allows more people to see it. He, like us, creates because he enjoys it.
For us, we wish to tell a story - to invoke a certain feeling from you.

For Zun, he wants to give you a bullet hell game. The story for him is probably something neat he thought up to tack onto it (which I believe was the case as outlined in one of his interviews). And while he might be alright with the expansion of it and the enjoyment his fans feel from his characters, he doesn't want it to go beyond what he envisioned for the series.

After all, the commercialization if nothing else would bring him more money, so there's no loss there. He just doesn't want the image of his creations to be skewed in a way he did not intend. Which is why he's not putting down the doujinshi in general, but the commercialization of his series which it's starting to bring forth.

With all due respect, I think the tone of this piece is pretty off. Without retranslating all of ZUN's comments (I don't want this post to get too long - but I think, generally, http://cardcaptor.moekaku.com/2008/12/13/maikazes-touhou-anime-and-zuns-comment/ has done the tone of the translation way more accurately), his new rules are, I think, best summed up as:
* You can make pretty much whatever you want, but don't try to sell derivatives of my work in Book Off; if you limit it to things like doujin shops, doujin events, and mail order - or, roughly, the same way I sell stuff - it should all work out.
* Even commercial works are generally okay if you give me some advance warning, provide proper attribution, and limit distribution as mentioned above.
* Try to refrain from excessive mass publicity; especially marketing to people who don't know who Touhou is.

Just to insert some of what I think ZUN's perspective would be, this is a guy who has said he doesn't like participating too much in the online community or speaking publicly too much, since anything he says will cause a big fuss online. (Pretty prescient there ... well, to be fair, pretty fucking obvious, it's the Internet.) He's also said he doesn't want to go too much into official commercial spinoffs of Touhou because it will make the copyright issues surrounding the series needlessly complex. (Both of these comments were made at the gaming event he spoke at last year.) I seriously doubt he's trying to be a killjoy or steal all the attention for himself; rather, he's probably just trying to keep the general atmosphere the current Touhou phenomenon has. (Whether or not this is a good way of doing that is certainly up for debate, though.) The rules he's given here really aren't any more "onerous" than any of the guidelines he's given for doing Touhou stuff in the past, and it's all in line with the "private works" copyright loophole anyway.

ZUN is not going to take his ball and go home. He's going to keep doing Touhou as long as it's fun to do, and I think he's just trying to keep it fun for as many people as possible (again, it's certainly up for debate whether this is a good way of doing it). Besides, eventually he's going to die of alcohol poisoning or give up game development and open a bar, so it's probably best we enjoy this all while it lasts.

I kind of sympathize with ZUN's wish to see Touhou remain a phenomenon where most people are also fans of the original games (it's nice to see doujin artists' impressions of the games in afterwords and such, and I like stupid references so I like comics where the punchline is related to the gameplay like Tako has done a few times), but I also think it's probably futile for the most part, especially now that he's been doing Bougetsushou. But, I don't think that the fandom is going to implode either way.

I'm sure his mind could be changed.

If an enterprising studio got him drunk enough to sign a contract.

The larger a franchise Touhou evolves into, the lesser control ZUN will have over the the serial. Evidently this is a situation he is wanting to avoid, as he seems a huge control freak. However, it may be that he doesn't quite grasp the whole situation of his Touhou phenomena - I don't know how many others followed this trend but I only heard of Touhou through exposure of its fan base, namely its huge tidal waves of impressive art galleries on countless sites. It was about a month before I figured out all this fan structure originated from simple doujin games, and have only played some of the games do to my already existing interest driven by the colourful fan base. In this way it is can be argued that the Touhou fan base does indeed exceed the actual Products and therefore it is a bit silly to downplay the distribution means or methods of the franchise as he's not going to find many new people playing his games unless they hear about them first, and direct advertisement of the hard-as-heck Danmaku shooters may be rather intimidating. Along the same line, how many people would of been interested in playing Strike Witches games before getting into the anime series? Mainstream exposure will not necessarily diminish the doujin appeal - if anything it could possibly expand it. Either way, ZUN is reminding me greatly of Bill Waterson who absolutely refused to commercialize his Calvin and Hobbes comics aside from publishing collections of the strips as he had decided doing so would invalidate the themes and opinions of many of his strips and of course his own opinions. So on an ethical ground I can agree with why one would refuse "mainstream" commercialization (is this series becoming something not so much about the love of the product as just making money?) but when his argument strays onto the grounds of keeping the series only for the fans of the games, I think he might of already lost that battle a while ago, and is also really an almost conceited and either way not a particularly practical objective.