Got into a new fandom recently
Touhou is a doujin videogame series that's renowned for being a shining example of danmaku or "Bullet Hell" gaming. I absolutely suck at danmaku but I've found plenty to enjoy about the series in general. Touhou is primarily a one-man project -- ZUN, the creator of the series, does everything from level design, bullet patterns, storylines, and even music. And the music ZUN creates is absolutely awesome. And if that wasn't enough, Touhou has quite the prolific little fandom that takes what ZUN made and just goes wild with it. There are tons of creators that do doujins, fanfics, music remixes, fan vids, not to mention the memes that get pumped out every other day. And being that this is Japan we're talking about, things tend to get...weird, as one read-through of the Touhou Wiki article on the Yukkuri phenomenon will tell you.
One of my favorite characters of the series is Cirno, the ice fairy that you fight as the second boss of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil and the first miniboss of Perfect Cherry Blossom, who's very much a ditz and is widely considered a "baka" (idiot) by the other characters and by the fandom in general even though she considers herself the strongest and smartest in Gensokyo, Touhou's primary setting. In the instruction manual for the ninth Touhou game, Phantasmagoria of Flower View, in a screenshot pointing out what each item was (i.e. ① Player character, ② Score, etc), Cirno, the player's opponent in the screenshot, is labelled as "⑨ Baka." The circle nine (or "nineball") symbol was quickly and widely adopted by the Touhou fandom as both a synonym for "baka" and her nickname. She's also mocked because of her "Icicle Fall" spellcard on Easy mode in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, which has a safe spot directly in front of her. In fanfic, doujins, fan videos and fan games, Cirno tends to get the Butt Monkey treatment quite handily (in Touhou Soccer 2, for instance, she's the only character whose combination shot with another character involves her getting hammered in the face by the ball due to the aforementioned fail-tastic "Icicle Fall -Easy-" spellcard. Ouch.). But she manages to make up for all of this by being utterly adorable, with perhaps her only unlikable trait being her hobby of freezing frogs, which Suwako (the patron goddess of frogs in Gensokyo) quite understandably hates her for. My favorite Cirno vid, by far, is the IOSYS flash vid Cirno's Perfect Math Class, which features what has got to be one of my favorite versions of her theme from Embodiment of Scarlet Devil and is quite funny in general. The full version of the song in question is here, with lyric translations in case you're like me and don't understand Japanese. It's even inspired a dance, of all things. Crazy, huh?
I'm currently into ADVENT CIRNO, an awesome doujin by the circle One Night Stand, which is basically a Touhou AU that has the characters running around in the Final Fantasy VII universe. Cirno takes on the role that Cloud filled in the original game. She's an ex-SOLDIER from Shinra and a monster hunter who maintains just enough of her original Touhou personality and mixes it with a quite awesome drive for justice. She uses a watermelon blade reminiscent of the First Tsurugi from Advent Children and uses many moves you might recognize from both her Touhou arsenal and Cloud's repertoire from FFVII. There are five stories so far, two of which have her monster hunting with a Nakama that includes Hong Meiling and Reisen Inaba the rabbitgirl, another of which has her teaming up with Marisa, and two "#0" stories which touch upon her past in SOLDIER with Letty Whiterock, the other major "ice chick" in Gensokyo and something of a Zack-figure for Cirno in this particular verse, and Mokou, the fire chick from the Touhou-verse, who looks to be filling the shoes of Sephiroth -- and given what I know about FFVII, this means that Mokou is probably going to pull a Face Heel Turn later on in the story, setting up an epic confrontation between her and Cirno that I'm not going to want to miss. It's been half a year since the last doujin, but I'm confident that One Night Stand will continue with the series.
One of my favorite characters of the series is Cirno, the ice fairy that you fight as the second boss of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil and the first miniboss of Perfect Cherry Blossom, who's very much a ditz and is widely considered a "baka" (idiot) by the other characters and by the fandom in general even though she considers herself the strongest and smartest in Gensokyo, Touhou's primary setting. In the instruction manual for the ninth Touhou game, Phantasmagoria of Flower View, in a screenshot pointing out what each item was (i.e. ① Player character, ② Score, etc), Cirno, the player's opponent in the screenshot, is labelled as "⑨ Baka." The circle nine (or "nineball") symbol was quickly and widely adopted by the Touhou fandom as both a synonym for "baka" and her nickname. She's also mocked because of her "Icicle Fall" spellcard on Easy mode in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, which has a safe spot directly in front of her. In fanfic, doujins, fan videos and fan games, Cirno tends to get the Butt Monkey treatment quite handily (in Touhou Soccer 2, for instance, she's the only character whose combination shot with another character involves her getting hammered in the face by the ball due to the aforementioned fail-tastic "Icicle Fall -Easy-" spellcard. Ouch.). But she manages to make up for all of this by being utterly adorable, with perhaps her only unlikable trait being her hobby of freezing frogs, which Suwako (the patron goddess of frogs in Gensokyo) quite understandably hates her for. My favorite Cirno vid, by far, is the IOSYS flash vid Cirno's Perfect Math Class, which features what has got to be one of my favorite versions of her theme from Embodiment of Scarlet Devil and is quite funny in general. The full version of the song in question is here, with lyric translations in case you're like me and don't understand Japanese. It's even inspired a dance, of all things. Crazy, huh?
I'm currently into ADVENT CIRNO, an awesome doujin by the circle One Night Stand, which is basically a Touhou AU that has the characters running around in the Final Fantasy VII universe. Cirno takes on the role that Cloud filled in the original game. She's an ex-SOLDIER from Shinra and a monster hunter who maintains just enough of her original Touhou personality and mixes it with a quite awesome drive for justice. She uses a watermelon blade reminiscent of the First Tsurugi from Advent Children and uses many moves you might recognize from both her Touhou arsenal and Cloud's repertoire from FFVII. There are five stories so far, two of which have her monster hunting with a Nakama that includes Hong Meiling and Reisen Inaba the rabbitgirl, another of which has her teaming up with Marisa, and two "#0" stories which touch upon her past in SOLDIER with Letty Whiterock, the other major "ice chick" in Gensokyo and something of a Zack-figure for Cirno in this particular verse, and Mokou, the fire chick from the Touhou-verse, who looks to be filling the shoes of Sephiroth -- and given what I know about FFVII, this means that Mokou is probably going to pull a Face Heel Turn later on in the story, setting up an epic confrontation between her and Cirno that I'm not going to want to miss. It's been half a year since the last doujin, but I'm confident that One Night Stand will continue with the series.