/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>36840615
Coming from someone who was still pulling for raymoo in Smash anyway despite my better judgement:

You. Do. Not. Want. Westerners. In. Your. Hobby.

Yes, it would have been amazing seeing Reimu do battle in Smash against all your other favorite characters and getting those awesome remixes and getting a Hakurei Shrine stage and you would have loved it for about a week.

Then /jp/ becomes completely unusable, as /v/edditors completely swarm it. There are suddenly millions of YouTube video essays to the effect of “How Do I Become A Touhou Fan?” Every fucking big streamer starts talking about (and not playing) Touhou. “Touhou” trends on EN Twitter daily as leading Trans Voices™ in the industry demand that ZUN accomodate his Western Community™. Your boorus disappear beneath a flood of Hazbin Hotel-esque fanart featuring Trans WoC Touhou reimaginings. You desperatley run to your favorite 2hu boards and forums, only to find that they’re unusable, filled with youngsters who have hopped on them after seeing a plug from their favorite TikTok influencers.

Then come the articles. At first, they’re just stupid. Shit like Touhou needing an easy mode to accomodate modern players. Appeals for ZUN to accomodate wider audiences in theming. Demands for an auto-play mode so people can experience the music. Demands for more black characters will probably pop up. And then you’ll notice some more concerted attacks in the articles against the game itself. Touhou covertly glorifies Shinto, and these subtexts need to be removed to accomodate Korean fans who want to follow the new Touhou Webtoon. The women in Touhou aren’t appropriately empowered or representational. The gameplay and story are too confusing. Touhou, these articles say, is a good IDEA, but the GAMES themselves, eh, they’re kinda icky. They should be done away with.

Despondent, you get mad. You defend the games online. And that’s when the real flood begins. Touhou fans are elitist pricks, the articles crow. They’re hostile to new community members; they’re sexist, they’re unwilling to help new members, they spam “EASY MODO”, they’re symptomatic of a toxic “git gud” mentality that the West has finally done away with. There’s a big thinkpiece in the Washington Post by Fuk Yu-Min, an eminent Korean Studies professor, who isolates a troubling link between the game’s perverse glorification of Shinto and the entitled bigoted strains of Japanese otaku culture that the West had grappled with during GamerGate. A Moment™ is declared. 2022 is the year Japan’s otaku industry faces its Great Reckoning. ZUN probably retires at this point, claiming the stress has gotten to him. If he doesn’t leave gracefully, he is eventually implicated in the Great Reckoning and we’re forced to “reappraise” his works. He then leaves in disgrace.

You try to vent on your old 2hu board; you’re banned because your comment violates the sites new Equity and Inclusivity policy. You go to your room, find an old fumo, and bawl your eyes out into it.

Coming from someone who really wanted Reimu in because I think she deeply deserves it, you should be very happy these events will not come to pass. Because:

YOU. DO. NOT. WANT. WESTERNERS. IN. YOUR HOBBY.