LAST EDITED ON Sep-17-20 AT 10:45 PM (EDT)
 
>I know! There are cheaper Chinese knockoffs available of at least the
>white/silver version (I haven't noticed the black one, but I haven't
>really looked), around 60 bucks, but they take forever to ship and who
>knows if they're actually any good? The pictures look fine, but they
>might be pictures of a Japanese original for all I know. Is it racist
>to instinctively distrust Chinese online vendors? :/
>

Being that much cheaper makes me suspect them regardless of source. For something like this, I'd imagine they took castings of an original, cleaned them up, and are using the result to churn out 80-90% accurate knock offs.

Makes me miss the 'last day of con, I don't wanna lug this home' sales from Otakons of yore (then again, I had time and energy back then, but not nearly enough money; my resource deficiencies have since reversed.)

>No, not that bad. I mean, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil has been
>out for 17 years, and the characters have stayed popular the whole
>time, plus they've appeared in other Touhou games since, which has
>kept them current in the fandom. The
>Remilia pics alone on danbooru
> run to 41,000+ with more still being added.
>
>Sturgeon's Law applies, of course, but even so, that's a deep pool.
>The playable Touhou characters run even higher, into the high 50s
>(Hakurei Reimu, for instance, currently stands at 57,000+); the only
>character from anything I can think of offhand who has more
>than that is Hatsune Miku, who's currently standing somewhere above
>64,000 after this year's birthday surge at the end of August. It
>takes some sifting (and some judicious tag blacklisting, in my case),
>but there's good stuff to be found.
>

That sounds practically 'infinite monkeys writing Shakespeare', the shear volume means something is nearly guaranteed to be non-dumpster-worthy. Good to know that that task is possible, just not trivial.

>e-hentai.org, despite its name, also has some worthwhile non-H Touhou
>doujins in English scanlation. I'm rather partial to Satou Kibi's.
>Super cute, doesn't fuck with your head. Fair warning: a lot of
>Touhou artists like to fuck with your head, and every character can be
>and has been flanderized to the hilt (especially—wouldn't you know
>it—Flandre). Fanon is especially unkind to Meiling, which I cannot
>fathom since she's awesome.
>

I'm not sure how close your version is to the source material, though I also gather that Touhou is almost a Rorschach test when it comes to how one might see its characters, but Meiling as presented here seems to just be a steady, cheerful presence. I get earth-bender vibes from her, even though I doubt there's a connection there.

>If you take a deep dive into that stuff, you will lose a bunch of
>time, but you will also probably notice a few bits and pieces that
>seem familiar from Gallian Gothic. I haven't riffed any plot
>wholesale, but I've run across an appealing design idea here and there
>(such as The World, which is actually a Jojo's Bizarre
>Adventure reference that a clade of the Touhou fandom has adopted
>for Sakuya owing to the resemblance of her special ability to that of
>one of the Jojo characters).
>

I had suspected (I haven't seen much JoJo myself, but the Internet is awash with references and memes, particularly to key components such as the World time stop power and its owner.) I hadn't thought you had any dealings with such dark forces, but I guess JoJo has permeated Internet culture to such an extent it is practically generic.

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