Touhou is Gay Culture

My Journey Through the Fandom

When I look back on everything that's happened, I almost can't believe how far I've come and how different I am today. When I joined Touhou, it was mostly by accident out of desperation for something to do. My online RP group had just disbanded, my Special Interest shows had ended, the game my OC came from had gone under, and I had nothing left, basically, but porn and Danbooru uploads.

Yeah, I had that kind of beginning.

Looking through my folders, I found an old comic my RP-mates had shared with me, a Touhou parody of something that our RP used to cover, and one of the characters was a white-haired wolf girl. I'll be blunt, I thought she was gorgeous, so I looked through Danbooru's tags along those lines to see if I could find a matching character, and I discovered she was Inubashiri Momiji from Touhou, and having heard of Touhou from my RP-mates, I decided to finally check it out. I downloaded a pirate pack full of official Touhou games, as well as a Visual Novel named EoSD for the Busy Person. I bumbled through HrTP and SoEW before getting impatient and jumping straight to the game with Momiji so I could see what she was actually like, to see just how the fans had exaggerated her... and I passed her by without even realizing. That's okay though, because I had now fallen in love with Marisa. Even so, that was the first inkling I got of just how MUCH my expectations differed from reality.

The reason I'd avoided Touhou in the first place was that I had the impression that it was a Collect-a-Waifu Harem type of thing because that's what the fan content posted in the places I went to made it seem like. I had the impression that the one man character was actually important and central to the plot and that the girls all wanted him. Even back then I liked Canons that respected women and didn't focus on how they felt about any men, and to my surprise, that's exactly what Touhou IS. It really DIDN'T have any notable men, and the one that is there is basically an NPC. Imagine my surprise.

However, I entered the fandom during a bad place in my life and I was in a downward spiral, coping with porn on Danbooru, which I was actively spreading from Pixiv because it's where I could search for all the fanart. I was also working towards my own ridiculous goals on Danbooru, which I now look back on and shake my head. If that weren't enough, the fans you tend to find on Danbooru and Reddit are the kind of fans that tells you "it's legal in Japan because the age of consent is 13" while joking about lolicon and claiming the gay is just a meme.

Under normal circumstances, that might have turned me away from them. Unfortunately, I was very lonely. Everything I had liked before was wholesome slice of life comedies with either no dub or an incomplete one, and even on Anime boards, nobody would ever talk about it with me. Touhou, on the other hand, had a HUGE fandom, it was just full of terrible people, and even though most of Touhou's canon was that same slice-of-life comedy, the discussion rarely centered around anything in Canon. I thought I was trapped in the room with the Gross Toad Fans if I wanted any companionship at all, and I was so desperate for friendship that I learned to not only tolerate their bullshit, but speak their language, tell their jokes, and deliver and translate their porn. I even started to think they were right, because... well, they were my community now.

Loneliness can lead a person to do terrible things. But there's a limit, and it wouldn't take much longer for them to reach it.

You see, it's pretty widely known that a very large part of Touhou is the gay, and it didn't take long for me to get exposed to ship art. I didn't start to take it seriously, though, until I started reading lesbian romance doujins. In these, I found a comforting break that spoke to me much better than porn ever did. Reimu and Marisa were almost always depicted as being in a wholesome long-term relationship, and before long, I started rooting for them.

I'd never been a big shipper, and in fact, I came into Touhou AGAINST shipping in fandoms altogether, ESPECIALLY gay shipping, because I was a person who thought of gay shipping as something done by straight people either as a joke or to sate a weird fetish, something that erased and disrespected canon AND gay people (it didn't occur to me that actual gay people might be making it until much later). ReiMari completely changed that. This clearly wasn't being done for a fetish, it was wholesome romance that felt so right. I didn't realize it right away, but it was what I'd been looking for all my life. Even so, I quietly lamented that I would never see this in the realm of reality. I believed the Anime Maru interview was real, the gay was just a meme, and Touhou's canon was totally straight but non-sexual. I wanted ReiMari to be canon more than anything in the world, but these "friends" of mine were all too eager to "remind" me that Touhou Isn't Gay and that they are Just Good Friends.

So imagine my ELATION when someone posted this in response to one of those:

""Yeah, such Good Friends,"" they snarkily said. It didn't take more than a minute for their comment to get deleted, which I thought was very odd considering it wasn't against the rules, but it didn't matter. I had now seen it. Starting from that moment, my life forever changed. I was invigorated with a passion I hadn't felt before, not ever. Now that I knew the gay was coming straight from CANON, I started digging some more. I started sharing any moments I could find with excitement, and I started translating gay things more and more.

The community around me HATED it. They started arguing with me, smashing my dreams to the ground, telling me I was delusional because I wanted my OTP to be canon, and that Touhou couldn't be gay until ZUN said so. It didn't matter what I presented them with, it didn't matter that they were putting the goalpost behind the Line of Confirmation that ZUN was loathe to cross, nothing would ever change their minds. They NEEDED Touhou not to be gay. I started to grow angry and disillusioned, but I still thought I was stuck with them. I thought that was The Fandom. Where else could I go?

Not long after, a post about ShinGyoku appeared on Reddit, with a title like "The Genderfluid Embodiment of Yin and Yang." Given that ShinGyoku switches between Genderless, Male, and Female during the fight, Genderfluid seemed like a factually accurate descriptor to me. It was downvoted to 0 in seconds. Angry, I arrived to call it out because it was just a normal picture of ShinGyoku, and the bigotry couldn't have been more obvious. Unfortunately, very few people were on my side. The OP, as it turned out, didn't even speak English as their first language and didn't realize the word would have this kind of reaction. I yelled at people for berating them and I think the point that made me snap was when one of them shouted back, "if he didn't wanna get the shaft, he shouldn't have flung around bullshit Tumblr words like genderfluid."

Until that point, I had believed everything the people around me said about Tumblr, that it was a mega-feminist hellhole where rationality went to die and any men would be verbally shot on sight. As soon as that exchange took place, I started to suspect I was being lied to, and just to make sure, I went to Tumblr myself to check. Once there, I quickly realized it was just a normal place like any other and I became confused. Why was it so hated on Reddit and elsewhere?

Oh, it's because it's because it's full of Lesbians.

Awesome!

I started following people who posted about Touhou Lesbians, and pretty soon I realized there was a thriving LGBT Touhou community there. I hopped in readily and started hanging with the lesbians. I got exposed to trans people and their stories, nonbinary people and why they were valid (because I used to believe nonbinary genders were nonsense), and something I was not expecting to find at all, something which touched the very core of my soul:

Lesbian Shitposting.

It was amazing. It was so relatable. Not only was it pro-LGBT, the culture there was fat-positive, sex-positive, and other things I liked. This place and these people were such a better fit for me as a person that I quickly stopped visiting Reddit altogether, and my posting on Danbooru became sparse. I now had people to talk to about the things I loved in the way I loved to talk about them, and they AGREED with me. It was the time of my life.

Over time, my new friends would expose me to new ideas that I hadn't been exposed to before, including the fact that you don't need dysphoria to be trans. That second one began the cracking of my shell. I started to question myself, and before long, I admitted to myself that I was indeed transgender. It was scary, but it was liberating, and because of the time I'd spent nurturing friendships with people who would accept me for who I was, I made the leap. I'm much happier as a woman, and I've grown closer to my friends ever since.

...until one of them discovered what I'd done on Danbooru all the way up until that point.

A former mutual discovered my old postings attached to my new name and began whispering to everyone in my orbit that I was a freak, and while her claims are wildly exaggerated, she took pictures of my old comments and passed them around, taking some out of context for maximum damage, so people easily believed all of her claims.

I became a pariah. My new name that once freed me had now become poison. Just when I was at my most vulnerable, everyone I'd come to rely on turned on me aside from a handful of friends who knew I wasn't the person she claimed I was. Even when I ran to Twitter, she followed me and kept using CuriousCat's anonymous ask feature to continue to anonymously whisper about me. I ended up blocked for reasons I could not understand until I saw proof of her involvement. Nowhere was safe.

For most of the year of 2019, I hid. I locked my main account and began posting under an alias that my friends were privy to. It was safe, but it was hollow. I hated having to lie about who I was just to hide from her. I had gotten to be my most honest, authentic self at long last, and she took that away from me.

Things turned around for me when a friend of mine invited me to Grassroots Youkai Network, a discord for LGBT Touhou fans. Hoping to blunt the spread of any rumors, I came forward about what I'd done almost immediately, but also warned people not to trust the person harassing everyone. To my relief, people there understood that I had changed, and many of my friends, who had joined with me, backed me up. Finally, I'd found a place I could heal and get back on my feet.

Now having a space to interact with a large community on the regular, I wanted to keep spreading the cause of Gay Touhou, so I created the touhou-is-gay-culture Tumblr and the TouhouLesbians Twitter so I had an outlet that couldn't be stopped by Her.

Unfortunately, her influence was everywhere on Tumblr, and I gathered that the few people remaining there either thought she was a hero or lived in fear of her extremist views on Media Discourse and had been traumatized by her whisper campaigns as well. I was far from the only person she targeted, and as I was painfully aware, she was willing to tell any lie and exaggerate any inkling of wrongdoing to get people to see things her way.

The fact that many knew about her was small comfort. It didn't stop her from constantly flinging abuse at the Tumblr anonymously if I didn't toe her line unquestioningly. She made it so difficult to even log in that I stopped posting there and made the Twitter the main posting area. It suited me better anyway, as Twitter has better direct access to the Japanese fandom, and because She was terrorizing everyone, not many content creators remained on Tumblr for me to share from.

As 2019 came to a close, I got my mental health in check and earned a promotion to Moderator in Grassroots Youkai Network, becoming essentially the second-in-command to the new Head Moderator, where I remained for over a year. Being a moderator there was a joy and a comfort, and it gave me the peace of mind to get this account off the ground. I was bouncing back, and things looked better than ever.

Unfortunately, that too would end, because something darker was lurking beneath the surface that I had yet to conquer: I have a temper, and I still had a chip on my shoulder after all I'd been through.

I eventually became a magnet for conflict and controversy, and I am very bad at apologizing. One controversy led to the removal of my moderator status on GYN. The fact that this kept happening eventually led to my removal from GYN forever. Losing another home and feeling the lowest I'd ever felt, I drifted aimlessly again, but I wouldn't have to wait very long to find a new home that was even better than the last, and it was there I would make my most amazing discovery yet.

My best friend made an Anarchist Touhou Discord named Kirisame Info Shop (Link in the Banner) and I got the honor of being the first member she invited. Notably, this friend of mine is plural, something I'd known for years at this point, and one of the first things she did was add the PluralKit bot to the Discord, which would allow Systems to communicate more effectively as themselves. Seeing this, the first people I decided to help invite were Plural Systems themselves. Eventually, I bumped into someone I knew, and being surrounded by so many systems, they came out plural the next week.

Seeing how easy it was, I suddenly felt like maybe I was in denial myself, and it was time I stopped pretending, so as I lay in bed feverish from the COVID vaccine, I looked inside my head and asked, "is anyone in here with me?"

And someone replied. "Yeah. I'm here, Juni."

It was Lily White, a character I had grown close to in the process of writing a fanfic that centered on her story. We talked, we cried together, and we talked to our plural friends about what must be happening to us, and they confirmed it: we were a System just like them. Lily and I hugged each other and cried, because this meant we got to keep each other.

Before long, over the course of a month or two, every single character I had ever written ship content for started popping out of the fog, and they remembered all the good times we had together. In spite of all the turmoil from System Discovery and the amnesia and dissociation that resulted sometimes, we all eventually became very close friends. If anyone has noticed me becoming less and less aggressive, that's thanks to them. Just as I helped them get through her own troubles in my writing, they're helping me get through mine.

But in spite of all our newfound joy, the Twitter had fallen into disuse. Sixteen of us and counting, and not one among us wanted to run it. It gave us a strange sensation of dissociation each time we tried.

But of course. I had forgotten. There was still one headmate that had yet to settle in: Kosuzu, whose voice had always been the one we heard when we ran this account. When I looked for her, she was already right there waiting, as though she'd been knocking at the door for a very long time, and was overjoyed to finally come in and sit with all the others. Her friends were happy to see her. And she could not wait to get started. She put her name on the Twitter and is ready to start again.

We thank you all for staying with us through everything. We have changed so much that it has honestly astounded me many times over. Heading into the future, we hope we'll all have fun.