Why Trans People Love Touhou

It’s deeper than it sounds!

Sources:

http://androgynousanime.blogspot.com/2014/02/touhou-project-and-single-gender-world.html?m=1

https://magic.witchgirls.moe/2019/06/gay-girls-whom-danmaku.html

Let me start by stating the obvious fact that I’m not trying to say that a majority of Touhou fans are trans—that would be daft. I don’t think enough of us exist to single-handedly make a franchise nearly as popular as Touhou is, being one of the most prolific and widely-beloved vertical shooting franchises in existence, and easily the best-known of the bullet hell variety. I’m also not trying to say that most trans people like Touhou, as that would also be daft. Heart-stoppingly difficult shooter games are still a very niche hobby, and even though the music and its endless fan covers and the megalithic empire of fanmade artwork, comics, and games outstrip the popularity of the main-series titles by far, I would bet that a majority of my primarily anime-centric viewing audience regards the franchise as little more than a name they’ve heard a few times in passing, or gotten a vague idea of from someone they know who likes it.

All I am saying is that there seem to be a lot more trans people obsessed with Touhou than there are with, say, Mortal Kombat—which obviously still has trans fans, so please let’s all try and be as understanding about this as possible so I don’t have to keep writing this intro, capeesh?

Many of the reasons Touhou appeals to trans people are the same as why it appeals to anyone else—but I want to talk about why the trans experience might lead one towards favoring this franchise, even if there are multiple reasons to end up there. For instance, consider what is often cited as the core appeal of bullet hell games to begin with—the trance-like meditative state one must achieve to be able to get anywhere playing one.

Bullet hell games take up a whole lot of brain RAM. They are one-part memorization game and one-part test of reflexes. Making it to the end of one of these games your first time playing is almost unthinkable, and if you’re new to the games or the genre it will likely take you weeks, months, or even years of consistent play to master one of these sub-one-hour games. In the effort you will spend playing from the beginning over and over, you will most likely get past the point of having memorized the early levels and caught on to that game’s points system, which puts you on a whole new tactical and memorization path as you try to top your high scores on each stage en route to a finish which only keeps looking even farther off until your next breakthrough. If the gameplay wasn’t already occupying a gallon of brainspace just in what it hits you with visually and demands of your inputs, the music compounds that mental occupation with its winding, multi-layered and frequently arpeggiated keyboard melodies building to explosive hooks.

There are no shortage of reasons to seek the thrill of getting good at these games, but considering the intense and repetitive nature of the practice, it takes a certain mindset and mental capability to be the kind of person who would dedicate themselves to it. Speaking personally as a casual fan of bullet hell games, I have not yet spent enough time with any individual game to play it to completion above easy difficulty because I get my full-focus mental thrills from writing very fast. However, when I do play them, I still feel the appeal most strongly in how it demands the kind of flow state mental and physical connectivity that makes time fluctuate so that ten minutes of routine play feels like one you’ll forget happened, and one minute of unique play feels like ten that you’ll remember forever.

I think almost everyone desires to feel this way as often as we can for whatever reasons we can. Sex, roller coaster rides, drugs, sports, and engrossing media are all great examples of activities whose appeal is the ability to activate this kind of emotional and physical resonance. Those who find themselves with a very niche means of achieving that flow state—especially those choosing something which can only be done alone, or sometimes with one other person, like playing Touhou games—likely arrived at it through a rejection of the other hobbies I’ve listed.

Speaking personally, I have always struggled with a feeling of disconnect between my mind and body. I very easily dissociate from what I am actually doing and wander into my thoughts, which is why I end up spending so much time analyzing things. That disconnect has always made me clumsy and inattentive in a way that makes extremely physically involved performance difficult. The more I have to acknowledge my own body, the more I realize my discomfort within it, and feel frustrated at its inability to perform the tasks I want it to. I think this is true for a lot of people who prefer video games over sports as a way to engage physically with something to achieve a meditative state of consciousness. When the only involvement on my part is through my senses of sight and hearing, and all the physicality is focused on reflexively making tiny finger movements, it’s easy to completely forget that my body exists.

There are tons of reasons that I and many others are prone to physical and mental dissociation—poor diet, states of mental and physical exhaustion brought about by participating in society and/or dealing with other people, and recursively unupheld physical condition are but a few. Any number of causes may lead someone to this state of being, but it is a state very common to people dealing with gender dysphoria. And to be clear, suffering gender dysphoria doesn’t automatically make someone trans. The trans community tends to use the term ‘egg’ to refer to those dealing with gender dysphoria that have yet to understand or acknowledge it, and even many people who do acknowledge their gender dysphoria do not change the way that they identify nor make any attempt at transition, whether they choose to consider themselves trans or not. For instance, the author of Stop! Hibari-kun, an 80s manga about a trans girl in middle school and her family, has stated in interviews that he wishes he could’ve been born a girl, but does not indicate any desire to be identified as female, nor does he alter his gender presentation in any way—instead, he pours his feelings of femininity into his artwork.

This approach to body dysphoria also goes beyond gender dysphoria. Plenty of people admire or visualize themselves in more idealized forms during situations in which their imagination for how they could get get what they want supersedes their ability. Most people use at least their clothing to externalize some amount of their inner identity and to better feel that they are physically conveying something reflective of their mental state. Also, this is both a productive and a consumptive tendency. Not only do we try to reflect our mental state in what we project, but we hone that projection by consuming things which reflect the understanding we already have of our mental state. I can paint the picture of this cycle no better than by describing a Green Bay Packers fan wearing a Green Bay Packers team jersey while watching a Green Bay Packers American Football game. When that person stands up to cheer after their team scores a touchdown, they are in the same ouroboros of passion and expression as someone beating a kboss in their favorite game finally after practicing for a week. Or, you know, a Green Bay Packers player who just scored a touchdown after doing the same. All of them have been reinforcing their passion in a constant cycle in search of these moments of cathartic exaltation.

I am not saying that any of these people are necessarily in a state of dysphoria when outside of the flow state—almost everyone has a base level of normal comfort and functionality between flow state and dysphoria—but for plenty of reasons, there are those of us who tend to find ourselves at a base level of discomfort almost any time we have to acknowledge our physical presence in any way—which is hard not to do outside of the flow state, as our minds are enclosed and in the feelings of some, imprisoned within our bodies. Gender dysphoria might be considered a sub-category of body dysmorphia which manifests itself differently in different people at different times—but it is most easily diagnosable by a persistent feeling of discomfort over any gender-based acknowledgement of how one’s physical form doesn’t align with what their emotional experience tells them it should.

So when, say, you feel strange doing anything too physical because acknowledging your body is emotionally draining, and sitting around makes you feel even worse because it does that to everyone thanks to the way being alive and having a body is, you will likely tend to want to occupy your mind with something—and the more difficulty you have with acknowledging your physical presence, the more distraction is going to be required to keep you from doing so—which is something that keeping track of hundreds of projectiles, reacting instantly to constant threats, and listening to five layers of interwoven keyboard melodies at the same time can do for you.

So that explains the appeal of bullet hell games to people with dissociative tendencies—and with Touhou being among the most consistent, long-running and most-beloved of those, it’s not a surprise that it would have the biggest audience amid that community, meaning that more trans people would likely know about and be into it than other bullet hell franchises. However, this once again fails to account for how the ancillary material far outstrips the reach of the main-series games themselves, and how those elements are also extremely popular with trans people, even who don’t play the games at all, or, like myself, play them casually.

There are tons of reasons to be intrigued by the world and characters of Touhou, and no reason that a trans person wouldn’t resonate with all of them—but for the purposes of this video I’m going to stick to talking about just the aspects of it most relevant to the trans experience. For an excellent rundown of abundant reasons to love the franchise, I highly recommend reading the article “How Touhou Inspired Me To Live My Best Life,” by Alice D., which I will be citing from as I move forward. I will also be pulling some quotes from an article called “Touhou and the Single-Gender World,” by Asa Turney on the Androgyny in Animation blog.

One of the first things one is likely to notice about Touhou from any angle of entry is the style of character design, and the fact that almost all of the hundreds of named characters in the series are women. “There’s no explanation as to why it’s full of girls,” Asa Turney writes, “there’s no plot-related reason (...) and certainly no social statement behind it.” Nevertheless, she continues, “In this sort of world, (...) gendered stereotypes are impossible.  When every character is a girl, there is no way to look at one and assume, "This one is weak because she's a girl!"  "This one is emotional because she's a girl!"  That makes no sense.  Much like in a universally androgynous society, gender is rendered useless as a tool for descriptive identity or prescriptive assumption, and everyone instead gets characterized very individualistically.”

The author goes on to discuss the androgynous design of Wriggle Nightbug, and how many fans went out of their way to ascribe maleness to this character simply because her manner of dress is more tomboyish compared to the extremely frilly outfits more common to the series, and because people have a tendency to seek binaries wherever they seem possible. I personally was a newer Touhou fan right around when Wriggle was introduced, and quickly became obsessed with the character, collecting all of the then-scant fanart and wanting to see the route the fanbase would take with interpreting her—but she was not the first Touhou character I became so attached to for the impression of their androgyny.

Actually, from the beginning I had a tendency to think of androgyny as the sort of “default state” of Touhou characters, and not only for the lack of men in the series to contrast them with. In the world of anime, femininity tends to be coded heavily through sexuality, and most especially through breast size. As a person seeking a feminine identity but lacking breasts, I never found myself projecting onto female characters that had them—I felt reinforced in my identity by the acknowledgement that girls can be small and flat-chested and have self-assured or even somewhat masculine personality traits and still be identified as women—even though the anime community is almost certain to label these characters as tomboys or reverse traps, or anything else which suggests subversion in their feminine identity.

My Touhou fandom began as a singular aesthetic obsession with the character Remilia Scarlet. The artwork which drew me to her tended to be on the brooding and cool side, often depicting her over oceans of blood, or on a full-moon backdrop, and with a dark expression in her face. When I played the fighting game Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, I was reintroduced to her as more of a haughty and intelligent but very self-absorbed brat, which I could still connect with even if it hadn’t been what I expected from the character. When I found Konpaku Youmu, I saw in her characterization something closer to what I’d originally sought in art of Remilia—someone more self-serious, silent and diligent, and more defined by her swordsmanship than by happening to wear a dress.

Suffice it to say that what I liked about the girls in Touhou is that the only thing that really registers them as definitionally feminine is that they are identified as women and dressed in feminine attire. This is why Wriggle Nightbug, who wears even more boyish clothes while still being identified as a woman appealed to me instantly as well—I wanted the representation of someone who identifies as female in spite of how they may look or dress. Even now that I have transitioned and started wearing clothes made for women, my manner of dress still falls largely into the comfortable and free-moving category, because I don’t see womanhood as a direct correlation to the amount of femininity which one displays outwardly, and I like to be comfortable.

As Alice D. puts it, the characters “all dress in intensely powerful feminine aesthetics pulling from a variety of sources, mixing traditional Japanese, Chinese, 19th century European, and contemporary styles together into what I can only describe as "high-femme tomboy." (...) the clothes nail that particular aesthetic while also being useful and easy to move around in. The petticoats (...) cut off at the knee and they'll often wear short-sleeved shirts so they can have the freedom of movement to get messy with everyday chores and duels. Try to think about it: if you wanted to wear frilly clothes every day, for absolutely everything, from dawn until dusk, what features in your outfit might you want to make it comfortable? Touhou's aesthetic constantly asks that question.” While I couldn’t have put it into words so easily, this was also one of the first things I noticed about the Touhou characters—they look comfortable. None of them is wearing clothes which conform to their body in an attempt to emphasize their physical features. For all the frills and femininity in the costumes, they aren’t usually especially complicated, and have an amount of roominess to them where you could see how the characters might want to fight or even sleep in them.

Practical femininity in dress is something that media and marketing have taken away from us in the push towards instead encouraging the constant purchase and release of an endless stream of hardly-practical cheap and disposable items that reflect current trends or have an immediate aesthetic appeal. As someone not raised under the expectation of wearing women’s clothes as a matter of course, or having peers to take influence from in the way I dressed growing up, I have come into women’s fashion holistically from the outside and been forced to approach fashion from a more logic-based than culturally-based standpoint, finding that clothes which are both practical to my lifestyle and appealing to my aesthetic sensibilities are extant, but uncommon—and so I am in solidarity with Alice D. in her appreciation of how the Touhou universe posits an almost endless number of ways that one can look comfortable and cute at once.

Another factor in this equation is the almost total lack of sexuality present in the official media for the franchise—and the extreme abundance of sexuality in the fan content. When I began feeling gender dysphoria in my teens, I was also first experiencing consistent sexual urges, and it made the presentation of sexuality in media incredibly confusing. Even though I was supposedly male and certainly attracted to women, I could not relate to any presentation of male sexuality in media. For a long time I exclusively sought sexual content between androgynous women, with a total aversion to maleness in sexual content as it intensified my feelings of dysphoria. This tendency lead perfectly into the Touhou fandom, which delivered an endless stream of lesbian sex between androgynous characters.

If you know Touhou fandom well then you know that there is much, much, much more to how it has explored sexuality, as different fans represent their own sexual interests using the characters—however, this level of multifarious representation is only invited by the setting in how it answers so few questions about sexuality in the first place. There are some characters who are suggested to have romantic interests and attachments within the series, but for the most part there is almost nothing to suggest a specific sexual identity for any of the characters.

On that note, Touhou is in general a series steeped in extreme vagary. Most of the characters only have a few lines of dialog and description offered in the main-series games, and they tend to communicate in cryptic, pithy one-liners that barely hint at any kind of personality. You can extrapolate some things from their designs and bullet patterns as well, and the fandom has done so to a degree which practically means rewriting the story; but most of the official comics and games tend to be more plot-driven and don’t try to dive too much into the relationships of the characters. The fanon has always been a bit of a free-for-all of character interpretation. The series creator, ZUN, has pointedly made almost no effort to correct or direct interpretations of the characters, leading to a mentality among fans of the series to simply collect what they consider personally favorable takes on the characters into an individualized canon established in their own minds.

When you spend a lot of time trying to understand why you don’t feel right inside of your body, and trying to discover what might be considered the definitional aspects of gender and personhood, you will likely come to realize the incredibly vagary of those things in practice. Media and marketing tend to favor a lowest-common-denominator definition of any aspect of humanity, and is the largest source of information that many of us have to go on for what people are like at large, not having met or observed hundreds of thousands of people in doing our own research. When we find a more complex and nuanced impression of what gender and personhood mean than what is conveyed in mainstream media, it tends to lead us toward seeking representations that more accurately reflect our understanding of the world in niche media—and so as a trans person, almost innately challenged to find representation beyond the bell curve of human experience, it can be a real challenge to find media which reflects our understanding and experiences.

In its vagary, Touhou doesn’t presume too much about the reality of our world. It is, after all, set in an alternate world that is home to things which would be considered too weird to plausibly exist in ours. Most of the characters are demons, fairies and deities with unimaginable powers and incredible lifespans. None of them is, strictly speaking, all that similar to anyone who might consume the franchise—and yet, in their intensely specific peculiarities, many people can find threads to grasp more powerfully than they might ever get from mainstream properties—and thanks to the vagary of the storytelling, there isn’t as likely to be another character trait that nullifies their ability to connect.

In the thirteenth main-series Touhou game, Ten Desires, we are introduced to the first canonically-transgendered character in the series in its final boss, Toyosatomimi no Miko. Specifically, she was born as the mythologized real-life sixth-century politician Prince Shoutoku, and chose to reincarnate in a contemporary feminine form in Gensokyo. Alice D. writes of this character, “nobody in Gensokyo takes issue with the knowledge that she at one point identified as masculine. While the word "transgender" isn't used explicitly, Miko makes no effort to "go stealth," discussing her masculine life with frankness, invoking her past accomplishments and even her former name as a power-move against her opponents. Simply put, you cannot make her feel ashamed of herself over it. It's very, very easy for such a character to feel tokenizing or "missing the point," but to me, she embodies an aspirational power fantasy: to live in a world where one doesn't have to deny their past, and can actually view the changes they've made to their selves and bodies as sources of true pride to put on display. Miko is proud of herself in a way that feels genuine and sincere, and within the stories of Touhou, she is allowed to take an incredible amount of initiative and to make her presence known in ways that feel meaningful to the series and plotlines at large. By allowing her to take such pivotal roles, in ways that feel meaningful, she moves well beyond any fears of tokenization and becomes truly awesome in her own right.”

Honestly, there is little reason to think that Miko is the only trans character in Touhou—and indeed plenty of people have their own headcanons about the characters and their gender identities—but the fact that the one direct representation of transness in the series is so well-presented definitely empowers the feeling of trans-inclusivity from the series.

Supposing that one does not limit themselves to connecting with characters that share their purported gender, there is little reason that men couldn’t connect with many of these characters as well, and plenty of them do. Aside from trans women dressing like the characters, I have seen more cross-gendered cosplay of Touhou characters than I have from any other franchise. After all, unless you want to dress as the one dude in the series who barely registers as a character, the only way to represent your fandom of the series in costume is to dress like a girl—and I have always been impressed with the comfort Touhou fans have in doing so, even if it’s just for the memes.

And that brings me to the last point I want to make, which is the intensely memetic culture surrounding the franchise. Being into something as specifically particular as Touhou at anything beyond a casual appreciation puts you into a certain category of person. It takes a lot of single-minded devotion to get obsessed with a franchise whose main series games take a ton of time investment to play well, and which is otherwise only engaged with by way of actively seeking fan content that is scattered and often buried all over the internet and comic markets. As such, there is a kind of innate camaraderie in being a Touhou fan that creates a disparate sense of community—like hundreds of bullets moving collectively in a particular pattern, but rarely touching. Even if you know it’s extremely unlikely for any two fans to have the exact same understanding and appreciation of the franchise as a whole, you also know that just being invested in the series means that you have something powerful in common that most people don’t share—and there is a comfort in occupying that kind of space. When I have attended Touhou panels at anime conventions, for instance, I have rarely felt so much like everyone in the room automatically understood each-other to the degree that they could feel comfortable discussing the different things that they care about within the Touhou umbrella.

There is probably an endless amount to be said about the appeal of the Touhou franchise, and I’ve only even scratched the surface of how deeply I know different fans to connect with different aspects of the franchise. I would love to read your comments about what Touhou means to you, and I hope that this video has helped you to understand some of the reasons that it appeals do strongly to its trans audience in particular. Make sure to check out the Anime Alphabet series if you want to hear more of my long-form analytical writing about anime, and subscribe to Branches of Ygg where I release two videos every week reviewing music, interviewing artists and hosting my own music as well. Support me on Substack for bonus aeticles and podcasts, or on Patreon, or by donating to goldenwitchfire on Cashapp or Venmo. You can also find me as goldenwitchfire on twitter, instagram, and tiktok. I’ve been Trixie the Golden Witch reminding you to never forget: anime forever!