#touhou manga

[abluehappyface]

Made a colored in version of a Ladies of the Scarlet Devil Mansion panel based on the colored in Lotus Eaters panels @blubblubisdead2me does! I really like how it looks considering this my first panel I've ever colored! I decided to make Meiling's outfit red because I've always thought that Meiling would look good in red (and I was right.) This took AGES oh my gosh. I'm trying to figure out what kind of "style" this looks like, but tbh it's too detached from any one style to be categorized. I guess that's how you truly know a style is yours lmao

[moose-goosey]

Okina during Cheating Detective Satori

[godiscommitingtaxfraud]

Finally gonna post those hand-drawn sketches I mentioned

This one’s the Touhou ones, under the cut because they’re a bunch (part I)

The satori Sisters

Hell raven (also, biggest sketch I’ve done)

Kotohime and Sunny milk

Kanako and Hisami

Okina and Enoko

Chiyari and Keiki

[secretlykoishi]

A rant about Foul Detective Satori/Cheating Detective Satori

Sorry, this will be long, but I have a lot of thoughts I need to get out. Spoilers abound.

I really tried to like this series. I defended it for awhile, and I thought it couldn't be as bad as SSiB, my previous least favorite Touhou official manga. As one might expect from my name and pfp, I am very attached to the Komeiji siblings. I also really love mysteries, especially if they're murder mystery themed like this one. But I found myself enjoying it less and less as it went on, and Chapter 29 finally killed the series for me. I'm so disappointed by how Satori is treated in the series named after her. You would think that being the titular character might make her at least A main character, but she's not even a secondary character. She's practically a glorified extra, which sucks because her ability that previous caused her to be hated by everyone in-universe could have been used to show her becoming loved for the exact same reason. Even worse is that the series is now fighting for who actually can be a main character between like five different people, and none of them are the titular character. Yeah, it was great seeing Flandre again, but why is she still playing such a large role in this when it's moved so far past the Scarlet Devil Mansion?

And as much as I love Reimu and Marisa, I can't deny that they are quite possible the WORST characters to lead a mystery story. They have no interest in figuring out the why, the how, the who, any of the things that make a mystery compelling. They just want to end the incident and be done with it. That works fine for games where it's not trying to build up a mysterious and tense atmosphere, but for something that's meant to be a mystery story, I can't help but wonder why they're so involved. Especially since this manga is probably the worst offender of a trend I've noticed recently of Reimu canonically losing at pretty much everything.

Characterization also started out pretty strong. We saw Reimu and Marisa being concerned about those around them instead of just themselves. Flandre was given interesting character shading that made her seem less violently unhinged and more of a standoffish devil-may-care kind of anti-hero. Orin was in the story at all (seriously, how long has she been tied to that damn tree!), and Satori was an active and key player at first. Now, Reimu and Marisa are in this pretty much just for themselves (which circles back to my previous point), Flandre has fully reverted into pure fanon characterization, actively UNDOING development she had (and don't worry, undone progress is going to be commented on more). And Satori is a glorified extra, which is insulting not only because the series is called Foul/Cheating Detective Satori, and not only because she's the only character who seemingly IS interested in the who, the what, the why, the how, and so on. And, she's the only one with a decent chance of solving things. It would be so much more interesting to see this from her perspective.

While it's not really here as much anymore, when the artist switched, I noticed a lot of very out-of-place comedy for a story that seems like it's trying to present itself seriously. I know comedy is nothing new to Touhou, but the story had established itself as a far more dramatic and serious story with the first artist, and I don't think it's unreasonable to want the same tone to carry throughout an entire story so it can be consistent.

Of course, what hasn't stopped is the awful pacing. This story has such a huge issue with padding that it genuinely makes me sad. It's gotten to the point of actively undoing progress, possibly best demonstrated in the most recent chapter (chapter 29 at the time of writing). The story drags itself out for so long that any time progress is made, you'd better not expect it to stay, because it WILL change anything before that progress means anything, and then we're back to square one. Like, for example, how we finally figured out who was possessed (Kyouko) only for the pacing to drag on so long for no good reason that it changed before that information could mean anything. Even more insulting, the person now possessed is the titular character, who by all accounts, should have been the story's heroine.

I also can't get into The Jailbreak King at all. I mentioned before that Silent Sinner in Blue was my previous least favorite official Touhou manga. There are two reasons for that, both present here. One is the aforementioned pacing and padding, and the other is the ridiculously OP antagonists. Yorihime made me enraged with how ridiculously flawless she was, as she was completely untouchable. The new villain Mizuchi is that but worse. She is pretty much entirely invulnerable and always 10 steps ahead of everyone. This could make for a good mystery premise if we got to slowly chip away at that lead, but again, the pacing and padding makes that impossible. Not to mention all the lore it messes up (like the most powerful youkai in the setting being incredibly easy to possess), or the fact that it makes no sense why Mizuchi can get away with possessing one of the sages and no one is particularly bothered by it.

I can't even be mad about the premise. It is such a cool premise. Like I said, a character who is hated in-universe by everyone for her ability to read minds because people are creeped out about it is now the only one with a chance to resolve a mystery that threatens pretty much everyone. It's a chance for redemption for her. It's her chance to prove that her ability isn't a bad thing to people that aren't herself. And if anything, is also a way to potentially prove that to her sister, who closed her third eye and shut off her emotions because of the hatred that she received from the people who hated them. Satori was literally the only one capable of figuring this out and solving this mystery in a timely manner that kept people safe. But between being demoted to extra and the pacing and padding being so awful, that I can't really see happening anymore. And now that she's become a victim in her own story, I don't think it's realistically possible for that opportunity to come again at this point. It took what could have been a really good premise, a really good mystery with a really good redemption for a character in universe was hated by everyone, potentially giving her the chance to finally be loved by people for the very reason that they hated her, and it fucking threw it in a garbage can and set that garbage can on fire.

So, yeah, all in all? I'm super disappointed by this series.

[michaelmac6072]

Something that crossed my mind when perusing the latest Touhou manga chapters is that I think ZUN often has difficulty making events flow naturally from one to another, and to cover for it, he ends up overwriting a lot of expository stuff that slows things down and takes up precious real-estate in the stories he wants to tell. It's kind of evident in the meme that most Touhou games are 4 stages of beating up randos followed by only 2 stages of people actually related to the incident, but I think a better point of comparison would between the latest chapter of CDS, where Reimu stays at Myouren temple, and the Sanae-san is On the Run doujin by WaHH artist Aya Azuma, where Sanae does the same thing. Both cover the same beats, with a shrine maiden getting an intro to the Buddhists and life at their temple, but Azmaya is able to cover a lot more ground in a lot less space than ZUN did.

More below the cut -- lots of manga pages and spoiler warnings for both comics. As a side note, I wanted to try using colored text to help break up all the black & white and make things easier to follow, but I apologize if it's distracting.

In Detective Satori, our first mention of the Myouren temple is in the end of chapter 23 as the place Reimu and presumably Satori suspect Mizuchi is at next, and so we spend the tail end of that chapter with several pages of establishing panels of the Myouren crew there before Reimu arrives confronting Kyouko, all without dialogue.

Come chapter 24, we begin with... more establishing panels of the Myouren crew doing day-to-day activities, this time accompanied by dialogue and mean-spirited titles, presumably assigned to them by either Reimu or Aya.

We don't even get to see Reimu's request to stay at the temple until page 10 of this chapter, and even then it is only indirectly through Ichirin's mention. By the time we get to Reimu on page 12, she's grouchily preparing a vegetarian meal at the temple before re-affirming to herself her desire to catch Mizuchi here -- which is something we already know from last time, about 18 total pages ago.

After this, that's the last we see of Reimu throughout the chapter - the rest is spent catching up with Aya and Marisa, which also isn't segued smoothly and instead relies on a cut to a couple pages of Kogasa's antics in the graveyard before Aya and Marisa chime in and discuss their own reasons for being there.

I could go on and post more pages from the chapter, but you get the point. The issue here is that there's no transition between these scenes -- rather than link these events together in any logical way, ZUN relies on lots of establishing material as filler to act as a buffer between separate events. You can see how it would be easy to join all this stuff together smoothly without so much establishment, which would give the meat of this thriller story some much-needed real estate. If you don't want to portray the scene where Reimu requests to stay, have ch. 24 begin with Reimu already prepping stuff at the temple, complete with the same grumblings about their lifestyle. From there, the action could driven by her interactions with some of the Buddhist crew -- not necessarily all of them, given the nature of the situation and the tension you want to preserve, but at least one or two of them. Then you can cut either cut to outside and have Aya and Marisa spy on or interrogate Kogasa, or even better, have Aya appear in a window and chat with Reimu, then you can have Marisa spot them from above and swoop in, and then they could all trade notes. Even if we are generous and give the Myouren temple the 5 pages of establishment it has at the end of chapter 23, there's no reason to do so much of it again at the start of chapter 24 and again again with Kogasa during its middle unless you're either deliberately padding things out, struggling for segues, or deliberately padding things out because you're struggling for segues.

Contrast this with Azmaya's comic. Here, the on-the-run Sanae meets Byakuren on the road after Reimu's attempts to exploit the spat between Sanae and her gods backfires. Byak good-naturedly offers her a place to stay after helping her clear up the aftermath of that.

From there, Sanae gets a crash course from Ichirin on the Buddhists' lifestyle, which she also grumbles about for the same reasons as Reimu, but comes to admire in her own way...

...before catching Ichirin and the others cheating on their discipline and storming out of the temple in betrayed frustration!

I would argue that more happens in just these 7 pages with Sanae here than in over 15 pages of CDS with Reimu. Azmaya's able to establish the Myouren temple as the next destination for Sanae in only a page or so, and the ascetic training there is conveyed efficiently in a training montage for Sanae, rather than two separate multi-page exposition scenes of the Myouren crew going through their daily routines. By the time we've reached 12 pages from the start of this chapter here -- where in CDS we were just beginning to see Reimu reacting to temple life -- Sanae's getting squabbled over by Shou as part of an effort to keep Sanae from damaging the temple's reputation.

I know CDS and this doujin have very different aims, and I know scripting a comic and handing it off to another artist leaves some artifacting that doing everything yourself does not. That said, Azmaya's comic had so much less fat on it than ZUN's, and a large part of that comes from how ZUN doesn't link events together well and so constantly re-establishes them, whereas Azmaya's events flow naturally from one another. Sanae at the was out in the village trying to gather embarrassing flyers Reimu made of her, and with Byakuren being a prominent figure there, it's highly plausible the two would meet up coincidentally. This conceit acts as a springboard for everything that happens in this chapter, whose ending in turn acts as a springboard for Shou to chase after her in the next chapter, which itself springboards into further events easily. There's a little re-establishment at the start of the chapter -- it is a serial -- but it's very casual. There's no starting and stopping like there constantly is in CDS: everything builds upon each other with grace and ease in a way that keeps the story going. And because of this constructive structure, Sanae can go through the same beats with Byakuren here that Reimu did in CDS in a much more efficient number of manga panels.

[fungifungifun]

luna's simple recipe for fukimiso

[anueutsuhos-touhou-profiles]

Kosuzu Motoori:

Kosuzu Motoori is the girl who runs Suzunan, a bookstore on the outskirts of the Human Village. It contains all kinds of books in every language, all abandoned by the outside world or brought in by humans unfortunate enough to be gapped in.

More interestingly, it contains far too many Youma books: books written by youkai and/or contain youkai sealed within. Cursed tomes, basically. These books can't be read by normal humans, but Kosuzu is special. She has the superpower (how she got it is unknown) to read anything in any language. She doesn't actually know every language, however, so she can't write in them.

Unfortunately, many youkai, most notably Mamizou Futatsuiwa, have taken an interest in Kosuzu because of this. Thankfully, so have Reimu and Marisa, who intend to keep an eye on her for as long as they need to in order to prevent her from misusing the Youma books or allowing them to fall into the wrong hands.

Kosuzu Motoori is the main character of the manga Forbidden Scrollery, which lasted from 2012 to 2017. Even though this girl only appears in the manga, ZUN still composed a theme song for her, called The Bibliophile with the Deciphering Eye: https://youtu.be/i0Wt3lN7-mk

Kosuzu is a naive and curious girl, who charges headfirst into danger. Yet she's also easily scared and can't handle the danger of youkai. She's very interested in the youma books she has, to the extent of completely losing interest in her normal books. She starts the series as ignorant of the true nature of Gensokyo as any human, but slowly finds out, through the youkai who visit her, the true level of interdependence between humans and youkai in Gensokyo. Humans should be scared of youkai since youkai do eat people, but youkai need that fear to continue existing, and thus have actually saved the Human Village from natural disasters and plagues.

Kosuzu's age is unknown, but she's only slightly younger than Hieda no Akyuu, who is 27, so early-mid 20s is the best bet. She lives with her parents, but we never see them onscreen.

Among the youma books in Kosuzu's possession, she has a book containing the smoke and fire youkai Enera, a book which sealed a demonic serpent, a set of cursed love letters, and, most importantly: the  Night Parade of 100 Demons Picture Scroll. This is a scroll containing a massive number of tsukumogami of all shapes and sizes, as well as a demon resembling a giant black cattle skeleton. Youkai night parades are a common concept in Japanese folklore, by the way. This is very important later. Since youkai started taking an interest in her, Aya Shameimaru the tengu convinced her to start selling her Bunbunmaru newspaper.

Oh and she has the Japanese edition of the Necronomicon.

Unlike Kasen, who cynically views Reimu as first and foremost a lazy good-for-nothing to the point of forgetting all the good she does for Gensokyo, Kosuzu views Reimu idealistically as a brave savior of Gensokyo's humans from the evil youkai. This goes to the extent that part of the reason she acts so careless with her youma books is that she expects Reimu or Marisa to solve the problem easily should it arise. She learns later on that the truth is far more complicated, but she ends the manga admiring Reimu as ever.

Her relationship with Mamizou is an interesting one. While Mamizou initially just wanted to get the Night Parade Picture Scroll out of her, and to manipulate her into distributing pro-tanuki propaganda through her bookstore, Mamizou's mature attitude and general confidence caused Kosuzu to admire her, saying she'd like to be just like Mamizou when she grew older. When Kosuzu finally found out she was a tanuki the whole time, she was mentally shattered. She started becoming paranoid about just how deep youkai influence in Gensokyo went. This, combined with what she knew about youkai preventing natural disasters, led her to begin wondering if youkai were bad or good.

She asked Akyuu, Reimu, and Marisa, and they all gave very bad answers that basically amounted to "youkai aren't bad, but you need to lie to yourself and say they are".

Eventually, she found out about how many youkai interacted with Reimu and Marisa on a regular basis, and started panicking. She didn't know what to do or who to trust.

At this point, Yukari Yakumo appeared to her, and appeared to offer a solution. This resulted, however, in Kosuzu becoming possessed by the Night Parade Picture Scroll and going on a rampage, attacking Marisa.

Reimu and Mamizou reluctantly joined forces to defeat Kosuzu as she was. Reimu figured out Yukari was behind it and went to go face her, while Mamizou took on Kosuzu. Mamizou did take care to spare Kosuzu's life, but only because Reimu demanded she do so. She used her tanuki armies to deal with the little tsukumogami, and separate Kosuzu from the scroll, leaving only the cattle skeleton demon to deal with.

Mamizou remembered that the Night Parade Picture Scroll specifically depicted a large gang of youkai partying all night long, and so stopped the monster of the scroll by turning into the sun! Of course, she did take the Night Parade scroll for her own ends. She's not really a good person, after all.

Eventually, Kosuzu and her friend Akyuu were invited to a big party at the Hakurei Shrine, where Mamizou, Aya, and a whole bunch of other past Touhou characters were. Reimu and Marisa decided to stop lying to her and invite her into the "inner circle" of people who know how Gensokyo really works.

Reimu herself had to be reminded of it from Yukari, who lectured her without struggle when Reimu faced her. Reimu's job is not to commit youkai genocide. It turns out Yukari's solution for Kosuzu's conflict was to turn Kosuzu into a youkai, cause her to cause an incident, Reimu was supposed to defeat her in non-lethal spellcard duel, and then they'd hang out at the shrine together like so many other youkai Reimu faced off against in the past. While it didn't quite work as Yukari expected, since Kosuzu was freed from the possession, it still worked out in the end.

Now Kosuzu lends books to both humans and youkai, though she personally evaluates people to see if they deserve youma books. She also dreams of one day being able to fight in spellcards against or with Reimu some day.

Kosuzu is loosely based on the real life Edo period scholar Norinaga Motoori. The book store Suzunan is based on Suzunoya, his personal study room.

Oh, and Kosuzu's name means "little bell". Ko being "little". You can see the bells in her hair. They jingle whenever she walks and it's adorable.

[william-o]

I have been peer pressured to get back to reading touhou manga and my life is also on the line.

[glow-youyoumu]

Hey! I've made a spreadsheet listing all official Touhou media (games, music, and manga by chapter) according to release date. Please feel free to make a copy of your own to help you keep track of what you still need to look at! There's also Steam links for applicable games. You can also listen to ZUN's music on Spotify if you want to support its official release.

If you want to redistribute an edited version of this sheet, please feel free; a link back is appreciated but not required :) And if you notice any inaccuracies in the sheet, please let me know!

*I sourced most of this information from the Touhou Wiki.

[honeylizabeth]

I got back into drawing on clip studio because it's just too confy, although I haven't decide on whether I'm paying for the upgrade to 2.0 or not. I just wanted to draw something on it, saw I had this saved, forgot the entire context, but decided to redraw it anyways.

Also, got my hand injured by day 6 of drawtober so i kicked it altogether. It was so painful i couldn't even pick a fork. But now I'm better.

[urumiushizaki]

are you ready???? Redraw of an old piece!

[relatablepicturesoftouhou]

[dailyfigures]

Cirno ; Touhou Project ☆ FuRyu

[rartorata]

i appreciate the initiative, Patchy, but i don't think you're beating anything out of anyone

[thefoilguy]

Reisen Udongein Inaba from Touhou Project - Aluminum Foil Sculpture