There was some good and bad with the Touhou panel.
Good: I thought the overall history about Touhou was fair. math4origami started with the doujin conventions which led to ZUN, then to aspects about the games created and the heroines and youkai. Overall, I think it flowed well enough and made sense. He did a very good explanation of the more prevalent memes in the fandom and also showed bits of the Chen Touhou M-1 Grand Prix as well as Gensokyo Call & Response. One of the more useful things math4origami went over was elaborating on ZUN's recent statement regarding commerical vs doujin products using his works. I think he explained it pretty well and that's what I got the most out of the entire panel.
Bad: The crowd was a bit rowdy, but that's not really unexpected. Text on the powerpoint slides was too small in general. Projector mishaps while trying to load EoSD was unfortunate, but I realize that having to get some actual gameplay in was important to the presentation. With the presentation itself, he covered all the aspects of the Touhou fandom like the doujin comics, games, and music, but I felt he spent a little too much time on explaining the memes. Even though the explanations were good, it seemed to indicate that memes seemed to be one of the primary drivers of the fandom. I think it should have been more balanced with perhaps having some more solid examples of the other things: actual doujinshi on hand and maybe playing a few remixes for the audience. While the crowd loved Gensokyo Call & Response, there wasn't really an explanation of why it was noteworthy or what was even going on with the clip.
I think if I had attended the panel without knowing about Touhou at all, I would have gotten the explanation as to how Touhou became popular, but not really understood WHY Touhou is popular. I would have understood that things like Niconico deleting videos with licensed footage would have caused a greater proliferation of Touhou vids as a result, but I wouldn't know why it had to be Touhou over something else like Vocaloid or iDOLM@STER. And I wouldn't have really understood why things like an IOSYS flash helped spread Touhou's popularity, only that it did. However, that in itself is probably an extensive topic that really can't be covered in an introductory panel about Touhou and without lots of debate. For what it's worth, I think math4origami had a good presentation layout that accomplished explaining "What the Heck is Touhou" and I gotta give props for that as well as running the show solo. I don't really recall too many people leaving the panel in the middle and there were at least 200 attendees there.
And he also gave a shout out to some of the prevalent Western fansites and imageboards including Shrinemaiden. So to any newcomers, welcome to the forums.
