What do you want to never happen in Touhou?

[Tengukami]

This is the exact reason why I'm against voice acting. I think voice and speech are half of a character's personality.

What? You mean you wouldn't want to see Aya Hirano voice acting as Reimu in Touhou 14?

*ducks*

[Zil]

Sorry about the difficulty talk, I didn't meant to almost start a discussion.

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not. I feel like when it comes to difficulty people start arguing about it and not much progress gets made, which is why I was reluctant to say more about it than I did. I guess it's a fine thing to talk about on it's own, though this particular thread would be pretty derailed by it.

On topic: I wouldn't have expected people to be against further character development.

[M M]

What? You mean you wouldn't want to see Aya Hirano voice acting as Reimu in Touhou 14?

*ducks*

I'd be fine with her as Tenshi :smug:

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not. I feel like when it comes to difficulty people start arguing about it and not much progress gets made, which is why I was reluctant to say more about it than I did. I guess it's a fine thing to talk about on it's own, though this particular thread would be pretty derailed by it.

On topic: I wouldn't have expected people to be against further character development.

I wasn't ^^
I feel pretty bad when I accidentally derail a thread.

[trancehime]

On topic: I wouldn't have expected people to be against further character development.

People seem to enjoy molding the Touhou characters to fit their own fantasies, is the thing

What? You mean you wouldn't want to see Aya Hirano voice acting as Reimu in Touhou 14?

*ducks*

that was terrible and you should feel bad. :colbert:

[haoreos2]

On topic: I wouldn't have expected people to be against further character development.

Almost everything in Touhou is practically designed for maximum potential for fan contributions. The vague, often volatile personalities are no different.
This means that the fandom has a relatively large role in providing the delicious entertainment, unlike a novel or tv series wherein the content is near-exclusively provided by the author or writers.
For the latter media, character development is great; without it, characters seem shallow and often peripheral.
In this type of series, however, the fandom takes it upon themselves to flesh out characters, settings and what have you. Each person will ascribe their own interpretations to their works, creating nuances that make the work differ from any other, to whatever degree. When people are looking for new touhou works to enjoy, they can pick and choose from a variety, and if they decide work X doesn't suit them, they can look elsewhere.
If there was further character development, then there would be a "correct" interpretation. A lot of works wouldn't happen, or would be substantially different, because deviating from definite canonical characterisations and events is often avoided by people, especially the ones who tend to do a lot of research, which are often the ones that produce the most enjoyable fanworks.
People can make their own works as detailed as they like- explaining the minutae of a character's personality, and the mechanics of their powers, as it stands in their setting. Because it's not going against anything from canon, people can freely accept it.

I'd go so far as to say most people who're in the Touhou crowd for the story aren't getting most of it from ZUN's works; he provides the skeleton of works, and the hordes of talented folks out there build their own works from that.
Give people the basics and they make whatever they want; a lot of it is boring, redundant, unimaginitive or poorly structured, but a lot of it is brilliant. Like minecraft.
Give them a detailed, clearly defined product and they'll be interested for a week, then get bored and move on. Like an FPS. Zing!

<Achievement unlocked: semi-coherent sleep-deprived rambling post without proof reading. Aww yeeaah.>

[trancehime]

Almost everything in Touhou is practically designed for maximum potential for fan contributions. The vague, often volatile personalities are no different.

It's a series of shmups, that kind of comes WITH the territory. You rarely ever see any shmup with fleshed out characters or anything resembling a developed story.

Most of the interest comes from the character designs, and that is what brought about the fan contributions. Common shmup design principles put flavor and plot on the back-burner while emphasizing gameplay, music and bullet patterns. Which is what ZUN has mostly succeeded in. The "maximum potential" was a complete byproduct of the development process.

[Desu_Cake]

On the other hand, for a shmup, Touhou characters have huge amounts of development. As a rule, that sort of game will have prety much all the bosses with about as much characterisation as nameless midbosses, with possibly the final boss getting a line or two of dialogue. With Touhou, everyone's had a name since PCB, most of them have a good few lines of dialogue, there's always plenty of characterization in the endings, and that's not even going near any of the written works.
I certainly wouldn't like to see any less character development, but I wouldn't mind seeing more.

[Tengukami]

I was under the impression that two factors set Touhou apart as far as shmups go, and contribute to it having the doujin base that it does:

1. The official works which do provide character development, background, and story.
2. ZUN's relatively lax attitude about attributions and fair use.

I think both of these work to encourage fanworks.

[trancehime]

I think both of these work to encourage fanworks.

This is true, but haoreos' post seemed to me like he was trying to imply that ZUN intentionally make it that way. Which I sincerely doubt.

[haoreos2]

While I can see why you would read it that way, that wasn't what I meant.

Almost everything in Touhou is practically designed for maximum potential for fan contributions.

I'm assuming you read that in the sense "Almost everything in Touhou is designed for maximum potential for fan contributions in a practical manner".
I intended the "practically designed" to be read in the emphatic sense. Like "I don't want to come back to that restaurant. The soup was practically frozen"; I.E, the soup was cold, rather than being solid for all practical purposes.

[trancehime]

I'm assuming you read that in the sense "Almost everything in Touhou is designed for maximum potential for fan contributions in a practical manner".
I intended the "practically designed" to be read in the emphatic sense.

I actually read it as "Almost everything in Touhou is intentionally designed to be that way" with the operative word being intentional >_> So, I read it as how I said I read it.

And I did get that after I posted it.