Stop saying that you are terrible at Touhou.
I have been on these forums for almost a month now and the one thing that I keep seeing are people saying that they're terrible at the Touhou STGs.
People who are capable of consistently 1ccing the games on Normal+ difficulty. People who are trying to time out cards that are fiendishly difficult. People who don't start having trouble with Normal difficulty until 90 FPS playspeed. People attempting to No Miss No Bomb clear Lunatic. People who are trying for the world record and are upset because they cleared Lunatic with only five hundred million points.
In short, REALLY GOOD PLAYERS.
Right now, I am terrible at Touhou. I take that back, I just pulled this out of nowhere and while it's still not very good it's a lot better than I usually do when I try that sort of thing. I have difficulty reaching the endgame of all of the STGs on Normal. I can't get past Murasa on any difficulty, even with Credit Feeding. I've only met Remilia once and Flandre never, and the only reason I've gotten to Ran Yakumo at all is because Malkyrian was kind enough to lend me a score file some years back. Granted I am able to consistently reach Mokou with Yuyuko Solo, so I'm not completely terrible but for this community I'm basically that little kid who will never catch up.
This community as a whole is leaps and bounds ahead of your average Touhou player because the average Touhou player is the casual. Hell, I fly circles around casuals because I'm willing to analyze my mistakes and spend time getting better at the games.
tl;dr: YOU ARE NOT A TERRIBLE PLAYER. YOU ARE BETTER THAN MOST OF THE PEOPLE WHO PLAY TOUHOU.
It's funny, you have the same issue another guy on shmups forum was talking about just yesterday. I guess I'll copypaste my answer.
Whenever a player says they suck, it is never from an absolute reference frame. It's from the frame where they're comparing themselves to whatever is above them and what they personally think they should be able to accomplish. When you don't achieve that usually-lofty standard (which is often), you get "wow I suck" because the player expects themselves to be able to not die on certain patterns, or be able to keep a chain going, or achieve some certain score, or whatever. It doesn't matter whether or not you're new or you're at WR tier; half of the issue here is that the better you are the more critical you will be of your more minute failures, whereas newer players are more concentrated on their overall ability to do anything at all. There is a clash between what they mean by "I suck" and what you think "I suck" means that needs to be understood when you're in the midst of a community of players who are mostly better than you.
The fact of the matter is nobody intends to make newer players feel bad, and more importantly it has nothing to do with any other players at all. It's easily understandable why you would think that better players casually saying they suck is somewhat esteem-dropping when you compare their play to yours, and it isn't immediately obvious to new players that they're only talking about some completely relative standard that they're comparing themselves to. There aren't any signs anywhere saying "RELATIVE TO WHAT I THINK I SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO". Hopefully after it's pointed out what they actually mean when they say "I'm so bad at this game", you'll stop perceiving the personal over-standards of other people as something for you to compare yourself to.
You don't have the proper context. If you were totally aware that people saying "derp I suck" is generally about their own play relative to more of their own play, then saying you feel super conscious about your not-as-good play is like, "well stop that". You're inserting yourself into others' frame of reference and it would be only your own fault for feeling bad about it.
To make a very apt comparison, this happens notably in the speedrunning community as well. But, not by the people who speedrun; the people who are watching the speedruns and have no experience with it themselves. You come in to watch a game you've probably played before, maybe a long time ago, and see all these incredible skills and control and amazing glitches being taken advantage of to create this astoundingly great performance. Then, as you watch with wide eyes and wonder, the runner resets the game and says he's bad at the game. You're simultaneously awestruck and frustrated because clearly, this person is not bad at the game. Them saying they're bad at the game tugs at your own self-esteem because you were nowhere near as good when you played. But really, this has nothing to do with you at all, this has to do with the standards of not only the speedrunner, but the level of competition that they're at. If they mess up a trick that costs them time, that is usually relatively easy to them, then of course they're going to think poorly of that, because what matters is their perspective and the perspective of their peers, not yours. Without the context of speedrunning and the level of play they're at, you're bound to feel bad. But if you watch for a while and learn what tricks are what and how things are done throughout the run, which spots are considered easy and which are hard, that gives you context, and you stop comparing your own play to theirs. You even start pointing out where they messed up, even though you wouldn't ever get anywhere close yourself. This is exactly that.
