Do you think Zun actually has a master plan regarding the development of Touhou, or does he just goes along with whatever crosses his mind at any given point?
>>14980667
>does he just goes along with whatever crosses his mind at any given point?
Yes. That's how art is created.
He's a drunkard, ofc second.
he lets the beer do the thinking
I think the overall story behind Touhou is very simple and Zun already has it figured out.
Yukari is the master mind behind almost all incidents because she either wants to kill Reimu or bring her to her side to take over Gensokyo and eventually the outside world.
The nature of each incident from the games and mangos is just whatever he's interested into at any given time.
>>14980701
Bonsoir rddt. That's not how you fit in by parroting memes.
You use the wayq meme when the target of quoting is unknown.
>>14980701
One should lurk before posting.
He's a alcoholic old man, of course he just makes it up as he goes.
What's up with that "Kongou desu" meme anyway.
Zun probably never went beyond his amateur level of thinking game plots, so at a very basic level Touhou is a big disjointed mess that only very recently did he started trying to piece together with the help of the manga he writes and strangely enough with the fighting games.
My guess of ZUN's creation process is:
He creates the first boss character for the game and then he bases off the next characters off the first one he came up with to keep with the style and give the game it's own distinction.
He then decides what role they have in the game by how intimidating they look.
Adds a story to them.
Makes any changes he thinks he needs to do to make them fit better.
Then creates the music for them to match up their design and story.
Doing it like this would make a 1-man team job way more simple and manageable.
>>14980755
ZUN's said in interviews that he starts with music first, and everything follows from that. There's no need to guess.
>>14980835
>music first
what in the fuck
>>14980841
maybe he just likes making music and is like "you know what kind of character would fit this tune?"
>>14980841
>The ultimate reason why I created Touhou is because I wanted to make game music at first. I was more interested in making music for games rather than the games themselves. So I made all this music, and I thought great, I'll find someone's game and put it in. But I didn't know anybody who was actually making games. So the next thing I thought was, right, I better make a game for this music to be used in.
>>14980835
Works out just fine for the most part.
>>14980835
That's fucking madness, that would mean he doesn't know or probably even care where Touhou is going and he's just improvising as he goes
>>14980835
Music is the first element that's created with the games, BUT, ZUN really starts with the research/planning stage. Some examples
Ten Desires was meant to be a bridge between 6, 7 and 8, and 10, 11 and 12.
The whole EoSD, PCB and IN Saga was pretty intentional, with PCB being created to introduce the playable shottypes in IN first.
And he does research. Main ones I can think of are TD (since he didn't know about Taoism originally) and MOF.
He doesn't put out all of the themes first, then builds the game around them.
Do you think Zun has a final game planned for the main series?
ZUN gets black out drunk one night, so drunk its abnormal even for him, and then draws all of the characters. That way when he wakes up in the morning he can be just as shocked by the designs as we are on release day.
Why do so many people care so much whether there's an overarching narrative for the games? The ‘endgame’ for Touhou is that he decides he doesn't want to work on it anymore, so he doesn't. Maybe he puts a bow on it, maybe he doesn't.
Personally, I thought that was one of the greatest things about Touhou (or it used to be): that ZUN didn't depend on it for a revenue stream, so he didn't have to worry about alienating a statistically relevant portion of his audience. As a result, Touhou was a product which had no compromises in design. The game was something which completely satisfied a single person, ZUN, and if we were able to share in some of that enjoyment, so much the better.
Then, if Touhou's ending is ZUN losing interest in it, that's certainly not something that can be planned out to a long extent. Perhaps ZUN may think to himself “I have another three or four games in me”, but he certainly did not think, say, back when writing IN, “Yeah, this is going pretty well. I think I'm going to take it to 23 games exactly, then I'll be done.”
Building up a complex, overarching plot of the sort that people want would involve him predicting the duration of his interest, both with an upper and lower limit. Considering what we have now, ZUN doesn't seem to be doing that. He's certainly leaving plot threads everywhere that he could decide to one day wrap up, but once a thread is dropped, he doesn't return to it in a way that would build a continuous narrative.
>>14980924
Who are you quoting?
>>14982272
Lafcadio Hearn
>>14982115
What's interesting is that he apparently is trying to create a cohesive narrative with the mangoes he's working on (specially WaHH and FS) and the fighting games, what you say pretty much only applies to the classic games (and only those who are too disjointed to easily integrate) because after TD he's also trying to include the main games into an overarching plot.
>>14982427
I have to dispute that. Look at the speculation leading up to LoLK, following the demo. Nobody (that I know of) got the plot, the characters, the scenario even close to correct. If there were an overarching narrative, people should be able to predict things about the next games. They can't.
Your point about the manga and fighting games makes sense though. Those aren't entirely built by ZUN, and he appears to not see them the same way as the mainline series of games. The links between ULiL and LoLK are a sign of that changing, but I don't think that induces a unifying plot on Touhou.
>>14982492
Of course there's still a lot of randomness in the main games but there are a lot of things pointing towards him trying to be more cohesive, integrating all canon material into a single storyline.
>>14982570
That statement could have been said at just about any point in Touhou's history, though. Things occasionally do get unified (e.g. all of the PC-98 games with MS), but once they're unified, ZUN then turns right around and adds something completely new.
>>14980754
Except we've been seeing connected plots since IN.
Not that it matters anyway since Touhou isn't about one big story leading somewhere but more about various stories than describe the life in a location.
>>14980667
>Do you think Zun actually has a master plan regarding the development of Touhou
Secondaries please leave.
He had a master plan regarding EoSD-PCB-IN. He had a master plan regarding UFO-TD-SoPM/HM. And he has a master plan right now with ULiL-LoLK-whatever follows next.
>>14980723
>He's a alcoholic old man
How old is he?
>>14985217
>39 years
Ok, not that old.
>>14980946
Are you stupid? That's how half the stories you love so much are created.
I always laugh at fandoms for not realizing how on-the-spot their favorite shows are, as if creators were some kind of untouchable storywriting machines.
Like when a series ending and people ask: "WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?", as if the author had necessarily written that far.
There are some wide known examples of thorough planning like JK Rowling with Harry Potter, who basically wrote things backwards, but that is not the common procedure.
Oda (from One Piece) is a more accurate model of long-term planning: he has the whole development/ending in mind, but keeps enough loose ends to freely explore the universe and build story arcs.
But Touhou is more along the lines of an unconnected, episodic series, where arcs are independent from each other and the whole universe is just a background for the current story.
