Touhou: Plot or not?

[Despatche]

Every story ever told in every medium > Touhou

That's really not funny. The "simple" in-game dialogue is leaps and bounds beyond any other game in the genre, and any of the print works (that includes the CDs) pretty much make Touhou into a completely different kind of series.

The real problem is that, ironically, people do not pay any attention to the in-game dialogue and do not read these print works. The so-called "fans" who swear to love the characters so much are the same people who routinely ignore how the characters actually act and the same people who will never read the all important print works.

Then we have the "haters", the people who make fun of the basic goal of each game simply for being basic, and who do not begin to care about how that goal is achieved and the kind of people involved... even though that is how every single story in the world has always worked.

And, since I get it all the time for some reason: "But it's just a joke, maaan". No, your joke doesn't really work out; it perpetuates a lie that should have been squashed years ago, so it needs to be challenged. It's about as bad as everyone making fun of the actual games for the myriad of idiotic reasons that they do.

Yes, I am a little angry that a great series is routinely kicked into the ground entirely because it's popular, even though you would never do that to your precious CAVE. No, I really don't care that you're trying to challenge the idiots who say "Touhou is harder", because you're using that as an excuse to do wrong. Have some respect.

[Squire Grooktook]

I've read the dialogue in Touhou many times (the games). I do not base my opinion of it on anything else (I've sampled bits and pieces of the printed works, but not enough to make a judgement...didn't like what I tried though).

Based on the games: I do not like the script, I do not like the writing style, I do not like the characters or the setting, I do not like the sense of humor.

Maybe something is just getting lost in translation, or maybe I would like the print works more, but based on my experience I find all of the above strictly un-enjoyable. I do not like Touhou on any other level then some of the pattern designs. Those I like, a lot. Probably prefer the series to Cave anything overall based on that. Although I like Guwange and Dangun a lot.

That's my personal taste. Writing is very subjective, so to each his own. Maybe you like all of the above, and that's cool. I personally can't stand it.

[Despatche]

Gee, that's nice. I do not believe you're being sincere, because that's how bad this meme has gotten, and because sincere people don't make such hateful "jokes". Your admission makes that little "joke" even more meaningless. "I personally dislike this thing, so I am once again going to participate in the stupid bandwagon about shitting all over that thing for existing." This is you. This is what you're saying.

We honestly live in a world where people believe this is legitimate opinion, or at least have fooled others into believing it is. It's not. It's an opinion trying to appear as a fact simply because people say they agree with it. It is a gigantic abuse of everything we understand about ourselves. It is so fundamental that any attempt to talk about it is met with ironically shallow-minded people who refuse to comprehend something so basic and resort to telling people that they're "overreacting", even though this exact kind of situation is why so many people think these forums are a toxic wasteland (i.e. at least one person who often says this place is toxic has told me I'm overreacting when I explain why).

Just say you don't personally like how Touhou plays out, when it's appropriate to say such a thing. Don't make this elaborate false stereotype that you feel the need to stick in everywhere. And for the love of God, please do not once again try to tell me that I'm overreacting, when I have seen this kind of thing routinely happen here alone for the last five years.

(I think the absolute worst part of this is that I'm going to be ostracized for being off-topic, as if I'm the problem here for wanting the forums to be better and for a very deserving series to get more respect, and as if I'm the one who initially decided it'd be a good idea to turn a topic about a game getting a port into a topic about stories in shmups.)

[Squire Grooktook]

I honestly don't care what anyone likes or dislikes. In my opinion, everything in the realm of entertainment is almost entirely subjective. That includes writing, game design, aesthetics, etc. etc. their worth is decided on their ability to entertain, and their ability to entertain is completely dependent on the individual. There is no good or bad in the realm of entertainment. Only craft, and that alone does not make something entertaining.

My joke was just a joke on the fact that I find Touhou's characters extremely annoying. Which I do. There are a number of other things in the realm of writing, unrelated to Touhou, that I find unfunny/irritating/unlikable in a similar way, and joke about in a similar way. But I have nothing against anyone who enjoys those things. It's all just entertainment, which is subjective and dependent on the individual, and whatever entertains you is A-Okay by me.

I don't care about Touhou's fanbase. I know exactly what you're talking about with the people who don't read the script in the actual games, but what some nerds on the internet are doing is far from my concern these days. I think Undertales fanbase is kind of ridiculous, but I like the game (though for my own reasons and own tastes, as I explained before. While a friend gives it 10/10, I give it a 9/10 because it didn't resonante with me as much) and I don't let any hype or anti-hype turn me off of it.

I like Touhou, though for my own particular reasons and tastes. I like the pattern design (particularly the emphasis on rng), and some of the level layouts. I'm not crazy about most of the scoring systems, not that there's anything wrong with them, but they're not quite what I'm looking for in terms of shmup scoring. I don't like the characters or aesthetics, and I only moderately like some of the music.

Again, those are just my tastes and I don't expect them to apply to everybody else...but neither do I expect people to butt in and take things seriously that should not be taken seriously. If we can't joke about opinions, then we can't joke about anything. If you think my favorite game sucks, you're free to joke about it based on your opinion of it. I might disagree, but there's certainly nothing hateful in lacing an opinion with humor.

Just say you don't personally like how Touhou plays out

I don't personally like how Touhou plays out.

I may also feel the need to phrase this as a joke, because the above statement is comparatively boring to read.

Don't make this elaborate false stereotype that you feel the need to stick in everywhere.

I didn't. My opinion (which I've had for a long time, ever since I began playing the series, and have mentioned to friends on several occasions) is strictly my own and may or may not coincidentally agree with any other popular sentiments. I don't feel the need to "stick it in everywhere", I've barely mentioned this aspect of the series outside of private discussions with friends.

*edit*

You know what, fuck it.

Right now I have an ulcer and a headache from sheer stress due to college. I don't need to have that compounded by whatever tirade you may or may not be planning on responding with. Save it: I don't plan on viewing or responding to this thread again.

[Bananamatic]

Gee, that's nice. I do not believe you're being sincere, because that's how bad this meme has gotten, and because sincere people don't make such hateful "jokes". Your admission makes that little "joke" even more meaningless. "I personally dislike this thing, so I am once again going to participate in the stupid bandwagon about shitting all over that thing for existing." This is you. This is what you're saying.

We honestly live in a world where people believe this is legitimate opinion, or at least have fooled others into believing it is. It's not. It's an opinion trying to appear as a fact simply because people say they agree with it. It is a gigantic abuse of everything we understand about ourselves. It is so fundamental that any attempt to talk about it is met with ironically shallow-minded people who refuse to comprehend something so basic and resort to telling people that they're "overreacting", even though this exact kind of situation is why so many people think these forums are a toxic wasteland (i.e. at least one person who often says this place is toxic has told me I'm overreacting when I explain why).

Just say you don't personally like how Touhou plays out, when it's appropriate to say such a thing. Don't make this elaborate false stereotype that you feel the need to stick in everywhere. And for the love of God, please do not once again try to tell me that I'm overreacting, when I have seen this kind of thing routinely happen here alone for the last five years.

(I think the absolute worst part of this is that I'm going to be ostracized for being off-topic, as if I'm the problem here for wanting the forums to be better and for a very deserving series to get more respect, and as if I'm the one who initially decided it'd be a good idea to turn a topic about a game getting a port into a topic about stories in shmups.)

[vvv_stg]

(I think the absolute worst part of this is that I'm going to be ostracized for being off-topic, as if I'm the problem here for wanting the forums to be better and for a very deserving series to get more respect, and as if I'm the one who initially decided it'd be a good idea to turn a topic about a game getting a port into a topic about stories in shmups.)

Really? I thought this forum really likes Touhou, to the point that it probably has more than one defense brigade dedicated to it. Also, see signatures of some of hi-scores forum prominent posters.

Regarding the plot, I think you're probably treating Touhou dialogue more seriously than its author. But debating which shmup has best plot/dialogue is not really meaningful, because those games aren't really focused on those.

[Despatche]

The people who actually play Touhou like Touhou as a game; these people are pretty much anti-plot. Most people don't really like Touhou as a game; when they do play it, they flail at Easy 1CCs with millions of deaths and bombs and then never touch the games again. There are a small few exceptions to the latter (not very good but haven't given up on the games), and most of them have disappeared. After that, you have an endless stream of people continually bitching about the actual games to this day through one meme or another.

"Plot" is that meaningless one-sentence summary that very few works actually try to be unique about, though it's funny that an awful lot of people misunderstand the very basic plot of Touhou; adventures in a sealed-away pocket dimension made of things that have been forgotten in the real world, with a bent for Japanese mythology (I guess that's relatively unique by itself). The details and characterization end up being the meat of the story, and that is something the series is all about. Just the in-game dialogues are enjoyable and explain a lot, but the print stuff is even better. Stuff gets serious, people die. In one of the more recent series, Reimu straight up kills someone because they set a bad precedent for disrupting the Gensokyo order.

[ACSeraph]

Most people here do not care about novels and tie-ins and all that crap which is why they don't respect Touhou's story. Based only on the content shown in the games themselves it's all just utter nonsense.

Shmups are about fast paced gameplay usually all done within the span of 30 minutes. The only way to tell a decent story in that time is to tell it via the environments, the stage progression, and the visuals. Most fail at this, and I would say Touhou fails as much as most do. Caladrius also fails (Yay on topic!). If you take away the short bits of nonsensical dialogue both of them become totally devoid of story. But if you took away the attract sequences of Metal Black or R-Type you would still feel the full weight of your adventure just by playing. That's the difference.

If you want a shmup with a good "plot", well executed for the medium, look no further than Rayforce. That is the pinnacle of storytelling in this genre.

[Despatche]

Look, I love show. I also recognize that tell is in no way, shape, or form bad. What you've said is the same logic that compelled some idiot to shit on Astebreed because of its fairly reasonable plot that you can almost completely turn off, simply because it was there. No, really, if Steam had ratings, he would have gleefully knocked off 2 out of 10 just for that, even though people just like him are always going on about how these games never have plot (exposition; these people would and have bashed games like Ray Force).

The thing is that your Ray Force logic applies to any Touhou game, it's just that the very small summary you get on the flyer doesn't say "save the Earth from a mad supercomputer" and the ending doesn't say "you stopped the extinction of the human race", if you even get a simple ending summary. Again, that's just a matter of taste. Taste is a very different thing from claiming that something fundamentally lacks value, as you are doing. And no, banter is not "nonsense", it's flavor, never mind that only about half a given script is banter, and that banter works well in what is a relatively peaceful world.

It's "nonsense" because you reject the context, chanting to yourself that it's just a shmup, it's just a shmup, it doesn't mean anything. The idea that a pretty hardcore shmup gets multiple good manga in real magazines could only possibly be derided by truly insane people. Except, wait, this is just about taste in subject matter; has to be dark and/or bloody, all the time. Maybe you should try Otogi Matsuri?

[ACSeraph]

I'm not saying it lacks value, I'm saying it's not why most players here are playing for so we don't care. If the story isn't interwoven into the gameplay then chances are it will be lost on us. The genre just isn't well suited to dialogue based storytelling. What I'm saying is that for the arcade style banter and text boxes are a pretty unrefined method of storytelling. They might be decent, and I agree something is better than nothing, but it's not really the ideal. This is an interactive medium, and a block of text is failing to take advantage of that. This applies to other genres too.

The more important thing here though, is that in Touhou's case the story as presented strictly by the game's own boxes of text makes no sense. Maybe the books are good? But we aren't judging the books, we are judging the game. I've played through a couple of them and payed attention to the "story". You really think Komakyou has a good plot as it's presented in the game? If you have to look outside the game and the included text/cutscenes to find the good points of the plot (or even understand it), then the game has a shitty plot. Plot isn't everything, but it's fair game to point out when it's bad. I do however think if you dismiss a shmup entirely because the plot you are not a real STG player. Squire wasn't dismissing the game though, just commenting on how pointless the in-game plot is.

I would also like to point out that I do like Touhou, and I think the game actually does express a lot of feeling and emotion through it's gameplay. The mix of the music and extremely beautiful patterns in the boss fights conveys an amount of emotion and feeling that is rare in other games. I love that. But I don't understand the characters or their motivations, because the game fails to convey it, so yeah, the plot sucks.

[Strider77]

Every story ever told in every medium > Touhou

lololol

[Jeneki]

... but the print stuff is even better. Stuff gets serious, people die. In one of the more recent series, Reimu straight up kills someone because they set a bad precedent for disrupting the Gensokyo order.

Out of curiosity, are these stories about the games? Or stories that have characters from the games, but not an actual retelling of the events in the games?

[KAI]

2hu plot is my favorite meme.

[Skykid]

Good writing is NOT subjective. To quote Oscar Wilde:

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

Touhou's "writing" is complete soap opera trash of the lowest common denominator and shouldn't be given an ounce of credit by anyone. Play the game, ignore the blather.

[AxelMill]

When I play a Touhou game for the first time I do read the dialogue, because why shouldn't I, and when I do I sort of blank out until the battle starts. I don't smile at the jokes, I don't gasp at surprising revelations. I don't even understand if there are either of those. I just stare at the screen and press Z every few seconds.
I don't even know if the endings I got are part of the same game I played a few seconds earlier.

[Xyga]

A good plot is at least F cup.

[Strikers1945guy]

Touhou's "writing" is complete soap opera trash of the lowest common denominator and shouldn't be given an ounce of credit by anyone. Play the game, ignore the blather.

Beautifully said.

[Ahmad]

Good writing is NOT subjective. To quote Oscar Wilde:

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

I disagree. I'll quote a writer named Tao Lin:

“I dislike [specific book or story]” can be a fact; “[specific book or story] is [abstraction, such as ‘bad’ or ‘good’ or 'important’]” can not be a fact unless a context/goal has been defined and calculations have been made to discern if [specific book or story] benefits the goal, or not, taking into account a limited context of a range of time and area of space. Saying “[specific book or story] is [abstraction]” without adding “to me”/“in my view” or without defining a context/goal is like saying “I am the only person who exists and my opinions are facts” or “I am the entire universe and the universe is not indifferent but actually makes value judgments on specific parts of itself without knowing for what goal the specific part is valuable within what temporal and spatial context.”

Fiction writing has no universally agreed upon purpose. Something without a goal cannot be “good” or “bad.” It can only be “liked” or “disliked,” though even those are not completely accurate. Someone can accurately say “Stephen King’s writing makes my face feel like a giant pancake” or “this sentence by Stephen King caused my heart-rate to increase by 2 beats-per-minute.”

[Shepardus]

Good writing is NOT subjective. To quote Oscar Wilde:

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

Touhou's "writing" is complete soap opera trash of the lowest common denominator and shouldn't be given an ounce of credit by anyone. Play the game, ignore the blather.

Care to elaborate, or is this a case of "it's objective, so I don't need to explain"? Also nobody's talking about the morality of whatever messages may be contained in Touhou's dialogue.

[Durandal]

Personally, I don't find the plots for Touhou in general to be any better than BLAST OFF AND STRIKE THE EVIL BYDO EMPIRE.
It's true that games like Rayforce or G-Darius aren't anything different in this regard, but what sets them apart from Touhou is that they tell a cliche story well. Excellent execution can make even the most generic and blandest concepts come to life.

As far as I know, the most appealing aspect to Touhou aside from the gameplay appears to be the interaction between characters. Well-written dialogue and great characterization is what makes games like Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines and Alpha Protocol shine, even if their gameplay is mediocre. The problem is that an arcade-style SHMUP which tells story through traditional dialogue boxes simply does not have enough time and room for proper character development and making character motivations clear. If you spend too much time on dialogue, you end up with 40-50% visual novel without branching storypaths and 50-60% SHMUP gameplay.

As for Touhou, most character interactions involve two or more cliché one-dimensional characters talking about something before they duke it out for rather vague reasons (I have a feeling that Reimu and Marisa quickly resorting to violence is actually just a running gag at this point). Touhou takes the DanganRonpa approach to offset the lack of deeper characters by having a larger amount of shallow characters, each with their own special looks, quirks, themes, etc. There is rarely any comedy given the lack of time for a proper set-up, there is rarely any tension felt between characters, there is rarely any character development since most characters are deported to the Faraway Islands after you defeat them, there is rarely any emotional moments given the light-hearted setting and atmosphere, there is no romance at all, there is rarely any mystery given the lack of exposition or an interesting hook, there is.... just 'banter'?

For me, this simply isn't interesting. It's like fast food, which you eat in a short time and directly forget about it afterwards. I feel that Touhou does not have enough time and space to make the dialogue stand out, nor is it of high enough quality to be memorable despite it's short length. I've played Labyrinth of Touhou 2, and even though the dialogue feels alot like the Touhou games, the fact that LoT2 is a dungeon crawler with a slower pace than SHMUPs means the dialogue has more time to seep in. Such banter feels more in place with slice of life anime, and in a SHMUP it just feels like filler dialogue. Be honest, has one conversation in Touhou before a certain boss fight stuck with you after you closed the game?

I guess there are plenty of people out there who like stories with a large cast of one-dimensional characters just interacting with eachother like Homestuck and My Little Pony, but I'm not one of them.

[Giest118]

Good writing is NOT subjective. To quote Oscar Wilde:

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

I disagree. I'll quote a writer named Tao Lin:

“I dislike [specific book or story]” can be a fact; “[specific book or story] is [abstraction, such as ‘bad’ or ‘good’ or 'important’]” can not be a fact unless a context/goal has been defined and calculations have been made to discern if [specific book or story] benefits the goal, or not, taking into account a limited context of a range of time and area of space. Saying “[specific book or story] is [abstraction]” without adding “to me”/“in my view” or without defining a context/goal is like saying “I am the only person who exists and my opinions are facts” or “I am the entire universe and the universe is not indifferent but actually makes value judgments on specific parts of itself without knowing for what goal the specific part is valuable within what temporal and spatial context.”

Fiction writing has no universally agreed upon purpose. Something without a goal cannot be “good” or “bad.” It can only be “liked” or “disliked,” though even those are not completely accurate. Someone can accurately say “Stephen King’s writing makes my face feel like a giant pancake” or “this sentence by Stephen King caused my heart-rate to increase by 2 beats-per-minute.”

But Skykid literally is the entire will of existence itself.

When I think about all the volcanoes and shit that Skykid could cause to explode with but a thought, I undergo panic attacks.

[d0s]

If you want a shmup with a good "plot", well executed for the medium, look no further than Rayforce

Word

I'm not a touhou hater but I can't mash the plot away fast enough when I play it. Stridently defending a waifu shooter's plot is kind of bizarre

[Squire Grooktook]

“Zun’s writing makes my face feel like a giant pancake”

[Eaglet]

I'm not a touhou hater but I can't mash the plot away fast enough when I play it. Stridently defending a waifu shooter's plot is kind of bizarre

“Zun’s writing makes my face feel like a giant pancake”

On the writing: it is pretty shit.

[Strikers1945guy]

I mean back story, whether be it small comics or even books, anything is cool, but not in the damn game. I want to see shit, shoot shit, see my score, next stage. All the story bit's are cool for merchandise and stuff but not in game. I even get annoyed playing pink sweets when the damn boss battles start and there's short dialogue, or the short conversations between characters in Gunbird. I just kicked ass during this stage and I'm on a roll, quit breaking my flow with this cheesy crap dialogue.

[Squire Grooktook]

I mean back story, whether be it small comics or even books, anything is cool, but not in the damn game. I want to see shit, shoot shit, see my score, next stage. All the story bit's are cool for merchandise and stuff but not in game. I even get annoyed playing pink sweets when the damn boss battles start and there's short dialogue, or the short conversations between characters in Gunbird. I just kicked ass during this stage and I'm on a roll, quit breaking my flow with this cheesy crap dialogue.

I don't see a problem if there's a button that lets you seemlessly skip it all at once.

[BIL]

VISUAL SCENE SKIP choice in the Options menu ala Cotton 100% is the best thing ever.

[Despatche]

This shouldn't have been split. I didn't really want to post in this again, and now the Caladrius Blaze thread will be dead forever.

Everyone on this forum needs to read and understand those Tao Lin quotes before saying or typing anything else to another human being. Everything having anything to do with creative works entirely depends on that logic in order for the system to work.

I didn't want to post again because I knew I was going to get the same nonsense "debate" that played out in my head countless times. People bash the plot simply because it's in a shmup. That is exactly what Durandal and other people have explicitly wrote. You can tell its nonsense because they're coming up with all these bizarre justifications that require you to go out of your way to hate something for any of it to make any sense. They also have no problem being honest with how poorly they avoid what they don't like; it's Ctrl, dear.

Yes, stories are subjective. The so-called "objective" standards for storytelling are 100% subjective and will change drastically pretty much every decade or two. Countless countless countless old novels that are now considered "classics" were considered "worthless" in their time periods. Some even became this "worthless" decades later for political reasons, then were "rediscovered" more recently. As long as you can write legibly in your chosen language, and sometimes even when you can't, you're good. And, yes, whether or not a character is "one-dimensional" usually depends on relatability and almost never on whether or not the character is actually functional.

I just don't know how you can have this discussion when you really do go out of your way to completely reject what's being discussed. It just completely blows my mind that people can be so shallow that they can 1:1 actual characterization to what is literally a sentence, and call it fast food because they have rejected it. I've already had people tell me that the print works don't matter because they're not in the game, which is a real 1:1 to the kind of garbage that goes on in junk anime communities when people argue about what's canon or not. People like this do not have the right to make any sort of far-reaching judgement.

You really cannot account for taste, can you? People cling to those poorly-made Compile games, reject game after game after game only because it's not CAVE or Yagawa, completely ignore and reject plots only out of a horribly mistaken belief that this genre doesn't need them, reject entire decades of games only because of fucking ship speeds, and absolutely refuse to play any of these games anyway.

I can't really talk about how I honestly feel about anything because of these people. I can't say "hey, this is kinda cool" without having a bread line of completely mindless people tell me "lol, you allow this to be a part of your life". Yes, it really does matter when half the forum rejects your existence simply because you like something they don't and you're sick of their bizarre reasons for hating on it.

[Squire Grooktook]

There was no hate in Durandal's post, he made clear that it was all his opinion and taste (prefacing statements with "personally", "I don't...", etc.). And layed out some pretty logical reasons why he personally doesn't get anything out of the script presented within the game. He never even worded it strongly enough to imply "hate". The biggest complaint was "I find it uninteresting" and "others might like it...I don't". Wow, such hate and venom.

Also I see a fair amount of Compile complaints in most threads where they're brought up...too long, unbalanced weapons, easy, etc. They're not exactly one of the developers I'd name for too much fanboying. Hardly a tragedy that some people like them for personal reasons.

Nobody here is rejecting your existence. I haven't stalked you or anything, but I've seen very few personal attacks on you in any of the threads we've both visited.

[Skykid]

Good writing is NOT subjective. To quote Oscar Wilde:

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

I disagree. I'll quote a writer named Tao Lin:

“I dislike [specific book or story]” can be a fact; “[specific book or story] is [abstraction, such as ‘bad’ or ‘good’ or 'important’]” can not be a fact unless a context/goal has been defined and calculations have been made to discern if [specific book or story] benefits the goal, or not, taking into account a limited context of a range of time and area of space. Saying “[specific book or story] is [abstraction]” without adding “to me”/“in my view” or without defining a context/goal is like saying “I am the only person who exists and my opinions are facts” or “I am the entire universe and the universe is not indifferent but actually makes value judgments on specific parts of itself without knowing for what goal the specific part is valuable within what temporal and spatial context.”

Fiction writing has no universally agreed upon purpose. Something without a goal cannot be “good” or “bad.” It can only be “liked” or “disliked,” though even those are not completely accurate. Someone can accurately say “Stephen King’s writing makes my face feel like a giant pancake” or “this sentence by Stephen King caused my heart-rate to increase by 2 beats-per-minute.”

I haven't read Shoplifting from American Aparrel so I can't comment on the quality of his work, but I can comment on his sentiment, which I disagree with for being ignorant of the broader issue: the capacity of the consumer to identify drivel.

Fiction is fiction is fiction. "I am the only person who exists and my opinions are facts" is a misnomer. You may not be the only person who exists, you may have differing opinions to others, your opinions or their opinions may in-fact, be facts. Absolutes exist in the world and are not dissuaded by 'perception'. Perception is a variable whose correctness is generally at the mercy of its beholder's brainpower, which is also a variable and ranges so dramatically that an individual can be qualified enough to discover the theory of relativity while not being qualified to tie his or her shoelaces.

To paraphrase the Wilde quote, a work is either of tangible merit, or it isn't. The elephant in the room is what persons are able to judge what that merit actually is? Here's the crux of it:

It may be a fact that to an individual, a Dan Brown book is a gripping work of fiction that they couldn't put down. To someone with a history in literature and an education in the classics, it may be poorly written trash. Both individuals are correct in their perceptions.

The only time the facts of the matter cease to be is when the person who considered it a gripping work of fiction tells the person with the education in the classics that it was a brilliant work and a literary marvel. At that point that person has stepped beyond their boundaries and made an erroneous statement.

This happens every day, and is happening right now with a discussion about the merit of Touhou's writing.

The question more simply: are you easily entertained by drivel, and do you have the ability to realise it?