While this is how mass media typically portrays the Touhou franchise, I feel obliged to inform you that the plots in these games are both more elaborate and more sensical than this.KAI wrote:You are not invited to my tea party.
bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bull
et,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bu
llet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet,bullet.
Makes perfect sense.
The plot of each game typically revolves around some "incident." Not some petty incident like "You aren't invited to my tea party"; in fact, in no instance is the player character ever formerly acquainted with the final boss and perpetrator of the game's central incident, so an invitation to a tea party would be perfectly infeasible. To pull examples from the first three games of the Windows era: in EoSD, a vampire is covering all of Gensokyo in a red mist which would allow her free movement during the day, in PCB, a ghost is elongating the winter by stealing Spring and using it to revive her dead body, and in IN, a Lunarian doctor swapped the moon for a fake one to prevent her and her princess from being taken back to the moon.
"But yorgje," you may protest, "you promised that these plots would make sense! What does stealing Spring have to do with reviving a ghost?" Questions like that I am unfortunately unable to appease: to a Western audience, ZUN's references to Shinto mythology and other aspects of Japanese culture simply seem strange (the plot for PCB, in case you're wondering, I think is a reference to a famous poem about dying under a cherry blossom tree by Saigyō Hōshi). However, just because the technical details elude us does not mean that the plot must mean nothing to us, and this is where most casual observers of the Touhou franchise fail: turned off by seemingly random or absurd details, they latch on to the gothic lolita trope that they were introduced to in their favorite anime and that epic manliness that Western pop culture has so strongly associated with guns and bullets, and completely characterize the series by these two impressions.
Personally, the way I prefer to think about Gensokyo, the universe of the Touhou franchise, is as a world full of beings with great power who choose not to exert it. Gensokyo is populated primarily by wimpy humans like you and me, and powerful monsters or "youkai". Typically, even the weakest of youkai have powers with a vague enough definition that any of them could conquer the world with a sufficiently biased interpretation of their power. A common trend in the three aforementioned plots, and also more broadly in the series, is the event of one of these youkai overexerting their powers: not necessarily exerting their powers over others, but simply using them in self-serving ways that happen to have adverse effects on their neighbors. By the end of the game, the protagonist puts the youkai in her place, some sense of balance is restored to Gensokyo, and everyone is happier for it, particularly the perpetrator of the incident herself. The joy of playing through the games under this framework lies in the poetry of emotions and psyche that accompany this disruption: we typically see smaller scale versions of the power struggle take place in the early part of the game, and the later part of the game fleshes out the main antagonist's situation and motives. Ultimately coming to a colloquial understanding of the balance that is restored is just as much of an achievement as getting that 1cc.
This is but one of many lenses by which one can understand the plots of the Touhou games - I believe that if you keep this in mind, you will be able to at least begin to make sense of the beautiful world of Gensokyo.
