So, as a writer, I personally love write-ins, as they're a sign of viewer interactions. Granted, I haven't had anything I'd consider a particularly silly or unwarranted write-in, so I might be a bit biased. I have had a few that have been fairly off-the-rails, but they've still been legitimately good (or at least reasonable) ideas based off of the information available at the time.

As far as writer interaction with the readers go, that's tricky. See, the thing is, I actually love talking about my story. I could easily throw several paragraphs in almost per update about what might have happened, or could have happened, or my thoughts on something. But I don't. I'll throw stuff in as an end-of-part coda, perhaps, but I fear to say too much.

Two reasons for this. The first is that I don't want to bias the readers with my personal commentary. Author's notes are fun, but the story must stand on its own without them. If someone who doesn't read any of the notes about what I intended comes to a completely different interpretation of the characters than what I intended, then I've screwed up as a writer, and that's a real risk if I keep outright telling the viewers what I intended after each update.

The second comes down to vanity. There was a previous community I wrote in where I got in trouble for self-advertisement, and I had a bit of a rant about how my story wasn't getting the attention it deserved compared to other, worse stories. It's not something I'm proud of, and pretty much ended my involvement in that community, as well as the story I'd been writing at the time. (Which is honestly a shame, as I wouldn't mind finishing or maybe rebooting that some day.) Because of that, I try to take a hands-off approach to commenting. It's easier for me to avoid attention seeking if I minimize my interaction outside of the updates. Or, as is increasingly the case these days, apologizing for updates being late. Alas.

Speaking of apologies, I'm one of the anons who floated the idea of participating and never did anything. So... sorry about that, I've just been busy lately. Even finding time t

>>16931
>If someone who doesn't read any of the notes about what I intended comes to a completely different interpretation of the characters than what I intended, then I've screwed up as a writer
I mean, that's going to happen no matter how much footwork you put into stage managing reader perception of things. You can outright directly tell people that things are one way or another, yet they'll still come to head-scratching conclusions based on inherent biases or whatever. I've had it happen time and again in my own writing to the point that I long gave up trying to correct people. Dunno, though. Maybe it depends how much investment people have in your story. Nobody around here really has the same experience writing, for better or worse.

As to actual book club matter, well, no real need for apologies. There was hardly a call for strong commitment. The pacing that so annoyed certain people was chosen with the assumption that people would probably fall in and out. If things go on and you happen to only find time to get involved every once in a while, that's fine enough.

Very belated in getting my thoughts in.

>>16920
>Did the story make you feel anything?
Hesitation, mostly, or a sense of "waiting for the other shoe to drop". I get the feeling in the end that it was mainly supposed to be a fun adventure focusing on personalities rubbing off on each other and which wouldn't get super into it, but it really was hard to tell because I still felt like that could have changed at any moment.

>What did you think of the writing style?
I think the author is a fair hand at scene-setting and has a good sense for personality as external affect, but could probably stand to get a little deeper into a character's psyche, past, and whatnot in order to get them to really stand out from the page as fully-developed people. Of course, I haven't seen them write any characters in extremis, so maybe they were simply keeping it up their sleeve, but the keystones-and-chicken-twine analogy from earlier still strikes me as salient.

>Was there any passages that stood out to you?
Hobo silence

>Would you recommend this story?
I don't think I could, in good conscience; but then again I pretty much have to have liked something nearly unreservedly in order to be able to recommend it to anyone else without a whole bunch of caveating. Besides, it just didn't get far enough.

>>16673
Looking forward to the eventual /at/ spinoff, Lust Market.

>>16700
Is that anything like Lust Bees, the porn companion to Lost Bees?

>>16701
When the Last Bee is gone, and the Lost Market fades...

>>16660 here.

Spontaneous manifestation of head ornamentation for medical purposes shouldn't count, I'd think. It's not part of their normal attire, it's just there for safety.

In other news, of the true hatless 2hus not yet discussed, I think Kaguya has a pretty good shot of dethroning the current leader.

Kaguya doesn't wear a hat, and doesn't need to. She has her own personal doctor in case she ever gets sunburned, she doesn't get much sun in the first place, and if she got a hat she'd stop having a character design in eternal stasis. Plus, Mokou has a very high hat score, and those two would obviously be on opposite sides of the scale.

>>16666

Not to be needlessly contrarian, but I cannot accept 'medical reasons' as a valid explanation for this phenomena. A vast number of post-battle band-aid application are placed in strange places such as over the clothes/hair. Meanwhile scuff marks, bruises, and other clear indicators of fisticuffs remain uncovered and untreated.

I can only assume that the bizarre ritual of increasing a defeated opponent's hat/accessory score is meant as a show of dominance.

Jade Beauty

Odd newcomer here, swinging in hard with something that isn't 2hu x [insert flavor-of-the-month game here], this has been bouncing around in my head since I started playing touhou

Anon wakes up in the middle of a forest with amnesia. They realize they have with them a big binder chock-full of pages written in by their past self, who claims that Anon entirely intended to end up smack dab in the middle of this secret magic land, but is unable to disclose any real details for reasons they refuse to elaborate on. Looking through the pages reveals large swathes of blank space in what's written, as if chunks of text simply decided they never existed in the first place.
Anon, of course, wants to go home (wherever that may be), but the binder insists that there's something really important they have to do before they can.
Thus, Anon is forced to fend for themselves in Gensokyo with vague guidance from their past self as they try to, in no particular order:
A) Escape
B) Regain their memories
C) Do whatever the fuck it was they wanted to do before they got brain-wiped

But it'd sure be nice to figure out why Past Anon was so insistent on nobody finding out about the binder...

>>16663

Alright so check it...Gensokyo gets destroyed by some cataclysm at a specific point in time after MC awakens right? Only he doesn't die and instead gets sent back to that point in the past for whatever reason. Certain parts of the notebook are 'blank' because there are 'allies' close to him that either contribute to or cause the collapse and they have ways to see the notebook. His future selves found a way to hide these entries untill certain conditions are met. The story progresses through several iterations of MC ignorance, investigation, and strategic combat with the enemy until the inevitable doomsday(or death), at which point the voters can choose a new vague hint they can send back in time(let's make friends with Sanae, watch the stars on XX day, 9PM curfew DO NOT answer the door, ect...ect..). For added mystery, be sure to make MC a bit of an unreliable narrator, with some of the pre-loaded hints/ journal entries being true/false depending on other factors in the current run.

Oh boy, just what we need, a few more uninspired babby's first fanfiction Anon drops into Gensokyo isekai stories that could be fitted into any franchise with the serial numbers filed off because the story itself isn't a product of the setting and the author doesn't even care that much about or understand the series they're writing for since they just want to wank over their newly minted OC that doesn't even fit into the setting, mmmmmm just love them, gimme more

>>16602
>I deliberately chose to execute it in a way that would not give away that the fact that it I wrote it.
You got me there. I mainly suspected it was yours but there was room enough to second-guess myself.

>>16602
Dammit. I like to consider myself a big fan, but I was totally fooled.

>lack of character
Just to quibble, what I meant was in terms of distinctness. I'll be honest in that I didn't give any entry a particularly deep look-over, so I wasn't primed to appreciate any subtleties of your work. Basically, I took the most shallow route for judging things for lots of things I could — but will refrain from — whinge about. That's rather unfair to you and others, but it is what it is.

>>16602
>It was really gratifying to see someone comment on the metaphorical aspect of it.
You’re welcome. Well done.

Hello. To no one’s surprise, I authored the fishtits piece. The aim, aside from you being happy to see me, was to effect a more “generic” pornographic scene such as may be found in other fanfiction repositories, complete with, yes, repetition, crudeness, etc. – but, between a somewhat confounding theme (how would a Slav know what summer is…?), work and and being busy with the bun over in /shrine/, I couldn’t commit 100%. Well, at least it filled out the category. Was better than leaving it (at the time) empty. Too bad about the middling, stopgap quality.

On which note, combined with Mibya’s comment up above, damn, we really screwed the pooch this year on that, didn’t we? Guess those votes of no confidence were deserved after all. I’m going to have to think about breaking some promises (er, again) and maybe making up for it in some way…

>>16479
Procurement Specialist?
>>/border/30152

>>16480
oh shit thats it thanks anon, gonna read it again

Hey, i'm fairly new to touhou (and so, the board) and i just wanted to drop in a rec for the story that got me interested: [i]Scarlet Devil Project: Antinomy of a Devilish Vampire[/]
https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/scarlet-devil-project-antinomy-of-a-devilish-vampire-touhou-whf.92110/

They pollinate plants, build neat structures, and make honey. What's not to like?

b

>>16491
Nice. I give it a 🅱️/🅱️.

What is blue?

gee I wonder

I am a blind fish then, sorry for posting at the wrong spot.

>>16446
Alright I looked at that forest story. The main criticism I can give is that the story is very meandering. When I was reading it, I got the feeling that things just sort of happen to Rumia instead of there being a central driving plot guiding Rumia. There used to be a central driving plot at the beginning, where a mysterious disembodied voice gave Rumia a mission to kill all the Anons and promised to guide Rumia on her adventure, but the voice just sort of vanished without explanation after Rumia killed the weird Alice goo monster and fell unconcious.

That's the other main criticism I have with this story. Characters and plot points have a nasty tendency to just sort of disappear from the story without warning. Take Wriggle for example. Wriggle ended up being killed by the Alice goo monster entirely offscreen, with no way for us to influence Wriggles fate. According to the Alice goo monster, it was entirely our fault that Wriggle died, even though the last thing we voted for prior to Wriggle's death was "lets try really hard to beat Wriggle to Marisa's house." Having the result of "lets race Wriggle" be "Wriggle is dead and its all your fault" seems like a rather extreme and unfairly unforeseeable consequence of our actions.

And Wriggle was one of the lucky ones, she actually got an explanation for her disappearance. Some characters don't even get that much. Like the Black Knight Anon that attacked us in Rinnosuke's shop. Rumia gets into a big fight with the knight, covers the area in darkness, and then the knight just sort of disappears. What happened to him, where did he go, what is he doing now? Who knows. He basically just fell out of the story with no explanation. A similar thing happened with the fairies Rumia met in the forest. Rumia attracts a horde of hundreds of fairies and runs to Reimu's shrine to escape them. Rumia spends maybe 10 minutes in the shrine and leaves with Shion through a window, and suddenly the fairies are gone, despite there being hundreds of fairies outside surrounding the shr

>>16448

I've read your criticism and firstly want to thank you for giving them. I'm sure it took some time to write all that and all of those are really good points that you're making.

Now I'm going to explain stuff as much as I can without making any sort of excuses for myself.

>Wriggle death.

That was going to happen anyway, you are absolutely not responsible for that outcome. It's simply something the thing said to make you feel even worse at what it thought was going to be your last moments for that extra juicy tears. The thing was blatantly a sadist and deserved to die. (And would be a nice thing to suddenly remember if you ever you yourself making someone suffer for the same reasons only to end up disgusted by how similar to it you're acting since I don't have the guts to make Rumia into a total monster regardless of how much she hypes herself up to be one).

Wriggle's revival is meant to be a main motivator to keep moving even if you decided to simply not listen to some voice in your head that told you to eat some yummy outsiders. There were multiple ways to achieve it and you're already found one of them so I have to praise you for that.

Heck, once that's achieved.

>Black Knight

You know what, I'll throw my story into the ring here. In particular, I'd like to know if there's anything in particular that works/doesn't work about my writing style, or any high/lowlights of note in the updates. A lot of what I've been doing has been making things up as I'm going along, so any feedback would be useful.

Urban Student in Limbo: https://www.thp.moe/th/res/202201.html

https://archive.org/details/transactionsasi22japagoog/page/n222/mode/2up

First up, we have a paper on those mysterious mountain-dwelling folk, "The Tengu". It's got more than you ever wanted to know about our nosey pom-pom-wearing neighbours—what kinds of tengu there are, their origins, their eating and possibly even mating habits, and selected myths from every era—courtesy of one Dr. M. W. de Visser from the Asiatic Society of Japan.

Goes from pp. 222–298 in the link.

>>16403
A quick look at that tells me that the tengu are very much a catch-all sort of supernatural creature in Japanese tradition. There's barbarity and oni-like behavior, possessions (and trying to seduce priests while in the bodies of women), transformations, behavior like angry spirits/are ghosts of the dead, tree demons, and a lot of links to Buddhism. They could just as soon be bros and teach humans swordmanship or something else or try to destroy them. There seem to be several mentions of pearls/stones in relation to (greater) tengu. All in all interesting stuff. Even if the source takes that sometime patronizing tone common in Victorian/Edwardian analysis of other cultures.

Of course no such thread could be complete without the oldest record of Japan's myths and legends and indeed the oldest extant written work from Japan, the Kojiki or "Records of Ancient Matters". Being written as they have been in a combination of Old Japanese and contemporaneous Classical Chinese, it is rather awkward in translation—B. H. Chamberlain our English translator going as far as to call them "queer and bald in Japanese ... and it is therefore right, even from a stylistic point of view, that they should sound bald and queer in English"—but still the stories contained within are quite vivid and a careful reader will encounter many familiar names and figures, not least of which include Hieda no Are its original composer and Motoori Norinaga its most prominent latter-day decipherer. One will learn of the cleverer and not-so-clever machinations of Yagokoro Omoikane and Ame no Sagume, the true species of the sisters Toyotamahime and Tamayorihime, and even the rather inauspicious birth of Haniyasubime. Most of all will one learn of the life and times of Ōkuninushi, youngest among eighty brothers and good friend of the White Hare of Inaba, whose story is so often forgotten in popular dissemination in favour of those of Izanagi and Izanami and of Amaterasu and Susanoo—and whose dealings with the heavenly gods of Takamagahara still cast a Moon-shaped shadow over certain parts of Gensokyo to this day.

Only, it is advised that one do indeed consult the footnotes (of which there are regrettably many, coming out to probably thicker than the text itself), and note down what Japanese name corresponds with what English rendering, unless one enjoy reading about the exploits of His-Swift-Impetuous-Male-Augustness in the palace of the Heaven-Shining-Great-August-Deity.

Also, all of the naughty bits are rendered in Latin, because this translation was done nearly a century and a half ago. But, trust me, you're really not missing out on much.

Without further ado:
https://www.sacred-texts.com/shi/kj/index.htm

(Alternative source, in the interest of maximal longevity: