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I just watched a movie I have never in my life heard of, that apparently won the Best Picture once. (like I pay attention to those!) Despite winning the Best Picture, its rating is only decent on Rotten Tomatoes and the like, getting mid-seventies in the percentage range. The criticisms I've seen of the movie were of how it pushed the suspension of disbelief that so many unbelievable things could happen and be connected to each other, and the fact that the movie was rather melodramatic. Another criticism was that the characters felt more like plot devices than truly characters, to push a message that seemed transparent and shoved into your face.
This movie is called Crash.
Sometimes I question my own taste in whatever it is I like...but ultimately a person should decide their opinions themselves, and shouldn't let subjective influences change their views. So for me, I liked the movie. I only watched the movie due to hearing people having cried at a certain scene, and I just happened to feel like watching something sad. Those people are overly emotional or I am a soulless monster, but I did not find it heart-breaking or a particular scene that would make me bawl my eyes out. It did have an air of sadness yes, but not to the point where I'd cry and cry and cry, like nothing was fair in the world. Perhaps if I had not been spoiled of that scene it'd be different. But what was especially fascinating about the movie was how human every character felt, even if the whole message about racism was overdone. The racism part, or whatever message the producer (or whoever is responsible) intended wasn't what got me in the movie, but more-so how someone who could seem innocent or perfectly nice could end up committing such heinous acts, and how those who seem more aggressive and likely a villain in a more stereotypical movie could end up being a hero.
For example, there are two cops in the movie who are partners, one who was clearly rather corrupt, and another, newer officer with a more optimistic outlook to the world. The corrupt officer ends up pulling an SUV over and almost arresting a black couple without much merit whatsoever. He pats them down for weapons and probably drugs, and ends up taking this opportunity to molest the wife. Later on, it turns out his father is suffering from an illness, and he cannot get coverage to see different doctors due to a likely misdiagnosis. His father had been very impartial to those of colour, especially during a time when the world was not nearly as tolerant, but due to various cultural circumstances lost everything, and the cop blames the African-Americans for ruining his father's life. This is supposedly an "excuse" for his deplorable behaviour, which would be hard to swallow for such a jackass as he is, but then an unbelievable coincidence comes up in which the woman he violated is trapped in her car after an accident, and it is he, being the first-responder, who must save her. He ends up doing his job. Though in the end of the movie he gets no happy ending (not that many did) because his father still isn't able to find a new doctor, it does give you a little bit of light in the mindset and life of a single person. If no one knew of his assault on the woman earlier, and only knew of his heroism, he'd be heralded as a saviour. If it were the other way around, he'd be a horrible human-being who deserves to be behind bars, but due to our backwards society will likely never be caught. The average person would probably still believe that he is a terrible person despite the fact that he saved the lady in the end, but it is for those moments that he probably became a cop, and for some reason that makes him very human to me.
On the other hand, you have his younger more idealistic partner, who is appalled at his commanding officer's actions, and spends most of the movie doing good deeds and not exercising judgement of others. He ends up being reassigned, by his choice, due to his distaste of the officer and is seen saving the man of the couple they almost arrested that night from making a terrible mistake, by letting him go once again. He then picks up a hitch-hiking black man out of sincere kindness, but this is when his seemingly infallible personality stops. The black man has always wanted to do things rather unheard of, of his race in terms of stereotypes. He speaks about always having a dream of becoming a hockey goaltender and genuinely enjoying country music, but the officer (who is off-duty by the way) shrugs this off by assuming the man is joking. Because a black man cannot possibly have such absurd tastes after all! The passenger notices the religious figure on his dashboard and begins laughing. This is unsettling for the off-duty officer, and the man begins to pull out something from his pocket. Assuming he is pulling out a gun, the officer goes into cop-mode and warns the man before finally firing at him, thinking it was either this or getting shot himself.
Instead it is revealed that the man was merely pulling out the same figure out of his pocket and that was what he found so amusing. The officer panics, throws him out of the car and eventually drives away. He ends up burning the car elsewhere. What is even more fascinating is that the man he killed was actually a petty criminal car-jacking for a living, but despite such a lifestyle was generally a decent person, demeanour-wise, since he and another man had run over someone else earlier with the car they stole, and they went into an argument of what they should do. He was the one who defended the wounded man and reasoned that he needed to go to the hospital instead of just leaving him there in panic. These two characters were the ones painted with the nicest coat of colour early on in the movie, but both end up with terrible, live-shattering fates. Meanwhile, the other officer and other characters, though do not get happy endings exactly, do get off scott-free for the things they did and mostly keep their lives intact.
So what am I trying to say with these things? There is a very real and heated debate out there about the integrity of the police in general, especially in a city like LA where this movie was taking place. The answer in the end isn't that all the officers in the world are terrible corrupt people, or that they are all model citizens who have the safety of the people at the top of their minds no matter what. The answer is that cops are people too, and they can make mistakes or do stupid things, or in other cases, actually be pretty damn efficient and excellent in their job. Unfortunately our world is not a perfect one, where we can expect (though we should) that those put in place to protect us will do so without incident. It's not just about cops in general though, but about everyone in the world. Even if this movie was trying to tell their audience all about the horrors and reality of racism, I think it's better to take out that instead, it's more about how we think of people in general, not just their race or sex or orientation or what-have-you, but everything! We are all human. Not one of us is perfect! And I don't mean that on equal grounds either. The saying "no one is perfect" does not in any way imply that we all have equal levels of virtues and flaws, but that no one is completely free of flaws nor that is someone completely free of virtues. We all have our own levels of how much of a decent person we are, and how we are raised in whatever environment with whatever it is we are born with, is what will pave our lives and make up the personality in our person.
So that takes me to the next topic...recently I've been falling back into some Touhoumon, in particular the Nuzlocke community and their delightful storytelling that again, could be up for question. (There are certainly many criticisms that can be had of the stories and I generally avoid most of them unless I'm sure there's enough content to warrant that the run was indeed, entertaining) But still, I cannot help but to end up reading, enjoying them, and ultimately wishing to do one myself. (I updated this~!) There was a particular one I ended up enjoying immensely, since it had a ridiculous amount of added plot for a run that mostly follows the standard outline of a Pokemon game. In fact, this person's Nuzlocke was actually an entire trilogy...with puppets returning sometimes for a second time and dramatic, climatic ups and downs throughout the story, twists to the usual turns and attempted reasoning for the nature of the game itself. One thing I found interesting though was that the author was male, which shouldn't be all that out-of-the-norm in itself, but the characters he wrote, mostly of females, felt very free and different from how one would expect when they are used to the misogynistic biased writings usually seen in male writers. Am I wrong to be surprised by this? It felt like it was written by a girl, honest!
To throw out some examples, every character that happened to be male who wasn't a villain was either extremely nice, extremely handsome, or extremely stupid/egotistical. You're probably wondering what exactly is wrong with that, but there are many many puppets you can catch in a Touhoumon run, and in the early days of Pokemon romhacking, the gender ratio was largely untouched, so male puppets of female Touhous occurred quite often. Basically I found the variance of character between the females to be far more diverse than the males, though there were still more females than the male characters. Though due to such circumstance there were indeed female characters with bland personalities, the males just felt more like of a standard than usual, as opposed to a deviance. There was also a cute love story of sorts between the protagonist and the rival that I actually cared very little for, but the way it was written also felt like a female fantasy or something of some way. I don't mean to be throwing up stereotypes in how I see things, but basically I was reading a drama aimed at females somehow written by a guy.
But why am I surprised by this exactly? ZUN, the man himself, stated in an interview or somewhere that he never wanted Touhou to ever have fanservice, at least in canon. (I forgot why) Though somehow Byakuren ended up with jiggly breasts in HM which annoys me to this day but perhaps the prevalence of well-known fanon throughout the background characters of the game influenced such. In an non-Touhou example, the creator of Hetalia is a male. There is no need to elaborate on that statement. But I'm not just talking about interesting and stereotype-breaking males, there are also the females...
It's not like a girl who likes hot guy-on-guy action is breaking any social norm, but there is an artist in the Touhou community that I mostly love. They draw tons of Miko and well, I quite like Miko. Miko has become quite the breakthrough character for me. And this person's art is gorgeous! Her colours are so pretty to look at and she draws extremely adorable Taoists/Byakuren. The art style has a very wispy-watercolour-like feeling, where the images appear as if they are in a dream with its lighter colour palette. I could stare at some of this stuff forever, or have it on my wall in all its glory. But recently her art has become far more of the carnal variety, which is not a problem at all actually because well, I'd hate to admit it but I do enjoy such pieces once in a while (if my entire post praising Gentle Pulse didn't clue you in already) but the nature of the artwork and the sudden frequency was somewhat alarming.
In terms of frequency, a large portion of this person's artwork remained safe for the longest of times. Eventually, it was like a flood gate began to ease open and perhaps, though this is pure speculation, the artist started becoming more comfortable drawing such things. But then the gate was torn off its hinges and a mountain of porn just totalled every single building in sight! The adorable cutesy artwork began to become more-and-more rare. At first I assumed someone just found the stash of un-privy material and decided to upload it all at once, but as time went by more and more new material was of the inappropriate nature. Eventually this seeped into the safe-for-work artwork, when a normally adorable Taoist family-like image depicted Tojiko with a bust so large it broke the fabric laws and moulded her dress itself perfectly around her mounds. Not to mention Tojiko's expression was not of a normal "I AM HAPPY TO BE WITH MY TAOISM BUDDIES" but of a lecherous stare! It just felt so out of place, as if her pretty cute art was tainted by the previous flood of that-which-should-not-be-named!!! (And in terms of nature, gee this stuff isn't very original! Like 80% of it is Miko, and in 90% of that looks like the same image of Miko with slight edits each and every other time! Suddenly this tidal wave feels cheap and pointless, losing the creativity and beauty of the innocent works once before! Let me give you an example, here is an image of Tojiko in an alternate universe, if she were a schoolgirl. The artist cleverly explains her legs as being prosthetics, seeing as Tojiko has no real legs as a ghost. There is no sign of any fanservice whatsoever in this image. Here is the recent "family Taoist" image I mentioned, and it's simply an image of the three being happy...with the sole exception of Tojiko and whatever happened to her face/body. Nothing is particularly clever or cute about this image! The best example of balance between incessantly cute and occasional daring dive into the sensuous unknown is Konac)
So that's when I start wondering....is this artist actually a female!? Why is my mindset so determined to push apart such aspects and traits of people, when I myself break such stereotypes and when my friends/family break them as well!? What has the media done to me to think in such ways when surely, in a perfect world we would not ever assign specific actions with one type of person over the other? All these things definitely make one think, that's for sure. My male friends do not ever bring up adult topics, but perhaps that's because guys tend not to that in the presence of a female. Maybe when I am not present it is a topic that is constantly brought up! But such an assumption is unfair because they are indeed my friends and it'd be pretty damn stupid to hold things back in front of other friends, especially if you're that close no matter the gender or orientation or race or what-have-you of the person. You as a reader may believe I am some sort of stereotyping fool perhaps to always default to such thought processes, but...let me give you an example of how I felt the other day.
I had eaten some watermelon. I LOVE watermelon, to the point that I've never once encountered anyone who may dislike watermelon. The idea that someone could possibly dislike watermelon was so foreign to me because it seemed like the perfect, "king of fruit"! This is how certain people may feel about other, more relevant issues than different preferences of food. That doesn't make them any less of a bigoted jackass, but it just brings into question how hard-wired our opinions or brain could be, and how difficult it the mission in life is to change the ways of people to get them to accept what they must accept and thus make the world a better place.
I would end it here, noting that I am indeed Spotto and the post is over, but I had a rant I wrote a few days ago that I never bothered to post yet. It is a lovely rant about Reimu:
This has been Spotto~! Woo!
This movie is called Crash.
Sometimes I question my own taste in whatever it is I like...but ultimately a person should decide their opinions themselves, and shouldn't let subjective influences change their views. So for me, I liked the movie. I only watched the movie due to hearing people having cried at a certain scene, and I just happened to feel like watching something sad. Those people are overly emotional or I am a soulless monster, but I did not find it heart-breaking or a particular scene that would make me bawl my eyes out. It did have an air of sadness yes, but not to the point where I'd cry and cry and cry, like nothing was fair in the world. Perhaps if I had not been spoiled of that scene it'd be different. But what was especially fascinating about the movie was how human every character felt, even if the whole message about racism was overdone. The racism part, or whatever message the producer (or whoever is responsible) intended wasn't what got me in the movie, but more-so how someone who could seem innocent or perfectly nice could end up committing such heinous acts, and how those who seem more aggressive and likely a villain in a more stereotypical movie could end up being a hero.
For example, there are two cops in the movie who are partners, one who was clearly rather corrupt, and another, newer officer with a more optimistic outlook to the world. The corrupt officer ends up pulling an SUV over and almost arresting a black couple without much merit whatsoever. He pats them down for weapons and probably drugs, and ends up taking this opportunity to molest the wife. Later on, it turns out his father is suffering from an illness, and he cannot get coverage to see different doctors due to a likely misdiagnosis. His father had been very impartial to those of colour, especially during a time when the world was not nearly as tolerant, but due to various cultural circumstances lost everything, and the cop blames the African-Americans for ruining his father's life. This is supposedly an "excuse" for his deplorable behaviour, which would be hard to swallow for such a jackass as he is, but then an unbelievable coincidence comes up in which the woman he violated is trapped in her car after an accident, and it is he, being the first-responder, who must save her. He ends up doing his job. Though in the end of the movie he gets no happy ending (not that many did) because his father still isn't able to find a new doctor, it does give you a little bit of light in the mindset and life of a single person. If no one knew of his assault on the woman earlier, and only knew of his heroism, he'd be heralded as a saviour. If it were the other way around, he'd be a horrible human-being who deserves to be behind bars, but due to our backwards society will likely never be caught. The average person would probably still believe that he is a terrible person despite the fact that he saved the lady in the end, but it is for those moments that he probably became a cop, and for some reason that makes him very human to me.
On the other hand, you have his younger more idealistic partner, who is appalled at his commanding officer's actions, and spends most of the movie doing good deeds and not exercising judgement of others. He ends up being reassigned, by his choice, due to his distaste of the officer and is seen saving the man of the couple they almost arrested that night from making a terrible mistake, by letting him go once again. He then picks up a hitch-hiking black man out of sincere kindness, but this is when his seemingly infallible personality stops. The black man has always wanted to do things rather unheard of, of his race in terms of stereotypes. He speaks about always having a dream of becoming a hockey goaltender and genuinely enjoying country music, but the officer (who is off-duty by the way) shrugs this off by assuming the man is joking. Because a black man cannot possibly have such absurd tastes after all! The passenger notices the religious figure on his dashboard and begins laughing. This is unsettling for the off-duty officer, and the man begins to pull out something from his pocket. Assuming he is pulling out a gun, the officer goes into cop-mode and warns the man before finally firing at him, thinking it was either this or getting shot himself.
Instead it is revealed that the man was merely pulling out the same figure out of his pocket and that was what he found so amusing. The officer panics, throws him out of the car and eventually drives away. He ends up burning the car elsewhere. What is even more fascinating is that the man he killed was actually a petty criminal car-jacking for a living, but despite such a lifestyle was generally a decent person, demeanour-wise, since he and another man had run over someone else earlier with the car they stole, and they went into an argument of what they should do. He was the one who defended the wounded man and reasoned that he needed to go to the hospital instead of just leaving him there in panic. These two characters were the ones painted with the nicest coat of colour early on in the movie, but both end up with terrible, live-shattering fates. Meanwhile, the other officer and other characters, though do not get happy endings exactly, do get off scott-free for the things they did and mostly keep their lives intact.
So what am I trying to say with these things? There is a very real and heated debate out there about the integrity of the police in general, especially in a city like LA where this movie was taking place. The answer in the end isn't that all the officers in the world are terrible corrupt people, or that they are all model citizens who have the safety of the people at the top of their minds no matter what. The answer is that cops are people too, and they can make mistakes or do stupid things, or in other cases, actually be pretty damn efficient and excellent in their job. Unfortunately our world is not a perfect one, where we can expect (though we should) that those put in place to protect us will do so without incident. It's not just about cops in general though, but about everyone in the world. Even if this movie was trying to tell their audience all about the horrors and reality of racism, I think it's better to take out that instead, it's more about how we think of people in general, not just their race or sex or orientation or what-have-you, but everything! We are all human. Not one of us is perfect! And I don't mean that on equal grounds either. The saying "no one is perfect" does not in any way imply that we all have equal levels of virtues and flaws, but that no one is completely free of flaws nor that is someone completely free of virtues. We all have our own levels of how much of a decent person we are, and how we are raised in whatever environment with whatever it is we are born with, is what will pave our lives and make up the personality in our person.
So that takes me to the next topic...recently I've been falling back into some Touhoumon, in particular the Nuzlocke community and their delightful storytelling that again, could be up for question. (There are certainly many criticisms that can be had of the stories and I generally avoid most of them unless I'm sure there's enough content to warrant that the run was indeed, entertaining) But still, I cannot help but to end up reading, enjoying them, and ultimately wishing to do one myself. (I updated this~!) There was a particular one I ended up enjoying immensely, since it had a ridiculous amount of added plot for a run that mostly follows the standard outline of a Pokemon game. In fact, this person's Nuzlocke was actually an entire trilogy...with puppets returning sometimes for a second time and dramatic, climatic ups and downs throughout the story, twists to the usual turns and attempted reasoning for the nature of the game itself. One thing I found interesting though was that the author was male, which shouldn't be all that out-of-the-norm in itself, but the characters he wrote, mostly of females, felt very free and different from how one would expect when they are used to the misogynistic biased writings usually seen in male writers. Am I wrong to be surprised by this? It felt like it was written by a girl, honest!
To throw out some examples, every character that happened to be male who wasn't a villain was either extremely nice, extremely handsome, or extremely stupid/egotistical. You're probably wondering what exactly is wrong with that, but there are many many puppets you can catch in a Touhoumon run, and in the early days of Pokemon romhacking, the gender ratio was largely untouched, so male puppets of female Touhous occurred quite often. Basically I found the variance of character between the females to be far more diverse than the males, though there were still more females than the male characters. Though due to such circumstance there were indeed female characters with bland personalities, the males just felt more like of a standard than usual, as opposed to a deviance. There was also a cute love story of sorts between the protagonist and the rival that I actually cared very little for, but the way it was written also felt like a female fantasy or something of some way. I don't mean to be throwing up stereotypes in how I see things, but basically I was reading a drama aimed at females somehow written by a guy.
But why am I surprised by this exactly? ZUN, the man himself, stated in an interview or somewhere that he never wanted Touhou to ever have fanservice, at least in canon. (I forgot why) Though somehow Byakuren ended up with jiggly breasts in HM which annoys me to this day but perhaps the prevalence of well-known fanon throughout the background characters of the game influenced such. In an non-Touhou example, the creator of Hetalia is a male. There is no need to elaborate on that statement. But I'm not just talking about interesting and stereotype-breaking males, there are also the females...
It's not like a girl who likes hot guy-on-guy action is breaking any social norm, but there is an artist in the Touhou community that I mostly love. They draw tons of Miko and well, I quite like Miko. Miko has become quite the breakthrough character for me. And this person's art is gorgeous! Her colours are so pretty to look at and she draws extremely adorable Taoists/Byakuren. The art style has a very wispy-watercolour-like feeling, where the images appear as if they are in a dream with its lighter colour palette. I could stare at some of this stuff forever, or have it on my wall in all its glory. But recently her art has become far more of the carnal variety, which is not a problem at all actually because well, I'd hate to admit it but I do enjoy such pieces once in a while (if my entire post praising Gentle Pulse didn't clue you in already) but the nature of the artwork and the sudden frequency was somewhat alarming.
In terms of frequency, a large portion of this person's artwork remained safe for the longest of times. Eventually, it was like a flood gate began to ease open and perhaps, though this is pure speculation, the artist started becoming more comfortable drawing such things. But then the gate was torn off its hinges and a mountain of porn just totalled every single building in sight! The adorable cutesy artwork began to become more-and-more rare. At first I assumed someone just found the stash of un-privy material and decided to upload it all at once, but as time went by more and more new material was of the inappropriate nature. Eventually this seeped into the safe-for-work artwork, when a normally adorable Taoist family-like image depicted Tojiko with a bust so large it broke the fabric laws and moulded her dress itself perfectly around her mounds. Not to mention Tojiko's expression was not of a normal "I AM HAPPY TO BE WITH MY TAOISM BUDDIES" but of a lecherous stare! It just felt so out of place, as if her pretty cute art was tainted by the previous flood of that-which-should-not-be-named!!! (And in terms of nature, gee this stuff isn't very original! Like 80% of it is Miko, and in 90% of that looks like the same image of Miko with slight edits each and every other time! Suddenly this tidal wave feels cheap and pointless, losing the creativity and beauty of the innocent works once before! Let me give you an example, here is an image of Tojiko in an alternate universe, if she were a schoolgirl. The artist cleverly explains her legs as being prosthetics, seeing as Tojiko has no real legs as a ghost. There is no sign of any fanservice whatsoever in this image. Here is the recent "family Taoist" image I mentioned, and it's simply an image of the three being happy...with the sole exception of Tojiko and whatever happened to her face/body. Nothing is particularly clever or cute about this image! The best example of balance between incessantly cute and occasional daring dive into the sensuous unknown is Konac)
So that's when I start wondering....is this artist actually a female!? Why is my mindset so determined to push apart such aspects and traits of people, when I myself break such stereotypes and when my friends/family break them as well!? What has the media done to me to think in such ways when surely, in a perfect world we would not ever assign specific actions with one type of person over the other? All these things definitely make one think, that's for sure. My male friends do not ever bring up adult topics, but perhaps that's because guys tend not to that in the presence of a female. Maybe when I am not present it is a topic that is constantly brought up! But such an assumption is unfair because they are indeed my friends and it'd be pretty damn stupid to hold things back in front of other friends, especially if you're that close no matter the gender or orientation or race or what-have-you of the person. You as a reader may believe I am some sort of stereotyping fool perhaps to always default to such thought processes, but...let me give you an example of how I felt the other day.
I had eaten some watermelon. I LOVE watermelon, to the point that I've never once encountered anyone who may dislike watermelon. The idea that someone could possibly dislike watermelon was so foreign to me because it seemed like the perfect, "king of fruit"! This is how certain people may feel about other, more relevant issues than different preferences of food. That doesn't make them any less of a bigoted jackass, but it just brings into question how hard-wired our opinions or brain could be, and how difficult it the mission in life is to change the ways of people to get them to accept what they must accept and thus make the world a better place.
I would end it here, noting that I am indeed Spotto and the post is over, but I had a rant I wrote a few days ago that I never bothered to post yet. It is a lovely rant about Reimu:
Rarely do I rant or type walls-of-text on here anymore...especially about Touhou. (Its characters/lore and such, not the game or whatever)
Let's fix that.
POPULARITY POLLS~~!!
Well, not going to post the poll or comment on individual placings, been doing that quite a bit here anyway. You know the drill, "noooooo my favourite character is in an Aki sandwich so disappoint" except this time around I actually kind of like the placings of my current favourites, which as my Tumblr followers know is clearly Nitori.
Ha, well Miko got 27th. Massive improvement from before, HM likely helped out a lot since Koishi was a whopping SECOND and Kokoro the newcomer has already kicked away many old-favourites by somehow reaching 14th and where did all the Suwako lovers go her placement is surprising...oh right, individual comments, whoops. Well before I ban myself from discussing this, I am a little sad Keine was 38th, but well, not surprised really. Never surprised, not even to you, Kogasa.Anyway this post is going to be about our good ol' arguably probably not lovable main character, Reimu! Lately I've noticed, especially in the western fanbase, the general distaste people have for Reimu. Meanwhile for the, I dunno, forty-fifth? time in a row Reimu placed first in the popularity polls...which is quite astounding by the way, for one character, even if it's the main one, to consistently top the charts year-after-year. Mayhaps ZUN is somehow rigging the contest? The playable character is the one everyone loves! More Reimu for all! Fwahahahahaha~! Well, I'm not really complaining, but again many out there seem to be. So I'd like to address that in this rather pointless post, just a pool of all my thoughts that floated in my brain for the day.
Any long-time reader of this blog will know that I often dislike the main character. Every damn thing I've seen, read, watched, I've always preferred the side-character to the spotlight-stealing parasite. There were a few rare exceptions, but I generally kept with the status-quo, filling my heart with deep hatred on why such an unoriginal, annoying/bland character could ever possibly topple over my beloved favourite for the heroism and love of everyone else. Oh, it was just so unfair! My favourite would be worf'ed, my favourite would end up relying on the main one, or my favourite would be pushed aside, irrelevant due to their minor influence on the plot! Oh such woe I had suffered over the years, forcing myself to watch/read/play stories upon stories where the one ignored in the background was forever ignored! It was such a travesty, I tell you.
Regardless, you get used to it and realize...welp, it's their story. I'm sure if I wrote one my main character would be sufficiently spotlight-stealing and probably bland/annoying too. But that's not even a point I can apply to Reimu. You know why? I like Reimu. She's cool. She's a bro. And she doesn't really spotlight steal...not especially. Oh sure, she's in pretty much all the games and in pretty much all the side-media, but it's never ever Reimu's story...that's the problem. In the games it's always the bosses you face who cause and are the main characters of the story. Reimu (and of course Marisa/other main character of the day) are merely the ones who come to investigate, so we the player will also learn ourselves. The side-media focuses on a new character introduced mostly for that particularly material, with of course Reimu and Marisa taking a big part, but they usually aren't the spotlight. They never are. They could share the spotlight, but we're not reading a coming-of-age story of Reimu, or the incident she caused because youkai kept sleeping in her pad. Of course not!
I like Reimu. She's a very simple character. You could say she's like all the shrine maidens introduced in Japanese media, but eh, while I agreed with that initially that doesn't seem to be the case either. If I had to describe Reimu with one sentence (or meme in this case) it would be "Notto disu shitto agen". Youkai are very strange creatures y'know, and when the only humans you know are crazy-eccentric (because what kind of human would hang out with youkai!? Only that rascally Marisa, what a fella) you're bound to end up a little fed up. Reimu gets the lovely job of having to deal with them. She was probably born in this role. It is all she knows. And it will be all she ever knows. Because of that, Reimu can be a little short-sighted...or perhaps very short-sighted. She's probably so fed up she doesn't think things through, or give youkai the benefit of the doubt. There's just too many of these cases interrupting her lazy tea-drinking afternoon, so she needs to finish them off as quickly and efficiently as possible. Seriously, Reimu is not the definition of " stereotypical main character" to me, not at all, and probably one of the reasons I do like her.
But what is it with Japan I wonder? There seems to be a case that the main character wins the polls there all the time. I'd chalk that up to culture. After all, the story they are enjoying...it is of that main character, it is their journey of course, and if they really do enjoy what they are enjoying, they will obviously love the main character the most. The problem here is...again, Reimu's never really the focus of the Touhou storytelling. She's more like an anchor to the audience, kind of like how you control her in the games. So...I'm not here to explain WHY she's consistently most popular or whatever, perhaps the fact that she's very, very Japanese? And thus her audience will adore her? Which may explain, in my opinion, MoF's larger influence in the East than the West? Eh, hell if I know. Also I suppose all this applies to all the main characters/playables in the games. (the danmaku ones at least, and no partnerships/PoFV doesn't count) So that includes Marisa, Sanae, Sakuya, and Youmu.Well, I've got zero problems with Marisa. I suppose the only reason anyone would dislike her (and this extends to the others) is overexposure, like if you're a shipper and you ship non-Marisa pairings. (who am I kidding? I'm the only one!) Or if you happen to like your Alice to not come with a Marisa side-dish. Sanae is also quite awesome, being a priestess to goddesses that actually show up on screen and actually do shit in the Touhouverse. (well, mostly Kanako...is that why Suwako dropped so much??) Sakuya and Youmu are two very devoted followers to radically different masters. Youmu often being the naive, overly-straightforward idiot compared to the ever-scheming trollish Yuyuko, while Sakuya is a sanity anchor towards Remilia's arrogant, haughty attitude. These two I'm not as fond of, mostly because Spotto will never like a serious character ever, but also due to my general dislike of follower-master type relationships and thus-characters. Regardless, every playable has a reason to be liked and disliked, Reimu is no exception.
I've actually no clue what else to talk about. This post was mostly "Reimu's not that bad" and Touhou is awesome because of it.
This has been Spotto~! Woo!
