Touhou Project: By Fans, for Fans
Frequently, fan-made and unlicensed works can become very popular. The most prominent example of this being Touhou Project. (東方Project Tōhō Purojekuto?, lit. Eastern Project) Created single handedly by a man under the name of ZUN. Despite millions of fans and incredible numbers of fan made works, including a few anime with their own fan done voices and soundtracks.
And a 3D animation based on the final boss of the 11th game, which stays true to the gameplay to some degree, called Touhou Dogfight
- This remains the only “official” artwork from Touhou. ZUN’s programming and composing skills are his only real selling point.
The soundtracks, particularly in Memories of Phantasm consist of remixes of tracks from the Touhou games. The music in and of itself has it’s own following, with several Doujin bands doing remixes of tracks from the games.
One torrent, called the Touhou Lossless Collection, has almost all Touhou remixes ever created in it.
- Yes, that’s one terabyte of Touhou music.
It’s particularly impressive when you realize that the original sounds like this:
Septette for the Dead Princess (Touhou 6, final boss theme)
And the remixes sounds like this:
And yet, merely because ZUN does not want Touhou to become an officially licensed series, it remains Doujinshi, despite the massive profit he could make by allowing an animating company to make an official anime. The Touhou fanbase seems to function best this way, though, as they’ve influenced plot direction and even the namings of some minor characters.
became 
Above is a picture of the 4th stage mid-stage boss of the 6th Touhou game: Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil. Fans took the sprite, built a character design off of it and called the character Koakuma (literally translating to “little devil”, due to the bat wings).
If more companies were as interested in creating quality over profit, the anime and manga community could be even more impressive.
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