>>50122622 (OP)
This is more a /jp/ opinion rather than a Touhou opinion and I'm guilty of this, too, so I'm not trying to say "I'm right and everyone else is wrong, stop having fun" in this post and I apologise in advance if it comes off like that. Touhou discussion is a good thing usually and I participate in it often but /jp/ in general (and maybe other sites too but a million dollars wouldn't be enough to convince me to use MotK or anything similar again) takes the series way too seriously sometimes, it seems to be a point of personal pride for some people whether you believe in "cutesokyo" or "grimsokyo" and most threads made about this are just bad-quality bait that seems to hit bump limit every time if they don't 404 first because the same two autists will argue about the same things they've argued about dozens of times before and fill up the entire thread with long back-and-forth posts with alternating green and black lines of text with each point meticulously dissected and rebutted for the one other person who will read it and won't change their mind.
It's fine to take something you enjoy seriously and I like Touhou a lot and would probably be a very different person if it didn't exist, but sometimes I get the feeling some anons here think that Touhou is real life and the actions of the characters have real-life consequences for how seriously they take arguing with random people who will never know their name over it. "Touhou lore" threads seem to end up just shitposting about fortune teller and how evil Reimu supposedly is and other boring things like that from people that seem get all their canon information from a single manga page.
It's not a bad thing to dissect and analyse a piece of art that means a lot to you, but when you're being very serious about and insulting people over their opinion on a character from a series that includes characters that look as silly as Ariya (as an example, she doesn't really attract this kind of shitposting but she does have a very silly design, even if ZUN put a lot of thought into it and I don't hate it that stone skirt will always be stupid to me) you should probably reevaluate your priorities.
Not to be all "4chan was better when I was a newfag" because I still consider myself a newfag honestly but I don't remember people being like this on /jp/ around 2010 or so. It was the Touhou containment board, as anyone who can google "4chan /jp/" can tell you, but Touhou was just treated for what it was: a video game series about flying girls shooting lasers at each other for vaguely-defined reasons with interesting takes on Japanese culture and mythology that you might learn some obscure legend from.
I feel like this change has happened slowly as ZUN himself has been taking Touhou more seriously, using it as a vehicle for social messages like "politics bad" and "AI bad". It's not a bad thing for a game to have a deeper message to it (it has a very deep message if you believe the esoteric Touhou threads, but that's another topic entirely) and ZUN can do whatever he wants with his own series, plus it's still unquestionably Touhou and retains a similar level of quality, even if every new game is the end of Touhou forever according to some people.
A creator is always going to change his artistic style over 30+ years, but he could be a little more subtle about it. FW could have been about over-reliance on technology in general rather than a story about literal real-world LLMs and other things that people generally play Touhou to get away from hearing about. He doesn't need to include a picture of Miko complaining about jobs being stolen by illegal youkai immigrants in the same cadence as Trump and saying the Japanese translation of "and some, I assume, are good people" (if I hadn't seen this with my own eyes I would never believe this was from an official book, he can't use the "Aya wrote this so it's not really canon" excuse forever) to send a message about how political leaders are often hypocrites who will say anything to win votes and that he doesn't like Trump in particular. Aya herself, for example, is ZUN's criticism of yellow journalism without imitating anyone specific, unless you believe the rumours that she was based on his girlfriend and future wife (it's a little unflattering if that's the case). She also has a character beyond "sensationalist gossip" and can be used for stories other than just "Aya writes a shitty article again".
I think I've made my point by now, and this post is a lot longer than I intended. If you're still here for some reason after reading all that, thanks for reading this far. If you just skipped to the end because you wanted me to get to the point I would have probably done the same thing for a post that's nearly at the character limit. This is more of a vent post than anything and I know nothing will change just from me making a self-absorbed 4chan post about it. Clearly I take Touhou (and /jp/ shitposts) way too seriously, too.
