First contact: I hung out with some anime and manga fans online, because of my comics hobby. Some of them used to post pictures. Some, if very few, of these pictures had
Touhou in their filenames. It sounded pretty weird in my Finnish ears, so I sometimes stopped and wondered what it might refer to.
Step one: I was doing some non-serious research on Miku Hatsune videos.
This one made me check Wikipedia and find out that this mysterious
Touhou referred to a bullet hell game. I wondered why a bullet hell would have a multitude of characters and why some people would be interested in the personalities of cannon fodder. I do not remember the details, but I believe I sometimes searched for ?Touhou? on Youtube and Danbooru, out of curiosity, after that.
Step two: The ?Alice → Dere?
promotional video (the combined effect of the arrangement and the imagery) managed to move me deeply. That does not happen very often. I started actively searching for Tōhō fan works.
Step three: After reading some dōjinshi (notably by Eda Aki), seeing more fan videos (notably ?
20 Good Reasons? by Flandre Scarlet), and browsing lots of illustrations, I became a fan of Patchouli Knowledge. For whatever reason, I felt that Patchouli would never be able to win Marisa?s heart. That hurt. It became my mission to tell a story of Patchouli, Marisa, and possibly Koakuma.
Step four: As I was visiting my country?s main science fiction convention, which was still arranged in tandem with the main anime convention back then, I realized there was indeed a Tōhō fan scene in Finland. I was invited to join their discussion forum, and after giving it some thought, I did. This is when a random wordplay,
Hieda no Mukyū, became a nick, and a backstory of who this original character might be began to form.
Step five: I started writing Tōhō filk texts. They need a certain mood and inspiration, but given that, they are much faster to put together than short fanfic stories. In addition to being a lot of fun, they helped my headcanon to develop. I learned about Setz?s
fan comics around the same time.
(This progress, from the first contact, took something like four years.)
Step six: After several years more, I published the final installment of ?Patchouli Suite?, my main fanfic project. The fic is not long, but thought out and written with my own heart?s blood. (This is not to comment its objective quality but my personal experience.) I originally published just a one-shot, soon afterwards the sketch was expanded into a trilogy, and eventually the storyline became to consist of parts 1, 2, 2.5, 3, and 4. Around this time, the Touhou.fi forum got very quiet, although the small community continues to live by other means.
Lots of other things happened on the road, such as discovering Nezumi?s fan work, but this is the gist of how Gensōkyō crept into my life.