Wonderful little Irish Canadian girl would always have silly stories about the fanon/canon stories made up for the Touhou characters, and she'd share them with me. At first I was like 'okay, whatever, *nodnodplzshutup.*'
Once I caught on that most of the fanon became ascended fanon, I was like 'hey now. This has that big a following, and the creator
s are that okay with their fandom to let them come up with the backstory? That's p. cool.' I started trying to keep track of the crazy-ass names (I'm looking at you, Keine Kamishirasawa and Aya Shameimaru) and the main characters, and the villians, who weren't really villians, because they actually became main characters later on, and OH MY GOD WHY IS IT SO CONFUSING BUT SO AWESOME I MUST DIVE DEEPER INTO THIS.
And so I did. The first thing that sucked me in was the canon/fanon relation and the open-endedness of Gensokyo, with all the diverse backstories taken from mythology (Hiya Kaguya, Mokou) and plain silliness (Humanoid tengu? Sure, why not. Have some Kappa, too), and then I moved on to listening to the music. Not too ashamed to say I've got a couple of remixes of U.N.Owen Was Her saved to my computer, but I've also got buckets of epic orchestral remixes of some of the 'deeper' songs (in the sense that you have to dig through more of Touhou to find them, e.g.
Fate of Sixty Years).
In my eyes, I became a Touhou fan shortly before the release of MoF, but I've never actually played any of the shooters beyond IN and PCB - both of which I have yet to successfully clear on normal difficulty. I'm more than competent on SWR/UNL, however, which I enjoy playing on a regular basis whenever I take my laptop anywhere without internet. I'd like to get some local friends to start playing it so I can duel 'em, or at the very least figure out how to patch up and connect online with anyone else. It's a low priority, though.
(Random tidbit - on World of Warcraft, I have a Holy spec Paladin. Her name is Yamaxanadu. When she dies, she doesn't make a corpse run, she makes a Corpse Voyage. BA-DUM, TISH)