After 12 years, the Dolls in Pseudo Paradise story has been fully restored

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cuc:
Never mind, we can do this all over again. Even if we are still on the first page of the thread.

2001: ZUN returned to doujin making, applied for Comiket 61 (Dec 2001), was rejected. There are sufficient evidences to prove that he intended to release an earlier version of Hourai Ningyo ~ Dolls in Pseudo Paradise. This version of course, was never released.

2002: ZUN decided he could use the remaining time before Comiket 62 to make a game (the first part in a trilogy), and built EoSD.

Aug 2002, Comiket 62: The CD-R versions of EoSD and DiPP were released. This version of DiPP contains the honest men story.

Sep 2002: The mass-produced version of EoSD was released via doujin vendors, starting the first wave of the Touhou boom.

Dec 2002, Comiket 63: The mass-produced version of DiPP was introduced (along with the PCB demo). This is the version of DiPP you can buy now. Its "story" consists of a series of evocative vignettes.

To add to the confusion, in recent days I have developed an elaborate theory that the C63 version's vignettes were written in 2001 (aside from the U.N. Owen Was Her? one, since the song was composed in 2002), before the C62 honest men story (which was written as a whole, with U.N. Owen, so definitely in 2002). They were the very first work in the Windows canon, the original prototype. That would explain:

On one hand, why they are so artistically immature and completely separated from the world of Gensokyo. Most of them are rough pastiches of weird fiction that has come before, without much new meaning or creativity. A cursed doll implied to make its owner murder people and take their eyeballs for the doll? An orphan bird man in the circus? Sure sure, been there, done that.

On the other hand, why they contained nearly all of ZUN's recurring motifs of that period, from Kaguya and the elixir, to the opium dens of Shanghai Concession, to the idea of youkai living in the modern world. The motifs are all laid bare, yet all undeveloped. If I were the author, it makes no sense to write a fluffy vignette on the body beneath the cherry tree while I'm working on an epic about the same.

I can also talk about how the honest men story was clearly written around pre-existing song titles, and how the song titles work better as a loose collection of vignettes than one story.

But this is still pure speculation, without any conclusive evidence.

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