Months ago, perceiving a lack of quality in discussions around Touhou characters in the outer communities, a community member began a thread for more structured, moderated discussion. The premise was simple: select a character at random and discuss facets such as their personality, relationships, potential role in stories, and so on. As of this time, the thread has continued into a second edition, the first thread having gone to auto-sage over a month ago. This is certainly no trivial amount of activity, considering similar discussion-focused threads have languored for sometimes years with few posts. Nonetheless, I wouldn't call it a smashing success, even by THP standards. This post isn't meant to cast criticism on anyone, but I do think there are lessons to be learned, and I shall be examining what I feel are the highs and lows of the exercise thus far and what they potentially say about THP and its current userbase. Where possible, I'll also offer my thoughts on possible solutions to issues, or at the very least opinions on what might be necessary for positive changes to occur.
Something of a bothersome takeaway from the off is that users on the whole seem to have odd notions of what constitutes a 'discussion'. Starting off, the majority of replies were along the lines of "I don't care about this character," with no real follow-up. After a reprimand from the OP, much of the first thread turned into rather self-centered diatribes about posters' overall opinions on the topical character. Sometimes, they went a little further and included interpretive elements. Others dragged in a lot of fandom nonsense that was barely relevant to the thread. What was rare to find in most of these posts was any direct response to other posts. What few responses posters had to each other didn't amount to much more than 'me too' sorts of non-responses or non-sequiturs to which there was no real response beyond perhaps expressing confusion. There was the feeling that these posters had flitted in, threw down their posts, and exited the thread with hardly a glance at what others said. Indeed, even when there were responses to things I posted, it felt as if the person responding hadn't actually read or understood much of what I said. In times when I myself tried to respond to others, most times the replies were cursory or even vaguely dismissive, not especially trying for any sort of engagement.
Related but slightly tangential to the above is that perceptions of high barriers to entry kept many from participating. Both out-of-band and more than once in the thread, lamentations that the poster didn't have a 'strong enough opinion' or 'intelligent enough opinion' to say anything surfaced as an excuse for not taking part. These sorts of posts came despite eventual clarification of purpose via suggested lines of discussion. Even offering direct assurances to these posters that the most token participation was part of the thread's objectives didn't seem to have any effect, netting either no further response or tepid replies of acknowledgement. To clumsily psychoanalyse, much like when people simply posted things that amounted to 'I like this character', an impression that most anons approaching the thread were 'playing it safe' comes across. This particularly feels true when considering how there were anons who would gladly argue (what they felt like) factual matter but would never presume to challenge others on their opinions, much less offer much more than the most inoffensive, surface-level statements of their own. It feels very much like people are averse to conflict or even observation when it comes to how they view things. Whilst it wouldn't do for posters to be flying off the handle at each other for their particular takes, the conflict-aversion on display offers little in the way of movement to a slow-moving thread, even accounting for things like a character's relative lack of popularity; even more notionally popular characters, like Aya, Sanae, or Flandre sometimes garnered fewer than a reponse every couple of days.
More of a neutral observation, but I noticed that whether or not the character selection and post from the thread-runner was 'on-time' didn't seem to influence activity in any measurable way. There were times during the first thread-runner's tenure that a forgotten roll or late post might have subtracted some time from the overall schedule. Under the impression that such a shift might have affected engagement, once I took over, I made best-effort attempts at keeping to the week-long schedule by shifting the date when necessary. However, doing so never seemed to produce any change to the degree of engagement. I don't recall ever having to account for holidays, though I suspect they wouldn't have mattered, either; they've been offered as excuses before for a lack of response to stories and should be considered largely suspect as a claim. Similarly, even periods of inactivity, like when I paused the thread when I took part in the second exhibition of the year, didn't have any obvious effect on activity. There was the same relative malaise no matter what the time or circumstance.
A personal observation is that running the thread in its present form requires degrees of admin that are sometimes hard to keep up with. Prior to the second thread, it was necessary to manually roll for the 'character pool' and then to select the character. Then, after the selection was made, writing up a lead-in post to mark that the discussion topic had changed was also needed. Whilst not strictly necessary, a general nice-to-have for any lead-in post was an appropriate image of the respective character, adding more minute friction to the process by the need to seek an applicable image out. Of more necessity was the general descriptor of the character, introducing who they're supposed to be and any noteworthy information about their appearances in canon, along with links to their official profiles and any coverage of them in print works, in order to hopefully point others to useful canonical information if they lack context. After that was posted, then there was the task of making an announcement to the outer communities to hopefully ensure that the thread didn't go unnoticed. An extra measure that I took under my tenure was mid-week and last-chance announcements in hopes of catching stragglers; I don't feel those really had any effect, so it's no surprise that they haven't made a comeback. All of this together made the process of starting or continuing the discussion a bit of a struggle at times. Thankfully, after Teruyo took over, he devised a mostly automated way of rolling and keeping track of the discussed characters, taking some of the initial friction out. However, that doesn't quite save the necessary efforts beyond the selection. I'm not sure there's much of a solution to this point, beyond perhaps further automation to simply announce the character or some such nice-to-have, but it is nevertheless an observation to be made.
Now, since the second iteration of the thread has run for a short while now, I can say that there have been minor improvements overall as time has gone on. Fewer long non-sequiturs have been posted, especially after Teruyo reprimanded certain parties over a rightfully perceived lack of meaningful engagement with the thread and other posters. For the most part, what posts exist do tend to be responses, or at least contain matter that could be seen as a response to others’ expressed views. The thread feels slightly more focused overall, less prone to wandering backwards to previous characters or off into tangents about unrelated topics. In a word, it feels a little more ‘efficient’ compared to days past. By the same turn, I would say that I perceive a slight shift in the character of newer posts that doesn’t feel entirely positive. In particular, some posters spend more time arguing about the veracity of other posters’ views based on examples from game dialogue or other textual matter than expressing much of anything. Whilst these sorts of exchanges do consitute replies to other posters, their usefulness is limited. Overall, I don’t see as many who go beyond crafting a loose sort of profile of the topical character, stating in some terms or other that there is a particular way that they view the character and suppose that they are situated in some way among the rest of the cast in the setting, never going much further than those sorts of stative utterances. I can’t recall the last seriously in-depth post featuring someone getting into particular situations and scenarios regarding the character they’d like to see, or discussing the sorts of outside influences that they pull in to form their views of the character. Also missing largely is any real comment on the characters in fanworks, positive or negative, especially as regards works on THP; statements about fanworks tend to be fairly broad and more directed towards ‘the fandom’ in general, never citing more than one or two examples at most. I can’t say I’m free of this particular defect, but the majority of fanworks are not really to my taste, so I can’t often offer more than the same few examples.
The way I see it, the substance of the thread is really meant to be largely interpretive. That is, most of the discussion happening probably ought to be about how participants view the topical character, their psychology, their relationships, and so forth. The nature of the Touhou Project is such that there’s rarely that much positively stated about a given character in the ‘canon’, even relatively ‘major’ ones. Thus, by necessity, there is going to have to be a lot of reaching happening, otherwise there is simply little to talk about. If all discussion falls to ‘canonical accuracy’, then what will result is simply regurgitations of written material and citations of manga chapters, game dialogue, etc. What is the alternative? There isn’t a simple answer, of course, but my general feeling is that it should just be acknowledged that all starting points are relatively arbitrary as far as interpretations of characters. As long as those discussing can hold that in mind, they can start from the standpoint of ‘this character puts me to mind of such-and-such from this non-Touhou property’ or similar. In this way, there are ideas that can be explored and interrogated in the shared context of the thread. However, I think care should be taken not to quickly dismiss views and resort to citations and arguments about why such-and-such thing is ‘non-canonical’. In character, then, the thread should largely be one of acknowledgement and genuine prodding for further comment — ‘I see; please tell me more.’ Whilst there are certainly degrees of this, what I mean to say is that there can always be more. I don’t know exactly how such lofty goals can be implemented, of course. For the most part, I think it’s likely to be a longer process of encouragement and outreach, trying to remind people that participation in the thread means more than just throwing down one’s opinion and walking away. Some of this is already in effect in the thread, and that is to be applauded. It’s partly a matter of continual application at this stage.
In the end, I’m not sure I can give much of a useful definition of ‘discussion’, much less offer much concrete in the way of ideas to improve the thread. Perhaps, for the time being, it’s best to simply stay the course, stay as active as possible, and encourage others where reasonable. I would certainly love to see more engagement in a more-than-trivial way, but I can’t say that what’s happened thus far is bad. In fact, it seems to generally be improving as time goes on. With fresher management and a bit of automation, at least some of the friction of running the thread has gone away. The main pain point, as with all things THP, will be keeping others in the thread and on-topic, as well as getting people to let go of preconceptions and think a little outside of normal constraints. Perhaps some might look at this whole exercise and deem it ‘artificial’. I think that all communities have a degree of artifice if they try to do anything of any real value. I won’t say that the Character Discussion Thread is the massive success that it could be, but I also won’t damn it for what it’s managed. I will simply take part for today and hope for a better tomorrow.