Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Characters of Touhou Project

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was redirect‎ to Touhou Project#Characters. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:31, 25 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Characters of Touhou Project

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was literally right about to blar it to start working on a draft, but it might be better to play it safe and take it here. as is, i think starting over might be the best option, as there is literally not a single reliable source to be found in the list. this isn't even a tattoo assassins case, where the article is small enough that even i could handle it, it's nearly everyone in the franchise. as is, i support draftifying, userfying, or blarring, with mild opposition to plain ol' deletion. blarring? blar'ing? blaring? what's the preferred gerund? consarn _{(prison phone) (crime record)} 15:57, 18 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Music, Video games, Anime and manga, and Japan. consarn _{(prison phone) (crime record)} 15:57, 18 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Delete In most cases, I'd probably say that deletion is not cleanup, but I simply do not think there is anything worth preserving here. To try and solidify my points, I did a BEFORE search on Reimu, Marisa, Reisen, and Koishi, the first two of which are the most prominent characters in the series and the other two are just random ones I chose. None of them have any results on google from reliable sources. Maybe there's some coverage of these characters from non-English sources, particularly for Reimu, but with how niche and globally irrelevant Touhou Project is beyond a niche community, I would be damned if there are any reliable sources for every single character in the franchise, let alone even two of them. And I did run a couple of searches using some of the characters' Japanese names; I obviously don't speak Japanese, but from what I could tell every source I ran into at first glance was either an artwork-hosting site or advertising a fumo or another figure. I could definitely be wrong and maybe there are some sources for these characters somewhere, but at present: the prose is terrible, there's no reliable sources, and substantial trimming would be required for this article to even be near an acceptable state. There is basically nothing here to preserve. My vote is to delete this entirely, but I suppose I'd be fine with draft-ification. λ NegativeMP1 16:32, 18 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@NegativeMP1 sorry for the ping, who was the third character? pc98 raymoo? consarn _{(prison phone) (crime record)} 17:19, 18 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I meant Reisen, my bad. λ NegativeMP1 17:25, 18 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
holy crap lois it's the wed rabbit consarn _{(prison phone) (crime record)} 17:34, 18 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

on a more serious note, the ones i have some faith of reaching gng if i look hard enough are reimu, marisa, yuuka, everyone in eosd besides rumia, daiyousei, and koakuma, yukari (specifically due to her appearance in aocf), sanae, suwako, koishi (tantanpou!), doremy, clownpiece, and hecatia. most are due to their memetic potential in japan, though some genuine arguments could be made for the main duo and clownpiss

the ones i only really think might have a couple tidbits are chen, yuyuko, reisen, satori, unzan (and his hitbox i guess), nue, mamizou, junko (yes, ddc gets skipped entirely), and yuuma

i really don't think the rest stand much of a chance, or that this would mean anything in the context of arguments to keep this list. it's mostly self-reminders to look into those, and maybe also into reimu's increasingly long gohei consarn _{(prison phone) (crime record)} 17:33, 18 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Fictional elements and Lists. WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 20:08, 18 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect and merge to Touhou_Project#Characters. I thought this could be saved by showing it meets WP:NLIST (of course, it needs much shortening, it is a gigantic plot summary, with many entries completely unreferenced). However, I failed to find a single RS that covers this topic (characters of TP). Do ping me if anyone finds a WP:RS covering this, and I'll reconsider my vote. For now, we have a valid redirect target (a section in the main article). It is short and unreferenced, and could benefit from some refs present here (even if we were just referencing some plot summary). Would be nice if we could find a RS that would at least say who are the main TP characters, sigh. PS. When I say merge, I mean few sentences, maybe a few paragraphs, as I concur that 99% of what we have here is poorly referenced WP:FANCRUFT (but there is no harm keeping in the history of the redirect). --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:35, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect per Piotrus. It definitely needs trimmed description, though. ⋆｡˚꒰ঌ Clara A. Djalim ໒꒱˚｡⋆ 12:27, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom. Lorstaking (talk) 14:35, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
unrelated to the actual discussion and not an indicator of me agreeing or disagreeing with this, but i love "do thing nom opposes per nom" votes. they're probably the funniest thing that can happen in an xfd venue consarn _{(prison phone) (crime record)} 14:44, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Two issues here: Is the topic notable; and if it is notable should TNT apply. To me, the answer is clearly "yes, topic notable" and "No, TNT is a poor fit." These characters are a reasonably big deal who show up in lots of games, and should get some coverage merely from reviews of said games if nothing else. I imagine many of the sources are in Japanese, but I'd be shocked if they aren't sufficient. I'm not saying that sourcing is going to be easy for something better known as fan-driven than big company driven, but notability is about the topic-itself, not about the current state of the article. Second issue, TNT: If the nominator wants to rewrite the article to be more reliable-sources-based, that's great, but no need for AFD. Don't blow away the history - that's the bad use of TNT when the history is certainly relevant and unproblematic. TNT is appropriate when an article is fundamentally "wrong" in some way and worse than useless, but it's not appropriate for relevant topics that have "too much" detail or cruft. That's just a call for normal editing to chop things down. So TNT is a poor fit here. SnowFire (talk) 17:51, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Do you have any sources proving notability? The nominator seems to have done a BEFORE on the topic and is actively researching individual characters, but notability of the list is determined by if the set is notable, and making a Wikipedia:SOURCESMUSTEXIST argument does not help with determining if those sources actually exist. Regardless of nominator rationale, there just isn't anything here to build an article on. Magneton Considerer: Pokelego999 (Talk) (Contribs) 23:39, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
comments: i know i shouldn't be too chatty here to avoid the risk of bludgeoning, but between nominating this and now, i may have run into a... couple problems that might warrant a blar and g7 deletion of a draft i was working on

i've been looking for stuff on every character indiscriminately and in order of appearance (first looking through their romanized names, then i'll do all the japanese ones). thus far, i just got done with the eosd cast. as is, i found nothing reliable for cirno, and even less for everyone else. to put it into perspective, cirno may very well be more popular than the franchise itself, which is saying a lot when it's one of the biggest franchises pretty much ever in japan and said franchise includes other characters that have become synonymous with certain cultures (sakuya and remilia with jjba references, patchouli and kaguya with neet culture, reimu and marisa with the concept of touhou, flandre with niconico, clownpiece with the concept of americans being nationalist pricks, etc.). even if this is just a first lap, this is really not a good impression
from an admittedly cursory glance, a good handful of text from this list seems to be pulled from the touhou wiki... or vice versa, it's hard to tell. put a pin on this, i guess
sources really seem to like keeping up with updates in live service fangames. not inherently relevant here, but it's what 80% of the results for 40% of the characters are about. how annoying~!
i think i might have actually found some usable stuff for scarlet symphony of all games. also not relevant here, but it's neat
results for "⑨" also gave me nothing （；´д｀）ゞ

ultimately, this narrows the list of characters i have some faith of finding stuff on down to exactly one character. and i honestly doubt it counts because it's zun. it's a shame too, because i really want this list to exist consarn _{(prison phone) (crime record)} 18:50, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Consarn I wish we had someone who could dig into Japanese scholarly literature. That requires both fluency in Japanese, and how-to knowledge in how to find and access such sources (which may not be digitized). Speaking from experience in working with Polish language sources for fiction content, that requires knowledge of specialized search engines, and frequent trips to the library for non-digitized sources. I.e. I think it is possible some Japanese scholars, critics or reviewers have written about Touhou characters, but a) in Japanese and b) in works that may not be digitized. Sadly, locating such sources is a major work - which is what we have is unencyclopedic WP:FANCRUFT (ORish plot summary). For the record, I'd also prefer to see this article saved, but I fear nobody here is capable of or willing to spend time looking for sources (I cannot as I am not fluent in Japanese :( ). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:27, 21 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

my life is about as subtle about how it requires me to learn japanese as i'm subtle about my opinions on puns, capital letters, the klonoa wii demake, the continued existence of brazil, brazilian cuisine, and getting the possessive form of "it" wrong. which is to say "not very"

the only real problem is starting off, and i have no idea where to do that :pensiveclown: consarn _{(prison phone) (crime record)} 10:57, 21 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect to Touhou Project#Characters. May as well preserve the page history just in case, especially since there's a relevant section to redirect to. There's a complete lack of any notability here, to the point where there's nothing really worth preserving. I'm not against adding some content editorially per Piotrus, but the article's current state just doesn't have much reason to exist. Magneton Considerer: Pokelego999 (Talk) (Contribs) 23:41, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect to Touhou Project#Characters. No reliable sources exist as far as I can see to be able to fix it and I don't see a need for a comprehensive list of characters. If needed, that section could be slightly expanded if suitable referenced. DarkeruTomoe (talk) 10:09, 20 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: To be fair there is a now-redirected (despite the consensus being to merge) article on Reimu Hakurei, which is of full length and has a useful amount of reliable sources, and the AFD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Reimu Hakurei did not take into account the part of WP:SIGCOV that says Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material, so there may be content to merge to this article and, most importantly, a case for improving this article overall. However, that article itself is not the most well-sourced of its kind any more than this one is, and there are other places to merge any reliably sourced content. I'll default to redirect otherwise. ミラP@Miraclepine 15:30, 21 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
ooh, good to keep that in mind. maybe some of those sources could be used for additional info, but of course, i'm not putting all those apples in my basket (one could say some of them could be... no, i'm better than this), so i'll look into them when i'm home or done with my first source-scrounging session (where i'm still at pcb because i had work to do ╯︿╰) consarn _{(prison phone) (crime record)} 15:40, 21 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. Disclaimer goes here that I am not personally a Touhou expert. I asked in a Discord channel with some Touhou fans, and "literally not a single reliable source" from nom may be a bit overblown. In particular, Perfect Memento in Strict Sense is a published official lore book, and is cited a decent amount. There's a new problem that it's not a secondary source (which would be preferred), but I'd lean toward calling it reliable in the same way that, say, officially published guides to video games / TV shows / movies / etc. are cited all the time without incident. It doesn't seem to be cited at the moment, but Who's Who of Humans & Youkai apparently is another official product with a bunch of character details that could be cited more extensively in a hypothetical better-sourced future version of this article. So there's at least something to work with here. As for the question of notability, I suppose I'm a dinosaur from 2007 and still think that since the top-level Touhou article itself is plenty notable and includes details spread across many many games, spinning off a long characters section to their own article is a totally valid WP:SUMMARY style move, and it's surfing off that top-level notability. It would be preferred if more and better secondary sources on the characters themselves could be found of course to not require the SUMMARY "excuse", but regardless that's enough for me. SnowFire (talk) 16:59, 23 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
- Also, apparently there's a Strange Creators of Other World magazine that has articles that would probably cover the topic, and could be argued to be an independent-ish product if "are the sources secondary enough" a concern. SnowFire (talk) 17:05, 23 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  The magazine is stated in the article you linked to be the "official magazine" for Touhou, and is fully supervised by ZUN, the series' creator, meaning there's very little in the sense of independency here. I doubt this could be considered independent, as even if you argue a different publisher makes it independent, many official magazines often have different publishers but are very much still PRIMARY material, since they often exist to serve as promotional material for the series (See Doctor Who Magazine as one example) Magneton Considerer: Pokelego999 (Talk) (Contribs) 01:47, 24 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'd argue Wikipedia:SIZESPLIT would only apply if all information were to be carried over; it's very likely that there's a lot of characters here that don't really need to be mentioned at the parent article. We don't need to mention every single character, especially so if 3/4 of the characters don't have any coverage. Magneton Considerer: Pokelego999 (Talk) (Contribs) 01:43, 24 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

the way i see it at least, primary sources can't really be considered reliable when there are no secondary sources for them to supplement. as is, i'm up to pofv, and... well, the results got a little interesting, but i'll save them for when i'm at ufo. sorry, slept away the weekend again consarn _{(prison phone) (crime record)} 12:09, 24 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
updates: finally, i'm up to ufo (after a few work interruptions). as mentioned above, things got... interesting, to say the least. among other miscellaneous stuff

results before, now, and in the future have and will have mostly been about lostword and genso wanderer, from tier lists to characters releasing there, but some of the later ones (seemingly starting at yuugi) have nearly all included some roblox game. this has nothing to do with the afd, it's just proof that the western part of the fanbase should be disallowed from existing within 20 miles of any hardware that has game development software
while most characters got at least a couple results about random things, stuff, and whatever else (as usual, nothing reliable), yamame and kisume specifically got absolutely nothing. which is saying a lot considering that kisume lives in a bucket and gamers really like buckets for some reason
there have been some official enough touhou fashion products. also not meaningful here beyond drowning out potentially usable results (not that any have been found thus far)
thus far, the character that has come closest to getting one (1) reliable source is... keine!? then again, it was just passing mentions on some top 10 anime teacher lists (idk, see for yourself), so that probably hardly counts
reisen got a little less close, i guess. the other reisen can wait...

it feels like every game's results get increasingly esoteric, but still never usable for this wiki. give it like 3 games and i'll be seeing articles from bunbunmaru consarn _{(prison phone) (crime record)} 19:16, 24 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.