The Triple Digit Club: 100 Followers Celebratory Post · 2:27pm May 4th, 2016
Alexander Crestfallen's follow, on the back of Scald's feature with TRG, is my 100th follower. Whoopie!
You know what time it is.
In lieu of this milestone, let's explore one of the great mysteries of Fimfic: long time followers of myself or Seattle's Angels may have noticed that I preface most posts - including the site wide ones - with a picture of Patchouli Knowledge from Touhou. Sometimes I even put two. Often it serves no narrative or symbolic purpose, working as at best an eye-catching surprise and, at worst, a flagrant unashamed display of random fanboyism. So, then, the mystery is this: WHY?
Patchy is, for those not in the know, the 4th boss of 6 in Touhou 6: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, the "first" game that kickstarted the series' rise to fame and memedom; the Touhou Project, the collective noun for all the games, is a vertical bullet hell, famous for its 99.9% female cast (the only canon male appears on a picture book), beautiful patterns, and conversely ridiculously tough difficulty. Secondary to that is the force of its fandom, which produces hundreds of articles every cycle, from artbooks to manga to music, a lot of which are of top notch quality.
Touhou fans will agree that while Patchy is not worst girl by any means, she is not an apparent candidate for best girl. Not the cutest, not a loli (which is a big factor for some people...), not the most powerful, not even the most interesting when it comes to lore or backstory or even gameplay, canon or otherwise. And let's be honest, her theme music's not the most fantastic, either, though it really grows on you (that honour is given to this, and I'm not changing it even if it's cliche). While every other boss in that game has had memes made of them, Patchy's been always just... there.
Patchy's fight starts at the 3:00 mark.
Canon Patchouli, as with canon most other characters, does not have much of a base personality, as it's hard to show it through a handful of lines of game dialogue. She's anemic (asthmatic?), stays inside a lot, cares on a fundamental but not necessarily emotional level for the magic library she manages, and is a humanoid but non-human mage. Think Humania Twilight Sparkle, replace enthusiasm with knowledge. She can be wry at times, but she's mostly reserved. Quiet. Dull, even.
In a world where animate cursed umbrellas throw space trains at you and a pet raven from Hell uses the power of a miniature sun embedded in her arm, Patchy... uses magic. Okay. I mean, she can use all five elements of magic, but magic...
Yet, I cannot stand the thought of posting any other Touhou but her. A few come close, but no. It's just not the same.
Part of it is, yes, the other candidates are too mainstream. I like the relative obscurity surrounding her, and dislike the idea of taking a more prominent character as my avatar. Perhaps it's because I don't like talking about the characters themselves; I indulge in fan work but am hesitant to produce any new takes of my own, because I'm satisfied with how they're portrayed as is.
But most of it lies much longer ago, before I came to Fimfic, back when it was the cool thing to post your stories in GDocs. Back then, when I first joined the pony fandom, I was a FF.net user, and stumbled across Ponychan's writing board, /fic/. Soon after receiving advice from Grif for a little story that would grow later, I started giving it.
Learning about imageboard culture as a whole led me to the next logical step: use images as part of how I communicate. Nicknack, a solid author and reviewer now long gone that some of you may remember, used Gilda. There was the Samurai anon who went by no name and only Samurai Jack pictures. I decided I wanted to be like them.
But at the same time, with the whole "egh mainstream" thing, using ponies was out of the question, or my posts today would be a lot less purple and more butter yellow and candy floss pink. I was into Touhou at the time, and settled on Patchouli because hey, she's a librarian, books, she's purple, connections, bang. I didn't expect to use only her. Once or twice, I used other Touhous.
Yet, from the first time I posted a Patchy picture, I knew this was it. Patchy was the first character I had posted on an imageboard, ever, and was even the first avatar character I took; up until then, my FF.net picture was that of a tree, or a heavily filtered shot of a hotel balcony. And it just felt right, taking on her visage for my reviews and discussions, because she summed up so well how I often felt about reviewing fics: an intellectual exercise of much logic and will, but little emotion. Patchy does not laugh out loud. She appreciates, sometimes nodding, sometimes even smiling, but in the end all books must return to the shelf from whence they came. And that was how I felt about ponyfic.
...yes, yes, this is a tad dramatic, I know, but would you expect less from the guy who wrote Worker Pony Falls Off A Building* and Papa Pinkie is Ded?
Anyhow, now that we have the context, hopefully it helps you to accept the answer to the question.
Why Patchouli?
Because.
And really, that's it. It's not inertia or that I simply don't care; when writing this, I reflected, and confirmed that I am rather adamant about keeping Patchy as my go-to best girl. It is, yes, partly because of history - your first is always your first, and all that - and partly because of circumstance, but it's not like I'm forced to, as if my branding or even character would suffer. It's not like you wouldn't recognize a Casca post just because Patchy's not there.
A lot of romantic things - sights of beauty, the taste of good food, even the idea of love - a lot of enamoring things are best enjoyed on the basis of "because". You could dissect the reasons as being biological, hereditary, social, ethic, historical, an effect of upbringing, an effect of environment. But then the magic is lost, because while you burrow deeper and deeper, you lose sight of the romance.
Patchy is like that to me.**
And that is why Patchy is best girl.
*Spoiler alert.
**Not that she's my waifu, no. No. ಠ_ಠ
You deserve ten times this many. D:
Aww, I thought I was lucky number 100
Here's to 100 more!
3921107
You're #99 =P
3918807
I dunno man. Maybe if this was 2012 and I had decided to write a lot more... There were a lot of long hiatus, all deliberate, for me to be consistent enough to make it happen. Even so, I'm pretty happy with where I sit now, because hey, triple digits!