Comment by jabroni_salad

5 days ago

2 reasons:

1. The creator is extremely cool about remixes and fanuse. In many ways touhou is the OG modern internet fandom in a way that previous ones weren't. Your bad apple video will not be taken down even though it has the same audio as all the others.

2. The shadow puppet format is recognizable at seemingly any resolution. I have seen examples in a 3x3 grid even. On top of that, it only has two colors (black/white, 1/0) so its dead simple to convert the video frames into any other format you can imagine with only a 'hello world' understanding of what you're doing.

> it only has two colors (black/white, 1/0)

As the article mentions, the source video is grayscale, not monochrome. Grays are used for motion blur, glow, gradients, etc.

  • True, I think it's more accurate to say that the video can be shown in only black & white while still remaining mostly true to the original content, which isn't the case for most videos. So you can play bad apple on two-color display and still easily be able to recognize it as bad apple, which definitely contributes to its "hello world for video" status.

> its dead simple to convert the video frames into any other format you can imagine

Maybe read the linked article about that. ;)

  • "It’s grayscale, not just black-and-white."

    Just in case reading TFA is too daunting for those only reading comments

    • I was alluding to the difficulties of frame-rate conversion, dithering, and compression artifacts in the original source being amplified by the conversion. Grayscale by itself isn’t the issue.

      4 replies →

For the same reason, if you play rhythm games you’ll notice that every single one has touhou music.

  • The toby fox music (undertale, deltarune) has been making the rounds in that scene as well.

    Commercial music is really hard to utilize in this way. ZUN and Fox know the music is special to the fans and that they like to see it in different places, so they put the effort in to accommodate it.