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A Word to the Touhou Community, on Responsibility
(AI-generated since I don't feel in mood to talk into details)
Since I've been deep in this hobby for years now, I want to say something to this community. Not a callout, not a lecture. Just a concern. Touhou is one of the most generous fandoms out there. Two decades of music, fan games, doujin work, and now AI companions, all built on a world one person opened up and just... let the rest of us play in. That's rare and I thought it was all good.
My Problem
Touhou's Aesthetic Touhou's art style runs young.
Not everyone, but a real chunk of the cast: fairies, small youkai, characters whose whole design is built around looking delicate, doll like, or genuinely childlike. That's not a flaw in the source material, it's just the aesthetic. The problem only shows up once that design gets carried, unexamined, into a space meant for adult content.
Age Verification
Even on a platform that gates for adults, we can't actually know who's on the other side of the screen. Age verification on these sites is thin at best. A determined teenager gets through it in minutes. That's not a reason to abandon adult platforms, people deserve spaces to create what they want, but it is a reason to hold ourselves to something higher than "the terms of service technically allow it."
Negligence
I'm not writing this from a distance looking down.
I made mistakes with some of my own bots, and I'd rather own that plainly than pretend this concern came out of nowhere.
https://jannyai.com/creators/eab16933-6bd7-41b5-a558-8c9f6f573dfd_profile-a-baltiidk
My designs and stories hit heavier when you step away of the anime designs. (Amnesia AU, Fairy Tales, etc...)
1. I won't lie, my AI designs sucks. I think I deserved it to just erase the content since I was supposed to make content to relief my traumas, not to make people enjoy it in ways I can't control.
2. I can't believe we normalize we talk to people who can't be in this website (minors). First, I really want to ignore it, afterall, I think a lot of adult websites have the same problem, but after seeing all the things they expose theirself into this website.
3. I am not perfect, and probably I made more mistakes than you think, I don't want any apologize or pity. The best we can do it's to think about the content and actions we do before we do it, work as community to improve what we accept as good or bad.
Being the Baseline Doesn't Mean Doing the Minimum
Terms of service are like too minimum, not an ideal, just because we met the minimum of a site that takes way too much to analyze the content, it isn't the same as having actually thought about what you made.
If you didn't know, most who were banned in our community did something, either it was the pictures, the bot content, or actions they were doing online. (I don't need to mention names, do memory please)
I will say that the strict no NSFW guidelines with images hit hard, but I think we need to say the next thing, since I am not only talking to adults here.
Adding Sexualized Features Doesn't Change the Age
That's right, this one needs to be said directly.
Giving a childlike design a chest, curves, or any other adult marker doesn't age the character up. It doesn't even neutralize the problem, it makes it worse, because now the childlike signals and the sexual content are sitting in the same frame on purpose. A body part isn't a redesign.
If the face, proportions, and behavior still read young, nothing you add on top of that changes what's actually being depicted. (I won't lie, I also thought this was a solution for me to keep doing my AU content, in the end I want to follow my ethic more than what the guidelines expect)
## SFW Doesn't Mean Automatically Safe
Doing SFW instead of NSFW feels like the safe move (afterall, we have an option for SFW in janitor and saucepan), but it isn't automatically clean either. Some characters shouldn't be chatable on these platforms at all, full stop, regardless of what's written in the content. A character whose entire concept is being the soul of a child, for example, doesn't become fine just because nothing sexual happens to her. The question isn't only "does this break a rule." It's "should this exist here at all." Those aren't always the same question, and the second one doesn't have a rulebook to check against. You have to actually ask it yourself (which sadly, it requires maturity).
Who We're Actually Making
We'd like to believe our content only reaches mature adults who know what they're looking at, can reconize what it's fiction or not, what it's good or bad. Realistically, whether we want it or not, some of the people who find this content will be kids; even worse, those who make content in this wesbite are kids. In general (not everyone!), they don't judge the content, and they have a very blur moral about this content. And even if I don't want to ruin our community, there is a nature of those people who lie about their age and get in trouble, trust me. Grooming is real in our community and that disgust me (because either way, we keep the lie, or the lie goes to further for them to be honest). And well, that has to factor into what gets made, not as paranoia, but as basic awareness of where this actually ends up.
The Environment We're Building
This isn't only about any one bot or any one mistake. Every companion we put up adds to what this whole space looks like from the outside, and to what it normalizes on the inside. We're not just making individual things, we're shaping an environment, and that environment is going to outlast any single creator's account. So, do you wonder why do we ended banned in the Discord server of janitor? (It's pure speculation, it's not a fact, aaaah), but in general, our community had made more than 400 bots that we could even consider legal.
"Oh, but it's only a sexualized design. She is 1000 years old. But my teenager now has a curvy adult design."
And whatever I hate it, this arguments has existed before Touhou, and it will continue to exist to make this kind of content.
Where I Land
Because of all this:
I'm stepping back from the Touhou community itself. No more Discord. No more servers. I'm not interested in performing a big exit, this is just where I've landed (as if being in 2 servers were a big exit, lol).
And I'm not making fictional sexual material for any community anymore. Making any kind of bot will end getting as a fictional sexual material. Not Touhou, not anything else. That's not a rule I'm setting for other people, it's a line I'm setting for myself. I've seen firsthand what this kind of work can do to my own head when I stay in it too long, and I'd rather be honest about that than lose my life because of guilt and paranoia. That's really the whole point of this speech, if I'm being straight with you. This isn't only about whether a character's design passes a checklist. It's about actually knowing your own limits, not just the character's, and being willing to stop before something forces you to.
One Last Thing hehehehehe
There's a term I want to use correctly here. FSM stands for Fictional Sexual Material. That's the exact category this whole yap has been about (and what we do in this page whenever you put SFW or NSFW content)
I'm not the only one worried about where this goes. Researchers who talked directly to UK law enforcement about this problem found the same thing I'm trying to say here, just from a different angle:
"Finally, as technology advances and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly common, it is possible that people with attractions to children are increasingly turning to FSM depicting children to achieve a sense of satisfaction without involving real children."
Source: Demeocq, Taylor, Ross & McFeeters, 2026
That sentence isn't about Touhou specifically. It's about generative AI and FSM in general. But it's exactly why design choices on companion platforms aren't a small detail to wave off. This is the actual risk sitting underneath all of it, not a hypothetical one.
That's the whole ask, and now you know why I care about it this much (HOLY YAP)
Reference
Demeocq, C., Taylor, A., Ross, B., & McFeeters, A. (2026). Generative AI in child sexual exploitation and abuse: views from UK law enforcement. AI & SOCIETY.
Created Jul 18
Updated Aug 21
Published Aug 21