in my many bumpings of threads I did not respond to and for some reason just now chose to respond to I remembered about the timeline thing
and so I came back here in what is almost certainly the wrong place to respond but it's also so right because we live in the wild west of forum
a few months ago I just went and looked at the timeline on the wiki for a good ol while and dumped all my findings in a notepad for later
I guess now is later
though I can't explain EXACTLY how it works I am gonna guess neither of us understood it to any degree so this post is not entirely useless
by the way since season is already in use I'm gonna refer to the time measurement of seasons as
well
seasons
and the actual seasons (winter, spring, summer, fall) as "quarters" because I have no idea how to say those without having to list them every time otherwise lamo
as warned on the wiki this is all conjecture and it's entirely possible the way I found how the dates worked is even weaker than the methods they used (though this is still pretty decent)
but like 70% of touhou canon is weak conjecture based off of 5 lines of dialogue anyway so in 2hus spirit here we go:
this image of ray moo, titled "Hakurei Festival Records - Distant, Hazy Moon" on the wiki (the page is miscellaneous illustrations by ZUN), was drawn by ZUN on august 14, 2005
he spoke of the whole sixty-years flower event, and ended it with "This year is that 60th year."
it sounds very very stupid but this alone is actually enough to get a general sense of the entire timeline (or to begin creation of one)
I forgot where but I believe ZUN also stated that touhou takes place in current day, meaning we can assume pretty strongly that PoFV takes place around 2005 or so
if it turns out he didn't say this it could be possible that 2hus takes place in 2065 or something because iphones and whatever already exist and fall into gensokyo
I'd hope that there isn't still sumireko talking about how she'll cancel raymoo on twitter or whatever 44 years from now in touhou canon
but I am gonna go on assuming ZUN actually did say this so uuh
BAiJR, being the first time the season system was used, places articles and incidents in seasons
and PoFV is in season 120
EoSD is in 118 and PCB is in 119 which would place them in 2003 and 2004 respectively which is weird because that's a year after they were released
in marisa's article (which took place in season 118) the scarlet mist incident was said to take place "one month ago" and marisa (in current day) says it was "about two years ago" which means it definitely is supposed to be in 2003 and not 2002
this also shows that seasons basically equal years because an article written two seasons ago took place "about two years ago" so we can be sure that seasons are not quarters
ZUN said 2005 was the same year as PoFV so we really only have a single real-life year to go on and it makes some stuff kinda weird like that though
either way go back 120 seasons/years and you reach 1885, which is a very familiar number
the estimated year in which the hakurei barrier was created
I am guessing season 0 is the beginning of gensokyo and not just some arbitrary starting point and the wiki also states that 1885 is an assumption but we know there's at least been 120 years since its creation
past that though, you can kinda only tell that things take place in chronological order and maybe be able to narrow down the seasons by the quarter the media takes place in
if you look at stuff on the timeline past SoPM, which was the last time the "season" system showed up more than like
twice in a book
it's all pretty vague
it goes from near-precise dates to general dates to months to literally just the quarter
you are literally able to tell when ZUN released an artbook because all the dates on the timeline around those years are precise (well except for SoPM because those take place all over the timeline) compared to "this one is in winter of this year probably"
you can see if they say "the cherry blossoms are pretty" or "it's so cold" and narrow down the quarter and year it takes place in and since the mangas are chronological you can put a timeline together that way
but there's not much else for newer stuff (past 2012)
I don't know exactly how they narrowed down the months but probably it's the same process as just putting things in chronological order
I don't really get how stuff like
this manages to have a date that takes place within a 30 day time span
stuff like
thismaybe can be narrowed down due to real world events though
I do not really know but eh one day I will go back and look to see how they did that
but today is not that day
looking at the beginning might actually be easier though
anyway that is timeline longpost I hope this is not crusty old information or anything