While I see the draws of the true demon ending I don't think it would be the best option to solve this issue
realistically there isn't anything to be done
if you look at fanart and doujins and whatnot you'll see a steep decline after what, ten desires?
ok wait ten desires is 13 and we're on what 19 now
and that came out what 2011 2012
look at the print works and you'll also see since 2012 we have gotten one (1) artbook that contains actual information on characters and their traits (grimoire of usami is just spells and those other two somewhat recent ones are just plucked from strange creators of outer worlds which are just taken from the old artbooks themselves if I recall correctly and ZUN didn't even write them)
and the one artbook we got goes up to LoLK and is kinda just a gag book
not to say it isn't good because it is but anyone looking for a serious or informative look at the characters won't find much there
and there's what like two modern manga that aren't particularly amazingly received especially considering the idea of "slice of life touhou" was done by the other two or three or four or however many before it so I barely hear anyone talk about those as well
basically I'm guessing the lack of content outside of the games themselves is probably part of why popularity is declining
why bother with anyone past maybe 16? 15? when the majority of what you have to work with other than designs and 3 lines of dialogue is from 15 and earlier
but then everything 15 and earlier is like a decade old and has been done 99999 times already so for most people there's no point in doing that again
and if you look to see who cares about gameplay it's definitely a minority of the fanbase so I know nothing about the current game quality and I'm not sure if it even matters (well ok it matters but probably not anywhere near as much as the rest of touhou)
I don't think it should be blamed on ZUN since he's a 50 year old man with a wife and kids this is the thing he was doing when he was 20 and who knows if he even has the passion for it anymore or if he just wants to make the fans happy
doujin works also take a lot of time and this is the day and age of scroll on the phone instant gram ten hours wasted so it'd take a very dedicated person to spend so much time trying to make content knowing half the audience is gonna skim through it once and say "good" and that's it
if you take a look at those who used to make touhou doujins maybe 15 years ago a lot of them immediately jumped ship (lel) to kantai collection once that became the new big thing and to this day a large portion of artists still try to chase popularity or recognition in that way
and again I aint saying the new big thing sucks always but if you see a guy trendhop like five times in a row it's pretty obvious he's not doing it entirely out of passion and there'$ $omething el$e he's looking for
also touhou was one of the first series to do the whole ten billion characters to choose from with shallow personalities to mess around with thing but if you look at modern gachas they do that shit easy
for some of them it's just a png and for others maybe it's a little 3d model or live2d or whatever it is these days but just keep tossing them in and get more money
gachas are designed for you to play them every single day and they dripfeed content constantly
in touhou you get a game and in a gacha you get like 1/20th of a game hyped up by a stream and vague announcement and you get those every few weeks from what I've seen
so there's constantly going to be an idea of "NEW SHIT!!!!!" even though it's like an hour of new content each time
the only thing that would stop people from playing those is burnout and loss of interest as opposed to a 2hu game where it ends and now it's done
and shit have you seen how tribalistic gacha communities get about their games too
for many of these people it becomes their entire thing (also sunk cost probably plays a part since it probably feels like garbage to spend hundreds of dollars or log in every day for a year in a gacha just to dump it)
gachas like fire emblem heroes end up making more than the main series and there's that blue archive one where it was made in korea and even managed to get past the whole japanese xenophobia thing
one of those comiket charts in the moriya thread shows it managed to get over twice as many... uhh... circles? or whatever as touhou and that's why you see it absolutely everywhere nowadays
gacha is absolutely a big thing as well as a modern thing that appeals to modern people more than 2hus would so it's not super surprising
haven't played the touhou gacha (or really any gacha other than smt dx2 for like a month half a decade ago) but I've heard it's the kind of game that only works for people who are already fans and it does nothing to try and get new people into the series and usually that type of thing flops hard like whenever a game tries to make an anime
I don't know if this one did/does/will but I've seen some of the designs and it's very confusing who it's for anyway
I've also seen a good amount of touhou fans very much dislike gacha as a concept (as well as vtubers which made up a good portion of that comiket space) and for some it's even why they got into touhou because it fills that niche of one billion characters without the part where you have to whip out your wallet
so I have no idea what's up with all that but I can imagine there may be some pushback if people try to get into touhou from gacha
touhou communities are split but so are communities of basically everything else and it really just depends on how active the community is since the ones with the most people will barely feel an impact when splintered across twelve websites and a bunch of random mongolian spear fishing forums and russian facebook clones
so I don't think theoretically uniting them all under one location would do a ton and people don't want to unite anyway which is why they choose to go to whatever discords or reddits or 4chans or dried up old ass forums with like five people left who remember it exists
anyway post aside there really isn't much to do and really isn't much that can be done I think
things are naturally going to decline over time and nothing about touhou gives the impression of another wave of popularity bringing tons of new blood into the fanbase any time soon
also the modern content is way less popular because there's far less to work with and I imagine old fans probably prefer old content as with every game series and I don't see a ton of new fans and of those new fans there is gonna be even less willing to make stuff to the point where I didn't even realize touhou 19 came out for months since I saw almost nothing of it
I think I saw the purple flower one once and didn't realize it was touhou
a similar thing happened with metal gear where it used to be big and tons of people had played the games but after mgsv (which is still controversial to this day) it was just eight years of radio silence and even with the new remake and the "remasters" (ports) recently it's a pretty dead fanbase
but anyone who sees a character hiding under a box or hears a sharp sound and an exclamation mark will go "ah, that's from metal gear!"
and as long as two fans remain who want to talk about some shit like how big boss is actually gray fox is actually revolver ocelot is actually three cats in a trench coat then it's all good
never really understood the whole popularity thing because of that
where people see sales going down or participation going down and start to panic immediately as if it's entirely a negative thing
and then you start getting the wars between the doomposters who think everything will go wrong and hopeposters who think everything will go right and it starts to feel just like my shin megooms where two sides see extremes that are correct maybe 5% of the time and argue like it's their livelihood
and no this isn't a cope the only difference between a series with 100 and 100000000 fans to me is the amount of resources about the games and the probability of running into someone else who also plays game
maybe I'm looking at some huge issue and saying "nah man who cares" but I really don't get the impression of it mattering much at all or being particularly unnatural or strange
if something good happens then it'll happen and interest is back and if not it's better to let it go than try to prop up a corpse and call it miyako yoshika (good)
give it a hundred years and there'll be basically nothing left but for any relevant amount of time there will always be 2hufans
