Marisa in Wonderland 不思議の国の魔理沙 Touhou Doujinshi Review 東方同人誌

I'm going to start this review with a little historical background. We see in Fredric Jameson's "The Political Unconscious" a pat explanation for the reemergence of the romance in late capitalist society. In the world of reality, Jameson says, there is no escape from social and political injustice without an active resistance to hegemony. As the leisure class, we naturally want to upset that hegemony, because life under it is unbearable; but we have no desire to participate in its destruction, because we benefit from the injustice in various ways. The mode of modern romantic literature is therefore that of a hidden escape, where hegemony is upset in fantastic or surreal ways. Thus we get works such as Tanizaki Jun'ichirou's cultural criticism disguised as ero-guro-nonsense, and Takahiro Awatake's transformation of the dying inaka into a planning ground for mysterious extraterrestrial or transdimensional intelligences. Now, this doujinshi by Cosmic Force moves quite beyond Jameson in its hallucinatory retelling of Alice in Wonderland, the earliest late modern fantasy, *within* the saturnalia of the doujinshi culture. The story opens with Marisa reading a book in Gensokyo. Already the trope is doubling back on itself. How can Marisa travel to Carroll's underground if she is already in a realm of illusion, the reified, digestible byproduct of a culture industry? Is she not reading Adorno by the pool, so to speak? In Cosmic Force's narrative, there is no shared dialectic in which the reality can oppose fantasy. We simply move from fantasy to a deeper fantasy, and not one in which strange and unusual creatures emerge, but simply the same characters surprising us by matching their preassigned tropes to the forms of the fantasy. And as we move on to the end of Marisa's tunnel, we see the book is literally escapes out of the page. Just as the story ignores the all-consuming message of capitalism, the book's pages ignores the very form of a normal doujinshi and becomes another type of object entirely, a children's plaything. Note the lack of all irony, one of the best features of doujinshi culture. Circles may call their work "parody" but there is often little parody going on. There is no commentary being performed on the Alice story, at least not directly. In fact, this book could double as a real children's book; the hidden meaning is no deeper, but simply jars the mind of the adult in the same way that the presence of images on the page jars the mind of the child. So, that's pretty much my review. This is definitely one of the more interesting doujinshi I've come across and I recommend it to anyone who watched this entire video.