Cookie☆OG
“Touhou Collaboration Video Project: Marisa and Alice’s Cookie Kiss”(【
The name “Cookie☆” in the specific sense refers to this very video. In a more general sense, the term refers to the entire subculture born out of it. The video itself is now often called as the “original work” or "Old Testament"(as compared to Taisa's Cookie☆☆, the New Testament). On this wiki, it is known as Cookie☆OG.
The voice drama is the source of numerous most iconic scenes of the Cookie☆ meme, such as “Puha Reimu” and “Udzuki-aneki”. It is the origin and centre of the entire Cookie☆ universe. In other words, it is the root of all evils.
History
Origin
The project was born in the Niconico community “Mariali is My Justice”. It was originally planned by a different user who later quit the project. Hazuna Rio, then active in the community, inherited the project as its organiser. At 5:17 on February 15, 2010, Hazuna uploaded the voice drama to the video site. Described as a “Yuri fans-oriented Touhou video”, its story is about Marisa attempting to make a chocolate cookie as a present for Alice.
The voice drama is almost 30 minutes long and involved a total of 43 participants. However, despite the scale, it received wide negative reviews due to the its terrible quality. The content of the voice drama contains dull Touhou references which condenses all the problems of Touhou fags, combined with a plot line that is cheesy and poorly paced, poor skills of the voice actors, and constantly changing art styles. With all its problems, the video is nevertheless almost 30 minutes long.
It is worth noting that many other Touhou fan works uploaded to Niconico at the time had approximately similar quality. Nevertheless, the voice drama became a huge controversy and received a massive wave of criticism, mainly due to the high expectations given to it as a result of previous advertisements.
Controversy and Involvement of Inmu
The great dissatisfaction lead to a huge pushback on Niconico, as MADs made of the voice drama with intention of mocking it were uploaded to the site. Such a boom of videos would have been temporary if not because of the further development of the incident.
In a following battle on editing the tags of the video, the tag “Manatsu no Yo no Inmu” was added to the video, bringing it to the attentions of the community grown after the notorious meme subculture centred around the gay porn bearing that name. This lead to an influx of Inmu-fags(people following the Inmu subculture) into the video’s comments. They linked the poor voice acting skill of the drama with the similar phenomenon seen in the second chapter of Manatsu no Yo no Inmu. While completely occupying the comment zone, Inmu-fags also used the voice drama as a material of Inmu MADs.
In response, Hazuna expressed his regret. He tried to create a filter that replaces all Inmu comments with “cookie☆”, and eventually shut down the comment section of the video. While it seemed like the incident should fade away after that, it was reignited as Hazuna copyright-struck cookie☆ videos with Inmu content and popular MADs made of the voice drama using his identity as the creator. However, Hazuna was only the author of the story, and the voice samples and artworks are not of his works. At that time, the Niconico community tend to be resistant to actions of striking down videos even by the copyrights holder. The Inmu community was especially sensitive to their contents being struck down. What ensued was a battle between multiple actors including Hazuna Rio, the Touhou community, and the Inmu community on Niconico.
In the midst of these developments, the Niconico community of Udzuki Kousei, Marisa's voice actor, was found, and Inmu-fags invaded her livestream. Meanwhile, Hazuna Rio was accused by numerous female participants who worked with him of sexual harassment, which greatly escalated the turmoil. It was thereby inferred that Hazuna may had started the whole project in order to get close to teenage female artists and voice actors, and the reason he chose Touhou Project as the subject was because the franchise contains mainly female characters.
Finally, Hazuna Rio issued an apology and terminated his online activity under this identity. The Touhou community would also give up their grounds, surrendering the voice drama as a fully integrated part of the Inmu subculture.
Aftermath
Hazuna’s filter lead to the name “cookie☆” being coined for both the voice drama itself and eventually the subculture born from it. The voice drama would be continually exploited as a part of the Inmu material. It gradually derived from a part of Touhou fan works to become a unique meme culture of itself under the Inmu subculture.
In the following days, there would be numerous cookie☆-related controversies occurring. Following the incorporation of three Touhou voice drama works by Taisa into the canon as Cookie☆☆, the subculture will grow and incorporate more and more voice dramas into its canon. Meanwhile, the eventual disappearance of Udzuki will mark from the very early on the cyberviolent part of the meme’s origin;.
The Cookie☆ controversy is considered to be one of the greatest and most serious turmoils to ever happen in the Touhou community. It was said that “countless of what belongs to the darkest side of Touhou fan works were dragged out and exposed to the sun due to this Rumour Damage caused by Inmu.“ The relationship between Touhou and Cookie☆ started as adversarial, although it would gradually deescalated as time passed on. To this day, Cookie☆ contents are usually not considered a part of Touhou fan works and are never tagged with Touhou.
While generally considered a part of the Inmu subculture, the decline of Inmu content and boom of Cookie☆ content since 2015 had lead to the latter growing as an increasingly independent subculture of itself. The two subcultures nevertheless remained closely linked with each other.
ZUN, the creator of the Touhou Project franchise, was twice asked about Cookie☆. He denied knowing it and never gave extensive comment on the subculture.
Content
Original Plot Summary
Realising that she had forgotten to return Alice’s Valentine’s Day present, Marisa had to make up her White Valentine’s Day chocolate in a hurry.
She visited the Scarlet Devil Mansion in order to use its kitchen, and encountered Sakuya and Koakuma who joined her in making cookies. However, they lacked materials and have to go and purchase them. Marisa encountered Alice again in the store and discovered that Alice has been using the materials sold here all along. Hoping to make a special cookie☆ for Alice, Marisa decided to find freshly laid eggs.
The three girls attacked Mystia in order to obtain her eggs, but they accidentally enraged Yuuka who knocked out Marisa. However, she was abled to obtain eggs from Erin to resume making the dessert. The trio could finally finish making their cookies, and Marisa rode her broom to bring the cookie to Alice at Hakurei shrine.
In the sky, however, she collided with Utsuho and caused the cookie☆ to break. Nevertheless, Alice was pleased. On the other hand, Sakuya was able to happily share her cookie with Meiling as well.
The drama is considered to be poorly made and composed due to multiple reasons:
• The voice drama involved numerous artist, some of whom contributed high-quality artworks while others drew poorly. There was no attempt to unite their art styles, and thus the quality of the art changed suddenly and constantly throughout the whole video.
• Many voice actors, including the leading roles, are amateur. Their performances are considered to be serious instances of bouyomi(棒読み, lacking of emotion in voice acting). Many voice actors recorded in their homes so the environmental noises were left audible in the final drama as well.
• The drama includes a lot of unnecessarily long scenes and lines. Many characters and arcs have no clear purpose of existence, and were included only due to Hazuna’s personal preference.
• The voice drama was advertised as an animation, but it is not animated.
Finishing the whole drama is described as an act of “penance”. Especially after the shrine part at the beginning and entering the Scarlet Devil Mansion part, the experience worsens and most audience could not make it to the rest of the video. Because of that, the content that came after the shrine part are also known as “unpublished part”.
However, since the voice drama serves as the material for massive amount of works by the community, much of the content of the drama is enjoyed as meme references. The MADs created based on the work had lead to interests in the original material itself. Nevertheless, it takes efforts to finish the voice drama from its start to end.
Cast
Organiser: Hazuna Rio
- Udzuki Kousei (UDK, Marisa）
- Reu (RU, Reimu)
- Hinase Haruka (HNS, Alice)
- Yamin (YMN, Suika)
- Yukimura Risakura (Nuclear-aneki/893/Genhatsu, Sakuya)
- Yuzuyu (YZY/Kusodebu, Koakuma)
- MSTA , Mystia)
- Makuta (MCT/Fast-talking aunt, Yuuka)
- Nadeko (NDK, Utsuho)
- RMA (Rumia)
- Shisou (Komachi)
- Chishou (FRN, Flandre)
- Gomi (Garbage/MCDN, Medicine)
- Renin (Eirin)
- Hime (Kaguya)
- Crying Rabbit (Reisen)
- Laughin Rabbit (Tewi)
- INU (Momiji)
- TORI (Aya)
- A Life Form That Flied Fluffily Around 5:20 of Cookie☆
- The Chicken That Appears in The Middle of Cookie☆
- Hell's Crow
- Arrow-kun
- Dokuro-kun
Lines
Can be viewed at Cookie☆OG/lines
On Other Platforms
On Niconico
On the site that it originated, Cookie☆ is extremely popular, serving as the subject of many videos and images. Its major and minor characters, backgrounds, and even BGMs are all used as material for content creation. Especially for Udzuki, Reu, Yamin, and Hinase, who are the centre of this voice drama, vast amounts of works are created for them. Anyone who understands thoroughly the original Cookie☆ will be able to understand much of the entire Cookie☆ universe. However, the extended content from Cookie☆ has already grown to a colossal scale following many years of development. It’s good to start with remembering these four characters.
On Hon-thread
The Hon-thread(home thread) of Cookie☆ was created during the controversy around Udzuki, the main voice actor of the voice drama. It hosted a lot of discussions around this video when the incident was ongoing. Its main subjects then were mostly the Niconico livestreams of Reu and Udzuki, the problems caused by Hazuna Rio, and the harassment of Hinase.
As the controversies gradually cooled, however, there were less of such discussions as well, and the subject soon shifted to the Cookie☆☆ voice dramas following their release. It will later host discussions about the livestreams of Reu and Yamin, as well as the Twitter activities of many Cookie☆ voice actors, but the thread would never grow as popular since.
In Livestreams
Although it now streams various kinds of videos, the livestream thread was established to stream this video. Thus, the voice drama itself remains popular as streaming content, often being streamed repeatedly like a preparatory exercise. There are also processed versions of the video being streamed, such as Cookie☆ being played at 0.5x speed, among other forms of variations.
Nowadays, however, people are more or less getting tired of the same content, or maybe they are just too proud to believe that someone will respond to them. Occasionally the threads will drop.
Sources
A blog post by Hazuna Rio explaining the production of the voice drama from his perspective.