Cirno

Bought this in Japan.

It was from the same store that I got the Ikaruga shirt from. It's this awesome little hole in the wall that I dragged Moke into on what seemed like our last shopping day. Initially I was looking for a really cool iPhone 4 case but had no luck that entire trip. The exterior of the store was an electronics shop with like keyboards and fans and junk going down this long alleyway -I really should have just taken a picture-. I believe that this was custom made, or made in a very small run. There aren't labels on the tags or even a copyright logo. These shirts were all on a rack that had a whole slew of Internet memes and anime/video game culture references. My hope is that they were all made by some die hard fan who lives in the area and prints the shirts that everyone wants but no one produces commercially. Honestly, I wanted to buy every shirt in the place but this was at the end of the trip and I was flat out of cash. There was even another shirt store that had even better designs that we walked into after this place and we were just dieing to buy more -but couldn't-. We'll probably never find it again but it was awesome none the less.

Before this trip I didn't have a single overhead shooter shirt or a Touhou shirt, now I do -that's an infinite percent increase in shirts of those types-! I had to make a hard choice on the shirts that I got -since I could only get two- but I feel that I made solid choices. The size fits me, since I am a Japanese large, which is probably what a Japanese otaku normally is? The printing is really very good, though it must have been an automated process or something because it wasn't printed, and creating any part of the design by hand would be a nightmare. I don't really expect it to last that long since it's fairly custom but boy is it ever rare. The only flaw it has is running up against the edges of the printable area. If you look really hard, just above the character, you can see a flat line where they ran out of space. That's a small detail I can overlook because they were clearly trying to get as much real estate out of their design as they could. 

So here's where it gets confusing. The pictures on the shirt are a girl at the top with snow and ice all around her and then a whole bunch of text. Starting just below her, in a little trapezoid with rounded edges, it says "safety zone". If you are playing an overhead shooter -like Ikaruga-, you have a little ship that you control, zapping enemies with unlimited ammunition and bombs. In a "hardcore" Japanese version of these games they are often described as a "bullet-hell" meaning that the shots coming at you are so abundant that they are nearly impossible to dodge, you find yourself ducking thought little streams of clear space that the designers leave in for the player. On this boss the place to dodge is just under the little girl. At the bottom would normally be a ship and your lives or score or number of bombs left. In this scenario it instead has 3 lines of text, "Ice Fairy on Lake Cirno" which is the name of the character at the top. She is from the Touhou Project line of games, which are quasi-fan made and have a gigantic fan following which has spawned into music, animation, games, comics and almost anything else that you can do online. The very last thing that it says on the shirt is "Icicle Fall - Easy" which basically describes the boss level that the "screen" is on: the ice boss on easy mode -the easiest level in the game-.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egRmObGOo3Y

In certain circles this shirt would be the bomb, but only there. Anywhere else it becomes either a "fun design" that no one cares about or a really really long lecture about the characters, origin and details of all the aspects of the image. Theoretically, there are a few fandoms that would get this shirt, SHMUP fans, Touhou Project fans, and well I was gonna say anime or Internet fans but then I realized that they would have to be otakus that knew about Touhou -at least the fringe of it-. I feel like the people I would be reaching with this shirt in public would number in the dozens in SoCal so I'm just going to wear it wherever in hopes that I somehow meet one. Conventions or club meetings would be good too, but that just seems obvious and I have better shirts for those occasions. 

Wearing this shirt is almost too nerdy. If you've been into console games for a really long time you should know what overhead shooters are, games like Raiden, 1942 and even Space Invaders. You might recognize the shape of the screen but with all the words, different fonts and references it feels as if people are overwhelmed. Their interest may be piqued but they don't want to have to invest in the time that it may take to get a thorough explanation. It goes without saying that I didn't receive any comments on this today but I hope to get one someday from someone who recognizes it or be able to turn somebody else into a fan.