According to a recent post on Music Machinery, the artist on Last.fm with the highest plays-per-listener ratio, which the blogger dubs the “passion index,” is Team Shanghai Alice. Some of you may recognize TSA as the one-man development studio (he also goes by “ZUN”) behind the ridiculously popular Touhou Project doujinsoft series. Or if you’re not yet acquainted with this particular cult phenomenon, hit the jump to learn more.

For the uninitiated (i.e. fortunate) few among you who’ve never heard of the Touhou games, it’s a danmaku (aka “curtain fire” or “bullet hell”) shmup series that’s characterized by masochistic difficulty, intricate piano-heavy soundtracks, and of course underage girls in frilly dresses. It’s developed an enormous fanbase in Japan that rivals that of many of the most popular commercial game franchises, as evidenced by the literally hundreds, if not thousands, of remixes, videos, and pieces of fanart released every year. Furthermore, some of these fan works have themselves spawned memes, resulting in scores of other offshoots of their own. If your mind hasn’t exploded yet from the sheer amount of meta-recursion involved, you can check out a couple of the more popular videos to come out of Touhou fandom below.

And then your mind will explode.

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Tags: Last.fm