adorable rockets

My friend and fellow Visual Novelist Samu-Kun has recently posted a dense and multilayered essay on the topic of moé. He has been thinking about the topic a lot, both as a consumer and a creator, and since he and I share an interest in art history I am quite interested in his insights.

He also used graphs. I am admittedly a sucker for graphs.

In his essay Samu-Kun proposes three distinct themes and theses and expands upon them sequentially. In summary they are:

1. Moé is made by artistic idealization, similar to the art of portraiture – what is desirable and good is amplified, and what is not is omitted.
2. The application of moé in the service of a story can be done many ways: stories containing consecutive layers of ‘absolute moé’ and stories which build and remove ‘relative moé’.
3. Moétic character stereotypes serve an important function, allowing implausibly idealized characters to be introduced into a story.

I shall expand and reflect upon each three in turn.
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Yes, yes Bakamonogatari was the knock-out hit of last season and quite possibly the last five years. So why am I wasting my time on what I should be bemoaning as typical J.C. Staff dreck, instead of waxing rhapsodic?

Two simple reasons:

1. Bakamonogatari deserves more than a quickie post dashed off from the hip.
2. A contrast between Railgun and A Certain Magical Index provides a unique opportunity, unparalleled in the annals of anime, to contrast two shows with near identical moétic goals but very different moétic results.

I dare say that even after only one episode Railgun is an almost unqualified moétic success, while Index failed to retain my interest for even ten episodes. Of course what’s most fascinating about this comparison is that we have not only similar goals, with contrasting results – we also have the same source material, the same studio producing the show, even many of the same characters. It is a near ideal laboratory to study the success and failure of moétic technique, and even to gain some insight into the evolution of this genre/school of art. Yes my dear readers, this is once again an entry in the service of moé.
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So the way I heard it was that Yoshida, Reiko, one of the script writers at Kyoto Animation got Rock Band(tm) last Christmas because she was such a big fan of Karaoke and Western music. This inevitably led to the entire animation department spending time in the break room endlessly trying to master Maps on expert mode instead of working on their next heartful anime. When the producer caught them at it, all they could do was mutter some half-hearted excuses about doing ‘research’ for a new show… and so K-ON! was born. Well, maybe it didn’t exactly happen like that, but you have to admit the timing does fit!

In any case there’s a few shows I was eagerly awaiting this season. K-ON had huge potential because, well rock bands are awesome (and they are more so now that we play entirely too much Rock Band(tm)), Japanese highschool girls are awesome (and they are more so when uber moé), so it could be two great tastes and all that… Of course it also had the potential to be utter dreck since an all-too clever concept can easily be a crutch that replaces the more important things like plot, and characterization.

So how did it turn out? Read on…
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Yes my favorite topic is back, and yes this installment is one that was not planned as part of the original survey. What gives? Well, actually this was going to be my review of Lucky Star but in the process of writing it I realized that:
A) Reviewing or even talking about Lucky Star is boring and it’’s been done ad-nauseum.
B) Lucky Star is not about plot or meaning, its about the characters, and the characters are not only moé in of themselves, they are about moé. Self referential, meta-moé.

Kagamin, moé!~

I think with Shingo’s groundbreaking work, and my modest addition we have a pretty good understanding of how we can define moé, that is a definition of how the word is used.

• Verb: To moé, i.e. to experience the feelings of adoration elicited by characters containing moe (noun / adjective) attributes. “I moe Noriko-chan. (*^ ^*)”
• Adjective 1: To be or have moé, i.e. to embody or contain certain moetic attributes (attributes to be defined latter). “Noriko-chan is *so* moe!”
• Adjective 2: The specific attributes which contribute or convey moé-ness. “Band-aids on the nose are definitely moe! I mean, that of combination of clumsy enough to scrape your nose, endearingly vain enough to try and cover it, and determined enough to keep at it, is perfectly moe!”
• Interjection: To express the active experience of moéing(verb), i.e an “uncontrolled” exclamation which states “I am experiencing moé” in it’s verb sense for a character exhibiting moe attributes. “Noriko-chan, moe!! Ganabare!!”
• Noun 1: Generally images (but also figures, text, sound dramas, hand puppets or basically any media) which convey to the viewer (reader, user, etc.) a character (hence an implicit narrative) who contains the attributes of moé, and therefore induces in the viewer the experience of moé. Causing the viewer to express his experience by exclaiming “moe” is optional. “I’m gonna hop on Danbooru and get me some moe!”
• Noun 2: The historical phenomenon in late 20th century Japanese visual culture where by moé was generally adopted as a term to express a feeling and an attribute. “The emergence of moe is inexorably linked to the rise of cheap high-quality bishoujo figures, erogames and visual novels, and the decline of millitant messianic and hyper masculine otaku culture.”
• Noun 3: The impulse within anime culture to create idealized and infantile feminine characters, which are simultaneously objects for the manipulation and exploitation by, and alter egos for otaku. This last definition is entirely my own and I’m sure would be the subject of much debate but bear with me. “Though not regularly used as such, moe is a trend which can be identified as early Tekuza Osamu’s work.”

Also through Shingo’s work we have a terrific framework for understanding how moé actually is delivered, but what I’ve been endeavoring to tackle is why does moé exist? What is it for? My thesis had been rambling and historical (and I think still valid), but Lucky Star made me realize I could reformulate it in much simpler terms:

Moé is that which makes the female accessible or unthreatening.

In this post feminist world of gender equality it’s easy to over look the gaping chasm of understanding between the sexes, especially in other cultures. Still even for us English language anime fans, and more so for the Japanese otaku the female can be in many ways (and plenty of them non-Freudian) a terrifying ‘other’. ‘She’ threatens to replace our established roles in society, consume our adult independence with a meta-motherness, and/or absorb our individuality in intimacy. Not really of course, but anxieties are often illusory or illogical.

Moé is the antidote, and Lucky Star showed me how even ‘threatening’ moétic character types like the tsundere actually fit into a framework. Shall we meet the cast?

Technorati Tags: Lucky Star, moé

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Back when I was in elementary school there was a series of books called “Choose Your Own Adventure“. Poorly written light action and adventure written in the first person, the books featured a few pages of story then what was usually a fairly random choice for the reader. Go down the scary tunnel and turn to page 83, or climb up the ladder and turn to page 45.

In a sense they were a primitive form of hypermedia used to implement a primitive form of adventure games, and that’s probably why I liked them so much. Sure I knew the story was dreck, and I was constantly frustrated by the game aspect. The choices you made often had fairly arbitrary consequences – which led Princess just read the ones she encountered cover to cover! But they were interactive. I was in control.

So, that’s basically what I expected when I sat down to play my first Visual Novel. A Choose Your Own Adventure with pretty girls and the promise of nekkidness if I “choose wisely.” What I discovered was something completely different, and something that did give me a far greater insight into the development of moé and anime culture.

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So I am playing Yume Miru Kusuri, and it is my first eroge (short for “erotic game” in typical Japanese portmanteau). I mentioned it before, though not by name, when I was musing over the oddly divergent attitudes US and Japanese fans have towards the socially unacceptable elements of anime culture.

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It’s just an anime drawing! vs. It’s just an anime drawing!

In the process of researching Moé literature I’ve come to realize I’m going to have to devote at least one essay to the topic of Loli and one to the topic of Eroge and Visual Novels. This is not either of those essays.

However when I saw the above character summary for a ero-game (one that is being translated and brought to the US mind you) I just had to stop and comment. In many ways this single image allows us to dive right into the issue of “2-D complex” and why many writers on and consumers of anime culture, moers, otaku and casual fans are so invested in the concept.

In case you missed it, the notable detail in the picture above is the claim that Aya is 18 years old.

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They say when life gives you lemons you should make lemonade. Since I can’t bombard you with images, I shall have to assail you with words. So without further ado I will begin my long anticipated (by me at least) survey and discourse on the topic of moé.

On Moé will be a multi part essay series divided into two major sections – Survey and Theory.

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What’s in a name?

I’ve added a new page with some thoughts on that very subject. As well as our favorite topic, the elusive moe.