Samu-Kun Muses on Moé
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010My 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:
- 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.
- 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’.
- 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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