adorable rockets

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

Miyuki - Miyuki is obviously moé. In many way’s she’s the proto-moétic maiden. Sweet, unsullied, innocent, helpful, cheerful. Endearingly clumsy and a little bit distracted but ultimately capable, successful and diligent in her duties. She is the ideal maiden. Smart enough to be a doctor, sweet enough to be the girl next door. She’s capable enough to take your job or emasculate you in marriage but her adorable personality will always prevent that from happening. She’s Mrs. Cleaver still young enough to date, and examples of her type can usually be found in medio costumes. Personally I find this is the type of moétic character the most off-putting.

Tsukasa - Also obviously moé. Unlike Miyuki, Tsukasa is not competent, successful or intelligent. Here the threat of masculine absorption or rejection is not mitigated by a personality type, but rather by Tsukasa’s inherent limitations. She’s clumsy, lazy and a little [sic] childish, however she makes up for it by being a good cook! ‘Nuff said. Excuse me while I look for my motion sickness bag. I get Tsukasa at an emotional level – you want to protect her because she so obviously can’t protect herself.

Kagami – Kagami is the tsundere character of the show – a type which is not always recognized to be moé. Moé is “supposed” to be sweet and childlike – the epitome of femininity. On the other hand a tsundere is usually abrasive, annoying and “un-femininie”. However thats the tsuntsun side. The deredere side is by definition the hidden sweet, innocent, and vulnerable true-nature of the tsundere character. If you consider the tsundere historically in the evolution of anime culture you see that before the rise of moé culture there were not many tsundere characters. Usually strong women were portrayed merely as being greedy, manipulative, out of control – basically they were un-feminie. Bad girls. Women who didn’t know their place. You’ve seen them – legs spread in a confident pose, back of the hand to the mouth, and a mocking “oh-ho-ho-ho~!”

You still see this charatype quite a bit in the role of the ‘rival’, but now it’s also often times repaced by a tsundere (I blame Gainax for the rise of the tsundere rival in their efforts to have well developed female characters even in the second tier – see Nadia, Jung, Asuka, Yoko). The tsundere takes this threatening ‘bad girl’, and says deep down underneath (if only you knew how to reach her) there’s a ‘good girl’ crying by herself. In fact this ‘hidden good girl’ is even more pathetic and adorable than the childish type Tsukasa represents. She’s broken bad because she just needs love and understanding. More to the point, tsundere types say that “this person is threatening and inaccessible, but only on the surface.” When viewed that way, the tsundere also fulfills my proposed definition of the function of moé. This functional fit, combined with the temporal coincidence of the popularity of the charatype convinces me that tsundere is indeed a moetic archetype. God knows I find Kagamin adorable! (*^_^*)

Konota – She doesn’t seem moé at all on the surface, not with a mole, monkey eyebrows, shifty looks, bad habits and coarse personality. Her uber-geekness seems unique enough that at first glance you have to wonder what kind of archetype she could possibly represent. However Konota belongs to a class of moé that is arguably older than the tsundere, and one that also fulfills the need to make women accessible and unthreatening: Konota is the moetic-prodigy/fanatic. Traditionally this type has been musical, occasionally artistic or scientific, and very very frequently an athlete. The threat to masculinity in this type is not merely that a female will enter a particular sphere which had previously been exclusively male, but that they may surpass and dominate that field. By taking the prodigy and making her in all other respects a flighty maiden, the male psyche has a ‘handle’ with which his position is kept secure. Konota may know all the Pokemon, but she’s still a child who worries about her height. Of course, by also being a self referential alter ego for the otaku viewer, the degree to which Konota has to undermine her achievements though girly attributes in order to be accessible, is actually pretty low. By nature she’s already way more accessible than normal girls are.

The nice thing about this framework for the understanding of moé is that is also makes the question of loli very simple. The loli-moé is of the same type as the ko-moétic attraction one finds towards Tsukasa. Ero-kawaii images are not about age, but about the degree to which the image presents a female that is accessible and unthreatening. Loli and moé are born of the same desire, but they are two distinct trends that share many of the same incarnations. Furthermore that desire is not intrinsically about age, or about childish attributes because they are childish per-se.

This realization does not change the nature of the ethical debate about the infantilization of women, sexual attraction to the innocent or helpless, and the degree to which the representational style effects the degree of fantasy. However for me it does provide a formal understanding of what many (including myself) see as a clear link between the two.

Now, you’ll have to excuse me, the latest Lucky Star just finished downloading…

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 4:14 pm and is filed under MOÉ. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.