What is a MILF?
The correct answer, of course, is a Mother You Would Like to Meet Between the Sheets. It is a fetish towards older, more mature women. But while a million things could be said about the concept of the MILF and its appeal, I want to point your attention to one in particular: what the word “mother” in this context really means.
The “mother” in MILF does not refer to the stretchmarks or the fact that they have a five year old sitting at home. Rather, it is very much a visual ideal. The MILF looks more mature and is therefore attractive in a way younger girls are not, and while it has a conceptual side to it, the idea that the MILF is also far more experienced in them in bedside manners, this is also achieved through visual signifiers, such as the clothes they wear and the hairstyles they favor.
While I’m no scientist, I think it’s safe to say that our minds are built to connect ideas and images, to associate one thing with another. This is evident in art, as symbolism abounded in works throughout history, changing depending on the culture. There, we find increasing levels of abstraction, wherein the “symbol” itself may potentially have the power to supplant the original itself, or at least to carry significant weight. So when it comes to anime and manga, the mental association of visual attributes to other physical traits as well as personality and sexuality isn’t that surprising.
Anime fans are encouraged, for better or worse, by possibly the shows or fellow fans, to grow and cultivate a visual vocabulary in this manner, creating a two-way street where looks imply personality and vice versa. Girls with large breasts either tend to be hyper-sexual (Anybody in Ikkitousen, but especially Ryofu Housen) or reluctantly so (Asahina Mikuru from Haruhi). Tsundere can often be found with twintails, due to their potential implication of guarded innocence.
At their most extreme, these visual signifiers can describe not just personality and background but the entirety of their characters. It’s like instant ramen. It tastes “enough” like the real deal, and it doesn’t require the time and preparation of a real deal. You might consider it shallow, efficient, or both, but it makes sense. Anime fans new and old and from every generation have loved anime partly because of the connections they make to the characters. They want their characters to have personalities attached to their looks, even if those personalities might be one-dimensionally simplistic. This is what a lot of the successful Visual Novel companies have realized. While the characters’ story arcs are just as important, the companies know that they can set the stage with the appealing character designs and hint at their personalities through those deisgn aspects.
They can have players experience love at first sight. Or first moe or whatever.
(Oh, and in regards to MILFs and taking things too far…)
OGIUE MANIAX 
I think this is true, but I wonder if the scope is a little narrow. By this I mean that a visual language like this isn’t limited to anime and manga. I realize this IS an anime and manga blog though. But I think one of the biggest visual indicators, used in many mediums, is that of a “villain.” They are sometimes the easiest to spot. I guess I would just like to see this post expanded beyond fetishes.
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I was actually thinking about the notion of villains “looking” evil, myself.
I couldn’t really think of a way to fit it into this post, so it’s a subject I definitely want to visit in the future.
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I’m pretty sure that the pragmatic usage of the term in the only metric that matters to society–I speak naturally of porn movie titling and categorization–is basically a shorthand way of saying “does not visually appear to be a teenager.” Most of these “mothers” are merely in their mid-20s to 30s, which isn’t really what one thinks of when the phrase “older woman” is used. That said, the life of a sex worker generally involves a great deal more drug use than an average one, so perhaps inverse Gunbuster-esque time dilation is at play here.
This is why, were they to be accurately transposed to reality, the majority of the casts of Ikkitousen, Rumble Roses, etc. would all qualify as such regardless of their stated character ages. Save for the token exceptions they throw in for the anti-woman crowd, these characters LOOK post-pubescent.
Now cougars, THAT’S a different story.
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Hinting at personality visually makes a whole lot of sense /anywhere/ because in the real world, people tend to act as they look. Clothes and other visual cues are real indicators of personality in manga or anywhere else.
I think I get your point though, there are stock personalities in Anime/manga culture that can be identified by the way they talk and the clothes they wear. We get a LOT more information out of the cues than what they directly imply because we know certain character types.
That can mean shallow and or efficient because they are cookie cutter templates. But even stock characters always have some unique aspect about themselves (due to the actor, plot, script.. ) that makes them memorable.
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oops. didn’t mean to reply to you specifically. : )
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