Category Archives: moe

Now You’re Playing with Moe

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I’d like to see a show where every the origins of every character’s moe facets are explored and shown on screen.

You would get to see the entire childhood friendship from day one to day they’re no longer kids. You’d get to see the exact environment that would turn someone tsun and dere. It wouldn’t just be a part of their personality from day one.

Basically, I think, the result would be that you get to see more of the characters’ parents, which is perhaps not something that happens often in this sort of anime.

“What is anime up to these days?” “Let’s find out!”

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I think at some point, I stopped watching new anime purely because it lined up with my own sense of aesthetics and storytelling, and began watching it more so that I could see how anime is doing. I still enjoy it though, so don’t get the wrong idea.

I’ve found that few shows ever violate my standards of taste, and I think the reason is that I’m treating it less as entertainment and more as friends with whom I can keep up. “How are you doing, magical girl genre? Oh, you’re marketing to older men now! Ahahaha you crazy card.”

It’s a strange place to be.

Thrice-Removed from Reality: Anime in the Current Age

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The anime we see today is the product of a generation which grew up watching anime produced by people who grew up reading manga. We are twice removed from reality.

Hayao Miyazaki has lamented before that people spend too much time watching anime, stating that if you have time to watch Totoro 100 times, that time should have been spent actually being in nature. Similarly in the field of video games, Shigeru Miyamoto is well known for taking inspiration from various times in his life in making some of his classics. The Legend of Zelda is based on Miyamoto’s exploration of the caves and forests around his childhood home, and Pikmin is based upon his gardening in his current adult life. Both men have produced great works, and both emphasize that one should not be too disconnected from reality.

At the same time, however, much of the progress in the history of the arts has been in the form of response to previous works. Impressionism led to Post-Impressionism led to Cubism and so on and so forth. There is nothing necessarily wrong with making art in response to art, and thusly there is nothing necessarily wrong with making anime in response to anime. If anime and manga are such a part of Japan’s culture and increasingly world culture, then doesn’t it too become a part of reality?

What is perhaps most interesting to me then, are the works which exist in the world of otaku but manage to push the content back into reality. Genshiken is probably my favorite example of this. Genshiken is initially devoted to introducing the reader to the world of otaku. Once the reader is firmly entrenched in the trappings of otakudom however, the series changes to being about pushing otaku into the real world, as time passes, graduations occur, and the characters have to confront their relationships with others. Moe itself, I think, has origins in subtly nudging otaku towards reality, with the complex emotions brought on by games such as Kanon and Air.

The problem, as I see it, is that while much of the anime made today is a reaction to anime made in the past, it often does not any sort of concerted effort to look deeply into the anime of the past. References are made, homage is given, but criticism is lacking. Not every title is like this, and even among the ones that do fall into this category, you will find many shows that I am fond of. If an anime is going to be twice or even thrice-removed from reality however, it does no good for the viewer or the creator to be ignorant of this.