Forum - View topicChicks on Anime [2008-09-09]
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Mohawk52
 Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
Goodpenguin
Posts: 457 Location: Hunt Valley, MD |
|
|||||||||
But then your right back to 'what is 'Moe'?' in the first place. For my own two cents, I think your earlier impressions were correct and your getting rushed a bit by the segment that will argue to the ends of the Earth how the bizarre is actually quite normal, and only you have a problem with it. It's not an accident 'Moe's' kanji is 'sprouting'. The point has been ground into the abstract, but what's glossed over in a lot of the lines of reasonings, that everyone likes cute things, or heartwarming moments, is that these emotions have been displayed in entertainment long before 'Moe' came around. 'Moe' didn't event a love for pets in anime. 'Moe' didn't invent a fondness for childhood and innocence in anime. 'Moe' didn't pioneer 'cute' in anime. 'Moe' is a byproduct of a commercial industry that has long made a yen looking to satisfy the desires of a geeky, niche community. A niche community that exists in Japan, which just so happens to be, famously, one of the most......sexually eccentric... places on the face of the globe. That fact, and the reality of the commercial industry around it, can't be blurred with very abstract arguments about general human emotions. Body pillows and similar merchandise exist *exactly* for the reasons you think they do, regardless of the protests. I could angrily argue I personally purchase DVD's to place in a post-modern sculpture in my back yard, but that's not what the DVD market, and industry, is centered around. As said earlier, there are a lot of 'Moe' conventions that have seeped out and merged with general 'cute' trends, leaving shows that don't have any 'fetishized' undertones. With 'Moe' being somewhat ubiquitous now, it's unfair to argue that people who enjoy a show that could be labeled 'Moe' are somehow enraptured by deviant desires. But to argue 'Moe' is a random collection of innocent emotions that are being picked on by alpha-male bullies, and that only a few shows/merchandise 'crossed a line' later on, is putting the cart before the horse. 'Moe' is just 'fetish' #4567894 marketed to a subculture from an industry built around 'fetishes' (not necessarily meant sexually), and progressed outwards in a more benign fashion into the general medium. Yes, you will get a hardcore segment arguing that 'Moe' is just a critics invention and that it's simply about enjoying 'innocent times/love' (which, again, overlooks the fact that every culture has an enjoyment of 'innocent times/love', yet only the Japanese anime/manga base have a 'Moe' subculture), but like a Monty Python sketch it's the same segment that would argue that if you hacked off their legs, that they in fact had merely 'removed' their legs own legs so they could rest. And that 'everybody' can remove their own legs. Except you, cause' you must be uptight or something. |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
daxomni
 Posts: 2650 Location: Somewhere else. |
|
|||||||||
I thought I was being fairly clear in making my point, but apparently it was still a little too vague. I think I'll just move along.
I hope you're not really implying that every time someone considers a view different from your own we're suddenly forced to go right back to defining the term all over again?
Rushed by whom? Is there a time limit I'm unaware of? How exactly does speed factor into how we define moe?
I really don't follow you. I thought nearly all definable words were the result of something that has already occurred or at least been theorized before there was a word for it. Is this not the case? If so then where are you trying to go with this?
This appears to be your primary point, but it's really hard to reply to it when it's all jumbled together like this. Most of your post doesn't lead me anywhere near this conclusion; it just seems to come out of nowhere. I think you should separate the contention above into its various points and also focus more on explaining how you came to each of your conclusions. I would also like to ask you where you think moe ends and lolicon begins. |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
Goodpenguin
Posts: 457 Location: Hunt Valley, MD |
|
|||||||||
|
daxomni wrote:
Or in other words I should begin to play the 'Death of a thousand cuts' game, where one person begins to question, ad nauseum, every sentence, till' everything falls farther and farther away from the subject at hand. Instead of a counter-argument it's an argument about the persons argument, and then an argument about the argument over the argument. Yes, that's a common line of attack in these threads. No, I won't dance to that tune. If you've got a specific disagreement, sound it out. I've expressed the same opinion, to greater length, both earlier in this thread and the other recent 'Moe' thread, so I really don't think there's any lack of context. I'm not playing the 'Moe equal lolicon' game because nowhere have I indicated one equals the other, nor is an examination of a particular vein of pornography of relevance to anything. It's odd that 'lolicon' keeps being shoehorned into the discussion by folks who spend the greatest amount of time arguing 'Moe' has nothing to do with a sexual nature.
Rushed as in responded to by multiple hasty defenders, not rushed as anything to do with time. And cutsey-poo verbage points like this or [you're] is what's employed when one doesn't like what another is saying, yet lacks the capacity to argue with anything but snark. Edit-
So the fact that the kanji for 'Moe' is akin to 'budding' is just coincidence. A love for a pet/object 'buds' right, certainly not a reference to coming-of-age female sexuality. In an entertainment category that often features young girls. No sir, just a coincidence. And of course 'Moe' is a relatively recent term that just happens to encompass a fondness for younger innocence and affection that nobody had got around to terming yet in recorded human history. The fact that it occurred coincidently with the rise of romance games/visual novels featuring younger, more-passive female models is yet another stunning coincidence. |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
Servant of the Path
 Posts: 90 Location: United States |
|
|||||||||
And what about those of us who see it as both bizarre and harmless? I like moe, I don't think it's sexual and I still think it's strange the degree to which some shows seem to magnify and focus on it. I think a lot of this discussion is being generated by a lack of understanding of what the other person is feeling and an attempt to force accepted definitions to fit the circumstances to close those gaps.
Do they? Or do they exist for the reasons the purchasers say they do? I'm not quite cynical enough to presume that should someone disagree with me on something like that that they are obviously just trying to cover up the real reason in the hopes they won't viewed as some kind of perverted freak. I have desktops on my computer of characters from various shows and like to be surrounded by the imagery to that extent but that's just because I enjoy being reminded of the experience of watching the show. I have my doubts about your presumed authority to determine that that can't be a reason why someone might purchase an anime body pillow. It's a body pillow, not an anatomically correct sex doll.
So what this all really seems to be revolving around is the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. I think the definition provided in the column is pretty clear and from most of the posting here by fans of moe they seem to form a consensus that moe isn't fundamentally sexual. And shouldn't the people experiencing the emotion be the ones to define what it means, especially since it's an emotional reaction we're trying to define? If that's the case then I'm not sure how relevant it is to debate over which definition or representation of the term came first. The companies selling the products aren't in the business of establishing the language necessary to explore the social or personal ramifications of such a reaction, they're just trying to sell their products. Since we're really talking about a personal reaction to these shows I don't think that company marketers have any more firm a grip on what moe means than the people experiencing it. If they think slapping the word "moe" on one of their products will make them more money then that's what they'll do. The thought that companies have the authority to simply redefine the terms by which I express how I feel about something, regardless of who defined them first and just because they want a few extra bucks, is a little scary to me. If we're talking about moe as being basically asexual then I suppose the people on the far end of the other side are going to end up being critical about the sexualization of moe. Either way, if we're ever going to emerge from the dregs of semantics we're going to have to pick a definition and run with it. |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
daxomni
Posts: 2650 Location: Somewhere else. |
|
|||||||||
Hey, I'm just trying to understand how you came to your conclusions.
I did sound out my view. In as clear and specific terms as I could. And then you said we had to go back to defining the term again.
If moe is sexual then how does it differ from lolicon? Why have two terms?
Hasty? In what way? You really seem to have a hard time explaining whatever it is you're trying to say.
Ahh, I'm really starting to feel moe toward Goodpenguin. It's just so cute the way he tries make a point and then becomes confused in the middle of it all and gets side-tracked and ends up talking about budding sprouts and cutting games and dancing tunes. So kawaii! |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
Goodpenguin
Posts: 457 Location: Hunt Valley, MD |
|
|||||||||
*yawn* Two post of increasing personal insults at me, neither specifying what in particular you disagree with nor even an argument of your own. Keep on shining you crazy diamond! Though if anyone else feels 'moe' towards me I'll license some plushies and make some money. Also look for me in an upcoming Key game. Servant of the Path wrote:
This is the center-piece reasoning of most of your arguments, and what I disagree with is the notion that anything and everything is to be singularly defined as how the individual 'feels' about it. I don't begrudge anyone enjoying 'Moe'/a product exactly for the reasons they personally state, but at the same time it's still an end-product of a commercial industry with specific market goals. Products aren't free-floating vapors that suddenly form on contact with a person's sub-conscious, their approved and designed in office spaces with a market in mind. Maybe you enjoy a product in a way that isn't the makers intent, that's fine. But to ignore the makers intent/normal audience when discussing the full scope of the product is divorcing the issue from important facts as well. To discuss something not from it's real-world origins but from how individuals 'feel' about them would render examining most anything meaningless. There's a layer of defensiveness that isn't needed, as at least in my case, I'm not trying to lock down 'Moe' into one small box. What I do counter-argue is against the reasoning that there's no sexual/romantic element that drove a popular form of 'Moe' entertainment into the greater culture. Importantly on this, folks seem to keep bringing up lolicon, but from what I'm familiar with a lot of the romance/dating-sim/visual novel 'Moe' stuff apparently features tween/young teen females in a product aimed at male teens. Sheepish/passive 13/14/15 year old girls aren't 'lolicon' to 15/16 year old male otakus; it's a pretty realistic 'romance style' switch from the older, physically mature, aggressive heroines of earlier ecchi stuff when you have an audience that doesn't feel confident competing on physical dating levels. Yes, there is a niche segment who goes for 'lolicon' that may feed off of parts of 'Moe', but when referring to sexuality around (applicable) 'Moe' it's usually about awkward young teens and passive/non-threating female roles, not 'lolicon'. And as said many times, 'Moe' conventions have branched out into material that has little to do with any romance/sexual themes. Nothing I'm arguing for is aimed at pigeonholing 'Moe', I'm arguing that it's rather dishonest to posit that part of 'Moe' momentum wasn't built around material with an expressly romance/relationship/sexual core. I don't think that should really be that controversial one way or another. |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
daxomni
Posts: 2650 Location: Somewhere else. |
|
|||||||||
|
Here are a couple other examples of what I consider to be moe...
---------- Example #2 One of the first times I remember ever feeling moe towards an onscreen character was when I was still young myself. I was watching The Shining and I wanted to protect the other boy, almost as though he was my real life friend or my brother. He was completely innocent of guilt and needed immediate protection. That's all it took. He wasn't the slightest bit appealing or attractive to me. I wasn't thinking about what I might get out of it, I just wanted to help. It was an instinctive feeling that didn't need to be thought-out in detail, it was just there. 
I didn't feel the slightest bit moe toward the girls, even though some folks seem to think that's what moe is really all about. 
The girls were creepy. I'm not saying you couldn't ever feel compassion for them, if you really thought about it, but the movie didn't present them in a way that would produce moe feelings and thus I never felt any fundamental desire to protect them or any exceptional sorrow over the fact that they appeared to have suffered greatly. The compassion you feel for Danny is on a much lower level. Finding compassion for the girls requires actively thinking about it. You have to decide to feel compassion for them, whereas feeling a desire to protect Danny is much more instinctive. Example #3 
Here we have several girls from Azumanga. People often seem to assume that Chiyo-chan or Osaka are the moe girls. But in my case they never gave me any moe feelings. They were cute, yes, but that alone was not enough to elicit any emotional connection with me. It was Sakaki that made me feel moe. Yup. The girl who was perhaps the least cute visually but who had the cutest personality by far. She was the humble, innocent one that I gravitated to without even having to think about it. She wasn't physically appealing, she was emotionally appealing. There was no desire to be intimate with Sakaki, it just wasn't that kind of feeling. I suppose you could say it was vaguely about being her friend or brother or father but it wasn't a well defined feeling, it was a very simple one. Anyone who could have helped her get closer to the things she loved. Does that make sense? Thats what "moe" means to me. That's why I don't like it when people squish it together with lolicon. We have two terms, let's accept that they have different meanings. I'm not saying that people won't pretend that lolicon is "cute" or whatever in order to avoid being demonized, that's their problem, but that doesn't in itself mean that moe is suddenly inclusive of anything and everything that people say it is. Words can become virtually meaningless over time if we allow ourselves to be too careless with their definitions. |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
Goodpenguin
Posts: 457 Location: Hunt Valley, MD |
|
|||||||||
What your illustrating seems to flow along the lines of 'Moe' in it's very broad usage today. Platonic love, feeling of brotherly protection, etc. I think the bone of contention is that when 'Moe' comes up in conversation a lot of folks jump right to it's more platonic-minded, mainstream usage of today, and completely shoot it's more sexual/romance/relationship roots down the memory hole. When something like 'Azumanga Daioh' comes up it's a pretty tough case to make that it's made to tickle anyones sexual/romance fancy. But when I recall 'Moe' coming to prominence as a 'force', what comes to mind were the increasingly popular dating-sim/visual novels of producers like Key, and they had a specific mix of elements that was decently distinct. To me it was a popular otaku-in-mind movement that gave teens the romance/sex fantasies they wanted, but replaced the overt sexuality and curvy, vivacious girls with a more toned-down model that fit a young otaku's comfort zone (again, referring to young teen fantasies around other young teens, not 'loli'). This kind of percolated in the margins of the subculture awhile, and then you began to see pieces of the 'Moe' style gravitate out towards the mainstream, where it mixed in with much more cute/platonic undertones that made for a very different style of show, and attracted a different audience. I'm not as apt as some to go along with the entire scope/history of 'Moe' as being this general platonic feeling, and something that's always been around in anime. Yes, general feelings of protection, brotherly love, etc. are pretty standard, and have often been used in narratives, but to me 'Moe' began as a more specific 'style' than that, even though it's morphed into a mainstream usage. Nobody called the 'Dog of Flanders' 'Moe' when it came out, even though it was a platonic tearjerker right in the vein people use 'Moe' today. I'm a big booster of 'traditional' ecchi, but when that kind of fan-service comes up nobody has an issue with labeling certain depictions/merchandise as racy, pervy, etc. Nobody ever argued that those Ryoko and Ayeka posters were designed so one could admire their competitive spirit, they were made to tickle an ecchi fancy. But when it comes to 'Moe' and modern merchandise offshoots like body pillows, suddenly any traces of the romance/sexual part of 'Moe' are treated as non-existent, or just happenstance. I'm more than willing to accept the platonic uses of 'Moe' today, but if we are talking about the entire scope of all phases/guises of 'Moe', then the otaku visual novel/dating-sim roots aspect is a component that's necessary when giving the full story. A counter-question to your inquiry would be how do you come down between the argument 'Moe' is just a modern term for something that's always been around and is misappropriated for criticism, and the argument that though now often a rather platonic, mainstream attraction 'Moe' had roots in a somewhat specific otaku relationship/romance/dating-sim origin? |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
Servant of the Path
Posts: 90 Location: United States |
|
|||||||||
My point wasn't that anything and everything is to be defined by how the individual feels about it but rather that terms should be defined in a way most appropriate to the nature of what they're meant to represent. It was my understanding that moe was a term being used to describe both the viewers emotional reaction to a character and the behaviors of the characters designed to evoke that reaction. That being the case, don't you think it's reasonable that those who can relate to and have experienced that reaction should be defining it on that basis? You're earlier statement about what it means when someone buys something appears to hinge upon assumptions made about what's going on inside their head. And why? Because of a trend you've noticed in product marketing within the moe sub-culture?
As far as I am concerned, what you are picking up on is not defensiveness, it's indifference. It's essential for us all to have a clear understanding of what we mean when we use these terms if we intend to have any kind of meaningful conversation about them. I really don't care what those definitions are so long as we can arrive at a consensus on them and move forward from there. A large part of the resistance you're receiving is, I believe, due to our failure to lock down "moe" into some sort of box to begin with.
I think a large part of the problem here are the different degrees of experience that posters have had with what you're addressing and I think that goes back to differences in opinion over how moe should be defined. I, for example, have probably not been a fan as long as you have and haven't been connected well enough with trends in that Japanese sub-culture to reach the same conclusions you have. I'll encounter a term like "moe," look up a definition on the web, try to relate it to what I've seen and form my understanding of it on that basis. In such a situation it certainly would not be dishonest for me to reach the conclusion that moe doesn't have an originally sexual or romantic core. It's similar, I think, to the word "otaku." Originally I thought this term was simply a reference to someone who loved anime and so at the time I wouldn't have had any problem using that term to describe myself. Later, after learning that in Japan this term could more accurately be described as a reference to a disfunctionally obsessive fanatic, I have distanced myself from the word. If the picture you're painting is accurate (as I've said before I lack the personal experience with the history you've laid out to dispute it) it's interesting to me that anime producers would begin to tailor representations of females in their shows to the emotional comfort zone of male teens in the manner you've described. On the surface it seems like a perfectly obvious tendency but it reminds me of the way in which television in America is designed to conform to the perceived limitations of its target audience, especially in shows aimed at younger viewers. At the same time, for anime, it seems that it's being done in a uniquely Japanese way and part of the result of that is the drift in the definition of moe that you've noted. One thing I've noticed about anime is that the Japanese seem to have a tendency to distill or concentrate specific personality traits of their characters into some absolute representation of those traits. This also seems to happen to their stories themes. Characters cease being characters and become visual representations of an emotion, as if they were created from the ground up just for that purpose. Everyone who sees that obsessively specific focus and doesn't like it will avoid it which only serves to define its audience and their entertainment as a new "sub-culture." This brings me to a contention I have with your claim that moe has been more recently redefined as nothing more than a quasi-nebulous, random collection of feelings of sympathy, warmth, etc. The characters I'm thinking of seem designed for the purpose of taking those qualities to their most extreme. That defines them as quite a bit different from the general smattering of cute, sympathetic characters you could find in entertainment elsewhere. So in the end is the industry just trying to cater to the emotional insecurities/limitations of its target audience or is it just diverging in the same manner in which the Japanese seem to treat everything else? |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
tankerboy
 Posts: 81 Location: Chicago |
|
|||||||||
|
For the most part this has been really fun to read and thought provoking.
I really don't think there's much difficulty distinguishing between lolicon and moe but that's just me. As that great 20th century philosopher Tom Lehrer poetically stated: "When correctly viewed, everything is lewd\I can tell you things about Peter Pan and the Wizard of Oz was a dirty ol' man" After reading this whole thread I believe it's become an extremely complex paraphrase of his statement "...filth, I'm glad to say, is in the eye of the beholder" Oh - and to me the prime example of unbearable cuteness is Azumanga's opening |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group