Moe 101: A Woman's First Look
The following is a guest post by Lauren Orsini. Lauren is a graduate student, journalist, documentarian, and convention reporter in Washington, D.C. Her love of anime, fandom, and Japanese pop culture frequently directs her reporting topics. To read about her adventures, check out her blog at www.lorsini.com.
The first person I ever heard say it out loud was Travis Touchdown in No More Heroes.
“Moe,” he gushed, slowly enunciating both syllables while he pawed a poster featuring three prepubescent anime girls.
I was familiar with the word and concept from reading Genshiken manga (though I admit I thought it was pronounced “mo” at the time), but I’d thought it stood for a general affinity for a character or object. Lately though, the more I’ve heard about moe, the more it seems to apply to a singular character type. Modern moe, in fact, appears to apply to just a select few anime titles.
As a female anime fan, I have a lot of male friends who are into these so-called moe shows, but I wasn’t sure if they’d apply to me: When the series’s audience is male otaku, what is the appeal for women? However, I enjoy shounen type anime as much as I do shoujo, so what’s the harm in trying?
In order to begin my first foray into moe, I crowd-sourced Twitter for some essential moe shows. I chose four: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, K-ON!, Toradora!, and Clannad. Based on watching one or two episodes of each, here’s what I think moe means:
Prepubescent features. Despite Travis’s prize poster, I was expecting moe to refer to women with hyper-sexualized features- big breasts and tiny waists. However, moe characters tend to be exceptionally young looking and acting. While they’re usually high school aged, their big eyes, thin frames, and – oddly enough – super deformed tiny hands and feet, they could pass for much younger. When older women, like mothers or teachers, are portrayed, they could easily pass for their students and daughters.
A sensitive male protagonist. Moe anime directors seem to go out of their way to make the male protagonist sympathetic. He is usually a quiet, reserved guy who has lost a parent. Because he’s usually a jaded delinquent who doesn’t fit in, he’s not sparklingly sweet like a shoujo anime male lead, but he knows what to do to attract that special lady. The obvious exception to the rule is K-ON!, which so far has no male characters at all, but I suspect a yuri protagonist eventually takes this position.
Quirky personalities. Every moe character falls into a type. There’s the class representative one, the energetic one, the quiet one, the spacey daydreamer, and most moe of all, the shy, embarrassed one. This last one seems to be the most desirable of all moe characters, and the general “fan favorite” moe character of each anime – let’s say Mio (K-ON!), Taiga (Toradora!), Mikuru (Haruhi), and Nagisa (Clannad) – possesses this personality type.
No overt sexuality. This is key. If this was standard anime, moe series with their multitude of female characters for every male character, would fall into the harem genre. But moe doesn’t ever address sexuality head on. The focus is less on sex appeal than on cavity-inducing cuteness. Even with characters like Mikuru from Haruhi who could fall into standard anime sex appeal standards, we’re treated to close up shots of her big, sparkling eyes, not her breasts.
From these four observations, I’ve deduced one very important thing: Moe is a genre, not a character design. It’s not just about appearance, or even just about character personality. Moe is an overarching theme that seeps into whatever else the show is about. Can moe be for women? It depends whether you’d find it distracting or not. While a moe anime may purport to be about a music club, the supernatural, or plain high school drama, the main focus is still on showcasing the cute, quirky, female characters. But with that in mind, don’t knock it ’til you try it.
Posted on 2010-04-08, in Editorial and tagged clannad, haruhi suzumiya, k-on!, keion, moe, toradora. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
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K-On!, like Lucky Star and Hidamari Sketch, is an evolutionary descendant of Azumanga Daioh, which many prefer and which also had no male lead (or gender-swapped equivalent). Really, if you’re not doing a romance series, the audience surrogate is optional, because it’s more about watching the girls be themselves. Interestingly, all four of those anime are based on 4koma strips.
Clannad, despite its female cast very much being designed with “moe” in mind, is usually classified as a harem/romance series, with much less “harem” going on in After Story. (Of course, this is just like K-On! and Azumanga Daioh being classified as “slice-of-life.”)
As far as “no overt sexuality,” you’re right in that very few anime at ALL have high school students who aren’t virgins, despite the fact that if what I’ve heard about real-world Japanese teens is correct, they have more sex than American teens do. Even this season’s B Gata H Kei, about a girl whose goal is to have sex with 100 different people over the course of her high school career, supposedly doesn’t have her get any farther than the first. (And I’d've been VERY surprised if she actually HAD had sex with anyone else.) Clannad does have that famous scene where Kyou thinks sex is imminent between her and Tomoya, and After Story [ROT13]ercbegrqyl unf n uvynevbhf fprar jurer Antvfn gryyf ure cneragf gung fur naq Gbzbln ner univat frk[/ROT13].
I’d warn against reading too much about male leads into your selections. Haruhi Suzumiya is a very unusual series that has been noted as difficult to pin down to a single genre, and Clannad was later made by the same studio. Toradora! also reportedly has a very unusual character dynamic.
Another thing — “moe” can be and has been applied to individual characters, including in shows that are not otherwise labeled as such. Take, for example, Gurren Lagann, an over-the-top super robot series. Yoko Littner doesn’t get the label, being a cool, mostly collected seasoned fighter who dresses in clothes that don’t leave a whole lot to the imagination and has the second-largest pair of breasts in the series. Nia Teppelin, on the other hand, is usually classified as “moe” (and yes, she does look much more prepubescent before the timeskip). Though I’m not sure if it really works for her — “cute,” “sugary-sweet,” and “slightly daffy” seem to cover it. Other characters that get the label include the male protagonist, Simon the Digger, especially early on when he has more confidence issues, and one of the male villains, the shark-toothed Viral, who pretty much can’t ever seem to catch a break. (And this isn’t an angsty guy we’re talking about — he’s totally loyal to his boss, proudly introduces himself as being part of the “Human Eradication Forces,” and calls humans “naked monkeys.”)
Dammit. Forgot to mention one thing. The most popular character in Hayate the Combat Butler, a show Jon recommended under “moe for those who don’t like moe,” is Hinagiku Katsura, who is quite confident and self-possessed, being an uber-competent “class representative” type (actually student council president AND kendo team captain) rather than the “shy, embarrassed” type.
Azumanga Daioh also lacks such a character, save perhaps the tall, busty, quiet athlete and cute-critter lover Sakaki. And Ayumu “Osaka” Kasuga (known mainly for being laid-back, daydreaming, and having a really weird thought process) is probably more popular.
I’ve never really thought as Clannad or Haruhi as moe overall.
I’ve thought of Mikuru as moe (mostly because Haruhi herself points it out), but not Yuki or Haruhi herself. As for Clannad (and this is likely due to also playing the game, where there’s the option to focus on the stories of girls other than Nagisa- some of them are a bit more normal as far as romance, like Tomoyo’s), I’ve never thought of anyone within the show as moe. I guess you could apply it to Nagisa, but I’ve always thought of her as more of a “clumsy and clueless sick girl”, though in some ways that could really make her moe as well.
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