Mega Megane Moé
Hell and Heaven Moéltdown
Posts tagged Analysis
Loli Pop Culture: The great divide
Jan 23rd
Twice now I’ve been called on my labeling of anime characters as lolis, when I thought I was near-certain that they were.
And aside from launching me off on awkwardly and one might say disturbingly statistical arguments – if you look at the Primula one – it set me off to thinking?
What in the heck really is a loli?
It’s kind of anime’s “weapons of mass destruction”. A term that sends a lot of people recoiling, without them knowing really what it is. I could point to a character very easily, much like I could point to a nuclear missile, and say “This is a loli.”
The character, not the missile. Please don’t tell me I’m wrong this time.
And I could point to a piece of styrofoam, and say “this is not a weapon of mass destruction,” much like I could wield Akiko Minase as an example that yes, there are girls in anime over 18 and decidedly non-loli.
Then, y’know, there’s the in-betweens. Those that are young in age but old in looks, or those that are young in looks but old in age. What really counts as a loli, anyway? A lot of people have a sort of shudder, knee-jerk “BAD!” reaction to the term, evidenced much by the Kodomo no Jikan manga scandal, but there are many varied forms of lolis out there, some pure, some perverted, and far too many borderline to count.
This ends up so that when one starts thinking about why they hate lolis, it’s difficult to come up with an argument other than “they are bad,” because nobody knows what they really are.
So here’s another editorial, an impromptu second part to the Moe Rising article from last time, about what a loli really is.
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Moé Rising: The line between cute and characterization
Jan 21st
(I like Hisui, but the ol’ line about “So moe I might die” comes to mind)
Moe: is it in your anime, killing your enjoyment?
Recently I’ve been in a bit of despair over Clannad, the third installment in Key’s sad-girls-in-noun series that has been animated by high-quality animation studio Kyoto Animation. By all means, I like to consider myself a Key fanboy (I believe the official term for this is “kagikko”) like the best of them; look up at my banner (might need a couple refreshes, admittedly) or down at my posts, and you’ll see a whole lot of raving, ranting, and allusions to vanilla ice cream, among other catchfoods.
But with the advent of decidedly more real, down-to-earth visual-novel type stories in anime, for example, the highly lauded KimiKiss, it seems that some of Key’s works could almost be growing stagnant. Even other shows with what could be considered mildly moe characters, take a more realistic, balanced view, as the infamous quote in ef – a tale of memories goes: “If the girl is thought to be cute, it means she isn’t being described properly.”
There are a lot of instances of concentrated moe in anime nowadays, but Key works are generally among the genre-leaders in this regard. Just look at Kanon, and Yuuichi’s four childhood friends. Clannad is a bit more even-keeled in terms of characters, but Kotomi’s recent arc is what really tipped the scale for me, and led me to this post.
It made me wonder – is there a sort of divide between moe characters and strong characters? Is a moe character, by definition, one that has to be shallow? Or is this just a false dichotomy?
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Survival of the Moe-est?
Dec 9th
Where did all the shoujo shows go?
This question came across me as I popped in Marmalade Boy into the DVD player last night. It should be apparent to most people that old anime are unmistakably different than new anime in all sorts of regards.
Perhaps it’s a fault of the genre Marmalade Boy (girls’ romance) is compared to most shows I watch today (guys’ harem), but there really is no such thing as ‘moe’ in a lot of the old shows, and even if there was, it probably wasn’t by design. Likewise, other cutesy things such as the ‘chibi’ form, present in the ’shoujo’ shows of today like Shugo Chara, don’t exist.
Things are simpler looking, without fancy 3D CGI effects; everything is done with simple animation trickery. There is, unsurpisingly, a retro feel to all these retro anime, from the animation to the music and more.
Now I’m not one to harp on how one era of anime is better than the other, having known very little of the 199X years of anime outside of English dubs and Cardcaptor Sakura, but it seems quite apparent to me that there has been a mass shift of sorts of the types of shows presented for consumption.
Quite simply, there are next-to-no real ’shoujo’ shows left today.
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Of Men and Magical Girls
Dec 5th
Who watches these shows anyway?
Apparently, we do. Magical girl shows have a surprising reputation and an even more surprising fanbase – at least gauging the English anime blog opinion, there seems to be a lot of positive reviews of the genre, or at least microcosms of it – Cardcaptor Sakura is the classic, some of us (me) stand by more recent ones such as Nanatsuiro Drops, and now the latest hit, Shugo Chara.
Admittedly the middle one was originally an eroge but what all three of these have in common, which is why I find this trend surprising, is that they are all ‘pure’ magical girl shows, unlike what I would like to dub “magical lolicon” shows which pander to more directly of a male base.
Somehow, ‘pure’ magical girl shows have managed to gather quite the male audience themselves, despite being aimed at an audience half (a third, one-fourth, etc) the age and with twice the X chromosomes. I mean, look at it. (Link through Canned Dogs)
Why is this?
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Schrodinger’s Anime, and other bad scientific parallels
Dec 3rd
The experiment would never go through with this cat.
Scientific analysis of anime strikes back.
Unfortunately none of the shows I watch are complex enough to involve any actual scientific theory beyond the hand-waving “if I say a bunch of fancy terms I can confuse you into submission” stuff, so what little knowledge I can derive from the shows I watch is of the humorous kind, which will probably send physics majors into convulsions.
Most of the theories are based off evidence from the current season, so consider it as you will a sort of praise for all the enjoyable shows of fall 2007; although, there are a few classics in the bunch as well.
So get out your pencil and get ready to take notes, there will be a quiz on this at the end of the – you in front! I see you reaching for that ‘read more’ link…
(Relative spoilers for Myself;Yourself, Clannad, and KimiKiss, and major spoilers for Kanon.)
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