noteDhero's Blog

Back to noteDhero's Blog

I can remember a few years ago, when I ran into the word “moe” for the first time. I suppose I was on Wikipedia, and the best description that I could find anywhere was that it was a current trend in shows where one character (usually female) would be different from the rest in that she was bizarrely pure, wide-eyed, dumb, prone to blushing, and spoke ‘cutely.’ The ‘moefication’ of anime is a dangerous example of the evils of catering to the fanboy faithful. When targeting such a small demographic in the overall population, an unfortunate sameness is the resulting product. With the trend going unchecked, it has threatened the prosperity of an entire medium.

In the beginning, moe characters were inserted organically as one of the “love interests” or the blank slates that serve as a vehicle of the viewer’s understanding of a highly fantastical world (Real Drive). Increasingly, though, the casts of shows began to fill with these unwitting takes on archetypes, and it wasn’t long before psycho-killers (Higurashi no Naku Koro ni) and (contradictorily) geniuses were given this specific type of characterization (To Aru Majitsu no Index).

Read the full article