It means a specific kind of affectionate obsession, and has vaguely sexual connotations. Moe is a slippery word to translate or define. In the East, the connection between moe and meme has remained close and immediate for decades in the West, only indirect.
This is because anime culture was influential on Western meme culture, and moe is influential in anime culture. I also think that an understanding of moe is useful for understanding the history of Internet memes in the West. The development of moe seems very much memetic to me: later artists copied earlier artists and added their own improvements. Though these have gone largely ignored for most of the moe debate, they’re beginning to see citation among fans.The term ‘moe’ is one of the most important keywords in Japanese pop culture. Since the early 2000s, there has been a growing body of academic research on moe and other elements of fandom behaviour, many of which debunk common misconceptions of moe. They’re quite often characterized as creepy, lonely, antisocial, right-wing, often overweight, white men, despite the existence of many examples to the contrary. Moe fans are also often characterized with harmful stereotypes. Many accusations surrounding moe (Especially those of sexism and misogyny) fundamentally ignore both moe aimed at women and female moe fans, who have been an integral part of the moe fandom for as long as the concept has existed.
Moe, by itself, is an emotion, extrapolated into a type of appeal based on that emotion. Again, the erroneous term “moe anime” is usually used by those who dislike cute anime girls to describe anime they dislike. The clash between the two sides often erupts into heated debates across internet forums and social media, often becoming hostile, but usually caused by a fundamental misunderstanding about moe. Other times, the very concept of moe itself is in the crosshairs, with assertions that its definition is too vague to mean anything. Armed with accusations of “creepy,” “childish,” “sexist,” “pedophile,” and other damning assertions, they take to the debate by devaluing moe as simplistic and clichéd as best, and sexist and pedophilic at worst. The Anti-Moe BrigadeĪmong those who dislike the proliferation of moe is a subset of fans that not only dislike it, but believe it to be harmful. In addition, many of them tout the wide potential of moe, pointing out that any character can be moe and that moe is in the eye of the beholder. They see value in moe as a type of appeal, in that it compels the viewer to care about the characters, fostering a deeper connection and investing the viewer in the characters and story in a way that couldn’t otherwise be achieved without the love-esque connection moe encourages. the moe haters, the most virulent among which came to be known as the “Anti-Moe Brigade.” The Moe Fandomįor the most part, the moe fans just want to watch their anime and fawn over their favorite characters in peace. This caused a rift within the fandom: The moe fans vs. A fandom that had gotten used to Toonami and Adult Swim, and revered anime like Cowboy Bebop as classics was suddenly inundated with Strike Witches, MM!, Chu-Bra!!, and OreImo.
Incidentally, this happened at a particularly moe-heavy point in time. That is to say, with the advent of streaming and simulcasts, the Western fandom could finally watch the same anime Japan was watching. For the first time, we were starting to “catch up” with the Japanese fandom. The late 2000s saw something of a paradigm shift in the Western anime fandom. It’s inconclusive whether the “moe boom” ever ended. This supposedly marked a large increase in the number of “moe anime” being made, sparking a similar increase in the fandom debate surrounding moe. Sometime during the mid-2000s (The exact date is still disputed) a “moe boom” occurred, according to fans. Cute anime girls are used to advertise everything, including the Self-Defense Forces. That said, moe has become a cultural phenomenon in Japan, transcending otaku subculture. Treating moe like a genre is an oversimplification of the concept. Commonly used among the anti-moe crowd, the term “moe anime” is erroneously used to describe any anime that focuses on cute girls.