[Editors Note: This is a promoted Community Blog, written by one of our readers. If you would like to see your own Cblog on the front page, warm up your keyboard and write something awesome! ~Jon Snyder] All right folks, all this fussin' and a-feudin' about the definition of moe is really ranklin' my rankle-regions. I mean when you get to the point where someone is arguing that Blade Runner and Cowboy Bebop are steeped in the same sort of moe we face in K-On! or Sora no Woto... Christ almighty. There exists not a palm large enough to contain that face,
The issue that's conflagrating the conflict isn't so much that moe exists, it's the concentration in which it occurs. Those pointing out that it has always existed are missing the forest for the trees. There is a huge divide between moe existing in a show, and moe drenching a show from head to toe. The latter is very much a recent phenomenon, worthy of criticism.
The whole scenario calls to mind an old war story I heard at a con once from Steven Bennett, about his experience working at an anime studio. When he was being trained for the job, he was asked who his favorite character from the series was, which one he'd most like to draw. It was, predictably, a cute female. He was then asked who his least favorite character was. Predictably again, it was a stodgy middle-aged man. So did he get to draw the cute girl? Nope, he was told to draw the middle-aged man again and again until his hands bled, and then draw him some more, until he was the unquestionable master of drawing that character.
While this may seem like cruel and unusual punishment on the surface, there's a valuable lesson there. Most good stories take all types to tell, and someone has to draw the less appealing characters just as much as someone has to draw the buxom beauties. I'm sure the folks making Cowboy Bebop would have much rather have drawn Faye and Julia all day over Jet and the old men playing poker, but would that have made for a better series? Absolutely not. Every part in a movie can't be played by a hot actress or actor, if you don't have your William H. Macys and your Kathy Bateses there to ground them in reality and give their hotness a bit of perspective, then you may as well just be hosting a fashion shoot.
And that's what these moe shows are becoming. The impetus behind these shows seems to be a childish tantrum against the sorts of trials that Steven Bennett recounted. "Oh yeah, well, I'll make a show where every character is a cute girl, that'll show ya," they say. In many of these shows, the male and the ugly are reduced to faint background noise, an elusive creature that may as well not even exist. In the off-chance that they manage to corporealize and interact with the story, it's only as one-dimensional conflict drivers that are simply discarded and forgotten after their short arc is done (wsup Railgun) so's the artists can get back to their cute wimmenfolk unabated.
It's an all dessert, no meal approach. This obsession with making every character one that people will want to draw is destructive and selfish, characters can do a great service to a story without being particularly good fanart/merchandising fodder. Anime needs its Kyons just as much as it needs its Haruhis, Happosais as much as it needs Shampoos, Zenigatas as much as it needs Fujikos.
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