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Andore Jr.

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Times are changing. For years, we chewed on the bones and inedible sinew that the Japanese otaku community had left behind. There was little to no contact between our respective CHUD colonies on opposite sides of the ocean, and because of that, our secret language of unnecessary loanwords suffered greatly. Kawaii? Sugoi? God, you guys, someone could decipher our code after sitting in for half a Japanese class! And then they'll figure out that we're talking about stupid robots and barely pubescent girls and why do you think people have a problem with us? We need some kind of Enigma cipher on our shit. Hell, we need some kind of 128-bit encryption here. We want the FBI to plug our yammerings into a computer, process it for a year and a half, and come out with a delicious recipe for bunt cake.

But now, thanks to the internet, the collapse of the dam keeping raging torrents of high-quality and thinly-justified fansubbed videos of recent animes out of our hands, and that Japanese is basically klingon for pedophiles now, we can pick up on whatever bizarre slang that our brethren are using, clumsily integrate it into our own vernacular with a skeletal understanding of its meaning and connotations, and continue blathering on and on about moe tsunderekkos, lolishotas and oppai meganekko all we want. We've got this secret language down so tight that half the time we don't even know what the fuck we're on about.

With the introduction out of the way, we move onto the big question of this article: what the hell is this “moe” thing that's been spreading through the otaku community like a bad case of the clap? Not so much like the clap because we don't fuck, period, unless you count jumping into our wonderland, manga in hand. And before you start on your “totally hot girlfriend who totally likes watching hentai with me and also screwing like tweaking poodles in heat while watching Gundam (UC Continuity only though, SEED JUST GETS ME LIMP!!)”, you lie and also she's screwing everyone else in the anime club (gave them the chlamydia as well.)

Like your completely not-real hot girlfriend going around and giving everyone VD and also crabs, no one can accurately define moe. The closest we've come is the doofuses who hear the word and immediately follow with “AND CURLY AND LARRY AND SOMETIMES SHEMP?” I'm sure they'd be in stitches if they saw all the Wangs in a Chinese phone book, provided they could understand those screwed up little characters that they assure us is a coherent language. And by Chinese phone book, I mean a Taiwanese male prostitute catalogue. But moe, I'm assured, has nothing to do with well-hung Taiwanese boys, at least as far as I've heard, because you can't get a straight answer without a sticky layer of obfuscation over everything. Not from the hot seed of the rock-hard Republic of China fuckboys, either, by the way.

But a shitty Three Stooges reference is the most real insight you can dredge out of anyone. You'd think you could get something by going to the experts, but trying to squeeze any sort of definition from your average otaku, without it turning into some kind of fluttery, meandering, feel-good thesis, complete with footnotes, is like trying to squeeze shit into diamonds. This was demonstrated about a year ago when impenitent manga pimp Ken Akamatsu, of the assumedly moe adventures in psychosexual dysfunction Love Hina and Mahou Sensei Negima, posted a twisting and decidedly lovey-dovey definition in his blog of this supposedly indefinable sensation he has so gainfully exploited for $$$PHAT BUCK$$$.



Now, come into this understanding that I am, by no means, a stranger to encountering a fictional girl, having my emotions ruthlessly manipulated with scientific precision, and, with my heart swelling like so much cardiac edema, ripping forth with the primal scream of “MOEMOEMOEMOEMOE!” I am not immune, nor am I innocent. But come on, Ken.

Ken Akamatsu knows moe. This is his bread and butter, the reason he's out there drawing ridiculous comics about guys, who in no way represent him, alternately getting beaten to within an inch of their lives and getting dogpiled by a dozen fine pieces of jailbait all smooshing their boobs in his face. The guy's face, not his. The guy who in no way is meant to symbolize his latent desire to get repeatedly savaged by beautiful underaged girls. If he didn't deeply understand moe from the depths of his soul, he'd be blowing whatever stipends his parents kept providing him out of guilt and shame on skeezy unlicensed S&M clubs. (Although that is totally not what he is into! Totally a fictional construction)

As you read this, you get a sense of what I'm talking about, and no sense of what Akamatsu is talking about. We read the first definition and it seems straightforward enough; you see someone or something cute, it warms your heart and you go “awwwww” in a goofy voice. It's so sweet, so pure; fresh, white snow on a mountaintop dotted by evergreens, a basket full of newborn kittens, a happy little girl out with her dad, carrying around a big red balloon. Everything is wonderful! That first definition is full-on horseshit, and Akamatsu knows it. Remember, we are talking about the otaku vernacular. Have we ever done anything entirely pure and beautiful without the whole thing erected on a toothpick-thin foundation of sexual hangups?

Yeah, our suspicions are confirmed. It's about admiring cute girls. The fog begins to subside! Could have told us that in the first place, Kenny! It's about being fascinated and moved by looking at young girls. Well now! I know I get fascinated and moved by young girls... In the pants! But seriously, I'm not on probation anymore. Furthermore, it’s a fetish toward their “special attributes”. Now, fetish isn’t a word you can just innocently toss around in an explanation without a few people, previously snoozing during your unending yammering-on about how moe is about the innocent human emotion of beautiful girls blah blah blah, perking up. It’s just not a word you can use without picturing morbidly overweight people in latex playing Khmer Rouge carnival games with each other. You can no longer feign innocuous sweetness after dropping the ‘F’ bomb, Ken. Your sweet girls preparing boxed lunch for their secret crush has now been supplanted by middle-aged Japanese salarymen covered in fresh whipmarks, flanked by their bizarro-nurse cum dominatrix, pointing valiantly to the sky or at least to the dingy cement roof of their bondage cave.

Remember the terms Tsundere and Nekomimi - or better yet, don’t. Forget them, right away. Listen, I know some of you out there are reading this out of some kind of twisted schadenfreude, and I respect that. I respect you. You have a life, you have a chance with women, you have hope and dreams and all the things which we filthy onanists, with our drawn faces and ghostly stares, lost long ago. I don’t want you going out one night, seeing a pretty girl, getting shot down, and this little bit of information you picked up from this site - tightly compressed, boiling inside of you, burning hotter and growing bigger every day - erupts like a supervolcano, leading you to tell that pretty girl you just met “Ooh, so you’re being a little tsun-tsun, aren’t you, baby? I’m just saying that you come back to my apartment, I show you how to get dere-dere. Bring the cat ears.”