Just For ‘Fun’: A Condensed Theory of Moe

As my Japanese is nonexistent, I’m just hoping it’s nothing scurrilous written on the box.

1. Where does moe (or moé for the pronunciation pedants among us) happen? The site of moe must be in the viewer. When, therefore, we say of a character that she or he ‘is moe’ we are identifying the presence in her or him of traits which provoke or stimulate moe in us (and perhaps in an imagined community of ‘people like us’).

GAR (VI): Further Musings

Shamelessly swiped from Beta-Waffle¹

In my last entry on GAR, I suggested that, through a (usually unconscious) process of emulation, watching an anime laden with GAR can be good for one’s character. In the process of replying to those who kindly commented, I began to feel the need for (yet) another GAR entry rather than my usual ‘epic-length’ [‘Of arms and the GAR I sing’] reply-comments. Sadly, therefore, this is less a coherent argument, and more a set of musings.

A Generic Entry

Psychological thriller which will probe the very darkest depths of the human soul

Genres are words – labels – we attach to things, as part of some giant, messy and Escher-esque Venn diagram. As genres are words, it’s all a matter of definition by example, which I have harped on about before. Continuing my commitment to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, I thought I’d throw down [?] a few thoughts on the way that we classify anime.

[The first two parts of this post are the boring bits. The third part is the interesting bit. Feel free to skip ahead.]

GAR (III): GAR and Gender

One man’s fanservice is another’s relevant artwork
(one of these people is a reverse trap)

[This is part of a series of entries considering GAR. The first one sets out what’s happening. The second one reinterprets the epic tradition through the lens of GAR.

I don’t like this entry very much. It seemst to me to be a collection of disparate fragments of argument. However, I think it is worth posting in any case, and I promise that the next one in the series will be more focused.]

Death of the Animator

A strange and twisted journey into methodology, during which I will kill off all animators, everywhere, namecheck the Father of Western Literature and (the ultimate challenge) talk about Gundam without boring people who aren’t interested in Gundam.

Why the busty succubus? Read on to find out, or perhaps to find out why that’s the wrong question. Alternatively, if you’re not very interested in ‘Theory’ with a capital ‘T’, go read another anime blog – there are plenty of good ones out there – and wait for my next entry.