At least I’m not the only one who hates shoujo. Oh! Pastel is really good. I blasted through the first volume. Big love to Del Rey for doing such a nice translation job.

SKYGIRLS!

It’s not those two news items together. Bitchyface McBitch talking about otakudom like she knows and some super loli action. Haha. Strangely, I haven’t seen the figures. I don’t have as much time as I’d like for browsing figures these days. :’( The site keeps me too busy during work. Still, I hope it’s a decent show. Every time I watch something with crap character animation, I get all pissed.

Mimei seems to be raging against a different machine than you are talking about, I think. Although, it is worth discussing, the whole commercialization thing. I think it is a standard way of happening. The trend will come into the mainstream and will die back out in due time as people forget that they’re supposed to like it. It will cause a riff for a little while, but we will all stay otaku and then things will get back to normal. To bring that into moe specifically, I’ve notice companies trying to purposely make shows with moe themes, and people say that will ruin it, and that’s just how things work. Every cult object anyone has ever liked went pop at one point, got ruined, and everyone moved on. I mean, I’ll say it again, moe is sort of a stupid con in the first place. It couldn’t last because the thing itself sort of starts to deteriorate when people start trying. But then, it was around before, and will likely be around after the bubble, because that’s just a style of character and lots of mangaka are using it skip by without a lot of imagination. Moving back to the point, it’s something that’s not worth worrying about, because the sole purpose of watching anime is for entertainment. We’re not here to dictate the thing, we’re just a part of it and as long as it’s entertaining, we’ll remain a part of it. That’s how the whole thing works and that’s why I feel Mimei has overstepped her bounds by calling herself an otaku and then trying to dictate where the world should go, especially by way of shame. She can take that shit right back with her.

Moreover, she seems to be using a slim definition of otaku, but lumping mainstream bandwagoners in with it, which seems to be giving a lot of cred to random people on the street. I am not a fan of that. I’m reminded of Acen a few weeks back when I saw a figure vendor and walked up to realize that everyone there was “nerdy” and probably “gross” and I thought “these are the people who deserve to be here” I mean, they don’t need to be gross, but all these little dress-up kids with their 3 show knowledge roster and crappy two-bit cosplay, don’t fit. Book by its cover and all, but it still tends to turn out that way sometimes.

Haruhi is like a golden goddess come down from on high. I’m mightily partial to Nagato though. Does that make me a bad person?!

Mostly I’m just going to reply to the bit about the us driving the market and then link to Shingo’s analysis at Heisei since he took a whole post to sum it up, and that’s good.

What I meant about us not dictating the market is in the way that she does it, not so far as content creators go. She stands above the rest and says “Moe is bad and super gay plz.” Which is not how the market at large feels about the meme. She is calling for a shift away from something that lots of people are accepting as entertaining, or arousing, or what have you. There is a two-fold responsibility here. The first is for the market to create content and second is for us to consume that which we find the most pleasing and entertaining. This creates a cycle which the otaku don’t necessarily dictate, as for something to evolve innovation must come through, and we cannot supply innovation, only a manner of growing bored of what becomes the norm. Thus, again, it’s cyclical. We get bored of the norm, the producer innovates, we remain happy. If the producer doesn’t innovate, the whole thing dies, and likewise, if the producer doesn’t produce popular product en masse when the market demands it, the whole thing takes a dive, or possibly dies. I guess to sum that up, I more mean that the pressure for change is on the producer. All we care about is being entertained, and it’s entirely up to the producers to recognized when this change would be advantageous and for how long they should flood the market with today’s hot item. So yes, in a way we move the market, but really the market is set up to move itself and evolve without our direction. It’s all shots in the dark from producers until something sticks, then they flood that until it’s time to move on.

Beyond that, I honestly take her entire idea about us buying things to be a bit offensive. I am of the opinion that, if it makes you happy and doesn’t hurt anyone, DO IT! If kids are spending outside of their allowance and hurting their parents, don’t do it. But if it’s their own cash and their own want, then they should go for it all day.

And, Nuke, I would respond to your other comments but I read them and feel like Shingo basically summed up my opinions on them very well in his analysis of the whole situation. Also, I learned a bit more about the woman herself, which made things make a bit more sense.

http://heiseidemocracy.net/2006/05/17/self-professed-moerer-rips-into-real-otaku-fetish-fakers/

It occurred to me that I have (had) shared Sakamoto’s opinion of Moe being (partly) a pedophilic fetish. I had thought a defining characteristic of Moe was the sexualization of apparent underaged characters. While there is the Erokawaii-kei moe aspect, it certainly doesn’t define Moe as a whole.

Not sure how that happened. I think my early exposure to some Moe had by chance, happened to involve an abundance of Erokawaii-kei moe and that shaped my perception of the theme. I’m going to print out Shingo’s “The Moe Image” article.

Shingo’s breakdown does put it into perspective. I latched onto the only paragraph in the entire article that Shingo describes as “an island of clarity in an otherwise incomprehensible rant.” Figures I’d pick the odd point, the one paragraph in the entire article that’s completely tangential to the primary argument. :P