"the moé-points extracted from the database enable real emotions."
September 25, 2015 12:10 PM   Subscribe

It is curious that while there are erotic works that appeal to otaku, in Azuma’s account the erotic is subordinated to the emotional. For example, “games produced by Key are designed not to give erotic satisfaction to consumers but to provide an ideal vehicle for otaku to efficiently cry and feel moé, by a thorough combination of the moé-elements popular among otaku.”
McKenzie Wark on the work of Hiroki Azuma: Otaku philosophy
posted by MartinWisse (8 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
Not speaking the language, I learned what I could by walking the city, in the company of foreigners who made a living by teaching English to bored housewives, or by wrestling naked in milk.

This is my new favorite example of preposition attachment ambiguity.

posted by nebulawindphone at 12:18 PM on September 25, 2015 [14 favorites]


Oh man, Japan's Database Animals is such a good book. This brings me back to undergrad literary and cultural studies classes.
posted by fifthrider at 12:18 PM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


The worst thing about reading Japan's Database Animals in English is that Azuma refers to so many critical works that sound fascinating but you can't read them unless you read Japanese. It's on my shelf next to Beautiful Fighting Girl and I'm still waiting for anything else.
posted by thetortoise at 12:33 PM on September 25, 2015


I don't know if it ironic or just damning that the last part of the essay made me think about Gatchaman Crowds.
posted by charred husk at 1:49 PM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


Well, that explains all the boobs and butt poses, up skirt, and crotch-shot artwork for all the media they consume.

Oh, wait.
posted by clvrmnky at 3:20 PM on September 25, 2015


The concept of moé, and much of the rest of the essay, seems particularly applicable to tumblr culture, with its squee and gifs and reinforcement of hermetically- sealed emotionally-heightened fandom.
posted by Svejk at 3:23 PM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


By the 90s, any product can spawn all the others: a series of stickers or a company logo could bloom into a series of manga, TV or film anime, games and more. By now “the narrative is only a surplus item”

Suddenly a lot of recent Hollywood (see: "Pixels") springs to mind.
posted by phooky at 6:34 AM on September 26, 2015


A great example of that is Kantai Collection, which started out as a very niche free to play browser game, got big through word of mouth and spawned various mangas and an anime series, and is all about the spirits of WWII Imperial Navy battleships reincarnated as cute girls fighting off an alien invasion. Moe as fuck but don't think too hard about the political implications.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:18 AM on September 27, 2015


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