From this post:
I’m not sure if this train of thought is common or not, but when I witnessed Rika’s weakness [Honey and Clover] for the second time, when I saw her damaged body and even more damaged mind, when I saw how she didn’t want Mayama to get hurt and how she couldn’t forget the pain of her loss…when I witnessed the spectacle that is her character, I realized something.
I realized that, in every sense of the word, she should be moe. She should be the girl that the viewer want to protect, that he wants to be with.
But she isn’t. Because the cruelty of her situation is far too severe to be made a mockery of using cute catchphrases and excessive snow.
Long story short: moe qualities aren’t so attractive in real life. In real life (as in Honey and Clover), there are other things to consider — for example, what trauma made the reclusive glasses-wearing bibliophile so reclusive to begin with? And do you really want to deal with it? In anime, characters often seem to be the way they are because they just are. And when there are complications, we have the convenience of letting the harem-powered protagonist fix things so we don’t have to.
Eternal (ETERNAL, _eternal, etc.) concludes:
The bottom line is that moé, of the emotional variety at least, is not about childhood friends. It isn’t about tsundere, either, or loli or dojikko or mukuchi. It’s about the fantasy elements, about the purity and innocence of love, without the hindrances of words like “relationship” and “marriage” – it’s about the feelings that the viewer wants to feel, not about the characters portrayed on screen.
Because when it comes down to it, it wouldn’t be all that impossible for a glasses-wearing transfer student with a ribbon in her hair and a weakness in her heart to show up at school one day, but unless the guy has harem lead powers, that seemingly perfect scenario isn’t going to develop like a dating sim – it’s going to develop like real life, where scenario =/= result.
Pretty much, yeah. Have any of you been one of the few guys in a circle of mostly female friends? It’s never anime-grade awesome, believe me — I strongly advise against trying to turn such a situation into a harem romance (no, I’ve never tried, because that’s dumb).
What we might have here is a split between “real” moe (H&C’s Rika) and escapist moe (Kanon’s Shiori); both characters stand to invoke protective urges in viewers, but the former includes the baggage of a living human being, while the latter by and large does not (alright, she’s sickly, but against that argument I posit the end — yes, the entire end of Kanon). Inclusion of the baggage helps us sympathize more with both the baggage-laden character and the poor fool who loves her/him; exclusion of the baggage promotes our slipping off into a fantasy realm, though we’re probably going to be dissatisfied if the escapist characters don’t occupy a happy medium (@Akane-iro ni Somaru Saka: fuck you).
In this comment, OGT delves into the heart of the matter:
I persist on having what is probably a highly controversial interpretation of the word “moe” (which I treat more or less like a recently-minted Japanese aesthetic term); basically, I see it as the feeling/emotion engendered in the viewer/reader as a result of characterization/character development. A character is not, intrinsically, “moe”; a viewer/reader feels “moe” for them. Characters can be developed towards the result of engendering “moe” in the viewer, or the feeling of “moe” can simply be a by-product of good characterization/development.
This works for me, mostly. But is moe a byproduct of good characterization or a liability to it? Or is it both? And, for that matter…
A character needn’t have “depth” either–to use Kanon, the characters are archetypes, existing less as “real people” so much as a platform from which to involve the reader/viewer in the emotional experience. It’s strikingly similar to the structure of Socrates in Love–which was published around the time that the Kanon visual novel was released–where the characters’ relative realism doesn’t seem to matter as it simply becomes a vehicle for carrying emotion to the reader.
Do characters even have to be realistic anymore? Do they have to invoke sympathy? My gut reaction is yes, but then I did enjoy Kanon, in which characters really are emotional catalysts (in the forces they exert upon Yuuichi) more often than they’re representative of the human condition as we know it. I’m not sure if these characters are archetypes, as OGT suggests, so much as qualities or ideals personified, as characters in medieval morality plays (they can certainly be both).
LOL, Akane Iro was pretty hilarious, but even more hilarious were the reactions to it.
I guess I have another reason to watch Honey & Clover though… so I can understand the other half of these posts/arguments/ideas. :<
The second season justifies the watching of H&C, IMO. The first drags, and drags, and drags, and drags some more…though I seem to be one of the rare few who feels that way.
I used “archetypes” more or less as a general-purpose catch-all, so don’t get so MUST. FIND. BETTER. WORD. unless you actually DO find a better word. I like “emotional catalyst,” so we can go with that!
Whether it’s a “byproduct” or a “liability” to it, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a “liability” to my own enjoyment of series (be they Kanon or Honey & Clover level); then again, I tend to use “moe” as a catchall term for “characters I feel strongly about.” Let’s not even talk about the seeming difference between scholarly moe and colloquial moe. Head hurts.
I don’t look for better words so much as other words. It’s just habitual; I can’t help wondering what else things can be, even when it isn’t really important.
I tend to think of moe as some set of conditions, something that’s ultimately definable if we keep working at it, but of course that’s because I have a desire to categorize everything. I feel like your use of moe as a personal catch-all might be more relevant to the way moe actually functions; I wish I could summon up a linguist to figure these things out. I’m sure there’s a definite difference between moe as commonly used and moe as, I don’t know, technical jargon, but I have no real idea where one ends and the other begins.
According to Ed Chavez, “moe” is what keeps you a fan (there’s a long, complicated, and drawn-out discussion that took place a couple days ago on Twitter that you might have caught), and he states what I said: moe is felt by the fan, the character is not intrinsically moe. He speaks, too, in a huge, broader term, and mentions what I’ve understood for a long time: that Hokuto no Ken/Fist of the North Star‘s Kenshiro is moe.
This, then, is why I persist on applying “moe” to non-anime characters. It’s fun! Try it sometime!