Anime as a whole has proved remarkably adept at insinuating itself in the hearts and minds of fans all over the world, and when Crayon Shin-chan creator Yoshito Usui died I was amazed at the range of anguished comments I saw on Twitter from fans in all corners of the world, writing in any language you can imagine. Still, it’s not uncommon for certain character design features or sight-gags employed in anime to be difficult for fans outside of Japan to comprehend. The female otaku Saori Bajina (the last name is a Zeta Gundam reference) in “My Little Sister Can’t Be This Cute” has super-thick “swirly glasses” that show how excellently geeky she is, but I’m sure the visual message isn’t always understood by everyone the first time. The unruly patch of hair that sticks up on some anime characters is called ahoge (ah-HO-gay), from aho or “stupid” in Osaka-ben plus ke meaning hair, and it’s used to indicate a somewhat ditzy personality, or to soften bad-ass female characters. Some visual jokes have always seemed a little on the gross side to me, such as characters with inexplicably large “big fat anime lips” or characters who sleep so peacefully they have a little bubble of snot coming out of their nose, or jokes involving poop. Other potentially confusing visual jokes may include the classic nosebleed (done when someone gets aroused), characters who fall down on the ground when they’re surprised (a staple of comedians on variety shows), or the strange chibi “super deformed” mode that characters sometimes enter for no reason.
Then there’s moe (mo-EH), a word that that’s come to define a large chunk of anime and manga today, which can best be defined as “the warm, fuzzy feeling you get when contemplating your favorite anime character.” Written with characters that mean “to sprout,” it has the same pronunciation as the word moeru meaning “to burn” which makes it similar to the idea of “burning with passion” despite having a different kanji. No one is quite sure where the slang word came from — one theory is that a character from a 1993 NHK anime called Dinosaur Planet whose nickname was Moe started the ball rolling, with another theory attributing the rise of moe to the popularity of Hotaru Tomoe, aka Sailor Saturn. The gestalt of moe has become quite developed, and animators have a large store-room of memes like meganekko (glasses girl) and dojikko (clumsy girl) with which to catch the hearts of anime fans — or a twin-tail childhood friend in a wheelchair who works as a blind robot maid and who’s secretly the ghost of a fox-spririt, if you like. Incidentally, we’ve got a new J-List T-shirt for you, hot on the heels of our popular Giga Pudding shirt (pudi pudi pudi). The new shirt features two of our favorite moe characters, Yui and Mio, along with the iconic moe kanji. Because too much of a good thing is always bad, the shirt carries a funny warning message in kanji, just like on cigarettes. On the front (with Yui), the message translates as, “Obsession with moe anime characters can lead to awkwardness in social situations,” and on the back, “Overdosing on moe can lead to romantic relationships becoming limited to two dimensions.” See the shirt here.
Saori wears super-thick “otaku glasses,” but what happens when they come off?
