It’s fun to observe how the visual elements of anime character design change and evolve from season to season. Animators must come up with a way to make their characters endearing to fans, blending existing character traits like glasses, “twintails” hair or those charming crooked fang teeth while inventing new visual memes, such as the recent boom in unique hairpins or the hair ribbons worn by Haruhi or Sora from PapaKiki. One character trait that was quite dominant during the last decade was ahoge (ah-ho-geh, literally “idiot hair,” aho being the Osaka word for stupid), an undisciplined stalk of hair that sticks straight up from the heads of characters like Saber from the Fate/stay night series. The basic ahoge went through several revisions, for example morphing into the “antenna hair” seen in Love Hina and Nagisa’s family from Clannad. The latest stage in the evolution of anime hair is Nyarko-san, our second favorite blending of moe with the Cthulhu universe, who has a “hair tentacle” she can use to express herself with. (Our favorite marriage of moe and Cthulhu would be our English-translated eroge Demonbane, of course.)
The “hair tentacle” is a new moe character design element.
