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LOLITA_MOE
February 24, 2011
AMERICANBEAUTY
As far as I can tell at a
distance, pedophilia is by no
means accepted or encouraged
in Japanese culture, but the
thought of it doesn't send
them into a panic the way it
does Americans.
It's possible that
that's true of An exchange on alt.gothic
"perversion" in (I think) some years ago:
general.
"Japan has vending
They don't have machines on train
the passionate platforms that sell
puritanism of girl's dirty underwear!"
Americans, and yet
it would be an "Yeah, but have
exaggeration to you ever seen the
say that sexual expression on a But that's just
perversions are mother's face as it: scowled at,
accepted. she goes by one of but not a public
those machines?" uproar to have
them banned.
(Oct 16, 2013)
But maybe they
have been? A
recent news
item mentioned
young women
busted for
selling their
underwear...
Someone who claims to know says that
this is close to being an urban myth:
they existed, but were never prevalent...
http://kotaku.com/5948143/japans-panty-vending-machines-the-unreal-hyperbole-and-honest-truth
An extremely common American
reaction to anime is to complain
about it's lolita-syndrome, it's
apparent obession with little E.g. see "The Rough Guide
girls as sexual objects. to Anime", which isn't
even sure what to make of
My impression is that the popularity of the
this moralistic rather mild "Melancoly of
knee-jerk may be Haruhi Suzimiya".
missing the the point...
MELANCOLY
I don't doubt that you could find
some anime/manga that's so twisted
it actually endorses (or appears
to endorse) sexual relations with
underage girls, but the otaku-yaki
I'm familiar with doesn't qualify.
LUCKY_STAR
Clearly, geezers lusting after
schoolchildren are not approved of...
They often seem to be regarded as
buffoon figures: they're laughed
at, and avoided, but not It could simply be that
particularly feared. they don't really expect
them to do anything,
whereas American pervs
are more enterprising.
A linguistic
puzzle: "moe". (That's two syllables, like "mo-aye";
it's often spelled with an accent:
"moè".)
If you look at standard
write-ups of the meaning of
"moe" it's related to "budding":
it at least originally referred
to a lolita-complex.
Since then I think it's
broadened, and is on it's way to
meaning almost any kind of fetish
("I have a pony-tail moe").
I gather "moe" doesn't imply quite as
strong an obession as 'fetish' does in
English, though that alone already But then: 'fetish' isn't as strong a
seems very odd from an American term in English as it used to be.
point-of-view, given the history of It was once a synonym of perversion,
the term. but it's use has gradually changed.
"I have a shoe fetish" doesn't mean
what it once meant.
That oddity -- presuming I've
got it right -- of 'moe' being Much in the way that "a fanatic"
a weaker term than 'fetish' is turned into "a fan", "fetish"
the sort of thing I'm trying is becoming a simple synonym for
to put my finger on here. "strong interest".
I've heard it claimed
that 'having a moe'
for something is less
extreme than the
obsession with
manga/anime implied
by the term 'otaku'.
But that's a tricky
one, too, because
'otaku' is one of
those terms that
was originally
meant as a term of
derision but has
since been embraced
by the people it's
supposed to describe.
SHAMELESS_DEVOTION
There's a lot of comedic
elements built-up around
the sexual appeal of school In the manga "Love Hina" by Ken
girls, though they're not Akamatsu (2002), issue number 1,
regarded as attainable. one of the many women the male
main character suddenly finds in
his life is a 13 year old girl.
His relations with this girl
vary between avuncular and
embarrassment that he finds her
somewhat sexually attractive.
It's embarrassing,
but not terrifying.
In "The Melancoly of Haruhi
Suzimiya", Mikuru is called
a "Moe" girl: big breasted HARE_HARE_YUKAI
and pretty... but also
clumsy and insecure.
Here the idea would seem to be
not that she's young, but that
she's non-threatening (unlike CREEPING_SPEARS
the show's namesake, Haruhi).
ORIENTAL_TWIST
In one episodes of The Ouran High School Host
Club (2006) the female fans of male-male
emotional engagment shout "Moe! Moe! Moe!" in FUJOSHI
appreciation. A sign, I think, that "Moe" is
coming unstuck from the idea of "budding".
But one of the guys
involved is a young-cute
type, so maybe the
association is still there.
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