An introduction to moe
In the past, I have called Godzilla the first true “moe” character. I also have at times made an issue of the way that other people—especially in the West—use the word moe. Usually, this has been restrained to my peculiar insistence that people should understand it as a verb first, not as a noun. But I have never really given much of an account as to why this is. And more to the point, those who disagree with this really had no opportunity to guess at the logic of my position on their own; in that light, they deserve a more serious explanation. Moreover, because I have never explained what I mean by the word moe, such a claim about Godzilla could only come across as unintelligible shitposting. So let us tackle both problems through the same lens.
I would offer a spoiler warning for the latest Hollywood Godzilla film, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, but that would be silly. If you have seen any of these films, the reason should be readily apparent: there is not exactly a plot to spoil here. And I do not really say anything worthy of such a warning. Regardless, we will approach the subject of this post using this film as our primary reference point—and more broadly, the characterisation present in this whole series of films. They’re easy-to-watch blockbusters, so feel free to come back here after taking them in. Or do the opposite. Whatever floats your boat. Honestly, this post probably spoils Sailor Moon more than any Godzilla film. So your choice does not matter too much.
To begin with, let us attempt to define moe. Of course, that is no easy task. Patrick W. Galbraith also struggled with this task in The Moé Manifesto, saying:
But what does moé even mean? The 30 Rock viewer sees a man with a body pillow, which he seems to love. Is that moé? Used as part of an inside joke, it seems that everyone implicitly understands moé—it needs no explanation. James Franco holds aloft exhibit A. He says it’s a Japanese thing. We know they’re weird, right? Case closed.
For Galbraith, the surface layer of confusion begins with a discourse of exoticism. Rather than being defined by any essential content, moe in the Western understanding appears as a purely aesthetic structure. Moe is an empty symbol for the perverse weirdness that typifies Japan from an outsider’s perspective. Therefore, moe is used as a catch-all term for the strange, and implicitly pedophilic, fascination with all manner of “cuteness” as captured in the “generic” look and feel of anime, manga, video games, etc.
The problems with this exoticism should be fairly obvious when assessed critically. To give a quick and dirty definition, ideology is when an idea manages to become its own cause by flipping the causation of empirical observations around on themselves: It is when an idea manages to make itself appear as obvious or natural by concealing its origin. Because the word moe appears as empty outside of precisely describing something Westerners do not understand about Japan, our prejudices cluster within the word and reemerge as an empirical assessment made about the “Japanese” concept of moe. That is, we see this strange fascination with “cute” girls, and lacking any authentically Japanese words to explain the reason for this fascination, the Western prejudices about Japan (especially of the sexual kind) insert themselves as an unconscious definition for this fascination.
However, this does not mean that my contentions about the word moe begin and end with the problem of exoticism. Galbraith may give it special attention, but even those who understand Japanese well, and thereby the Japanese definition of moe, do not necessarily agree with my particular insistence on how we should read the word. After all, leaving aside the vagueness of certain conventional Western understandings of moe, it is an oblique and evolving word in Japan. However, since my own definition is identical to Galbraith’s, I will begin by offering it in full before addressing its differing interpretations:
In this contemporary usage, moé means an affectionate response to fictional characters. There are three things to note about this definition. First, moé is a response, a verb, something that is done. Second, as a response, moé is situated in those responding to a character, not the character itself. Third, the response is triggered by fictional characters.
I agree with all three of Galbraith’s defining points. But how does this differ from its common usage—in the West or otherwise? For most people, moe is a type of product in the otaku market that exists for a particular type of consumer. A show or a character might be a moe-type show or character, and they exist for consumption by those fans who respond to a moe-type appeal. This appeal is defined by its reference to an evolving standard of sexualised cuteness, usually being understood by its strong attachment to the youthful features most common to anime: unrealistically short proportions, large eyes, infantilised speech patterns, and other exaggerated character features which are easily quilted with supposedly moe-type values. In this mode of thought, Yuru Camp is a moe-type show:
Frieren has a more restrained, but ultimately fairly moe look:
And Monster is a non-moe anime:
It is obvious for anyone who has been exposed to the sheer breadth of anime art styles that this conception of moe is too vague and ill-defined to serve as a real guide for anime aesthetics. There are too many styles of drawing that do not cleanly map to this continuum. But our main quarrel for today is with its value as an underlying rationale or explanation for these styles. The logic this story uses to explain the world does not fit with the actual history of “cuteness” as an artistic style, or with the history of moe as a word.
The diversity of moe
Admittedly, the origin of moe as a word is shrouded in some ambiguity and myth. Moe in Japan (written 萌 and literally meaning to sprout) seems, in many accepted readings, to be as simple as a pun for a Japanese homonym that means to burn (“moe” written 燃). That is, to burn with passion for a character is written as to sprout for them, as a silly joke. In all likelihood: a dick joke about erections. A further reasonably plausible origin story for this pun is that it emerged in the Sailor Moon fandom as a further play on Sailor Saturn’s real name. (Hotaru Tomoe, written 土萠ほたる, where 萠 is importantly a variation on 萌.) So, a likely available history is that moe started as a joke about getting an erection for characters in Sailor Moon.
However, this crude and effectively pedophilic origin story also reveals important differences from the conventional current understanding. Firstly, as a point of pure grammar, its verb usage preceded its noun usage (the pun only makes sense when used as a verb, to “moeru”). The early usage of moe, whether in this origin story or others, conforms to Galbraith’s contention that moe is “a response, a verb, something that is done” and “situated in those responding to a character, not the character itself.” But more importantly, there is an aesthetic dissonance as compared with any simplified readings of the concept.
Among the Sailor Guardians, Sailor Saturn is the cool and collected one. She has a dark and distant aesthetic, and occasionally adheres to some tropes of the “kuudere” type character. In addition, she has a grim backstory and a challenging role in the narrative. While this does correspond to certain “moe-type” stories, it also is hardly representative of the stereotypes that have come to define the word—which are usually attached to the most bubbly, outgoing, and cute characters and stories available. Moreover, Sailor Moon is an interesting specimen in the realm of pure art design. Despite the canonical youth of the main cast of Sailor Moon, it follows an artistic tradition of shoujo manga that tends to feel more “aged-up” than “aged-down;” for example, long limbs and necks, angled chins, and well adorned and complex hairstyles:
The connection between Sailor Moon and moe has some interesting, if unconscious, associations, as embodied within its plot: The Sailor Guardians are in essence much older souls contained with the bodies of underage girls. This, combined with its particular aesthetic dimensions, gives this point of origin for moe the unintentional metaphorical implication of a fascination with the tension between adulthood and childhood within the same subject (body). (This may have some importance for a more critical reading of the concept of moe once disentangled from purely exoticised prejudices about Japanese cultural “pedophilia.”)
However, what interests us for the moment is that moe was from its outset much more complex than an attachment to youthful “cuteness” in otaku media. It intersected with diverse art styles and concepts of what kind of appeal could be found in a character. And this diversity has proceeded accordingly since. Among the characters who inspired a moe response in Neon Genesis Evangelion, there were a range of character archetypes, none of whom adhered to the contemporary concept of a “moe-blob” representation of purified cuteness. (Indeed, one of the three “main girls” is an adult woman as contrasted with the two teenage girls.)
The artistic features that are currently (mis)understood as the essence of moe have a long and diverse history that belies their reduction to a simple aesthetic. But we should not let this diversity misguide us into thinking that there is no kernel to the idea that moe is associated with sexualising characteristics that code as perverse (and even pedophilic) to the mainstream culture. Tamaki Saitou, in his own account of this origin story, illustrates this nuance best:
One of the essential characteristics of the otaku is their affinity for fictional contexts. Their fundamental desire is oriented by a sensibility able to appreciate the paradoxical idea that there is “reality in being fictional.” The proof of this is that they love and genuinely desire the beautiful fighting girl, an utterly fictional being. … Sexuality is the defining issue when it comes to otaku. It is hard to imagine a Disney maniac feeling direct sexual desire for a character like Minnie Mouse or Pocahontas. …
In recent years the term moe has emerged among the otaku. The young friend I mentioned before tells me that, “as the character Tomoë Hotaru from Sailor Moon became popular, fans who said they had the ‘hots’ for her would substitute the second character of her family name (meaning ‘bud’) for the homophonous ‘moe’ in that expression (meaning ‘burn’). Eventually people started using the expression ‘XX-moe’ to mean that they were really into a character.”
The emergence of a term like this tells us something about the unique internal dynamics of the otaku community. It was here that I first became aware of the essential problem of otaku sexuality. They turn even their own sexuality into an aesthetic performance. Saying that one is a moe of a character is a way to comically objectify the self that experiences this attraction. … Being an otaku means being able to keep one’s idolization of a character neatly within the boundaries of aesthetic performance. In otaku society, fans like this, who confuse fiction and reality, are considered heretical, if not perverted.
It is hard not to belabour on this point in excessive detail in order to dispel certain notions. However, the essential point is that moe, like much of the grammar of otaku media, displays a great detail of self-awareness that what they’re specifically attracted to is the impossible irreality of fiction itself. For Saitou, his analysis centres on the specifically sexual dimension of this interest, which was no doubt very important for the development of moe as both a concept and a style. (For those who wish to hear Galbraith use his own words to explain the origins of different features of contemporary moe-style art in both sexual and non-sexual contexts, he covers the issue in some detail in this video essay/interview:)
But our more immediate concern is the degree to which many accounts of moe get the causation exactly backwards. It is not that short, youthful, cute characters are essentially moe or correspond to a coherent moe-type. Rather, moe emerged as a piece of vocabulary to describe (with some irony) the oddity of feeling attraction (oftentimes sexual, but we shall not define it as necessarily so) to a character specifically in a manner that could not map onto a “real” version of them. An art style that exaggerates an unrealistically cutesy and youthful type of body is just one of many possible manifestations of this feeling. But from its origin and not long afterwards, it was already understood in terms that applied to “cool beauties,” mature women, and even in LGBTQ+ contexts. (Even especially there, with the decisive importance of yaoi manga in the shoujo space for establishing the visual grammar of these styles.)
So, about Godzilla
I do hope the conclusion that you have drawn from the above is not that Godzilla is the first moe character because he is hot. (Whether you hold that he is or not is between you and your god.) Rather, it was Godzilla’s particular history and technological context that allowed him to emerge with a kind of fictionality that was not present in prior works. This fictionality preempted the core mechanisms of moe appeal, and thereby makes Godzilla an arguable candidate for the first true appearance of moe. Exploring these mechanisms in light of certain evolutions in the new Hollywood incarnation of the character should, I hope, more deeply clarify what I mean by moe.
Godzilla, in an important step in the history of monster fiction, came to represent himself-as-image. By this I mean he took on an additional layer of abstraction rather than serving as a seemingly-pure metaphorical analogy. As I have argued in the past, pure metaphor is an impossibility, and Godzilla in particular embodies many contraindicative metaphors. But the attempt to purely embody some analogous social symbol or status has been central to the conceit of the “monster” in fiction from the beginning: It was never a secret that the medusa’s gaze was not, in fact, the medusa’s own gaze to have. What Godzilla achieved, through his overlapping and contradictory formal meanings, was a special kind of untethering: Given his connection to various metaphors, he became a highly symbolic character; Godzilla as the embodiment of radioactive terror cannot be taken as a self-contained existence—Godzilla must be read with reference to a real-world analogy, not as his simple diegetic existence as himself. And yet, because Godzilla is also other contradictory metaphors (the vengeful spirit of Japan’s dead in the Second World War; the hope for peace and prosperity under the American Empire), Godzilla cannot be read as a simple analogy for something existing in the real world. Godzilla cannot be the diegetic appearance of the real concept, as in the Xenomorph as a phallus in Alien, because Godzilla is also his own opposite. The result is that Godzilla is an abstract structure that can be interpreted as a fictional symbol of the real world, but the connection to the real world is free-floating and can shift.
The connection between this structure and the concept of moe can be found in its ability to allow for an appreciation of fiction for its fictionality. What otaku appreciate in characters that they conceptualise as moe is not some analogy for a “hot” real person. (This one-degree-removed kind of analogising is already structurally similar to the fetish as present in all kinds of human attraction/sexuality.) It is specifically characters that are able to obtain a two-step kind of abstraction through only embodying fictional concepts that elicit moe. This structural component forms my only major amendment to Galbraith’s definition of moe: It is not merely “triggered by fictional characters,” but exclusively triggered by characters whose specific form is recognised as impossible—lacking the possibility of reality. The gap between reality and fiction is essential not just as an actualised thing, but as a matter of what-ifs.
But I digress, the full details of my understanding of moe could continue for quite some time. Our subject for now is how this relates to my experience watching the American Godzilla film I just finished. At the launch of the first trailer for Godzilla x Kong, a peculiar fascination instantly appeared for the “running” scene shown at its close:
At first, this may seem like the nonsense fixations of memetic natural selection. That is, just another case of the internet being attached to whatever random thing comes across their screen via algorithm for that moment. But the degree to which this interest cut across language barriers, and the rapidity of its spread, belies another origin. This is to say that it spread not just as a social phenomenon, but also on account of something resonant in itself. I found myself returning to this fact as I took in the full film in question.
The visual dimension of these Hollywood Godzilla films has been constantly evolving in both subtle and obvious ways. Through the hand of Adam Wingard, it seems that the relevant executives have found a contemporary style that they believe serves the franchise well enough to be given multiple films to play with. But for me, the defining moment came in the shift from 2014’s Godzilla to 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The opening film of the franchise is decisively in the camp of the serious monster movie. The weight and importance of Godzilla as a post-nuclear metaphorical phenomenon is given a great deal of primacy. But from King of the Monsters onward, the more easygoing style of the shouwa era Japanese films started to bleed through into its characterisation. As the co-director, Michael Dougherty, explains it:
Yeah, most of the performance of the creatures was done by our visual-effects artists and animators. But every now and then, for very particular scenes where I wanted to convey a little bit more emotion from the creatures, we did performance capture to sort of help with that. It’s sort of a great, modern-day version of the man-and-suit process they used during the original Toho films. … And so, with Ghidorah, I also wanted to make sure that each head had its own intelligence, its own personality, and that they sort of interact with each other the same way that three brothers might, so they aren’t just mirrors of each other. They’ve got their own habits and reactions in situations. So I hired Jason Liles, Richard Dorton and Alan Maxson, who were experienced mo-cap performers for other films and video games, and basically, like, tied them together. …
And so they would perform these scenes with TJ Storm who played Godzilla. And it was just ridiculous because they’re wearing these like skintight mo-cap suits. But, TJ had a big heavy foam Godzilla tail that he would wear, and it just looked like a bunch of overgrown kids playing Godzilla in your backyard, which is how I got started. And it really helped add just an extra spark of soul to the creatures.
This attention given to the “soul of the creatures” comes through strongly in the film. From King of the Monsters onwards, this incarnation of the Godzilla franchise has been marked by a great deal of character animation and expression being given to the monsters despite their allegedly animalistic nature as a matter of canon: they emote simulacra of laughter, frustration, anger, take poses, and, as of this latest entry, perform professional wrestling manoeuvres. This general style of Godzilla will, as already mentioned, not be unfamiliar to fans of the shouwa era films and their suit-based special effects. But with Godzilla x Kong leaning into this style more than ever before, I found myself thinking about what motivated Hollywood to finally embrace this style—beyond randomly happening to hire staff who were interested in it.
Godzilla as the “first moe character” was a phenomenon of contradictory poles. The fact that Godzilla was a symbolic synecdoche for the horrific experiences of the war removed him from his immediate nature as a simple pseudo-dinosaur. But this was only crystallised into a moe-esque phenomenon with the subsequent shouwa films. The subtle potential was there even from his first conception for the reasons we discussed earlier, but this potential was not yet realised. In the shouwa films, Godzilla acted as a highly emotive “superhero”-like character in fairly light-lighted action romps alongside a range of Toho monster characters. This particular kind of dissonance exaggerated the possibility for Godzilla—a metaphor—to take on a symbolic personality in the sense of certain affects of appeal. This affect, once read in the light of Godzilla’s metaphorical abstraction, produced an effect that is equal to moe. (We will leave the sexual dimension aside for now, as that was only relevant here for a particular sub-section of weirdos.)
But how did this enter into the Hollywood consciousness, and how is this retroactively relevant for explaining the mechanisms of moe? Was it merely a case of unconscious reproduction by fans of these shouwa entries? There is no doubt that an unplanned fishing up of the past within the frame of the present is to account for some of the peculiarities of contemporary Godzilla films. But I also believe there is a stronger world-historical force at play.
For Siegfried Kracauer, “the photographer’s approach … must follow the realistic tendency under all circumstances.” This is an essentially accurate description of the nature of the medium. The camera, despite whatever other techniques are utilised, is a tool that captures an image of reality. Therefore, an unrealistic effect when created on film, is generated using a technology that collects fragments of reality. The filmmaker, if they desire the effect of unrealism, must assemble unrealism from these various realistic puzzle pieces. It is not a medium of the wholesale invention of new realities in the same manner as painting or prose—no matter how much faith we put in movie magic.
This is exactly where animation wildly diverges from film as-such. Animation applies the grammar, style, and methods of film to the technological creation of entirely synthetic realities. It is freed from this realistic tendency. This has obvious effects on the content of art, and returns us back to certain concepts discussed in the originally-Japanese context of moe.
Moe does not exclusively correspond to anime. But in whatever medium it appears, moe relies on techniques that distinguish the appearance of characters from the filmic realistic tendency. If a character is to be appreciated for their fictionality, they must appear in a form that denies the possibility of reality. That is, some part of their existence must invite the imagination to invent a new reality, rather than assembling reality from what is captured in the camera lens (or comparable tool). This is why the technological features of anime, manga, video games, etc. were as indispensable to the evolution of moe as any cultural particularity.
Godzilla nominally appeared in “live-action” films, but as the originating “tokusatsu” (lit. special effects) character, Godzilla was also defined by anti-reality. This reveals an important consideration: past a certain quantity of manipulation with special effects, film takes on the quality of animation. What, in a technological sense, distinguishes a Marvel action set-piece from an animated film? Very little. This technological component was key to the kind of fictionality and abstraction that Godzilla was able to evoke, which was necessary for his diverse characterisation to be read as moe rather than merely inconsistent. (We have previously covered the origins of symbolic characters if your understanding of this kind of moe is still murky.)
While watching Godzilla x Kong, I happened to find myself thinking of these transformative qualities of special effects in Benjaminian terms. Film, in the manner understood by Walter Benjamin, relies on technology particular to mass industrial production under capitalism. For most Marxists, art is a general reflection of its surrounding political-economic climate. But for Benjamin, who was “the oddest Marxist among a movement that did not lack for oddities” (Hannah Arendt), the economic contours of daily living were infused with specific cultural characteristics and meanings. As Fredric Jameson explains it:
Adorno [another Marxist thinker] feels that the base should be invoked only in the most general way, as “capitalist production” (and, although he does not say so, by way of the mediation of the commodity form, of commodification, also in general), whereas it is clear that for Benjamin, and in light of the mass of data contained in the Arcades convolutes, the details themselves are fully as superstructural as they are economic.
Originally, realism in the Kracauerian sense of cinema could be rightly understood in a general Marxist sense as emerging under the condition of industrial mass production. It was the productive capacity of capitalism in a new technological horizon that freed artistic “reproduction” from its laborious restraints. The ideas implicit in the medium of film are only possible on account of the productive realities that make its technological realisation feasible. However, the Benjaminian insight lies in how the dialectical tensions implicit in this productive base crystallise in unison with the minute details of the culture—or practically, art—that is produced through it.
In the era of cinema where the original Godzilla film came to be, the “realistic tendency” was automatically included within the large-scale cinema of the United States and its Hollywood system. But there was no comparable system at Japan’s economic level. In this light, realism was demoted to just one tool available to cinema rather than the exclusionary default. Many historical accounts of the unique development of Japanese art in the post-war context cannot help but return again and again to the consequences of this economic dimension. The radical divergences in style that came to characterise anime were serendipitously contextualised by a gap in scale next to Disney and the other major American film studios. Manga, as another example, did not inculcate the same standards for colouring as are present in American comics precisely because of the implausibility of mass scale colour printing in Japan—whereas it was possible in the United States.
This was meant to be a short post, so I cannot waffle on too much longer: The aesthetic dimensions of tokusatsu evolved homologously to other Japanese approaches to the mediums of mass entertainment. As the Hollywood system reinvented itself over and over again to find new heights of realism as the assumed meaning of photographic aesthetics, Japan had to discover aesthetic styles that utilised the realism of film in parallel to unrealistic sources of appeal. They had to operate in what might be called a constrained horizon of realism. However, these values crystallised into something of their own as a kind of subculture; this was the original context where moe was located. Godzilla’s mature diversity of appeal within the realm of tokusatsu preempted what eventually transformed into a wider post-realistic phenomenon in a range of mediums and styles.
For a long time, the developments of the West and the East carried on in disunity on this point. No matter their awareness that Japan was engaging in particular innovations and unique styles, realism was a necessary aesthetic guide stone for the values of the Hollywood system. However, in recent decades, there has been an ironic inversion in the technological bases of Hollywood. In the pursuit of greater and greater realism, technology has been developed in the realms of CGI and advanced special effects that were designed to create realism of a level that was not possible for human beings to capture on camera. However, as this technology matured, it reached the point where the tools for absolute realism also became the tools for “the technological creation of entirely synthetic realities”—the traditional domain of animation. The age of the new style of blockbuster that has developed and accelerated from Star Wars to The Terminator to Jurassic Park and beyond has slowly polluted the logic of photography with the technological conditions of animation.
Realism is still a key aesthetic marker of the appetite of Western audiences and Western films. However, the past two decades in particular have seen an unprecedented rise in films created by and for the green screen. Godzilla as a moe character initially only made sense in the constrained realism natural to the Japanese context. The dissonance of the suits emphasised an unrealistic human dimension to his character that facilitated the type of moe discussed in the first half of this post. However, leaving aside any conscious awareness on the part of Hollywood executives, Godzilla in a contemporary American context is no longer limited by technology to only one side of this binary. From King of the Monsters onwards, the creators discovered that it was technologically possible to take a high-budget realistic model for Godzilla and make him move and behave in unrealistic and human ways. The new world is one where a detailed and lifelike CGI Godzilla model could pick up King Kong and deliver a human-style suplex.
The result has been an accidental break with the founding logic that was used to understand film in its live-action American context. The meaning of this current set of Godzilla films is not just a conscious consequence of respect for Godzilla’s origins as a moe character—although that is no doubt present. It is rather that the tensions that bifurcated film between live-action and animation have been anachronised by subsequent technological conditions and the arrival of a new globalised economic substructure. And these new conditions will continue to crystallise in the minute details of art and culture that is produced under their shadow. The conditions that gave rise to moe will see its underlying logic sprouting up as colonies of hyper-fiction. But we cannot possibly expect it to take the same form as Japanese moe. Rather, understanding moe gives us an important key for understanding what frontiers of culture will be opened up as we begin to live in new technological horizons.
