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To touch upon the moe topic one more time, as I always love to say, I like to distinguish between shows with moe in them and moe shows. Basically a "show with moe in it" is just that. A show where perhaps there's a character that has some traits that can be considered moe and that's where it ends. An example for me would be Steins;Gate and characters like Mayuri Shiina and Makise Kurisu. Mayuri can come across as a bit of a "moeblob", but she also has a pretty tragic storyline surrounding her that seems to have delayed her mental development somewhat. Kurisu tends to get really embarassed and flustered easily by some of the things the main character points out about her personality and interests and this also tends to come with blushing and her momentarily losing her intellectual aura and basically acting more like a typical girl her age. Both aspects can be considered moe IMO, but they don't necessarily make the show or the characters overwhelmingly moe, they're just character traits to go along with the other ones that they have.
A show like K-On I would classify as a moe show. The characters barely exist for any other reason than to be cutesy and are really limited in their character development in order to fulfill a specific type of moe appeal while minimizing any traits that might detract from arguably being a personifaction of those ideals. Yui is the ditzy girl, Mio is the easily flustered girl, Tsumugi is the prim and proper girl, Ritsu is the genki girl and Asuza is the cat girl. The characters come across more as concepts than actual characters to me and thus I could categorize the show as using it's characters to pander to people who like specific fetishes.
However I think this is a rare example of a case where you arguably can just tackle and criticize a series on that front since it's IMO really difficult to seperate K-On from moe and still be able to say much about the show. To me in most cases criticizing shows for having any degree of moe elements, no matter how small in impact, is a little silly. It may seem like hypocrisy since people seem to get the impression that I'm some sort of rigidly anti-moe person, but that's not the case at all. I simply am critical of shows that attempt to showcase one thing and one thing only and where the intent seems to be to appeal to one very specific niche fanbase only. I find they show a lack of ambition and effort and perhaps this is where I can sort of tie pandering into lack of originality a bit....or at the very least a lack of craft.
This wouldn't normally be a major problem, but I feel that the anime industry had recently given far too much say to a very specific and arguably small group of otaku in Japan to the point where they were practically allowing them to write the series to be marketed at them and to me that is both pandering and the industry belying a lack of originality. The industry however seems to have at least in part realized that a certain line had been crossed and seems to be dialing things back a bit to where they maintain control of ideas and concepts as opposed to the fans.
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