Quote:
Originally Posted by DanielSong39
I think Clannad TV is a great opportunity for Kyoto Animation to make some advances when it comes to character design and development. One criticism I have is that some of their female characters push the boundaries of moe, to the point that they either become superficial, one-dimensional, or both. This may be a desirable quality to have in certain side characters, but certainly not in the leads.
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One more before I go to bed. I consider the Moe thing to be more of a side effect of H-Game character personalities. It's not exactly Kyoto Animation's fault per se, but the cahracters they were given to work with are just to cutesy for their own good. Now if what you say about Clannad is true it's starting to sound more appealing, because one of the things that keeps me from normally enjoying these shows for more than a few episodes is that I get overloaded with moe so quickly that I can't continue without short circuiting. It's already been an experience of a lifetime at that point. I call it the 1/4 Law, wherein for me to be able to enjoy an episode, no more than 1/4 of the episode can rely soley on moe antics to fill time. I think that's a reasonable expectation of any series if it plans on making any sort of impact other than "That's so cute". Take Yggdra Loli, the characters are ungodly cute looking and it makes the art style quirky and fun to look at, but the story is actually fairly serious and militaristic and the characters keep developing as well throughout the stage. An example would be Yggdra evolving from an innocent naive princess into a warmongerer and then into a strong and compassionate leader. This satisfies the 1/4 law quite well, containing just the right amount of moe.
And holy crap there's an economics article on Moe. I think the article speaks for everything I've talked about to this point, the exploitation, the realization of how easy it is to milk a certain sect of people, and the trend's direction as whole. Simply unbelievable though. I knew it was a huge market, but to think its worth 2 Trillion Yen.... I think I need to research this a bit as this is damn interesting. Seeing as this article is from 2005, I wonder if we have already passed the peak of Moe' overwhelming popularity and are on the way back down the other side of the slope, settling into somewhere comfortable, but not out of control (small doses within episodes instead of entire series). This almost singlehandly explains all of 2005-mid 2006 and why it was such a weak season.