Quote:
Originally Posted by Triple_R
Wiki isn't perfect of course. They can get some things wrong. But they're generally not this far off. Wiki would be almost 100% wrong here if moe is strictly a feeling. Most of what Wiki presents here is total gibberish if moe is strictly a feeling. If moe is strictly a feeling, then what the heck is "moe media"? Wiki even puts forward rough estimates for what the total commercial value of "moe media" was for Japan in 2004.
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I think you've misunderstood my central premise. This isn't about "moe is
only a feeling and all other uses are
absolutely incorrect". It's not like I'm an authority on linguistics, nor in any position to determine the way words will be used by people. (Note that Wikipedia identifies it as "slang"; slang is something that just happens and takes on a life of its own. It's not necessarily inappropriate for Wikipedia to try to capture the way it is being used as slang, or for people like John to postulate about it.) What I'm talking about is how
useful the word has proven to be when used in various ways.
When used to describe a feeling, my impression is that its meaning is generally understood. This is the core meaning of the word. But when used in a derivative way to try to describe anything else (a trait, a character, a franchise, a genre), I have observed that it causes more confusion than it solves because the root word is too nebulous. At first it seems so simple ("it's the thing these three shows have in common!" or "it's a collection of these identifiable list of traits!"), but it's nearly impossible to draw the boundaries of where it
stops. And in the end you have endless arguments about "this is moe" and "this isn't moe", and no one can possibly be right because, at its
core, moe is a feeling not a fact.
This is why I posed all those rhetorical questions. You might think you've got it all figured out and can answer all the questions and organize everything into nice boxes of "this is moe" and "this is not moe". And no doubt you'll appeal to everyone to just "be honest" that "this is what
the world thinks", as you've been doing so far. But you will never get "the world" to agree with you, because no clear common definition exists. People who "don't like moe" already have a personal definition that encompasses a broad cross-section of things they dislike (and, I've noticed, tends to conveniently exclude things they do like, or just think shouldn't count). People who "do like moe" don't usually confine themselves to some artificial box that says "survey says these shows are designed to make you feel this way", and placing things in a "moe box" has little-to-no meaning as a distinguishing factor. And whatever line you propose on the "is-it-or-isn't-it" front, someone can argue -- and probably will -- that there's a clear precedent that things on the other side of the line should be included. Even if you write "RRR's Moe Media Manifesto", no one will follow it.
So all this is why I've been saying all along: it's futile. It's not that people aren't using the term however they're trying to use it, it's that the way people are using the term has no clear meaning. Of course, you can think I'm full of shit and that you will succeed where countless others have tried and failed. But I'm not saying this out of some sort of stubborn resistance to "oh no, they're putting a box around my 'favourite genre' and that's bad for me somehow!" I'm just fully convinced, by all the dozens and dozens of debates about this I've followed and participated in over the years, that it'll never work. It always goes the same way: someone thinks they have a clear idea, other people come in and muddy the waters, and in the end the only thing that can be agreed-upon is that moe is
at least a feeling, and people will like what they like.
Again, just so I'm clear about my core point: futility of the argument, not invalidation of the slang (which can't truly be invalidated anyway).