Moon Channel’s latest video dives into the darker side of moe attachment through a literary and sociological analysis of K-On! and its relationship to the online right.
When I first investigated the idea of moe a lifetime ago it was from the perspective of a person playing in the lab with stem cells that would grow into the terminally online segment of a reactionary culture war. I diverged from that path largely by accident, and with the benefit of hindsight, I feel obliged to return and address where things went wrong. Moony’s analysis here is a great point of entry.
Moony crams references to Catcher in the Rye, the Tale of Genji, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, a dissection of manga demographics, the hikikomori phenomenon, and prescriptions for emergence from a position of antisocial alienation and commodity fetishism all within a tight 36-minute run time. Worth the watch.
Image from the K-On! anime, via the Spanish K-On! Fandom wiki
