Appearances

As I said before about the way superhero cartoonists associate hair colour with certain powers before that while I think this was discussed on Livejournal before (somebody saying that comic book redheads are either dangerous or dangerously fun with Barbara Gordon being neither of those), I don’t think not a lot of them brought up how a good number of superhero redheads are given the ability to manipulate flame and the like. One character that I came up with is Jean-Louis Lumiere and the way he’s presented pretty much pushes this meme to an extent, while he doesn’t outright manipulate flame but with his dyed red hair, red clothing and ability to manipulate light he does teeter on it.

The logic as presented in a number of stories like Stormwatch, X-Men, Young Heroes in Love and the like seems to show that if you have a flame-haired character, they could as well manipulate actual fire themselves. Not all redheaded superheroes do this, but it’s one association that shows up fairly often enough to make itself obvious in some regards. Within the X-Men comics where in addition to Angelica Jones, you have Rachel Summers and her mum Jean Grey who are both given a fiery aura. While there’s a blonde character who manipulates volcanism and eventually fire, whose name is Amara Aquila, but another is Emma Frost who wears white and is subtextually linked to the cold.

That she’s an ice queen makes you wonder the way she’s depicted and designed as if it exists to oppose Jean Grey’s fiery association, Emma Frost may not manipulate ice herself but she has possessed an actual ice-making character named Bobby Drake, AKA Iceman. So her association with ice is there in some form or another, a good number of white-haired characters like Tora Olafsdotter and Captain Cold are depicted manipulating ice themselves. Snow is white, water is wet. This may not always be the case for other ice-based characters, whether in appearance or in personality (Jojo’s Ghiaccio has a hot temper).

But the way the characters are presented play into our semantic understanding of colours and their elemental associations, sort of like how the Chinese word for fire also doubles as the word for temper. The French language kicks back in a way when it comes to the word colère froide or cold anger, as in the anger is there but has gotten kind of spiteful. Funny enough, Ghiaccio personifies this idiom very well where he not only manipulates the cold but also has hissy fits every now and then. Also blue is the hottest colour, so his temper is appropriately hot as well. Then we have Touhou Project’s Mokou no Fujiwara, who has white hair and manipulates fire that she could literally be considered white-hot.

But on the other hand a character like Mokou no Fujiwara is pretty rare in the greater scheme of superpowered character design, even if she personifies the idiom white-hot very well she’s also not a character that’s commonly encountered. Likewise Teen Titans’ very own Kid Kold is a rare example of a redhead that manipulates ice, while red is actually a colder colour than blue in the world of light and fire because it’s less energetic it’s also commonly considered to be a warm colour. Ditto Santa Claus wearing red every winter season, ditto the odd fact that red hair evolved in colder climates. Ditto that blond hair among Europeans evolved in darker environs.

If it looks light, it must be linked to light in some way. This may not always be the case with all light-manipulating characters, but a good number of those who manipulate light such as Starlight from The Boys, Marvel’s Dagger, Dazzler, Karla Sofen and Carolina Dean or DC’s Halo and Stargirl have light hair and manipulate light themselves. Again this isn’t always the case for all of them and Jean-Louis Lumiere fits this, well covertly because he has natural blond hair himself, but Touhou Project has a blonde girl who manipulates darkness and her name is Rumia. So it would be fun to have another darkness-manipulating blond named Cyril Darkholme.

The more the merrier I suppose, but it’s not hard to see how the semantic association of colours matter when it comes to superpowers. This may not always be the case, not even consistently so, but it does play into the way characters and their powers are conceived. If they manipulate fire, they ought to have a bad temper or something like that. The association of light features with light itself is there in Tagalog, where the word for somebody with albinism is anak-araw. Despite the ironic fact that somebody with albinism will be at the short end of the stick when it comes to the perils of solar radiation.

Even if a character like Jojo’s Ghiaccio personifies the French idiom of colère froide/cold anger very well, he’s also a character not commonly encountered in fiction due to the expected semantic associations. Same goes for Rumia in another regard, when it comes to European blond hair evolving in low-light conditions. (Makes sense that if the place is so dark that somebody with this little melanin would be spared from sunburns, well at night and during the spring and autumn months of the year.) Semantic associations will override biological fact in most cases, that’s why the characters are depicted the way they are.

The way the characters are designed hinge on semantic associations in one way or another, sometimes it’s pretty accidental as it would be with Ghiaccio when it comes to the French language. More often than not it’s unconsciously deliberate in some way, so a light-manipulating character ought to have blond hair and a flame-creating character ought to have red hair. It’s unconscious but also not that coincidental.

The evolution of moe

Moe, as a word, came into being in the 1990s when it comes to fans being rather infatuated with characters from certain anime like Dinosaur Planet for instance. However, as a fannish practice and sentiment, this goes all the way back a decade earlier or more when it comes to lolicon, kemonomimi and other forms of moe anthropomorphism (Gundam Girls anyone?). While anthropomorphised animals and half-animals aren’t anything new in manga, be it Cat-Eyed Boy by Kazuo Umezu, Osamu Tezuka’s Hecate or Gegege no Kitaro, the animal eared aesthetic as we know it can be traced back to Wata no Kunihoshi (綿の国星).

As with a good number of shojo manga in the 1970s and 1980s, it was really popular with otaku so popular that Hideo Azuma created his own kemonomimi character not too long after (Shan Cat). Likewise, characters like Clarisse from Lupin III and magical girl characters like Minky Momo and Creamy Mami were also popular with otaku so popular they even spawned copycat characters appearing in pornography and the like. As for what constitutes otaku manga, in an interview with Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure author Hirohiko Araki he knows what otaku manga are like but admits he doesn’t get the appeal.

Strangely enough, the late Hideo Azuma’s born a decade earlier than Araki but the difference is that the former, for all his love of horror movies, wasn’t that as engrossed in otaku culture as the latter was. Either what Japan considers a geek could be different from what Westerners call a geek or perhaps Araki wasn’t and still isn’t that greatly involved in otaku culture himself. So that’s why he sees certain manga as otaku pandering, which makes me think a good number of moe anime is otaku pandering in that they pander real hard to otaku.

It’s parsimonious to say that most anime and manga in Araki’s time didn’t pander hard to otaku, well not to the same extent that happened in the 1990s around the time that interview took place. While there were cartoonists like Azuma who pandered real hard to fellow otaku and were otaku themselves, they were in the minority and since Araki didn’t do fancomics so he never had much of a big otaku background himself and probably so do other mangaka who didn’t indulge in lolicon and other paraphilia that much either.

While the lolicon boom died down in the late 1980s and early 1990s due to a scandal surrounding Tsutomu Miyazaki, the infatuation over and sexualisation of moe characters continued unabated in later decades not just in fan comics and proper hentai productions but also later late night productions like Queen’s Blade for instance. Stuff like Touhou Project and Higurashi, given their background in doujinshi culture, are knee deep in otaku aesthetics. These include knee-high socks and kemonomimi.

If Superflat artists are any indication, it’s possible to divorce kemonomimi and other otaku motifs from otaku fandom but the otaku sensibility wouldn’t be there so what makes an anime otaku-pandering can be pretty specific to those who’re knee deep in otaku culture themselves. This is what separates the mostly pre-moe generation of mangaka from their moe-drenched successors, while it’s true some contemporary mangaka aren’t that deep in otaku culture themselves.

But the fact that later generations of mangaka are deep in otaku culture, especially when it comes to stuff like Killing Bites having the hallmarks of otaku pandering (idol culture, twin tails, tsundere, kemonomimi and maid outfits) are things Hirohiko Araki and most of his contemporaries wouldn’t do much and never do to begin with anyways. Why I call Killing Bites a moe or otaku manga while Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure isn’t (well to the same extent) is that Killing Bites has more things Japanese otaku are into.

Not just schoolgirls, kemonomimi, twin tails, maid outfits and tsundere but also idol culture since in Japan there’s such thing as idol otaku. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure does have a schoolgirl character or more, but one of the manga’s biggest influences (as evidenced in many of the characters’ and stands’ names) is Western popular music. So it’s not a moe manga in the same way Killing Bites is, I might even go out on a limb saying that Black Lagoon is also a moe or otaku work.

Pretty much because it has things that would immediately attract otaku to it like twin tails, maid outfits and so on though I don’t know much of it and it wouldn’t register as moe to some people. Moe, however, can be a rather vague term to define when it comes to what makes otaku infatuated with a character. Nonetheless, otaku anime and manga are pretty much anime and manga calculated to create moe feelings in fans that they’re full of stock motifs and characters to know how moe they are and can get.

So that’s why I consider Killing Bites very much a byproduct of otaku culture in a way Jojo isn’t, certainly not to the same extent and it becomes evident when it comes to other things otaku like very much. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya contains a fair amount of characters intended to be moe, you have dandere characters like Yuki Nagato, tsundere like Haruhi herself and the fact that it contains schoolgirls in school uniforms has in common with Sailor Moon when you think about it.

Sailor Moon, to those who’re Japanese, is one of those anime that attracted a male audience not unlike what Totally Spies, Kim Possible and My Little Pony got in the West. In fact, it’s sometimes considered to be a moe anime because it has things otaku like. So did Creamy Mami and Minky Momo, which were both casualties in the lolicon crossfire. Neon Genesis Evangelion would logically get caught up in the moe crossfire, which seems surprising to some at first, but it did plant the seeds for dandere and tsundere moe characters in later anime.

So to conclude, stuff like Fist of the North Star and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure were both conceived in an era when moe otaku weren’t that hugely influential to the same degree they are these days and both their respective authors weren’t that hugely involved in otaku culture themselves show up in the works’ sensibilities. However, while Wata no Kunihoshi were never intended to appeal to otaku it did hugely influence otaku when it comes to moe and conceiving such characters they think are moe.

Thus we get the beginnings of kemonomimi moe with Wata no Kunihoshi which later begat works like Shan by Hideo Azuma, likewise the roots of lolicon lay not only in works that sexualise young girls but also with clean works that have young girls in it that get sexualised by the fanbase such as Minky Momo and Creamy Mami. Moe anime has its roots in works that are popular with otaku, even if it’s not always the case with other works popular with otaku it’s not hard to see how moe anime came to be if it weren’t for otaku.