Anime Club no Densetsu: The Tale of the Moé Pioneer

I’ve attended an in-person anime club for quite a while now, but it wasn’t until recently that I learned that these sort of group organizations have kind of a bad rap. There are some YouTube personalities who’ve discussed this at length, and while I don’t doubt that they may have had some negative experiences (they’re hard to avoid when you put a large group of very different people together who are extremely passionate about something), personally I don’t share those feelings. My memories are more the sort that involve making friends, watching great anime, going to conventions in large groups, and generally just having a venue to immerse myself in what has become my primary hobby. Rather than contribute to the pile of “anime club horror stories” that exist on the internet, I’d prefer to write about some of the more positive, or at least truly interesting or thought-provoking things I’ve been able to experience as the member of an anime club that’s existed for multiple decades. I’ve been blessed to know many different people over the years, and have had the great privilege to watch various eras of anime fandom pass by, changing the ways in which we consume what we love.

As some background, I started attending the anime club associated with my University in 2001. I found it through some acquaintances in my Japanese classes, as well as from some advertisements around campus. When I first started attending, the club was watching Revolutionary Girl Utena, which I didn’t understand at all but which I quickly grew to love (I had missed the first couple of weeks, but a kind soul took pity on me loaned me the first DVD so I could catch up). It took a few weeks, but I eventually made some friends and there are still a few of them that I keep in contact with today. After a couple of years in the club, watching the type of selections coming through the fansub pipeline, it was apparent that the recent rise of moé* entertainment wasn’t just a fluke; it was becoming a full-on phenomenon. It’s because of that genre’s popularity that I have this story to tell.

Unfortunately, one of the aspects of geek culture that geek culture itself has some trouble accepting is that it can often be just as cliquish toward perceived outsiders as those at the high schools that many of us look back upon with disdain. At anime club we were all anime fans, but there could be sharp divides in the type of anime we were drawn to, and these new moé series – the sort of ill-defined “cute girls doing cute things” stories that occasionally skewed into what was perceived to be lolicon territory – was divisive to say the least. As someone brought up within the 1990s fandom on the violent action anime featured on the Sci-Fi Channel every Saturday, as well as someone who was (and still is) very sensitive to the ways in which women are portrayed in media, I was put off by this new form of cutesy, cloying entertainment. Never mind the fact that a lot of those violent gore-fests that I held dear weren’t very diplomatic toward their women characters either, but my personal understanding of “strong female characters” was not nuanced at that time. I was convinced the guys who watched moé entertainment were budding sex criminals, mostly because of the way the characters were designed and how they were portrayed to be consumable. Needless to say, I was pretty angry about a lot of things that didn’t directly affect me in those days.

There was one guy in club who was the target of most of my ire. I won’t share his full name, but I’ll refer to him as J. J was a fan of moé, and unapologetic about it. Every semester, when it became time to nominate series to watch for next semester, he’d nominate Bottle Fairy which, to my current understanding, is cute but not very substantive, and Princess Tutu, which I now know to be a verifiable classic (seriously, go pick it up and watch it if you haven’t seen it). While nowadays I’m friends with many guys who enjoy cute entertainment and I don’t, surprisingly, consider them to be creeps, I found J’s passion for these series in particular (as well as a show called Magical Nyan Nyan Taruto, about cats who are also small girls… I still find that concept a little iffy) off-putting. It caused me to interpret his motivations as very suspect. He and I had many an argument on the anime club’s online bulletin board about it; my sour attitude was only bolstered by the fact that my group of close friends at the time professed the same negative feelings about moé and made me feel secure in my own black-and-white opinions. This went on for a couple of years. In 2004 Princess Tutu was voted into the showing schedule, and like the stubborn person I was I refused to watch it. Some time after that, like most normal people, J left the club (I assumed that he’d graduated). I, of course, stuck around, and four years later the club ended up watching Princess Tutu again… and I found that, despite my prejudices and my continued wariness, I truly loved it.

I’ve spent the past several years coming to terms with a lot of the more emotional aspects of my life, including the fallout of having been the person I was when I’m younger. I figure most people go through this kind of painful personal reckoning at some point; while looking back upon who I used to be is often an exercise in enduring the most biting cringe, I’m told that having some negative feelings toward your previous actions and attitudes suggests that, in the meantime, you’ve experienced some emotional growth. I guess I can’t deny that there may be some truth to that. For me, though, I can’t help but dwell upon how much of a toady I was back then. I’ve always been kind of an awkward person and so deeply hungry for friendship that I’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying to make myself palatable in the eyes of other people. Agreeing with them and more so putting their feelings ahead of my own. I now suspect that this has always been some form of social “masking,” though I’ve never gotten any official diagnoses that would lend credence to this. I feel like I just don’t understand “how to friendship” in the way that others do.

This realization came to light in a couple of different ways. One was an epiphany I had after I went through my divorce. For those who don’t follow all the details of my personal life (please don’t, it’s even less interesting than you might suspect), I was previously married some years ago. My ex and I had a lot of mutual friends, and when the breakup came to light there was a fairly large sub-set of those mutuals who dropped me like a hot potato. As you can imagine, that’s not a great feeling (especially when no one seemed particularly interested in hearing my side of what led to the situation) and especially not great for someone who has often and consistently dealt with issues of self-loathing throughout their lifetime. However, that forced distance, though cruel it may have seemed at the time, gave me perspective to see just how hard I had been working to try to make sure those people liked me. When I didn’t have to uphold the façade any longer I realized the sheer amount of emotional labor it had taken to be a palatable person, someone worthy of friendship.

The other train of thought that brought me to this destination was more roundabout. The truth was that I spent a lot of my early anime club (and anime reviewing) career with a very binary opinion on controversial subjects like fanservice, violence, and sexuality in anime. I was greatly influenced by the “all-or-nothing” opinions many of my close anime club friends seemed to have. I obviously could have been misinterpreting their opinions, too (I suspect this is true), but I had this idea that I wasn’t being a good feminist if I didn’t speak out against every instance of fanservice in the shows that we were watching, or the episodes or series that I reviewed. I would get so agitated in my gut any time that sort of material popped up in anime that I was watching because I had both lofty expectations of myself in terms of calling it out, as well as dreadful expectations that the subsequent comment threads on my website were going to include at least one (and usually more) abusive reply because of it. While I’m still friends with a lot of folks I hung out with at that time, once they detached themselves from the actual club (like normal people who graduate from college and leave their college anime club), I started to feel less stressed-out about anime that contained a little bit of nudity or fanservice. It’s not that I think those things all deserve a pass, but the mere fact of their existence doesn’t consume so much of my energy anymore.

Some of the consequences of having these experiences are not real great; while I would truthfully say I currently have many friends and those relationships are valuable to me (and I wouldn’t want to imply otherwise in case any of those folks are reading), I tend to keep the majority of people at arm’s length. I’ve found myself saddened sometimes because, aside from my partner, I don’t feel like I have the type of very close friendships a lot of other women in my broad social circle seem to have, and yet I find myself unable to put in the actual work needed to create those kinds of relationships (and to be honest, I’m not very interested in once again experiencing the deep, all-consuming pain I felt when I was abandoned by friends who I had previously considered very close – why lay it all out there if you might just get thrown out with the rest of the trash?). I jokingly tell people (and speak it inwardly to myself to make myself feel better), that “I’m just not the type of woman who gets invited to weddings.” But it hurts to be someone that people wave to in the hallway at an event, but who can’t be trusted as a supporter at anyone’s big life events. An afterthought, if there happens to be leftover space (there never is). As a divorcee and an infertile, I’m sure I also seem double-cursed to have around, so I get it.

I recall a time where a group of women I know went to a really cool out of state convention that I had no idea existed until it was too late to register and make plans to attend. I had the brief, indignant thought of “why did no one tell me about this thing I would clearly love?” before I self-corrected myself. Of course they wouldn’t reach out to someone who has made literally zero effort to interact in months. I hear that there’s a phenomenon for folks with ADHD (I’m thus far undiagnosed, but once this pandemic is over it’s on my priority list to get answers even though I feel like I already know) where their continuity of friendships is mostly unaffected by time between interactions, but that obviously isn’t the same for other people who naturally require a little more consistent give-and-take. C’est la vie, I suppose. Here’s a peek into my more evil thought processes – I thought briefly about signing up to attend on my own one year and seeing those folks in passing there “just by chance,” projecting the falsehood that I was deeply enjoying myself as a loner who didn’t need them to include me. Of course I figured that such a lie might be just a little too passive-aggressive, even for a life-long Minnesotan like me.

This somewhat depressive dumping has been a very long-winded explanation of the fact that there was a long time I went along with the opinions that other people expressed, because it was the only tool I’ve had in my friendship toolbox for the majority of my life. When I finally tossed that well-worn implement in the trash, it was a larger loss to my social life than I think I expected. But it also meant that I could let go many opinions that weren’t really my own to begin with. This includes my previous views on moé anime, which over the years has gotten much more nuanced. And every time the subject comes up, I think about J just trying to live his life in a world that was even less kind at the time toward men who enjoyed the cuter things in life. While I still have a general wariness of people who actively choose not to see the difference between anime series that feature cute girls, and anime series that feature cute girls and their implied underage sexual availability (that sort of feigned ignorance is neither flattering nor charming, my dude), I don’t really think, looking back, that this was the issue at the time. It was more my own inability to discern one from the other, and my strong, aching desire to have people like me. It turned me into the kind of basic-ass bully that I’d always claimed to revile.

I actually still see J from time to time at local conventions; he’s attended quite a few of my panels over the years. I often wonder if he remembers me and the person that I was. I tend to dress up in ridiculous J-fashion at these events, and thus may have adequately disguised myself (though I doubt I could ever truly expect to hide myself entirely behind a poufy dress and makeup). I try now to be the sort of public fan who talks mostly about what they like, has measured responses to what they don’t, and who chooses to interact in a friendly way in public, but obviously that wasn’t always the case and I can’t pretend like I was never kind of an ass. I often think about apologizing to J when I see him, but I can’t help but think that it would be sort of self-serving for me to do that so many years later. Maybe I’ll just state here that I’m sorry for assuming the worst of him, and for allowing myself to get caught up in others’ bad behavior.

Oh, and Princess Tutu is great! I’m glad I got the opportunity to come around to it.

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*I will not be arguing with anyone who wants to be pedantic about my use of this word here. While I think we all understand that the original meaning of moé was to define a particular feeling toward certain types of characters, current use of the word has since become a catch-all to describe the sort of entertainment containing those sorts of characters.

I also use the accented e (é) when writing the word, because otherwise it just looks like the name “Moe” to me and that feels odd.