I feel this strange urge to apologize for writing my column on time, but I will resist and dive straight into it.

As I mentioned last week, the Japanese anime and game industry has learned over the last few years that adding some random Sprouting-moe girls to a work will draw more fans. It doesn’t matter if the girl even fits the mood of the work at all - shoehorning a maid or a spunky childhood friend into your show will guarantee that some fans of that particular Sprouting type will give you their money.

There’s no better example of this kind of shoehorning than The SoulTaker. SoulTaker is a dark but generic action story (you might even call it Burning) which would have been forgotten quickly under normal circumstances. However, it was given extra shelf life by the insertion of a pink-haired, squeaky-voiced nurse named Komugi.

Komugi was a huge hit in the Sprouting crowd, spawning her own series and salvaging some measure of profitability for SoulTaker. She was also an extremely minor character. But her success wasn’t at all isolated.

Other studios took note of the sheer amount of money to be made from the Sprouting market, and the various Sprouting character archetypes became increasingly prevalent in Burning-type shows in more and more overt ways.

For example, maids started popping everywhere, whether they fit the setting or not - the bridge bunnies from Macross were replaced by bridge maids in shows like Gravion and Demonbane (admittedly, Demonbane started out as an adults-only visual novel, so it was meant to appeal to the Sprouting-obsessed male crowd from the very beginning, despite the giant robots). Capcom even added a useless little girl to the Devil May Cry anime to try and extract some extra money from a fanbase not usually inclined to watch a shirtless man perform over-the-top stunts while fighting demons.

What I term the “moefication” of anime doesn’t seem to be slowing down at all - fans vote with their wallets, after all, and the rewards for hitting the right chord with a moe-obsessed fandom are great. Every company is looking for the next Komugi-style gold mine to be merchandised and exploited, like the Shuffle! franchise or the Haruhi crew.

What do you think about the perceived need for any given show to have at least one girl who is made for the moe crowd? Is it annoying? Does it make a show more enjoyable? I’m curious about other people’s opinions on the matter. Personally, I’ve learned to accept it as the norm, though the more blatant the moe money grab, the less I enjoy watching a show.

See you next week for Feel the Burning, when I talk about a subject near and dear to my heart: the pile bunker.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 4:20 am and is filed under Win-Myun Kim, Sprouting, anime. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.