Food for Thought: My Little Pony and the Moe Phenomenon

That is so moe! Or is it?

Find out after the break.

When I started watching My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, one of the first things I decided about it was that Fluttershy was moe. It's kind of obvious, isn't it? "Moe" is usually defined as a particular sort of cuteness that appeals to the protective instinct (except that it's really much more vague and complicated, of course), and Fluttershy certainly fits the bill. Isn't that squeak she makes at 0:38 in the video just adorable?

I'm not the only one who's gotten that impression. She's listed in TV Tropes's article on the subject, for instance, and you can find image macros declaring her "moe as fuck."

D'aaaaaawwwwwwww.

Perhaps the matter isn't that clear-cut though. Fluttershy is superficially moe, but the reasons behind her conception run completely contrary to its general workings.

The thing that bothers me most when I'm watching shows with a strong moe focus is the knowledge that I'm not watching proper characters, but some kind of bizarre fetish objects. Make no mistake – moe is fan service. It's generally emotional rather than sexual, but ultimately no less demeaning to women than T&A. (Isn't it just hilarious how the stereotypical moe character is clumsy and ditzy? There's nothing as attractive as a woman being pathetic, apparently.) Moe characters exist only for the gratification of otakus.

The characters of MLP: FiM are cute and huggable, but they weren't designed to appeal to grown men. They were designed to be exemplars for little girls to identify with, and are appealing to men only incidentally. They were created to be strong as individuals. Furthermore, while the casts of moe shows are varied only to "cover all the bases" and provide material to otaku with different tastes in anime-girls, the ponies are varied for much more idealistic purposes (as explained by the show creator, Lauren Faust, here): to give little girls role models and to raise the level of characterization for female characters in Western animation. So I'll go ahead and say that MLP: FiM is artistically superior to anime that use moe fetishism.

I don't know about you, but that makes quite a bit of difference to me. But all the same, it's not enough to definitively declare that Fluttershy and other ponies = not moe. The problem here is that moe is not only a very amorphous term in general, but also fundamentally subjective. (We should really be saying "I find Character X moe" rather than "Character X is moe.") Most people are probably attached to Fluttershy for the very reasons moe characters are liked in general, so perhaps the distinction is academic. Still, it doesn't sit right with me to lump them in together. Cuteness is used by the anime industry as a cynical tool, and I would prefer to set apart My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic's sincerity from that somehow.

Also:

Isn't this just the cutest thing you've ever seen?