Miku my nemesis
Do your remember the 00s? Probably not, objectively it was over 20 years ago and no matter how i would like to spin it to feel younger that is a sizeable chunk of any person life.
But if you are as old as me to remember it and watched anime in any way shape or form then you probably remember that cat girls where incredible popular in that era.
Do not get me wrong they remain popular until today but back then it was everywhere and it was cat girls specifically.
The reasons for this are beyond my pay grade but i understand that japan has always liked cute animal people or kemonomimi and audiences latches to them in the 01s hard. That would be just a simply a historical footnote on audiences interest if it were not for the sheer scale and an specificity of it so much so that a wolf girl or even a fox girl was considered exotic.
So we quickly got into this monoculture were we had cat girls and cat girls only. And both producers an audiences latched into them as a shorthand for a quirky cute girl usually romantically interested with the protagonist.
It was around this time that i stopped watching anime, simply lost access to cable and any semblance of broadband internet so watching it became basically impossible. But by the late 00s something interesting happened. People realized the cat girl stereotype was really liked and that you could use physical markers as a shorthand for personality. And I am not saying this caused the moe wave of the late 00s and early 10s but I am saying that it proved you could standardize personalities and sell them back to your audience, just keep the cat ears to tell them apart. Which is what moe tried to do with the whole taxonomy it accidentally invented. And turns out that is enough for most.
Running in parallel we have Hatsune Miku, she was originally the box art for a voice synthesis program, all aesthetics no character. And she became wildly successfully, ridiculously so that today i can buy Miku themed gear and even Gundam. And let me be clear she was not written with any personality, fans have been spending the last decade or more retrofitting one for her. Which showed people another thing: The markers for personality, the cat ears the aesthetics is more important that then personality itself.
By this time moe was all the rage and even cat girls were more basically already absorbed into it we got Eris from cat planet cuties which was more a package for ecchi than a character, notable exception is Holo from spice and wolf which is popular to this day since she has an interiority.
And this lead us to the tens proper. While Kawahara was out there accidentally inventing modern isekai. Which had a similar standardization effect but towards the protagonists. Something more interesting happened. Now that studios knew that the aesthetics trumped personality and audiences were well acclimated to that they began to write characters more as archetypes than people. Why bother to do all that writing when outfit and a couple angsty likes did like 90%? Which got scaled up into the modern gacha anime girl.
The modern anime girl in any gacha game is mostly aesthetic with a precisely controlled dose of personality enough to generate the emotional response to the paying customer and not more. They have a character in the same way McDonald’s burger have gastronomy.
And who proved this was possible? Our favorite girl Hatsune Miku! She is the ultimate case: no interiority ridiculously popular. That is why she is my nemesis, she is the epitome of art industrialization and character written in assembly lines. She proved that aesthetics beat interiority and the container beats the content more often than not. She is proof of concept for every character designed to maximize engagement and minimize risks.
That is why she is my nemesis not because i dislike her, there is little in her at all. But because she proved that did not matter. She is a robot pretending to be human and succeeding without trying particularly hard.
- Art by Tom Fischbach *