A Deep Dive Into Anime Waifus

I've been a fan of anime for a long time I find it to be one of the most expressive and interesting forms of media currently in existence being capable of beautiful visuals complex characters and stories that I can honestly say have changed my life and yet it gets a bad rap though anime is more mainstream than ever there are still parts of the community that have a massive stigma around them parts that are dismissed as weird despite people not even knowing where they came from in a previous video I covered fan service both its history and its relationship with the media it's a part of and while that video was titled a deep dive it may as well have been into a kiddie pool compared to the ocean I found myself lost in trying to research what I'm talking about today I have read novels dug up decades-old Forum posts and studied anthropological papers all centered around one topic all trying to answer one question why do people like waifu so much [Music] to those unfamiliar the word waifu is a Japanese borrowing of the English word wife in Japan a lot of the time when there's no Japanese word to describe something they'll use what's called loan words where they just take a word from another language and adapt it phonetically into Japanese other common loan words are convenient stores being called konbines and my favorite professional wrestling being called pororesu the word itself dates back to the 80s when the common Japanese word for one's wife at the time was Kenai which literally translated to inside the house it said the younger generation at that time were upset by how that sounded and so came up with the word waifu as a more neutral alternative however the term did not receive its association with anime until around 2002 with the show azumanga Dayo azumanga Dayo is a comedy anime about this ensemble cast of school girls in their everyday lives episode 15 of the show the one important to this conversation is a classic sports festival episode and in one scene early on in the episode the girls are discussing what events they'll be participating in and what cost assumes they should wear for the big cheerleading event and while this happens now the usage of waifu here is completely normal or at least it's used in normal context a character is referring to their wife and they use the word waifu but it is from here that we can directly trace the lineage of waifu to the larger anime Community as a lot of people began to use the phrase as a sort of meme phrase that eventually became the popular title for one's favorite character also just for fun here's the English dub of that very same scene for comparison mostly just because they use the regular English word wife which I think ruins the joke it's a photo of a woman she's a real pretty lady who is it my wife [Music] the spread of the term waifu from azumanga Dayo then came primarily in the form of anime fans on online forums 4chan's slash a anime Forum being the most popular it's hard to find any exact references or archives of anything posted right after that episode since a lot of archives don't go back that far and browsing 4chan this much has already put me on an FBI watch list but I did uncover some archive posts on 4chan from 2008 where people talked about waifus in different contexts and even used the exact phrase my waifu to refer to their favorite character the earliest post I could find online was actually on the anime Suki Forum from 2006 which uses it in a thread talking about characters from rosenmade and it's around 2007 that the first entry for waifu was put into urban dictionary according to all this Plus Google Trends graphs showing the terms popularity starting around 2007 it's safe to say that that's when waifu as we know it took off interestingly enough it's also in 2007 that the oldest archived usage of husbando was recorded in reference to lock on from mobile Suit Gundam zero husbando as you can imagine is just the male equivalent to waifu so discussion about it is mostly the same and I won't really be talking about the differences since this video is long enough as it is so waifu was popularized as a term in 2007 and its usage hasn't changed much at all since then it just became more and more popular and well known to the point that it actually stopped being a term for one's real wife entirely and became solely used to refer to fictional characters along with another term or an ayome which also means my wife and is used in Japanese a bit more often anyways while the meaning of waifu remained Loosely as a fictional character I like the usage of it online became heavily split with even those early 4chan posts being half ironic uses of the word and half sincere it wasn't uncommon for someone to post a picture of some random person or character with the caption my waifu and this ironic Association of the word does lead to some confusion and mystification surrounding those who are sincere a good example being the subreddit R waifuism where people post about characters they are actually in love with with and show themselves going on dates with them or buying merchandise related to them now some people might want to believe that these are all ironic posts that it's all one big bit that 50 000 people are somehow participating in and that nobody could possibly develop real feelings for an anime character but I'm here to tell you that that's just not true many many people have genuine feelings for fictional characters even outside the thousands on Reddit there are most likely millions of people worldwide who would say they have something that you could call a waifu so I want this video to be a record of waifu culture I want to cover the entire history and everything that led up to our modern understanding of it not only to try and explain how this all started but also why someone could develop feelings towards an anime girl and in talking about all this we can understand the ways people consume media even today just a quick plug before we begin though this video has had some censorship to avoid demonetization on YouTube if you'd like an uncensored version go check that out at patreon.com lectorius and with that out of the way this video is long and in depth and took me way too much time to make so just buckle up grab a snack and get comfortable because the first stop in our journey takes us all the way back to the 1970s [Music] series written by rumako Takahashi it began serialization in 1978 receiving an anime adaptation in 1981 and a remake anime in 2022 which I guess makes this the perfect time to talk about it the show follows a flirtatious high school student by the name of ataru who is and stay with me for a moment chosen as Earth's Champion by an invading alien race where he must win a game of tag to save the planet and the aliens Champion for this game just so happens to be a cute girl with colorful hair named love to keep things brief ataru wins the game by stealing lum's bikini top then loudly asks his girlfriend shinobu to marry him however Lum thinks he's asking to marry her and so now this loser high schooler has a cute alien girl desperately trying to get with him while he try I used to live a normal life with yirasayatsura being roughly translated to those annoying aliens looking at Lum you can see a character designed to be incredibly cute and vibrant put into a situation where she is uncontrollably attracted to the plain male lead her personality is also a combination of cute displays of affection alongside outbursts of comedic violence whenever ataro is unfaithful to her with their whole dynamic being a parody of Japanese married couples at the time the entire premise of the show is pretty blatant wish fulfillment something that would later transform into the modern Harem anime a genre in which a male protagonist is stuck in some Fantastical situation where multiple attractive women want to date him and with this fantasy plus lum's bubbly personality and the fact she only ever really wears a bikini many fans began to like her she was dubbed the first otaku Dream Girl by Jason Thompson in their book manga the complete guide and this otaku dream girl moniker is almost certainly used simply because she predates the phrase waifu by several decades to comment on her influence a bit more I'll refer to comicat organizer ichikawa koichi who says your sayatsura had the first Harem and the character lumchan she was a super sex symbol in Japan what movie stars are to France and America and was my first love however love is a limiting word to describe what most people feel towards characters like lung while it might suit someone like koichi lots of anime fans are more familiar with another term moe moe possibly even more so than waifu is a very hard word to describe the most apt definition I found is from Patrick W galbraith's book The Moe Manifesto where he calls it an affectionate response to fictional characters basically Moe just refers to any feelings you'd have towards a character you like the feelings themselves can be a wide array of things from excitement to attraction to wanting to protect and nurture a good 90 of the time it's just some variation of cute but to say Moe means Q would be vastly oversimplified as just an example foreign [Music] did watching that clip make you feel something congratulations you just felt Moe and if you felt nothing watching it uh uh you should already be able to see how this concept is related to waifu culture after all Moe explicitly refers to feelings for a fictional character it cannot apply to real people so to understand those feelings is to understand waifus but while the concept is already a bit hard to explain the history is even more convoluted in fact the complicated nature of Moe is Apparent from just the origins of the term itself because the etymology of the word is actually somewhat unknown we know how the word probably came to be but nothing concrete the most common Theory comes from psychologists tamiki Saito and Ken kiribayashi who identify it as stemming from the Japanese word moeru which means to burn as The Story Goes otaku in the late 90s were trying to use the word to describe their burning passion for a character or continually auto-corrected to another Japanese word meaning to Bud or Sprout which was also pronounced moeru thus Moe came into being as a slang term referring to both budding feelings and burning passion however regardless of the word's origin the the first uses of the word like waifu date back to early internet forums this time going all the way back to the 90s with online Message Board 2 Channel and I'm not even gonna try to find you any examples of it being used there I don't speak Japanese but in another paper written by gulbraith he describes a story about how the term came into popularity in Japan he says quote the word entered the popular lexicon with densha otoko an otaku who saves a woman from being by a drunk man on the train and with advice from his fellows on two channel successfully courts her dench's story was collaboratively created on two channel on a board for single men between March and May 2004 and became an internet book a film a Primetime TV show for a manga series and an erotic video the last episode of the drama aired in Prime Time on Fuji TV in 2005 was viewed by 25.5 percent of the national audience the protagonist's dreamy recitation of Moe became a media phenomenon encouraging emulation foreign [Music] and just like that Moe became one of the most popular slang words in all of Japan however just like waifu while the term itself has a relatively recent history the concept stems from much earlier so let's go back to 1948. the history of Moe actually begins with the manga Lost World by Osamu tezica the creator of Astro Boy in the Sci-Fi manga a scientist creates genetically engineered females out of plant matter another scientist befriends one of these plant women named ayami and the two of them are stranded in an alien world and decide to live as brother and sister as Helen McCarthy author of a number of reference books on Manga and Anime writes on her blog this is essential Moe an innocent literally budding girl a geeky young man with the heart of a hero and protective instincts to do any father proud though it is important to note that while the relationship depicted in Lost World is very nurturing and familial the female plant girl ayami was also drawn to be physically attractive because why not and later in the late 70s the manga artist hideo azima would take this a step further as I mentioned in my fan service video Shonen just means anime and manga for boys and features rougher masculine characters Shojo just means anime and manga made for girls and features smoother feminine characters what hideo azama did was combine the rounded character bodies of tezica with the expressive faces associated with Shojo manga to create his own unique style called bashojo meaning beautiful girls and these cuter characters in manga still primarily made for boys became a massive hit however bashojo also represents a much bigger shift in the culture of manga than just art style as in the 60s and 70s there was a massive change in terms of gender Dynamics and consumer practices as sociologist kimio Ito explains in the 1960s there had been huge social movements in Japan against Wars in Asia and our security treaty with America going into the 1970s there was a sense that young men had run out of steam even their manga weren't that interesting on the other hand girls culture started to expand rapidly consumer culture was on the rise and with it so-called cute culture with how Hello Kitty and fancy Goods this was also a time when Shojo manga was really maturing the early 1970s was the peak of the Shojo manga scene in Japan overshadowing anything going on in Shonen manga men were searching for Alternatives and this is one of the things they found so now in the 70s even male audiences were reading lots of Shojo with their more personal emotional stories as compared to the high octane epics of Shonen and bashojo represents a sort of response to this word focused on appealing female characters for a male audience while also maintaining that more female-oriented perspective so for the same reason that this video focuses on Moe because it could help us understand feelings for fictional characters the history is full of Shojo and bashojo because those are the genres that facilitate those feelings which is why the most common type of bashojo media is bashojo games or as you might know them dating games anyways referring to Galbraith again fans of bashojo characters were among those Manga and Anime enthusiasts first labeled otaku the columnist nakamori Akio writing in the subcultural magazine manga borico in 1983 used the word otaku to mean something like geek or loser ozima hideo is named explicitly in nakamori's articles about otaku and after azima other artists would begin adopting the bashojo style one of the most famous examples being that of hayo Miyazaki with characters like Lana from Future Boy Conan and Clarice from the castle of cagliostra however the most famous character of the bashojo boom and the one who would go on to change the medium was our good friend LOM yes urasayatura was not only the birthplace of the waifu but the anime partly responsible for popularizing bashojo as well as Moe as it was a particularly male-centric bashojo manga entirely written and created by a female artist the same one who would go on to make Rama one half and Inuyasha lum's rounded cute features and attractive appearance played into the bashojo aesthetic perfectly and her romance story with the protagonist massively popularized it within otaku culture not only that but a defining trait of lump's character is that she continually attacks sataru as a display of affection and this would become the birthplace of yet another popular anime Trope called sundaren in case you don't believe me here's the rest of koichi's quote from earlier urasai yatsura had the first Harem in the character lumchan lumchan is the source of Moe the queen she's the first Sunday character so following lum's Legacy the bashojo genre and its aesthetic would seep into the rest of the industry and this developed in two major ways in one the typical male-centric Shonen anime were beginning to add more pretty girls and romantic scenes most notably the original Mobile sugundum in 1979 featured a good number of female characters and Macross in 1982 featured the fictional singer Lin Min May whose romance with the male lead makes up a large portion of the show The Other major development was that Shoujo anime started adding elements to attract their new male viewers living up to 1992 2 when Sailor Moon would take off as a mix between the classic Shojo magical girl genre and the more action-packed Super Sentai and uh if you don't know what Super Sentai is just Power Rangers Power Rangers is literally just re-edited scenes of Super Sentai with additional shots of teenagers in high school in fact Macross is a series about transforming robots designed by Shoji kawamori and his transforming car robot toys would later get rebranded and turned into the Transformers so if you grew up at a certain time in the 90s there's a good chance a lot of your childhood media is just reappropriated Japanese stuff but unlike Transformers and Power Rangers Sailor Moon was an explicitly Japanese media property that expanded into Western audiences and though written by a woman for a female audience it does focus more in action and Shonen type story lines which made it even more popular among guys all the while explicitly calling the main character a bashojo I mean it's in the original title but Shojo senshi Sailor Moon and due to Sailor Moon being so popular I doubt anyone watching this video hasn't heard of it before it is also one of the key contributors to Moe in the mainstream with anime columnist John opeliger even crediting the Inception of the term as stemming from the name of hotaru tomoe a particularly cute character in the show that audiences often wish to protect from here the use of Moe to describe the Shojo characters grew more and more popular with entire genres of anime manga and bashojo games all until a Tipping Point in 1995. with the release of a little-known anime called Neon Genesis Evangelion [Music] [Applause] [Music] so if you've seen my previous video on anime history you'll know that gynex the studio behind Evangelion is largely responsible for the popularity of fan serps and so it should come as no surprise that they'd have a hand in the rise of waifus and Moe as well I mean their first ever animation as a studio the daikon 3 and 4 fan films both starred a distinctly bashojo character so moving forward to Evangelion it would continue to carry that style you see Ava's story focuses on the protagonist Shinji akari who is a rather Meeka and mild-mannered teenager that's been thrust into saving the world he learns he is possibly Humanity's Only Hope in a battle against Cosmic entities known as angels and Shinji must pilot a Mech robot to fight them alongside two other Pilots named Ray ayanami and Oscar langlisorio Rey has this timid and cold personality showing herself to be even more passive than Shinji at times which is hard to accomplish considering a large part of his character is just him not wanting to do anything ever but more than that throughout the series Rey is shown to have a motherly connection to him in contrast to her childlike personality which leads Shinji to continually defend and look after her meanwhile Oscar is hot-headed and determined which leads to her bullying Shinji and continually teasing him and even when Oscar later grows to respect him she remains antagonistic as a way to hide her vulnerability which just leads to Shinji in turn repressing his budding feelings for her in this way Oscar and Rey showcase a split in the personality of the waifu as personified by Lum Invader where the cute innocent side of lem's personality is taken out and put into Rey who embodies Moe a desire to protect and nurture and the Bold arrogant side is taken out and put into Oscar who embodies sundare a desire for passion and vulnerability and both of these girls were written with a more intimate perspective that allowed further explorations of these archetypes where the series goes in depth into their mental health and emotional states a large Porsche of Ava is all of these characters confronting their own trauma and learning to develop relationships with each other so it should come as no surprise that hideaki Anno the show's creator has stated that he read female written romance novels to better understand these characters and make them relatable which just cements the influence of Shojo and the female perspective on waifu culture when the creator of two of the most impactful female characters cites female works as his inspiration in fact to say evangelion's female leads had an impact on anime culture would be an understatement to this day both are consistently ranked in the top five of any popularity poll conducted on women in anime and even just discussion of which character is better has sparked massive online debate formally dubbed as the original waifu Wars which should just go to show how well-written and popular they both are as a fun aside Anna was once asked his opinion on which character he preferred more to which he responded the truth is I have no emotional attachment to Rey at all in the midst of making Ava I suddenly realized I had forgotten her very existence which seems to undermine everything I just said about how well written she is but is also hilarious so I'm Gonna Keep It In the video yet despite Otto having somehow forgot he wrote one of them both Rey and Oscar Have Been instrumental to Evangelion becoming one of the most successful media franchises ever made being worth an estimated 16 billion dollars which makes it almost solely responsible for the rebirth of the anime industry in the late 90s and the creation of the merchandise economy that Japan has now popularized just for reference the Evangelion franchise is worth more than Game of Thrones My Little Pony and Minecraft put together and all that for merchandise and pachinko machines partly featuring these two girls as just one example of merchandise that started to be sold around this time body pillows the most commonly associated waifu item became popular in the late 90s following Evangelion as Doki Makara these large Hugging Pillows had existed in Japan for quite some time just as Orthopedic pillow existed in the west so anime merchandisers got the bright idea to slap cute anime girls on the front of these pillows you were supposed to fall asleep with and it turned out to be a match made in heaven the massive Financial Revolution that Evangelion caused in Japan actually caused a major cultural shift in the perception towards Moe and waifus with Rey a anami alone being credited by many for starting what was dubbed the Moe boom in Japan whereas before they were seen as Geeks and losers in only a few short years otaku were becoming a driving force of Japanese culture and their economy which you can see exemplified in the National popularity of densha otoko however the history directly following the Moe boom needs just a bit more context as under the surface of all these popular anime and cute waifus something had been slowly shifting in the background before Evangelion with the success of Moe and bashojo in the late 70s and 80s a lot of creators and companies began to catch on to this newfound culture and this would coincide with a massive of economic boom in Japan where they would essentially be launched into leading the world economy and so something interesting happened the 1980s saw a blossoming of media and material targeting otaku and this conditioned a pattern of consumption and culture eventually the products began to be designed specifically to elicit an emotional response in the consumer I.E to include characters that would Inspire Moe manga scholar itogo argues that since the end of the 1980s characters in anime manga and video games became so appealing that fans desired them even without stories so somewhere along the way as we just discussed these characters became attractive to people and so the stories they were a part of were being enjoyed for the characters first and the story second you are no longer a fan of Lum because you like urasai yatsura you were a fan of yuris ayatsura because you liked Lum in their book otaku Japan's database animals literary critic Hiroki azima actually talks about this quite a bit they say as a result instead of narratives creating characters it has become a general strategy to create character settings first followed by works and projects including the stories given this situation the attractiveness of characters is more important than the degree of perfection of individual works and the know-how for enhancing the interactiveness through the art of the Moe element has rapidly accumulated basically it doesn't matter how good your story is all that you need to be successful is the ability to create a character that is in some way Moe but even further than that Osama points out that the characters as a whole aren't what's attractive to people it's the individual characteristics like big eyes or frilly skirts or certain personality types this is what he means by the art of the Moe element and if you can figure out how to put as many of them as possible into a character you've got a winner so what all this leads back to is well I'll let Galbraith explain azima posits that a turning point came with Neon Genesis Evangelion an immensely popular TV anime produced by Studio gainax Evangelion features a female character named ayanami Ray who became the single most popular and influential character in the history of otaku anime fans still isolate parts of this character to amplify and re-articulate in fan-produced Works to inspire Moe after the success of ayanami the focus shifted to fictional characters with Moe traits in lieu of story in Works featuring these characters the original work functions as a starting point and the extended process of producing and consuming Moe takes place among fans in online discussions and videos fan produced Comics cosplay and figures and this is very interesting because it directly explains why words like Moe and waifu All Began on online forums fans of Evangelion or other waifu media would watch the show feel Moe from someone like Rey and then continue to feel Moe as they discuss their waifu online then the discussion of their waifu became almost more important to them than the show itself they could just consume or create fan fiction and Fan Art about their waifu and get the same feeling as they did watching the show if they had even seen it to begin with because of this characters no longer needed to have backstory or well-written personalities when fans could just fill in or change that information on their own and the creators already knew to focus on adding Moe elements over good characterization so the era of Moe following Evangelion started to head in a completely new Direction [Laughter] [Applause] foreign [Music] Japan in 2003 the market for Moe related merchandise and media was 88 billion yen which was one-third of the entire otaku Market at the time so there was now more incentive than ever to make not only more Moe characters but characters that were more Moe and as we know somewhere between then in 2007 the term waifu was starting to be used showing that sort of self-awareness of Moe culture and cute girl media so while tons of shows and Studios were all cropping up during this time and plenty of them were using waifus to talk about them all would take hours so I'm just gonna focus on one one Studio that would exemplify the capitalization of Moe and change the culture forever a studio by the name of Kyoto animation Kyoto animation was founded by married couple Yoko and hideaki hata in 1985. as Yoko and other Housewives she knew began to paint additional cells for several shows on their own time which later developed into creating a studio based around support animation and some of the shows that Yoko and her Studio worked on include Astro Boy SDF Macross Akira Evangelion and you guessed it yurisai yatsura and fun fact that I forgot to mention earlier hideaki Ono also worked as an animator on yurisai yatsura while founding gynex so like everything in the anime industry it's all connected however Kyoto's reputation for amazing support work led to them later being contracted to make adaptations of visual novels like air cannon and Clan app all of which being stories that relied on cute girls with the most gigantic eyes you've ever seen being put into melodramatic situations usually meant to make you cry so naturally they were all successful and Kyoto would follow them up with even more cute shows like Lucky Star Clan Ed after Story and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya all three of these shows were massively successful in capturing this newly growing audience of Moe seeking anime fans with harohi in particular being a cultural phenomena in Japan at the time a poll in two thousand sex conducted by TV Asahi on the top anime of all time in Japan placed harohi in just fourth place only behind Evangelion and Fullmetal Alchemist because of course Fullmetal Alchemist was at the top of the list every goddamn time though Haro he actually owes a lot of its success to viral Marketing in the early 2000s as the main ending theme for the series harihari yukai became one of the first viral dances that people would film themselves performing online and so many clips of Haruhi were being posted to this new video sharing website called YouTube that the Japanese copyright administration had to step in and request they be taken down so glad that doesn't happen anymore and yet all of that massive success and cultural impact is still nothing compared to what Kyoto would release in 2009 K on is a four panel manga series that was originally serialized in ubuntu's manga Time karara magazine in 2007 and in 2009 the series would get an anime adaptation from our friends at Kyoto animation lasting 39 episodes and 2 ovas following four high school girls as they join a band club in order to prevent it from being shut down the musical Slice of Life series featured all of the Hallmarks of a typical Moe show all four of the girls are cute they do cute things they're in the genre of cute girls doing cute things and that's it just a regular show about high school girls who play musical instruments Keon went on to become the highest selling anime television series in Japanese history by Blu-ray Seoul with 500 000 copies it would come in second place for most Blu-ray sold in Japan period only behind evangelion's first rebuild movie The Show's first and second album debuted at number one in the Japanese top music charts and two singles from those albums were certified platinum by the Japanese record industry kaon would win the awards for best anime in the TV category best voice actor best anime episode best female character best original song best voice actor again and best anime of 2009. K on was so popular that in 2011 electric guitar sales in Japan reached a new all-time high just from schoolgirls going out and buying instruments to emulate the show and why was it so popular might you ask does the show have a phenomenal storyline or deep and interesting characters like Evangelion was it revolutionary to the genre like Sailor Moon or did it bring something new to the industry like yurisa yatsura nope it just has some really cute girls doing really cute things [Music] and in fact you can look no further than the chaon subreddit to see exactly why people like it because all of the posts on there are just different Gifts of cute things that happen in the anime or fan art of the characters made to be even cuter you want K on girls as OverWatch characters how about Canon girls is Michael Jackson or maybe K on girls as Attack on Titan spoilers chaon meets the NWA perhaps what about one of the girls as 19th century expressionist painting The Scream just like we discussed before now the practice of sharing these characters online and putting them into situations that make you feel Moe was more important than watching the show the show was still good I mean it won awards after all but the plot or greater meaning was obviously put aside to focus on maximizing the cuteness of the girls which is exactly what azima was talking about shows that are built on characters first and characters that are built on being as cute as possible so it should come as no surprise that exactly two things happened following the success of chaon one a billion other shows jumped in line to copy the cute formula and try to recapture the magic and two these shows began to Garner criticism for their over-reliance on Moet as John opeliger puts it these characters no longer evoked Moe feelings they were literally Moe characters characters that were the physical manifestations of the defining characteristics of the Moe movement they demanded notice and adoration from viewers rather than passively earning adoration and protective feelings in other words these shows knew their appeal was cuteness they knew that Moe was the whole selling point and that fans just wanted more of it to share online and the criticism was that they shoved in as much as possible until it became overwhelming if you weren't into it now some people may argue this criticism is a bit harsh but just as an example here's a clip [Music] the episode that clip is from also features both a beach scene and a hot spring scene I know the show is good again it's won awards but you can clearly see what they're doing here so characters like the one apologer lovingly described as physical manifestations of Moe would then go on to be dubbed Moe blobs as a sort of passive aggressive term referring to the fact that a lot of these characters don't have strong features outside of being an amorphous blob of cuteness and chaon would be one of the biggest shows to have its characters deemed Moe blobs for obvious reasons and this represents the sort of final split in the waifu archetype that I mentioned now instead of sundare and Moe characters like Rey and Oscar in one show you'd have an entire show built around a sundare or Moe character or an entire cast of girls that were all different flavors of Moe it became increasingly common to take a single personality trait and stretch out an entire anime around it though while tons of shows would come out since K on none would quite recapture the magic like the original including love live which is just chaon but now the high school goals are idols and they have to compete in a pop star competition I have not seen love live I know it's massive in Japan I mean it was ranked the top selling media franchise for the entire country in 2016 but I just don't care that much and that general feeling of not caring seems to be a prevalent theme coming toward the end of the 2010s not just among video essayists who've spent three weeks researching cute anime girl shows for a silly video but for the anime watching audience as a whole because one thing I found very consistent while looking online is that while Moe was absolutely massive with the successive chaon it seems people don't talk about it nearly as much anymore the discussion of the topic seems to have died down quite a bit in recent years and I think the reason for this is almost entirely due to how prevalent Moe is in the anime Community now it's just ingrained in the medium itself that there are cute girls who are gonna do cute things sometimes we as an audience have become desensitized to it it's now as much a part of anime as Shonen protagonists yelling whenever they power up it might be in every show but there's not much to talk about This falls right in line with the massive rise of the ironic usage of waifu most people that use the word which is very popular don't use it sincerely it's just become a part of anime discussion hot girl equals waifu even if you have zero actual feelings for them which just leads actual waifu culture to sort of simmer in the background without anyone noticing or discussing it however there is still discourse being had over genuine feelings for characters more than ever in fact it's just completely shifted outside of anime and manga on July 13 2011 a YouTuber by the name of Amy Yamato would upload a video titled first Vlog trying this out in it she would try out a popular Trend at the time vlogging where she would sit down in front of a camera and talk to it about her day the main topic of the almost two minute video was all about her moving back to London from Tokyo and how a lot had changed since she first left and all of this would be fairly standard Vlog content at the time except for one thing Amy Yamato was not a real person she was actually a computer-generated character being portrayed by a real person who would play the character of Amy and Amy would continue to upload regular Vlogs and assorted videos to YouTube without ever acknowledging that she was an animated Avatar much later in 2016 a channel by the name of kazuna AI would debut as another fully animated Avatar though this time run by an entire production company named activate and professionally voice acted by nozomi kasuga and she would be dubbed a virtual YouTuber or vtuber for short kazuna AI would adopt a more classic anime aesthetic than Amy and would upload daily content for several years though it would only take 10 months for her to reach 2 million subscribers and by mid-2018 with the release of Technology like live 2D that made avatars available to the public there would be over 4 000 YouTubers uploading on YouTube with a collective subscriber count of 12.7 million from 2018 to today and especially during the covet pandemic YouTubers would Skyrocket in popularity full vtuber agencies like nijisanji and Hollow live would open creating and debuting dozens of now gigantic Channels with millions of daily viewers and in 2020 YouTubers accounted for 38 of YouTube's top 300 most profitable Channels with a total revenue of 26 million dollars now I won't linger too long on the history of YouTubers or how they relate to waifus because honestly it's a whole different Beast that could be its own video also they're real people so it's a bit harder to talk about them like they don't actually exist but suffice to say they are essentially the final evolution of what azima and Galbraith were talking about you now have no story or fiction related to these characters at all because they're just real people putting on shows as these personas and because they're fully interactive the continued enjoyment of their character can happen in real time you don't have to watch their television show or read their manga you can watch them play Minecraft for eight hours a day on YouTube you don't have to look for fan works to continue feeling Moe from them you can directly interact with them through stream chats and comment sections and communicate with all of the other fans of the character in those same places the characters are still anime girls with cute designs and high-pitched voices in fact a lot of them even crank up the Q factor to a degree that most anime don't dare to but the interactions with them are interactions with real people which leads to a much stronger ability for the audience to Garner feelings for them because it's essentially merged waifu culture with the already existing relationship Dynamic of content creators all in all vtubers are the newest continuation of this history we've been discussing which I find interesting they are very different in how people engage with them and feel for them and some might even argue it's impossible to feel mowey at all because they aren't entirely fictional but it is that Evolution that fascinates me and is why I bring them up however that's where I'll end the discussion of waifu History because that's about where it ends we've now reached the current year YouTubers are a currently existing phenomena and Moe and waifus are still going strong the history is still being made and I am very interested to see where it goes so all we can do to continue this video is talk about why all of it was important [Music] now I would like to preface the rest of this video by saying that from here on out we start getting into opinion and speculation while the history of waifus is documented the psychology and cultural influence really isn't or at least not as much as it should be so I've taken it upon myself to fill in the gaps with my own ideas but I am not a psychologist I am not a sociologist I am not any sort of professional that would have a credible opinion on the relationships between people and fictional characters what I am is a 23 year old College Dropout talking to a camera while sitting in my living room so keep that in mind with everything I have to say however I don't think it takes someone with a PhD to explain or at least talk about why someone develops feelings for a fictional character in fact if you've grown up in the age that I have being surrounded by media and characters since birth then it should be quite self-evident humans are empathetic creatures the sole reason for our survival as a species is because we're able to relate to and communicate with others and so going into the Modern Age we started to communicate more abstractly we learned that we could empathize with media like television and movies we could relate to the characters and their struggles and we could feel real emotions for fiction I mean I know I cried at the beginning of up but not only are we able to feel emotions from media we're able to cry or laugh or feel catharsis from fictional stories as a way to vent those emotions and deal with the real world better you know if you've ever gone through a rough breakup you know it can help to watch a movie that makes you cry if you're feeling depressed watching something that can make you laugh is extremely helpful and love affection and intimacy aren't desires that are any different from a desire to laugh or cry there's still emotions that people need to express and will vent through media if they're unable to feel it in their everyday life because anime gives you every opportunity to feel those things it is characters you're going to be very attached to you see their emotional states and their day-to-day lives you watch them develop and learn every everything about who they are as a person and they're often people you want to like so it should come as no surprise that someone can fall in love with an anime character or take waifuism seriously it's already normal to grow attached to characters and shows and movies loving them or feeling affection towards them is just another step forward if someone wants to feel intimacy and Anime provides that then feeling intimate towards a fictional character is a logical conclusion and it's one that's often a response to the growing turmoil of real life unsurprisingly if you look back at the history of waifu culture I just covered all the developments fall in line with a real need to vent emotion the original otaku of the 60s and 70s were all part of the student movements of Japan massive protests and the political left that shook the entire country and after the exhaustion of these protests students would go on to find solace in light-hearted Shojo manga and bashojo going into the 90s Japan had then faced the collapse of their economic bubble the whole era is referred to as the Lost decade because the economy crawled to a standstill so with a newly popular show like Evangelion people could find escapism that promoted a positive message about connecting with others even going into 2011 shortly after the release of chaon Japan was hit with Fukushima the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl that was caused by an even more devastating tsunami there was now more need than ever for positive media that you could consume to avoid the tension of real life who cared if the story was deeper complex you just needed it to be fun and throughout all of this the entire world has become more isolated than ever the number of people in their 20s and 30s that have never developed real relationships keeps growing and the feeling of collective loneliness has gotten exponentially worse in recent years especially in Japan where the birthright has fallen so much that the population actually peaked in 2009 so with all that loneliness comes a desire from people to project unreciplicated feelings into something familiar which can come in the form of a waifu though as it is a common misconception I do not think that waifuism and Moe culture means someone is unable to tell the difference between real and Fantastical or that they treat them the same but rather just the same way that you can cry at a movie while understanding the character you saw die was fake waifus are sought after specifically because they too aren't real as Galbraith States Moe is a desire for the Fantastical not the physical an attraction to the fantasy form does not necessarily reflect a desire for the physical one one can have a younger sibling without feeling Moe because that person is real and is not performing the character called little sister or simply because she is not a two-dimensional fantasy these young characters are not part of the real world and do not demand their Partners be socially mature and responsible adults with Moe characters men can experience love outside the confines of manhood and women love outside the confines of Womanhood in other words expressing emotion through fiction is one of the only ways that some types of emotion can even be expressed especially in the earlier ages of anime a which were tied to more conservative social climates you surely couldn't express any desire for non-traditional fantasies without being ostracized so you had to funnel that into Moe characters and fiction and with the Advent of otaku culture and later the internet age people were able to express these non-traditional desires to others without criticism or consequence and it's because of all this that I don't see an inherent problem with waifus I don't see a major issue with the process of enjoying fictional characters as long as people are responsible adults they should be able to freely express love towards anything they want to after all why should it matter so much if someone is in love with a character and wants to share that love with others such actions aren't harming anyone and in fact might be both helping the individual and invigorating the Manga and Anime Industries and faint communities love is never an easy thing to understand and it can be embarrassing to watch the silly things that people do when they are in love but I for one think we should embrace love rather than condemn it so uh you might be wondering why there's still so much time left in the video as we discussed the history of waifus you might have noticed that there is quite a lot of focus on the profitability and consumption of these characters in fact several quotes I read even alluded to this idea of profiting off of the emotions of consumers but now is where I'd like to fully talk about the issue I mean just think of the ways that people display their love of a fictional character they buy merchandise of that character if you really love this anime girl the only way to show that you love her is to buy a 250 body pillow of her or a collection of overpriced figures or a Blu-ray box set of the show she's from the only way you interact with this character is through spending more money on her when you think of someone with a waifu you inherently think of someone with anime merchandise and that is all entirely on purpose I showed this graph in a previous video to discuss how much the anime industry makes but if you look closely the biggest slice of this pie is merchandise that's how most of these franchises make their money back they either make a profit on Blu-rays or they sell a ton of merch so they have a financial incentive to create stories that have merchandising potential and one of the best ways to do that is through waifus now we already talked about how these characters were made more cute with less focus on story but thinking about it in terms of profit makes it clear that it's an issue when you know that a waifu with tons of appeal will net you more sales it becomes hard not to just sell out to that crowd why make any character that isn't a cute girl you can sell figurines of who cares about story or message or themes when you can just make a cast of Moe blobs who sell like hot cakes because on the flip side if you don't make any profit you probably won't stay in the industry very long as a Creator then the problem snowballs because this genuine need to make a profit can very easily slip into exploitation one of the most predatory extremes of this and one I've talked about before being gotcha games gotcha games are built on waifu culture they will have dozens of cute characters in the roster that appeal to every Niche they can think of but give them all backstories and quirky personalities and sometimes even romance options then they put up the most egregious monetization strategy to unlock them where you need to gamble on their virtual slot machine to even see the character you like they turn genuine feelings of affection people have into a gambling addiction some people who take waifus this seriously spend massive amounts of money on them and some of them might be spending money they can't actually afford to lose because their emotions for these characters are genuine and the industry is conditioning them into tying their self-worth to these material possessions waifu culture is telling them to put their emotional well-being into question if they don't spend enough on their favorite character after all how can you love your waifu if you don't own all their stuff now throughout this video you should have gotten an idea of just how important the female perspective is to waifu and Anime culture as a whole after all this all started from Shojo manga female creators like rumiko Takahashi or naoko takayuchi then pioneered the bashojo space and even when it got continued by male creators like hideakiano the female influence was apparent however there are still massive amounts of very male-centric anime your typical Shonen in insanin which sort of developed alongside all of this Moe and bashojo taking a lot of elements and using them in stories that were strictly written by and for men now the history itself isn't that important to the development of waifus which is why I didn't cover it Shonen wasn't ever really a leader in the history so much as it caught up to the rest of the community and absorbed certain aspects of it but the reason I'm talking about it now is because a lot of anime in that space in particular comes with a much stronger appeal to male fantasy which when combined with our problem of exploitation and unhealthy Behavior can lead to a bad place anyone who has seen enough anime has seen at least some female characters that perpetuate an incredibly warped perception of women they might be incredibly submissive and meek seemingly to the point that they wouldn't be able to function without the help of a male counterpart they might get put into a sort of housewife or maid role sometimes literally and they might be a strong Warrior that kills a thousand men in the battlefield wearing nothing but a metal bikini but they've never kissed a boy before and turned into a puddle of mush when the Dork of a protagonist talks to them now these are exaggerations but real characters in line with each of those tropes do exist and they definitely paint a pretty awful standard for women yet they come from waifu culture and that strong focus on male fantasy in order to be profitable some female characters in these shows will just be made to fit certain tropes just the same way that some of them are designed to be physically attractive and often even when a character breaks the mold they're still confined to Fantasy archetypes if they're not submissive they're a sundaray if they're not typically feminine they're a tomboy if they're a strong person personality it's because they grew up around 15 brothers and the author wrote them as a male character in a female's body the tropes dominate the conception of a lot of characters even those that are otherwise pretty well written and that conception shines a lot of light in the situation when you consider the people behind it the creator of Naruto Masashi Kishimoto has self-admitted to being bad at writing women in the girls in Naruto are constantly ridiculed for having a lack of agency and having too much Focus put on their crushes on the male leads Sakura is useless is literally one of the biggest memes in the anime Community the director of persona and Catherine katsura hashino once said in an interview I've never successfully forged a true friendship with a girl in real life which is just insane the Persona series is about forging friendships with other characters Catherine is about the protagonist's relationship with women and the director just has no personal experience even chainsaw man which has some of my favorite women in anime has them written to be the author's type makama is a commanding character explicitly because tatsuki Fujimoto had his bike stolen in college by a girl and thought it was hot that's not a joke that's her real story his female characters are so strong because he has a thing for dominant women so you have characters written for male fantasy because of the industry's hyper fixation with waifus and then you have these characters being written by people who self-admit to being bad with women now I'll give chainsaw man and Persona a pass because I genuinely like them but at its worst this can all end up mixing together into the worst cocktail of harmful stereotypes and offensive writing you know I love Demon Slayer it's the biggest anime in the world right now it's massively popular and appeals to a wide array of people yet the main female lead is literally a pet to the protagonist that's kind of weird I mean you can replace nezuko with a pit bull and it wouldn't change anything about the show other than the fact that zenitsu would now be constantly harassing a dog alright well what about one of my other favorite shows Death Note it's a fantastic drama with some of the coolest and smartest characters in fiction probably one of the easiest recommendations to someone new to anime and yet every female in it is written like the Creator hates them they are all either desperately in love with light to the point that they can't form a thought that isn't about him or they get taken advantage of because light is smarter and cooler than them which is really kinda awful when you think about it now Demon Slayer is amazing the first 25 episodes of Death Note are fantastic and I'd very much like for more people to watch and enjoy these shows but the writing of female characters can actively hurt that even if you don't care about the depiction of women these characters are just not as strong and interesting as they could be and that comes from this focus on male fantasy over everything else which leads to the most common counter argument you'll hear these shows are made for a Target demographic and if you don't like them they're not made for you but oftentimes the only thing keeping people outside that demographic from enjoying the show is the focus on the demographic like if Death Note wasn't so obviously a power fantasy for edgy 15 year olds it would be enjoyable to more people now you could say that better written female characters might hurt the enjoyment of the show for those edgy 15 year olds but I would argue that if you can't appeal to male fantasy without being straight up sexist then you shouldn't even try and in general I think anyone should be able to enjoy a show with an appealing waifu character or male fantasy element without the fantasy appealing to them and not have the show then be ruined by it because there are tons of people out there watching anime who don't care for a lot of these waifu archetypes or aren't attracted to anime girls at all and these shows are just a worse experience for them when they don't have to be I get that there's Target audiences but you can write waifus that are also good representations for women it's not mutually exclusive do you know how hot the cast of Jiu Jitsu Kaizen is yet most writers just don't care enough to try because they can be successful without having to or their Kishimoto and probably shouldn't be writing women at all if they admit they're so bad at it now the assumed problem lots of people have with these harmful depictions is that they cause misogyny I mean the whole of anime gets accused of this by a lot of people and when you see some something like death note you can't help but see their points but I don't necessarily agree I myself grew up in a time where video games were being accused of causing violence and that argument while similarly sensical was proven objectively false with no correlation being found between the two and violent video games still being made so I think the anime and misogyny argument is much the same however in the most extreme cases what these fantasies do is act like a safe haven for those who already have pretty poor views in real life anime might not cause these harmful thoughts but you'll often see that people with already unsaved reviews love certain kinds of anime whether it's Reddit threads or YouTube comments or video essays on feminism bad I'm sure plenty of you have seen the arguments from some of these people that go along the lines of real women need to act more like anime girls or Western women need to act more like Japanese women which is the same argument because their entire view of Japan is from anime and these people are the problem not the media they consume but it's important to note that the waifu fantasy does appeal to them which is still not good it's hard to consider yourself a fan of a medium that appeals to harmful people now this last problem as you might suspect is pretty serious it's dealing with possibly the worst issue in the anime Community one so bad that I'm not sure YouTube even lets me say the word or at least not as much as I'm about to say it so just to be safe I will be coming up with an alternative this segment of the video is about lemonade you know the genre of anime starring lemons if you don't know what I'm talking about that's probably for the best now I will try to be sensitive of this issue and I don't get too deep into it or talk about anything that bad but if hearing about it still upsets you feel free to skip to the time code on screen and the discussion of lemonade is a very complicated one it becomes especially complicated when you learn I've been lying to you about the history of waifus up until now you see Lemonade as we in the west know it came from Vladimir nabokov's lemonida a book about an adult man and a 12 year old girl this then spawned the term lemony to complex to describe people like that adult man and lemonade became a shortening of that with obviously there very negative connotations however I think it's important to note right off the bat that while it does still get into questionable content the word as it was adopted by Japan is completely different from how we understand it and has a rather positive connotation referring to cuteness and innocence for example lemonyta fashion in Japan just refers to people dressing up in frilly dresses and gothic clothing and has so little to do with nabokov's book that many lemonita Idols were disgusted and defended to learn what it was about though the loose beginnings of the culture in anime actually began with Shojo manga where cute and innocent girls were already being depicted in softer Artistic Styles and as we know in the 60s and 70s more people especially men began reading Shoujo so with them came more adult depictions of these youthful and cute characters which slowly reached a turning point in popularity and the person who heralded this turning point was none other than hideo azama the person who started the bashojo boom I didn't mention it before but his official title is the father of lemonade and his most notable work was an adult parody of Little Red Riding Hood in a comic called sibel where he took the rounded bodies of Osama tezica and put them into adult situations meaning before the bashojo boom ever started what he actually brought into pop culture was the lemonade boom lemonade manga like a lot of anime started with fan works or dojinshi and it actually played a massive role in attracting male fans to comicat the Japanese dojinchi Market comicat's first run in 1975 had an attendance rate of 90 percent women but by 1981 the number of male and female participants were equal lemonade created by and four men at these markets served as a response to the female dominated yaoi and one of the First characters to grow popular in fan works shared in these markets was Clarice from Hayao miyazaki's castle of cagliostro who was so popular that early lemon dojinshi were originally called Clarisse magazines the genre then grew in popularity until several official lemonade magazines started to be produced including lemon people which uh actually refers to lemons like it actually uses the word lemon I didn't change that and mango burrito the magazine responsible for coining the term otaku in 1983 used it to refer to fans of bashojo and hideo asama's lemon manga one of the most recognized artists of this new era was Aki uchiyama known as the king of lemonade as he produced 160 pages of manga a month for these magazines uchiyama was actually so prolific that his work was published alongside mainstream Series in the magazine Shonen Champion which you might recognize as the magazine that debuted Baki the grappler cutie honey and B Stars however the most notable work of uchiyama was actually the world's first born anime called lemonida anime in 1984. and the world's first lemonade video game named lemonita syndrome was produced by none other than Enix in 1983 and if that name sounds familiar it's because in 2003 Enix merged with another company called Square to form Square Enix the now famous creators of Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts though after 1984 and all the way up until 1989 lemonade saw a slow descent in popularity the focus was never put directly on the attraction to these characters or rather the style they represented and so in order to expand this style Moe and bashojo adopted a lot of the traits and Aesthetics of lemonade and continued to push the culture of cute except now to a much broader appeal this then resulted in the actual bashojo boom which would later carry on with Sailor Moon and Evangelion and you already know the rest from all this I hope that I don't understate just how important lemonade was to the development of bashojo Moe and the entirety of anime culture because without it everything from gynex to Studio Ghibli would not exist as they do gynex's first work with daikon 3 start a lemon character Hayao miyazaki's entire style was taken from the same Shojo that inspired hideo azima and his early success was partly due to the fans of lemonade though he's been on the record multiple times to State just how much he hates them but suffice to say the history of anime would be completely different without lemonade I mean even Square Enix has it firmly planted in their catalog though the downfall of the term and the rise of its negative connotation in Japan came in 1989 when a man by the name of stoma Miyazaki kidnapped and did things I don't feel comfortable talking about to four girls under the age of seven Miyazaki was actually referred to as the otaku because widespread photos of his room were circulated which found them to be full of VHS tapes and tons of manga including lemonade and Shojo magazines and when faced with sentencing he played Insanity with his defense at the time saying he had been unable to distinguish between fiction and reality now going into the 80s and even since then Japan has had a very low crime rate so something as awful as what Miyazaki did hit National headlines and caused a massive moral Panic especially around manga and lemonade however after the Panic of stomo Miyazaki died down Moe found itself in the mainstream and with it carrying over the defining aspects of lemonade you can bet that the culture has had a Resurgence anime today has tons of lemon characters whether it's 9 000 year old dragons or just adult characters drawn to be two feet tall the influence of the lemonade boom is still felt today and there are many fans of the genre still around lemonade has just ingrained itself in anime culture right alongside Moe and waifus in fact the word waifu itself even has roots in lemonade this character is named Mr Kimura and he is described by Wikipedia as a creepy and a febophiliac classical Japanese teacher who openly admits he became a teacher to be closer to high school girls so when the girls find a photo of a beautiful woman who he calls they can't believe this creep would be married to someone like that yes the term waifu was popularized by a pervert character who likes lemons isn't that interesting though before we continue I should clarify that there is a big difference to me between anime with young characters anime with lemon characters and the problem I have with lemonade because for the most part anime characters are made to be young to appeal to a teenage audience that's pretty much it the audience is 17 so the characters have to be 17 which is why almost every anime has the whole cast in high school even though they might be a superhero or gang member or internationally hunted serial kill numerical age is an anime just mean nothing because even if the creators write and draw someone as an adult they have to be made a teenager to be published in a Shonen manga so my rule of thumb has always been that if the show treats the characters like adults they are just adults to me and can be put into adult situations even if the numerical age would suggest otherwise this might be a controversial opinion to have and I understand if you don't agree but it's the way I think about things and it makes enjoying anime much easier for example in my fan service video I talked about Tamaki and how much fan service she has and someone left a comment talking about how creepy they thought the show was because Tamaki he was 17. my genuine reaction to that information was to look up her age because I thought she was like 20. Tamaki in the anime has already graduated school she is a full-time firefighter alongside adult co-workers and the show doesn't bring up her age at all by all means she is written and treated like a 20 year old character and so when she's put into loot situations I have no problem with that then looking at lemon characters and a lot of regular anime they're almost always an overlap with Moe culture I mean moan bashojo basically assimilated all the aspects of lemonade in the late 80s so attention is drawn to how young these lemon characters are usually just from their childlike designs but explicitly for the purpose of making them cute and that's it you know look at any of the Kyoto animation shows I mentioned almost all of them are focused on young schoolgirls almost all of them have lemon characters and yet all of them are just cute girls doing cute things I have no issue with the use of lemons in this way and a lot of anime includes lemon characters like this even azaman which has a pervert teacher character is a comedy anime Mr Kimura is a joke his entire character exists to be made fun of including the scene where the girls laugh at the idea of him having a wife so even though the show acknowledges lemonade culture with a character like him it's making fun of him and not endorsing his point of view so the vast majority of anime though there are lemon characters and tons of teenagers uses them in ways like I just described which I don't find to be bad at all it's only really the most extreme subculture of lemonade and the audience of that that most people have a problem with that problem obviously being where a character looks like a child acts like a child and is by all means supposed to be a child nine years old or nine thousand it doesn't matter and they're put into lewd or otherwise adult situations how this affects regular anime to me is a continuation of the last problem lemonade like this is basically unrealistic depictions of women taken to the extreme so all my points there apply here or two if you're not into the fantasy which a good amount of people aren't lemon characters used in this way are distracting at best and downright hard to watch at worst it makes things uncomfortable is very offensive and harmful to a lot of people and doesn't have any purpose in making the show better now obviously the larger issue of lemonade people have tends to spread out into the legality or morality of the subject but starts to get extremely complicated extremely fast so I'll let people smarter than me touch on that because I don't really want to go anywhere near it so that's about all I have to say in the subject I mostly just wanted to include the history of lemonade because it is very closely related to the history of waifus and to not address the issues with it would be a disservice again most of lemonade culture is completely fine with me except for the very worst parts of it which give all of anime a bad name however with that being said I'd still like nothing more than to wrap up this segment and never speak of it again so let's do that [Music] foreign [Music] s are an incredibly fascinating and somewhat misunderstood topic they are intertwined with the very history of anime and they are ingrained into every facet of the medium the culture surrounding them has massively influenced Japanese society which has in turn affected media around the world which is even more surprising considering how few people know the full story so hopefully after watching this far into the video you understand what a waifu is I mean I'd have hoped you'd have learned that by now otherwise I am terrible at my job hopefully you also understand the history of waifus and the most critical points in their development and hopefully you can understand the psychology of waifus why someone would have one and the possible problems that can come with if anything I want to clarify that having feelings for a fictional character isn't a bad thing it can be very healthy for people and in the anime Community it has been going on since before it even expanded to the West with little issue and now that culture has seeped into the very way we consume media in the Modern Age everything from K-pop stands to celebrity culture to online content creators can be seen through the lens of waifuism developing feelings for those we don't directly interact with but at the same time understanding this culture and its effects are important to discussing its problems whether it's the way that creators can exploit Their audience or the way that the audience can end up falling into unhealthy patterns of consumption or just the way that a lot of anime and manga can end up with a less than Stellar writing and characters due to the massive fixation on fantasy all of these issues don't Define waifuism but they are certainly a part of it and while I make no claims to solve any of them I did want to at least address them educate people on them and hopefully start a discussion about them because most people are aware of these problems through the stigma surrounding waifus a lot of people have unwarranted negative feelings towards the entire culture which I don't think are helpful and the discussion of the topic can Trend very one-sided so hopefully having a deeper understanding of all this can actually lead to people talking about these issues and trying to solve them rather than just lumping together all of waifu culture as an inherently bad thing after all who doesn't like anime girls [Music] so first I'd like to give a big thank you to everyone who watched this far into the video this project took me way too long to make and came with more technical issues than I can count I've had to re-record this video twice now but I finally gotten it out there and shared a topic that I've been thinking about for a long time so hopefully you enjoyed it that being said big shout out to Patrick W Galbraith and Hiroki azima whose books on the subject I've been quoting this entire time I've linked everything of theirs I found in the description as well as a bunch of other stuff I read it is all fascinating and finally thank you to the people who have supported my channel whose names you can see scrolling up the side of the screen if you'd like to join them or if you want to watch uncensored and extended editions of my videos you can do that on my patreon it is pay whatever you want so you can get every benefit for just a dollar or you can go above and beyond and support me with as much as you think my content is worth go check that out at patreon.com likestorius Link in the description while the credits roll here I just want to reiterate that my history of waifu culture is nowhere near complete after all the history of waifus is the history of anime itself so naturally I didn't talk about a ton of characters and shows because I wanted to get across the most important points so to make up for my lack of thoroughness I'm just going to be listing every wife who I found while writing this that I didn't actually get to talk about that way if someone leaves a comment saying you didn't talk about Lucy from Fairy Tale we can all make fun of them for not watching this part of the video in fact if anyone leaves a comment about something I missed at all feel free to make fun of them anyway alright here's the waifus I missed zero two Aqua Megaman Amelia Ram saber Ryder Bulma la Latina baldandi tatsumaki akame Chile mine minori Mikasa Sasha Historia Peak Levi Violet evergarden Carissa moccasay mayarashina rinto Saka artoria Pendragon my sakurajima yukaroyukanoshita Mikoto masaka Mako mankenshoko malti s merrimark Momo Yao yorazu megametarakoro your forger kagya karoka Kalin chica chizuru CC hasca guts Griffith Ichigo Ino Aegis raftalia Albedo EZ death Nami Maki estalfo Nico Robin Robert EO Speedwagon Hollow from Spice and Wolf Torah from Dragon mate to me from near automata A2 from nir automata 9s from nir automata Asana from Sao rias grammarie Faye Valentine Tifa Lockhart yuno gasai komishuoko ryoko matoy Satsuki kiruin urza Scarlet chinoba oshina Android 18 winry Rockville Yoko littner Juvia loxer Yu takayama Rio Futaba Aero chitanda Mash kirilite Alice nakiri Balsa yansa zhanda Arc now timori suyo asui Kana kamui shinobo kocho kyokojiro and takamaki rizai kujikawa Tei Takami Chi sadanaka Futaba Sakura Kasumi yoshizawa sareo kawakami matsura Kirito Makoto nijima Nao to shiragani teletha Tessa Testarossa oh that's all of them

Channel: Lextorias

Views: 469,206

Keywords: lextorias, a deep dive into anime waifus, waifu, moe, moe anime, waifu anime, waifus in anime, waifus deep dive, waifu deep dive, moe deep dive, the moe boom, the bishojo boom, a deep dive into anime moe, a deep dive into moe anime, a deep dive into bishojo, bishojo, bishojo anime, lum invader, urusei yatsura, the first waifu, evangelion, the complete history of the anime waifu, the history of the waifu, the complex history behind anime waifus

Id: rRBupcAy8ds

Length: 73min 39sec (4419 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 31 2022