The current isekai wave can be explained by the fact that most young men in 2025 are depressed incels seeking escapism through power fantasies.
But why did the moe wave happen in the 2000s? What were the social, cultural, and economic contexts of that time that fostered the emergence and popularity of this genre?

>>280757386 (OP)
It was literally the ascension of tranny/LGBT ideology. It started in the 2000s.

>>280757537
This. It never went away.

>>280757386 (OP)
The moe wave happened in the late '70s mainly due to Hayao Miyazaki, Hideo Azuma and Katsuhiro Ōtomo influencing the otaku culture
I don't know why you place it almost 25 years after its historical presence

>>280757386 (OP)
>current isekai wave
the isekai wave started before you even knew what anime is

>>280757386 (OP)
Drop of testosterone levels, that's it.

>>280757643

There is no Isekai wave

>>280757839
>AI
thanks for you concession, nigger

>>280757839
Moe and ecchi was already popular in 1990s and then 2000s was the final part for that before easy money grub light novel adaptations. Prior that you had only had a FEW light novel to anime adaptations and their materials were well thought out and not mass-produced trash. Slayers light novels, Monogatari and Melancholy. That's the trio that started the cash grab trend.
> These things adapted from light novels were great!
> We can make more money from it!
> We don't care about quality, let's pump all shit out we can from light novels because that's the trend instead of quality Manga sources.
Holy shit did anime shit the bucket fast after that.

>>280757386 (OP)
>But why did the moe wave happen in the 2000s?
9/11 happened. People wanted something fun, cute, disposable to make them forget about how shitty things were getting.

>>280757386 (OP)
Japan's economy hadn't recovered from the crash and was showing no signs of doing so. The ability to make a profit making high quality animation was gone. Expectations of changing future was replaced by an expectation of stagnation. Going on adventures was replaced by fondly remembering the last time a Japanese person had friends and free time. The group of kids that grew up in these times now have the same sort of nostalgia for video games, not even having social life in childhood.

Japanese people are wierd.

And they deserve to die. Because they are japanese.

>>280758967
>t. grandson of a Nanjing comfort woman

>>280757386 (OP)
Toheart, very simple
More it's anime being successful

>>280757386 (OP)
The audience for this genre is salarymen. Moe SoL anime provide relaxing comfort at the end of a long, shitty workday.

>>280759300
You mean your grandma?

>>280759515
>no u
Great reply

>>280759515
She was fun. The dog stuff was a lil wierd tho

>>280757386 (OP)
Terror attacks and natural disasters in the late 90s left the country traumatized which created the demand for healing anime

>>280759515
Also the butt stuff

Ignoring me is what the dog did

>>280759515
It disappointed me as much as your grandma did

>>280759515
I could love you the way she never did

>>280758128
That event did not matter to anyone outside the U.S., it only brought laughter and “they deserve it” in Japan.
It only brought trauma and repression in the US, and death in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the rest of the world people were already experiencing worse tragedies than a single fallen twin building.
Americans magnify the importance of their towers in the lives of people in the rest of the world.

The moe wave was born as a response to the unfulfilled hopes of Japan, which believed that the economic growth of the 80s was going to last forever and that they were going to be the first world power as some people expected. To realize that in the 90s they did not grow as expected, they only maintained their high standard of living but they call it the lost decade because they did not grow more although they lived very well at that time. And in the 2000s there is like an acceptance of reality and to enjoy the simple things in life as in the CGDCT.

>>280757537
I don't think western culture wars had any influence on nipland until after 2015
>>280759431
Maybe this is it?
Moe was escapism for salarymen
Isekai is escapism for teenagers
The age where your dreams are crushed by the world just keeps going down

>>280757386 (OP)
Despair after over a decade of economic stagnation

>>280757386 (OP)
What I love about moe is not just the fact that the girls are super cute, making moe so fluffy and healing, but also the fact that the genre embraces and celebrate femininity while in the West, writing feminine female characters gets you called a "misogynist," a "sexist," a "pick me," and a "conformist." Having an entire genre of fiction dedicated to starring women, and embracing and celebrating their femininity as something beautiful and even cool, instead of it looked down upon as being "emotional" and "weak," is unironically the most feminist thing ever, yet that's "right-wing" apparently.

I'm not even virtue signaling either. Naoko Yamada literally said that she directed K-ON to be a celebration of femininity (besides the main theme being the fleetingness of youth, of course), which by extension makes everything moe after K-ON a celebration of women and femininity since it was K-ON that pioneered the modern moe formula.

This is one of the things I love the most about anime in general. Not just moe. Japan doesn't write boys with tits and call it "empowerment." They actually write girls and celebrate them as girls for who they are. But this is mind-breaking to the modern Western psyche sadly.

>>280757386 (OP)
>>280757537
Moe killed anime forever. Now anime is just the playground fantasy of a mentally diseased tranny. Nothing but fetish shows about idealized visions of femininity made by sick men for sick men.

>>280763928
>Moe killed anime forever
Anime died in the '70s?

>>280763928
this dudes BEGGING for more dick in his anime and still wants us to believe he isn't a raging faggot lmao

>>280757386 (OP)
Someone post the Nihei moe commentary

I wish I could meet a girl like Yui. I think she would make a great girlfriend.

>>280763928
Sounds like your vision for the ideal female lead is MCU Captain Marvel. Cringe.

>>280764770
As an autist, she is my spirit animal. She is also a great senpai. She may be a silly daydreamer who's a bit airheaded, but she's very sweet and thoughtful.

>>280757386 (OP)
The explosion of moe anime in the 2000s was an extension of the popularity of moege (gal games, visual novels, dating sims, etc) in the late 90s and 2000s. For a while, until around the mid-2000s, 90% of "moe anime" were straight-up adaptions of visual novels until the trends started shifting to CGDCT in the late 2000s.

The origins of the word moe itself is really hard to pin down but it started showing up on online messageboards in the mid-90s in Japan.
I'm pretty sure that To Heart's anime adaption in 1999 is the first proper "moe anime". There's moe characters before To Heart but To Heart was the first TV anime of it's kind that was simply about hanging out with cute girls doing without any strong comedy, plot or drama moving things forward.

>>280766864
cute girls doing mundane, SoL things*

>>280766864
To Heart has a standard romcom plot and the second season is pretty high concept. Anime where the primary appeal to a male audience is cute girls hanging out doing cute things is older than To Heart too; you can go all the way back to the Pierrot magical girl anime of the 80s and see that. The most notable thing about To Heart is that it isn't also for little girls

>>280766961
> Heart has a standard romcom plot
Kind of? But not really. To Heart differs from previous TV anime romcoms because it was a visual novel adaption; The FIRST TV anime visual novel adaption, at that, and had the unique position of trying to adapt a visual novel, which has multiple different routes at once. While the MC gets with his childhood friend in the end, each episode of To Heart focuses on the MC hanging out with different girls while the romance between the MC and Akari is saved for the end. It's simply hanging out with different girls and showcasing their personalities in regular, mundane settings. It's not really a "romcom" either since it's not a comedy anime. It's a slice of life anime.

>and the second season is pretty high concept
Nobody talks about the "second season", which wasn't a second season.
It's a shitty anime-original sequel, not an adaption of a prior visual novel, and it's rightfully shat on. It's a completely different shift in genres and tone.

>Anime where the primary appeal to a male audience is cute girls hanging out doing cute things is older than To Heart too; you can go all the way back to the Pierrot magical girl anime of the 80s and see that
The difference is that "moe" is specifically aimed at older males, not young children. Feelings of moe in children's mahou shoujo anime are incidental. A "moe anime" is specifically an anime that intentionally is made with evoking feelings of moe from its audience.
To Heart's 1999 adaption was the first anime of its kind in that regard. It's not a comedy, it's not a drama, it's not plot driven. It's a SoL where the focus is hanging out with various popular VN archetypes in a mundane school setting.

Studio Pierrot magical girl anime are not "moe anime" for the same reason Anne and Heidi aren't moe anime. You can feel moe for said anime but otaku are not the target audience.

Moe anime is specifically something that grew out adaptions of moege.

>>280767173
grew out of* adaptions of moege

>>280757537
Moe anime is more dangerous than 2 nukes

>>280763685
Unfortunately if not for feminism and its societal pressures, employers would struggle to find college educated workers for their middle management jobs. In order to keep up our current standard of living, EVERYONE needs to be in the workforce, the men, the women and even the children. The days of the 1950s are far behind us and never coming back. Now we're dealing with nanotechnology and realizing how complex the infrastructure behind it is, and how much we relied on China and immigration to keep everything afloat.

>>280766961
>>280767173
And moe anime evolved in the mid-late 2000s as CGDCT manga adaptions essentially removed the standard male VN protagonist from the picture to focus solely on the girls.

>>280766864
>>280767173
Pia Carrot's 1997 OVA adaption could also be considered a contender for the first moe anime, being an adaption of a VN and all, but I find it too focused on comedy and slapstick humor to be a proper moe anime.

Interestingly, Pia Carrot popularized maid cafes, and maids in general in Japanese culture.

And we're talking about firsts in moe, Kokoro Library (2001) is undeniably the first CGDCT anime.

Moe/CGDCT is the anime equivalent to western animated sitcoms.
Obviously there's the main difference being the focus on 'cuteness' instead of '(grotesque) humour', but they are functionally quite similar. They're episodic and character focused, with very simple narratives and no depth; they serve as something to put on the TV that doesn't require much attention, while you're just relaxing or doing something else. Like with any genre, there are some that go beyond this and become memorable classics, but those are exceptions

I don't know if the wave OP is talking about even existed, and if it did, all the explanations in this thread are overthinking. Moe anime got big and has enduring popularity because it is a simple, replicable formula for banal entertainment that gets a guaranteed audience and makes easy money. That's the main reason above all else

>>280764264

Essentially if you want a further explanation of how "moe" as a concept came to exist, a proto-moe culture already existed in the 1980s with the bishoujo and lolicon communities, which were primarily manga and anime based and regulations were far less strict in the 1980s. A combination of the economic bubble collapsing and Japanese conservatives regulating shit around 1990 in response to two high-profile cases of otaku raping and murdering children, caused a dramatic shift in anime for a years where it doubled down on focusing mainly on appealing to children rather than young adults, and bishoujo/loli manga was harder to come by in the mainstream, along with the perfect storm of PC games becoming popular, drove a lot of otaku to PC games. VNs, dating sims and gal games became the new frontier akin to the boom in ecchi OVAs in the 80s and it was in this VN/dating sim/gal game scene where moe became more defined and refined as a concept over and over again.

A combination of Evangelion causing TV stations to back down on over-regulation, and the popularity of moege saw an explosion of "moe" influencing mainstream anime and manga in the mid-late 90s and even moe-focused anime being made in the late 90s and throughout the 2000s.

The early-mid 90s was sort of a "lost decade" in otaku culture and the moe that popped up in the late 90s onwards was kind of an explosion of an underground subculture and idea that grew on early messageboards and video games/visual novels.

>>280768181

>>280768203

>>280757386 (OP)
the moe wave cannot be explained

>>280757386 (OP)
Prove there was a moe wave with data. I dare you.
I feel the opposite, the 2000s had more shows with more manly protagonists, more focus on action and same sex friendship, less LGBT garbage overall.
Shows like K-on stood out more back then but were a rarity.

>>280768222

>>280769829

You didn't actually watch anime in the 2000s did you? Anime in the 2000s was full of gay characters.

Ffs even darker than black had that lesbian in s2 and there are dozens of other examples I can name.

>>280766864
The vibe of dating sim harems and CGDCT is very different. In the harems, the girls are more separated trophies and revolve around the male mc more, even if there was also slice of life content. Also, it's always the male going in and solving the girls' problems. The newer CGDCT genre is non-romance, it's about friendship and daily life. And no, yuri doesn't count unless it's a dedicated yuri anime, girls' bonds being deeper is normal.

Yuri baiting and friendship anime being exclusively about girls is an optimization to make it more appealing, male friendship in anime has died, it's harder to do anyway, besides men are innately more emotionally distant so it's just not as interesting. Male-oriented shows can be better for something with plot and problem-solving, but I guess slice of life and friendship themes are dominating in this lonely state of world. I wonder why we don't have so many shows with multiple male and female characters (not just mc+goofy sidekick) like Nagi no Asukara, I guess they are just hard to write, and due to collapse of socialization, real life references are disappearing.

Also, the collapse of men's testosterone levels makes them less interested in themes of proaction and achievement, and more interested in empathizing and understanding characters in a comfortable lull and safe atmosphere, which is basically the new CGDCT.

>>280764264
>>280768181
>>280768203
>>280768222
>>280770041
TLDR?

>>280767255
That's only because everyone keeps sending trillions to Israel.

Note to self: Your body's capacity for pain is immense. You have forgotten the pain, kill yourself before it comes back.

>>280770719
People have lost the ability to imagine the future and understand the present, so they have lost the drive to create stories and the result is media that is entirely character-based.

Blame Academy is a little piece of comedy gold that's what.

>>280770041
>boom and bust cycles tend to last ten years perhaps when the dystopian mourning story comes back into
Welcome to iisekai.

>>280757537

Trannies like 1990s anime. Literal niggers such as yourself like 2000s anime.

>>280757386 (OP)
>The current isekai wave can be explained by the fact that most young men in 2025 are depressed incels seeking escapism through power fantasies.
No, it's not. The "escapism" was and still is all the modern day school setting stuff that's always been around, because salarymen didn't want to think about what post-school life is like. There are very few college/university settings because it's preparation for the salaryman/black-company life and salaryman/black-company settings were likewise almost non-existent except for ones that show people that are at minimum middle-management.
Why is that? Because high-school was the last part of life where nips felt like they were actually alive. It was a callback to the time where things were still great and only the past can be a solace, not the futre.

Isekai is different because isekai at least acknowledges the hardship of adulthood and the isekai is mostly a metaphor for either a career change to a workplace in more rural areas (most isekai), or for retirement (specifically slow life) but in general it depicts the actual physical escape from the dystopian work culture and not the escapist (escape from reality to the past) that the modern day school settings have always been.

>>280767173
>>280766864
good posts

>>280768191
very good post, too. well put, lots of information that is new to me.

>>280757386 (OP)
>What explains the moe wave of the 2000s
Massive influx of normalfags into the medium so animation studios took advantage and began catering to them

>>280757537
YWNBAW

moe is just a Japanese subculture movement that the west misunderstood.
First of all it didn't even start in the 00's that's just when the term got mainstream, the roots of moe go back into the 70's at the earliest.

>>280757386 (OP)
Moe was always there, nips were just polishing it over the years

>>280757778
In that case, I hope testosterone levels drop even more, so we will get more cute anime girls than ever before.

lol this thread really shows how narcissistic westoids are, always making things about themselves even though it literally doesn't.

>>280757386 (OP)
Because anime industry was in juvenile state before like mid 1990s. There could be seasons with zero new series. It lacked it terms of genre diversity as well - there were mostly kid shows (like fairy tales adaptations, not Pokemon), formulaic mechas and short OVAs. Plus it lagged several years behind the manga industry. Something like Death Note was unthinkable in the last century. So it just took some time for the Japanese to realize that harem doesn't actually need the male protagonist.
>>280759338
>>280766864
Is that right? So is the person in suit in the picture just another girl doing cute things?
>>280767541
why do anidb tags tell me that it's just iyashikei then?

>>280763685
You're such a fucking faggot holy shit, and a stupid one on top of it.

>>280777020
>brazilian ape unironically writing about the 14 words
The Internet would be a better place if those cables could transport kicks to the face.

>>280757386 (OP)
Japanese people always loved moe.
It just took until the 2000s for the anime, manga and video game mediums to mature and for creators to figure out how to produce distilled moe.

>>280757386 (OP)
The Moe Boom of the late 2000s happened for two reasons:

1. The indudtry was desperately trying to get rid of trends and tropes that plagued anime in the 1990s
2. It's cheaper to produce

You must be a zoomer, because you don't remember how much shitanime was being pumped out for the first half of the 2000s. The tentacle fetish and ryona scenes were fatiguing.
There was initial blowback against moe like Ichigo Mashimaro and Lucky Star, but everyone here eventually warmed up to it because the alternatives were generic shounenshit or fujoshit.

>>280780936
My Mauritanian falseflag senses are tingling.

>>280757386 (OP)
Depressed incels seeking escapism through cute girls doing cute things, not having to think about the shitty world around them

>>280784342
>There was initial blowback against moe like Ichigo Mashimaro and Lucky Star, but everyone here
>here
Incredible revisionism.
Early 2000s/mid-2000s /a/ consisted of people who were mainly into moe anime and couldn't really go anywhere else since mainstream forums were dominated by shonentards and toonami normalfags.
There was never any pushback against Ichigo Marshmallow and Lucky Star on /a/, you're thinking of /b/tards who were already being replaced by Gaiatards and entry-level fags from other websites like newgrounds and shit.

>>280784342
>>280784650
No but really, why the fuck would a website that formed out of an Azumanga Daioh-themed IRC be against moe anime?

I wonder what happened in the 1990s that may have been an influence on young people growing up at the time, which in turn made them seek deepening levels of escapism.

>>280760835
>but in the rest of the world people were already experiencing worse tragedies than a single fallen twin building
That attack killed more than 2900 people, so no. If Osama had been black instead of Arab, killing as many children as he did in a white majority country, all of 4chan would want his dick cut off.

>>280785414
echo chamber and narcissistic behaviour. this retard really thinks 9/11 influenced the anime industry in any way. and by the way, outside of the usa people didn't really care about that shit and was even laughed at.

>>280786503
Retarded sociopath. I didn't say anything about it influencing moe but saying the rest of the world was experiencing worse tragedies is moronic.

>>280785414
Millions died in the Second World War in Europe. In Russia millions died, in the Balkan war that was yesterday thousands died in horrible ways. In Africa people are still dying in horrible ways by warlords and in the cobalt and diamond mines. In Latin America thousands die every day from organized crime and drug trafficking. Not counting dictatorships that tortured and murdered people for decades and subversive groups. And in Asia there have been worse genocides such as Nanking, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki in which 160,000 and 80,000 people died in an instant respectively. Or the current civil war in Myanmar. Let alone Gaza and the Middle East where thousands die every week. And you think that two stupid towers is the worst tragedy that happened in the history of mankind.
You are a narcissist, sociopath and moron who ignores what has happened and continues to happen in the rest of the world.

>>280788795
>Millions died in the Second World War in Europe
You're a joke. And an edgy retard who thinks the death of 3000 is funny.

>>280757386 (OP)
Calling K-On 2000s is like calling DBZ '80s or One Piece '90s.

>>280786640
>you're a sociopath if you don't care about muh fee fees
narcissistic as always