The internet is one of the most powerful technologies the world has ever known, but why that power so often results in dehumanizing and hurting people is not as mysterious as we sometimes assume. It is the direct result of the choices people with control over internet platforms make.

“I don’t know if I believe in the true self, to be honest,” he admits. “I think who you are is not something that is dictated by an unchanging static character core. I think who you are is what you fill yourself with. In that sense, I don’t think it’s a destination to get to. This is something that will always be changing, and it’s something that I’ll be exploring until I’m not here anymore.”

Initially, fans would use expressions such as moe moe or moeru moeru to express their affection for characters. There, they used the verb 燃える, meaning to burn or to get fired up, which can refer to love or sexual desire. However, computers would often automatically convert the kana characters not into the “fired up” verb, but instead in 萌える, pronounced the same way, but which means to bud or to sprout. With time, the original kanji was lost since the early 1970’s, otaku culture has largely revolved around one thing: the bishoujo character. In its first incarnations, it was the result of the lolicon aesthetic, that had emerged from shoujo manga. But its shoujo roots quickly disappeared, and this enabled lolicon to expand and become ubiquitous in anime and manga, to the point that even when it faced a crisis in the early 90’s, bishoujo characters would keep thriving not just in anime and manga, but in new mediums such as video games and light novels. This mutation didn’t just mean a widening of the scope of otaku activities: it profoundly changed them and their underlying logic, as the emergence of the concept of moe illustrates. Strong affection for fictional characters had always existed, but moe gave them a name and a consistency that they didn’t have before.

Which brings me to a note about trigger warnings. I have seen more and more people demanding that each and every work have an exhaustive list of trigger warnings. But how can you account for everything? Sure, putting a warning about sexual content or violence should be a thing, but isn’t that already normalized? Don’t we have an MPAA system, ESRB ratings, doesthedogdie, parental advisory labels, and so on? I feel like a lot of things that people demand already exist, and many of those things are notoriously harsh towards minority groups, so maybe we shouldn’t try to push for more of that?