So that happened.

New Elfquest chapters will be going up on BoingBoing now. Two things about which I feel troubled and ambivalent have come together as one.

Kimi no Kakera, volumes 1-4

I cannot rule out the possibility that Kimi no Kakera is a deadpan satire of all the most revolting elements of the moe aesthetic. It's not impossible; there do, after all, exist shounen magazines which appear to exist at least in part as some sort of practical joke. All the available evidence, however, suggests that this manga simply a collection of all the most revolting elements of the moe aesthetic. It's by Takahashi Shin, creator of Saikano, who is evidently even madder than that might suggest.

Every single panel.

It shares with the unpleasant Letter Bee both its MacGuffin - a missing sun - and its pornographic fascination with the suffering of wide-eyed, androgynous children. The protagonist is Icoro, a princess who, for reasons not entirely clear, is forced to do menial jobs to support her little brother while being heaped with verbal abuse. She is also constantly starving and cold, never gets a full night's sleep, has no friends, and was born incapable of smiling or laughing. When these various indignities build up too heavily upon her, as they do every two or three pages, Icoro cries massive, bulging, physically-improbable eyefulls of tears, so that it sometimes resembles a face less than a molten Venusian landscape. It's usually snowing, though.

If you worry that watching a Princess cry in the snow might get a little tedious, fear not, for sometimes she also wets herself. Also, there are other children to be tormented. These include her little brother, who is blind, sickly, and probably doomed; two emotionally stunted child soldiers; and an amnesiac boy whom she names Shiro, because he can't remember his name. Shiro, like Icoro, is missing certain emotional responses - he's incapable of crying or expressing grief, even when seriously injured, or explaining to Icoro that she is the first friend he's ever had.

Unfortunately, Shiro loses his memory again every time he's forced to fight to rescue her from something, meaning that he is constantly forgetting about her. Given that, with the exception of her doomed brother, he is literally the only character who doesn't abuse her (even her cute animal sidekick hates her), this sets off even more weeping on her part.

At one point, at the climax of a particularly intense cycle of abuse-and-weeping directed at Icoro, two sets of her tormenters - the child soldiers and some evil adults - are fighting over which gets to kidnap her. She bursts into tears so effectively that everyone has to stop to look at her. She's a virtuoso. She says, "I feel sorry for you all!" and launches into a tearful speech about how pathetic all of their lives are.

One of the child soldiers, later, spends a good deal of time thinking reluctantly about this. He begins to admire Icoro for this; her pity of them, in fact, strikes him as the highest emotion to which one could aspire. He sees something deeply profound in it.

I've been formulating a theory about moe.

( Cut for length. )