>>2265687>>2265714Moe is an extremely hard term to categorize and there's tons of misconceptions about what moe is and what moe isn't. People make the misconception that moe exclusively refers to cute things, female characters, or even genres like slice of life or high school anime, but the truth is moe has nothing to do with either of that. A high school setting starring cute girls doing mundane things can be moe, but the same premise can also not be moe.
Moe as a premise has been around since the early 80s, but the term itself only got coined in the late 90s when Japs on on 2ch were arguing over who was the best Sailor Moon girl, which evolved into month long arguments into people arguing over what makes an anime girl in general ideal or good. Moe itself is not a character archetype, an artstyle, or a genre, but it's the feeling of attraction, admiration, or fascination from the viewer towards a fictional character.
Because this concept is so vague, you could make a case that you can feel moe for literally any anime character.
A "moe character" specifically is a character intentionally written with traits, tropes or archetypes meant to invoke these feelings from the general mainstream otaku audience. This is why cute girls get associated with moe most of the time, because the mainstream otaku audience feels attracted, admiration, or fascination with cute girls.
The term moe got really muddied up in the West in the mid-late 00s when cute girl anime started to become much more mainstream among Western anime fans. Western fans of oldern shonen stuff and old Sci-fis like Dragon Ball and Gundam didn't like these cute anime taking over the industry, saw the term moe thrown around and labelled anything remotely cute as moe.
