Trying to nail psychology in a non-abstract way usually won’t yield much…

Even for games like D.C., I personally found the ero distracting and, in many cases, jarring from an otherwise believable story. There are some games I think do ero well (Happiness), but not Key titles.

I only played FSN, the wasn’t much eroge as the story was more than enough for the readers/gamers to enjoy.

Most of the time when you talk about visual novel, first think that comes into their mind is those dating sim games, and the goal is to see how much girls you can be with at once.

Some eroge/hentai is ok but building a whole game on that, no thank you. If I wanted pron, I could find it much faster lol. Story matters for me :D

and I was just kidding about school days :P

As for the “wisdom teeth” analogy, it’s applicable to the industry as a whole, but I don’t think it applies to moe. Games like F/SN and, from what I heard, Seiken no Inganock, don’t need ero scenes to get by, and it’s awkward when the writers force them into the story. However, the H-scenes are still a cathartic moment in most normal galge, usually concluding the conflicts and consummating the budding relationship. It’s pleasing from an emotional perspective and a sexual perspective, even if it’s technically porn.

You could say that good examples of moe are usually found in stories in which both the sexual and emotional desires are fulfilled (i.e. most good eroge). Key games are also an example of this, and although I haven’t played Clannad, I don’t think ero scenes would have hurt it. However, I don’t think the two forms of attraction are intrinsically connected. They usually go hand-in-hand, but one doesn’t require the other.

I mean, I pretty much fell for Mai Asagiri’s character design at first sight, but I can’t say much about her as a character because she hardly did anything in the Yoakena anime; likewise, I have never felt the need to search for Shiori doujins, although I certainly won’t skip her H-scene in the game.

Anyway, I think mt-i said it correctly: the relationship between moe and sex is complex. Considering how often the two need to be combined to create an experience without any “gaps”, so to speak, it’s possible to go a lot further with the topic. But I still think that one can exist without the other – not for the sake of protecting the purity of moe, but simply because waifu status is rarely about character design, and because English speakers read untranslated ero doujins for a reason.

I think this probably comes down to the fact that, in the average male brain, physical/sexual attraction isn’t necessarily easily-separated from emotional commitment/involvement. So the more emotionally invested someone is in a character, the more they might find themselves drawn to erotic content of that character as well. That is very much the theory at work in the average “story-driven” ero-game. The reader has spent most of the narrative building up an emotional attachment to the character, and arriving at the point where the emotional buildup is consummated physically in the story can be, as you put it, rather liberating. The dichotomy often seen in terms of the tone of the writing and so forth reflects the dichotomy of these two shouldn’t-necessarily-be-connected-but-are aspects of the average male brain. It’s a sort of physical counterbalance to the emotional investment that can be, in a strange sort of way, fulfilling. But it’s not as if the erotic content on its own is necessarily “gratifying” enough to be the main feature — it only works in the context of the “relationship” the reader has forged with the heroine. And this is why you also have works that are “ero-centric” and focus less on the “emotional” content; in those cases, you’re appealing to an entirely different set of “desires”.

So, back to the original point, you can probably expect to see (and in fact we have seen) lots of ero-doujinshi for a franchise like Love Plus that demands a lot of emotional engagement/commitment on the part of the audience without that counterbalanced physical gratification. While “moe~ attraction” needn’t necessarily be sexual in nature, I think it would be rather difficult for the average male to completely separate out their emotions from their physical/”carnal” side. At the same time, I suspect that could be a point that brings guilt/shame to some who may want to believe that idealized “love” needn’t have a sexual component.

So basically, I think I am agreeing with you, just using a lot more words to do so. ^^;

also,
>the goal of moe is to provide emotional therapy to the viewer, not physical therapy.

you just said a mouthful there.

I think there is a sexual component to moe, and that recognizing that sexual component (as PC bishoujo games usually do, even though it sometimes comes off as trite) is rather liberating. Purity is certainly an important part of the moe ethos, but that purity isn’t an ideal of asexual asceticism.

Which is not to say that unfettered promiscuity is a particularly moe quality either, of course.

If you’re wondering why I wrote all of this when it seems like common sense, it’s because I’m not sure if it is common sense. I also wanted to put it down on paper to make sure it was logical. This is one of those concepts that I thought of without reading anything on the matter, and theories like that always feel flimsy unless I write something on them.