That sounds oddly like tsundere.

All in all, it should be in line with *your* vision, because you know what you want best. The first stop to good art is the artisan being pleased with what he sees.

I’ve always been of the opinion that moe is a personal thing, that just happens to match the tastes of other people on a broader level.

I.E. I love meganekko. I have my own reasons for loving them. I know there are tons of other meganekko fans out there, who love them for their own reasons, which often don’t match mine.

This is what makes moe, in my opinion, hard to lock down as a set of genres; each person experiences it differently enough to make it difficult to make a 100% blanket statement about any them.

I like Demo-tan. Her hair’s short for my tastes, and she lacks megane (>.>), but she’s very cute and spunky, which I think reflects this site very well. ^_^

Her blonde hair and blue eyes don’t catch the feeling of ancient Greece either, instead they give her sort of angelic presence which is ruined by her overconfident attidute. Mayby it’s just me but overconfident angel just doesn’t sound right to me. So if she didn’t have such an attidute and she had wings or a halo, she’d look much more like angel than moe anthropomorphism for democracy.

However I think that Demo-tan can be seen as a moe. Confident, arrogant and tomboyish characters can be considered moe characters by some. There is no absolute definition of moe, just a big bunch of moe characteristics. Though Demo-tan doesn’t feature any typical moe characteristics and is quite far from stereotype moe characters, she can be considered moe by some people. For example I like girls with short hair but since I don’t really like overconfident and pushy girls, I don’t really know what to think about Demo-tan.

I think the idea of the character looking past the viewer rather than at the viewer is an intriguing one, and I think that’s the point at which you should start. Confidence is not automatically unmoetic, nor are angry eyes, snaggleteeth, ears, or pointed fingers.

Have Demo-tan looking not at the viewer, but at the prospective feature of spreading moetic democracy to the world, give her big dreams that she wants to fulfill, and I think there you will find moe.

I wasn’t really trying to make a comment on the image’s moeness, but on what makes it stand out as being, if you’ll forgive the terms, wapanese or weeaboo.

As for the lack of moe qualities, the pose does need to be less… – confident isn’t the right word – less confrontational? More general happiness, genkiness, if you will. Less “attitude” circa mid-90s platform game mascots. The shinyness of her skin is something you see more often in porn images or bath scenes than basic portraits.

Comment >>1 mentioned that she doesn’t have an overarching universe to draw in the viewer. I think it’s not necessary to have that, an image of a cute character can and should be able to stand on its own, creating that moe feeling regardless of whether any backstory has been written about it. Many well-known and loved mascot characters started as little more than one-note ideas. Windows ME, a buggy OS turns into a clumsy maid. The Fastech 360 bullet train turns into a catgirl because of its cat ear shaped air brakes. The Nijiura maids, born out of cheap puns. http://shii.org/maids/

My point wasn’t that the viewer should become part of the narrative, but that he(or perhaps the creator?) should not intrude on the narrative.

In my opinion, she needs more shading, less teeth, thinner drawn lines, smaller or no ears showing, and as anonymous stated, the pose needs to be less confident. Also the eyes need to be done differently.

As of now she reminds me of Kagali from Gundam Seed.

I don’t disagree with you; Demo-tan as currently rendered falls short in some of the clinically aesthetic “moe specs” that both you and Anonymous identify. However, were it the case that one could merely follow a list of technical guidelines to produce moe characters I think we’d see a lot more of them from Western artists.

On the other hand, a lot of the characters currently gracing moe-themed Japanese magazines are very much from a cookie-cutter, color-by-number mold. If I were to hazard a guess I’d say Clockwork Machina was trying to deliberately escape that mold and create something original and fresh, but by doing so strayed from the path of mainstream moe.

Regardless of whether moe lies only in the lines on the page or in some element of the artist’s intent, I believe the final product does follow the rule Anonymous hints at – the moe character doesn’t look at you, she looks at a fictional abstraction of you that is consonant with her narrative. And for whatever reason (probably because I asked them to), Clockwork’s current rendition doesn’t do that. Not that I think it necessarily has to to be an effective mascot, mind you.

That being said, I’d like to point out that this is one of the few non-Japanese works that registers on the “fetish” scale (if you will) at all. I mean, bravo. SRRSLY.