Happy Faces, Grassy Feet by Jordan Ayres

Emoticon started to be used to portray gesticulations too. These characters became known as “kirbys,” a nod to Nintendo’s blobby, pink, and oh-so-squish-able mascot. Actually, the ‘three slashes’ made its way back into anime (artists often draw lines on the face of their subjects to show shyness)! Who would have ever thought that something as simple as little kawaii text faces would have so much cultural impact?Īs differenct ASCII characters were created and symbols from other languages were discovered, we began seeing people use things like braces and carets >o^^)> started to spread across IMs and microsites (like MySpace). Similar to the butt cheek-shaped snot you often see in anime, using /// gave a feeling of blushing.

Dashes were used to show contempt (-_-) or sleepiness. Later, when people actually wanted to get across a dead guy, they’d use “X”s, like this face: X_X.Īfter some time, netizens got more creative with their kaomoji.

The use of asterisks as eyes was something that you’d really only see in Japan, and was different from the western internet standards at the time (the :-) face). Because characters and computer memory were limited, you’d often only see stuff like (*_*) and other dead-looking faces. Originally, kaomoji weren’t really meant to be cute. These special emoticons are creative faces made from text and symbols taken from multiple languages. Around this time, the first “kaomoji” were created by people in Japan who wanted to express themselves in a more visual way. In roughly 1986, the internet started to spread to Japan.

Happy Faces, Grassy Feet by Jordan Ayres