I like Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai!. For a show that I thought would promise nothing but primitive wish fulfillment, creepy sister complexes were notably absent.  Actually, can I say this?  Kirino and Kyousuke’s sibling bonding over her secret stash of eroge was pretty heartwarming!  And there’s a lot to think about here, once you start digging a bit.

So let’s do that.  But first, some basics: A glottal stop is a type of consonant sound, and a very important one for the flavor of spoken languages.  Cockney English has a lot of them, for example (pronouncing little “li-uhl,” among other things), and languages like Tagalog and Arabic wouldn’t sound the way they do without glottal stops in nearly every word.

In Japanese, glottal stops are especially interesting, because they possess emphatic power. For example, if you say “shikkari,” what you mean is “properly,” pretty much.  But if, on the other hand, you say it more like “shi—KKari,” with a strong glottal stop in the middle, the meaning intensifies to something like “really really properly.”  All it takes is a little pause between syllables.

Now let’s take this example:

Su...

... GOKU kawaii, etc etc.

Truly, the glottal stop of the gods.

But what does it mean?  Well, for one thing, it gives us a good gauge of her passion.  She loves this stuff in a way her poor, super-square brother struggles to comprehend.  Otaku and feelings of moe are tightly linked, and Kirino definitely feels a strong moe for little sister characters.  Her emotional moment near the end of the episode (which I have sampled in the first image) reads like a soliloquy of the otaku mind.

“I’m compelled; even if I wanted to stop, I couldn’t.”  You could see this coming out of the mouth of Ogiue Chika, or, for that matter, Madarame Harunobu.  It’s a neat cross-cultural moment between Akihabara and Ikebukuro, the territories of male otaku and the burgeoning fujoshi class.  Their common thread is love—and a kind of constant helplessness.

On the other hand, this glottal stop thing, it’s a moe trait.  It’s totally a moe trait.  I mean, she did it twice.  She even does it again when she says, “Younger sisters really have to have black hair and twintails!” (Yappa imouto ga kurokami ni twintails ja nai to DDAme to omou no!)  Well, I find Kirino pretty lovable, so I guess it worked.