About

Awoo~ is a catchphrase and nickname associated with the character Momiji Inubashiri from the Touhou Project video game series. Unlike many other Touhou Project memes, it is widely regarded as a form of shitposting on communities outside of Japan, most notably on 4chan's [s4s] board.

Origin

Momiji Inubashiri first appeared as a midboss character in the tenth main series Touhou game, Mountain of Faith. ^[1] She is a white wolf tengu, a kind of Japanese mystic apparition analogous to the Western idea of goblins. Despite its limited appearances in the official Touhou media, Momiji proved to be a very popular character with the fanbase, ranking at #21 most favorite Touhou Project character out of 159 in a 2014 popularity contest.^[2]

Precursor: WAN

Likewise to "Awoo~", "WAN" was a catchphrase similarly associated with Momiji Inubashiri. The first known use of associating Momiji with "WAN" comes from a 2010 Flash animation with various canine-based Touhou characters singing "Someone Else", the opening theme to the anime Working!!. The joke comes from "one" being a homophone for "wan", the Japanese onomatopoeia for a dog barking. This onomatopoeia can also be found back in a Youtube video uploaded in March 2014 featuring cut-out images of Momiji from a Touhou doujin saying "wan" and the song "Wop" by American rapper J. Dash (shown below, left). The background music of this video was used a month later in another Flash created by a currently unknown animator,^[6] featuring a Gyate Gyate version of Momiji (shown below, right), which later became a form of shitposting sometime in the same year, although not to the extent that awoo~ did.

Spread

The earliest instance combining Momoji with "awoo" dates back to a Touhou thread posted on 4chan's [s4s] (Shit 4chan Says) board on February 9th, 2014.^[3] Two months later, on April 8th of that year, Momiji was first called "the awoo one" in a Momiji thread posted in the /s4s/ board, followed by an image reply of Momiji howling (shown below, left), eventually leading to Momiji being nicknamed "Awoo~" and turning into a form of shitposting.

Since then, Awoo~ threads became a common occurance on [s4s] and remained so for years, often featuring large amounts of Momiji fanart. In time, "Awoo" also became the common name to refer to Momiji, with her actual name receiving almost no usage anymore. In July of 2014, a subreddit devoted to images of Momiji, /r/awoo, was created; "Awoo~" and its accompanying image are featured prominently in the design of the subreddit.^[4] As of February 2015, the sub-Reddit has more than 380 subscribers.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

References