Awoo~

About

Awoo~ is a phrase associated with the character Momiji Inubashiri from the Touhou Project series of video games, who has also been given the nickname “Awoo~” as a result of this. Unlike many other Touhou Project memes, it is most popular in Western circles as a form of shitposting, most notably on 4chan’s /s4s/ (Shit 4chan Says) board.

Origin

Momiji Inubashiri first appeared as a midboss 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 appearing in few other official Touhou media, Momiji proved to be a very popular character with the fanbase, ranking #21 most favorite Touhou Project character out of 159 in a 2014 popularity contest.^[2]

Precursor: WAN

Likewise to “Awoo~”, WAN was a phrase 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. Several years later in 2014, another Flash was created by a currently unknown animator, featuring a Gyate Gyate version of Momiji and the song “Wop” by American rapper J. Dash. The image of Momiji used in the second Flash 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 in /s4s/ (Shit 4chan Says) thread 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.

In July of 2014, a subreddit devoted to images of Momiji, /r/awoo, was created. “Awoo~” and its accompanying image feature prominently in the design of the subreddit.^[4] As of February 2015, the sub-Reddit has more than 380 subscribers.