"The anime body is not simply an ideal body. It is a reduced body. An abridged, simplified body, ideal for reproduction in the painstaking process of serial animation. The anime waifu is a depiction of an idealized woman filtered by the limitations of commercial expression. It seems perplexing, then, that a ready-made human body, which the animated waifu is made to portray, would be itself reduced to approximate the depiction. The system of signs that comprises the whole of the waifu trope has detached itself from the signified in the form of the ideal human woman, progressing from an unrealistic expectation to an expectation of total unreality, a focused and intent lust for a floating signifier. The anime woman-in-itself."