Emoting Mokou — Chibi Mokou holding emoticon cards with text 'You can't win me!' overlaid on a background of hundreds of emote variants.

Emoting Mokou

2015reaction imageclassic

Published October 8, 2026

Emoting Mokou is a sprawling series of fan art images of the Touhou Project character Fujiwara no Mokou, created by Chinese artist 上官绯樱 (also known as MiLk or @jokanhiyou) starting in 2015. The pictures pair simple cartoon expressions with bilingual Chinese and English captions, and the saddest and goofiest entries became long-running anime reaction images across 4chan, Reddit and Twitter.

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Overview

Each Emoting Mokou drawing follows a tight formula: a chibi-leaning sketch of Fujiwara no Mokou, usually solo but sometimes with other Touhou cast members, doing one small action like crying, pouting, hugging a pillow or grinning. The art is captioned in Chinese and then translated into blunt, grammatically loose English like "I want baobao" or "My sadness is very big"1. That bilingual mismatch is most of the humor, and it is why individual panels work so well as standalone reaction images.

The set is huge. By October 2017, 上官绯樱 said on Twitter that she had drawn over 300 of these Mokou pictures since starting the series8. Rutterkin's December 2016 Imgur dump collected nearly two hundred of them in one album6, and new entries kept appearing on her Pixiv, Weibo and Twitter accounts. Western fans tend to call the artist by her Twitter handle @jokanhiyou or her nickname MiLk, and the images themselves are often filed on 4chan and Reddit simply as "Mokou reactions."

Origin & Background

Platform
Pixiv (origin) / 4chan and Reddit (viral spread)
Creator
上官绯樱
Date
2015

The series began on April 29, 2015, when 上官绯樱 posted a Pixiv illustration of Mokou clutching a pillow with the Chinese caption translated as "I want baobao"1. From there she kept uploading more pictures in the same template to her Pixiv account, as well as mirroring the work to Weibo and Twitter under the handle @jokanhiyou5.

The artist is Chinese and sometimes goes by the name MiLk in English-speaking fandom spaces. The character she keeps drawing, Fujiwara no Mokou, is a side character from ZUN's long-running Touhou Project doujin games, which gave the pictures a built-in niche audience of Touhou fans primed to share them.

How It Spread

The jump from Pixiv to the English-speaking internet happened on 4chan. On April 22, 2016, a /jp/ thread posted the now-iconic image of Mokou crying with the caption "My sadness is very big," alongside several other panels from the set2. Four days later, on April 26, 2016, the "Comical" smiling Mokou appeared on /int/, pushing the images outside the Touhou-only board3.

Reddit picked them up next. Redditor Punchingblagh cross-posted the crying Mokou to r/anime_irl on May 25, 2016, where it pulled close to 1,900 upvotes4. In December 2016, rutterkin dumped a nearly 200-image Imgur album of Mokou panels on r/Animemes, which hit roughly 2,700 Imgur views over the following year6. The format's biggest single hit came on April 11, 2017, when CHArt4 posted a "You have been visited" edit of Mokou as a Milagro money cat to r/Animemes, racking up over 25,000 upvotes7.

The series picked up unwanted drama in January 2020. 上官绯樱 drew Mokou in a crusader outfit shouting "Deus Vult," then deleted the post on January 22, 2020, apologizing on Twitter and saying she had thought the line came from a video game9. The removal split fans: @snugunim's "Do not apologize to people who are perpetually offended at nothing" reply pulled over 1,900 likes, and the fight was later written up by Redditor KanchiHanuhara on r/HobbyDrama10. On January 24, 2020, 上官绯樱 posted a follow-up asking people to "stop fighting now and be wholesome again," which drew more than 3,000 likes in six hours11.

Timeline

2015-04-29

上官绯樱 uploads the first Mokou picture, "I want baobao," to Pixiv[1].

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