A Guide to Anime Emoticons And why they're getting popular By Sohan D'souza At the dawn of the internet era, BBS-users discovered that the lack of face-to-face communication resulted in conflict when, for example, parodies or humorous comments were taken seriously. Even telephone users could use voice tone to indicate anger, sarcasm or humor. As such, they needed to find a way to express the tone of the messages they were posting. No need to go into how exactly it happened, but the first emoticons were a godsend, and prevented many an awkward, confusing or flammable situation. Over the years, with the evolution of the BBS into the Internet, and then the explosion of online websites, forums and chat interfaces, the proto-emoticon regularly evolved into a myriad sets, mostly unique to their hosts, and even developed into codes that were translated by the communication engine into images and sometimes even animations. As the environment molds evolving lifeforms to its demands, ...