This week, Simpsons fans who still haven’t watched an episode post-Season 12 nearly turned on the show entirely, but the loyal viewers told them, “Not today, old friend.”
It’s no secret that the majority of human beings who identify as “Simpsons fans” don’t watch the new seasons, nor have they tuned in on a Fox Sunday night since at least the Jerkass Homer years. Since then, the show has had to get creative with the character arcs of some supporting Springfieldians, given how the Simpson family itself is frozen in the floating timeline and there are only so many secret backstories Abe Simpson can have. One such post-9/11 Simpsons development is the romantic relationship between formerly suicidal tavern proprietor Moe Szyslak and his fiancé Maya, who first made her appearance in the 2009 episode “Eeny Teeny Maya, Moe.”
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As that title suggests, Maya is a little person, a point that Moe struggled to handle respectfully in their first encounter. Thankfully, however, Maya is a little adult, not a little child, as some Twitter users recently believed for a brief, terrifying moment:
Critical to the viral clip of Moe embracing a very small female person while his mother disapprovingly tells him, “four and a half more years” is the context, which comes from the most recent episode in The Simpsons Season 37, “Men Behaving Manly.” Leading up to Sunday’s episode, Maya had been absent from The Simpsons since the Season 33 entry “The Wayz We Were,” in which Moe reunited with his former love and asked for her tiny hand in marriage, which Maya gave gladly.
In “Men Behaving Manly,” the Simpsons writers explained Maya’s absence with a meta joke that only Simpsons fans in the know would appreciate within its decidedly non-pedophilic context: Apparently, in Moe’s vaguely Eastern European culture, engaged couples aren’t allowed to see each other for five years following their betrothal. Thus, the “four and a half more years” comment has nothing to do with the age of consent and everything to do with a fictional tradition inserted as a little “F— You” to the fans who wish the canon would be more consistently kind to poor Moe.
Put simply, there are plenty of reasons for the Simpsons fandom to be outraged by the throwaway line that basically insulted us for caring about Moe’s marital status, but none of them are related to grooming, sexual exploitation or any other sort of undesirable behavior. As Moe’s literary tastes have taught us, he’s into little women, not little girls.