Where would they belong if not Unicode? Emoticons are a "writing system" (whether or not you believe them to be more "text" or "meta-text") that needs encoding

Where would they belong if not Unicode? Emoticons are a "writing system" (whether or not you believe them to be more "text" or "meta-text") that needs encoding, and one that was encoded in standards that predated Unicode. (They were at first added for compatibility with CJK systems that had already been using them for some time. They've been greatly expanded since those original encodings that Unicode "inherited" from other text encodings, but they started as text encodings in other standards.) Personally, I think Unicode actually did the world a favor by taking ownership of emoji and standardizing them. There's nothing "weird" that emoji do that doesn't exist somewhere else in some other language's text encodings. Things like ZWJ sequences for complex graphemes existed in a number of languages that Unicode encoded well before emoji. Emoji being common and popular helps break certain Western-centric assumptions that language encodings are "simple" and 1-to-1 code point to grapheme, assumptions that had been needed to break for many years before emoji gave Unicode users a tool to test that even "Western developers" needed to respect if they wanted happy users. Better emoji support is better Unicode support across the lovely and incredible diversity of what Unicode encodes.