In Defense of Sailor Moon

i'll stick to haggard, morally ambiguous ronin, thanks.

I think a lot of the stigma attached to it is (obv) the way anime is marketed in the US & the whole scary-otaku phenomenon.

Also they get to have the whole elemental-association thing which is hella cool.

(& Susan Napier to thread!)

(though actually I prefer something like Revolutionary Girl Utena for my when-I-grow-up-I'm-going-to-be-a-princess fantasies)

(& BLUE HAIR! Swoonage!)

I have two words to explain why I like Sailor Moon up to a point but don't really watch: Chibi Moon.

If you had a future child that annoying (a gazillion times worse than whiny and over-lipglossed Dawn), what motivation would have to save the universe? Personally, I would give up.

"Sailor Moon" isn't half as quotable, tho (in fact, it's not quotable at all- none of those girls ever came up with anything even REMOTLEY as good as the legendary Giles/Spike exchange "I almost died!"/"what, did you see your whole life flash before your eyes? Cuppa tea, cuppa tea, cuppa tea, almost got shagged, cuppa tea...") And while Buffy's plots have a tendency to be cheesy, at least they TRY, as opposed to "Sailor Moon" which just recycles the same tired storylines over and over (I mean, seriously, could you even imagine SM coming up with anything like "Hush" or "Once More With Feeling"?)

But I'm probably biased, since I've hated the Japanese style of animation since I first discovered it- I've found out that I cannot eat while watching anime because those bug eyed fiends make me feel genuinley physically ill. That's more than even The Manic Street Preachers could manage...

i recently discovered Sailor Moon. it's fantastic!
i'm currently working my way through the japanese version, and really enjoying it.
but looking upthread, a lot of these comments are already familiar to me (buffy similarities, "omg it's for schoolgirls" and "if you are a boy and like sailor moon you are middle aged pervert lololol")

why does it get such a bad rep? it's a really tame show. sure, the US version was obviously aimed at kids, but aren't most cartoons? nobody rags on each other with such intensity for liking Thundercats, etc.
maybe it's because SM has romantic storylines, which, omg, is so GURLY that i shouldn't be allowed to enjoy them.
the 'Nephrite Dies for Love' episode was very sad and touching.

i've lost focus (ha, like i ever had focus) a little. whoops.
incidentally, i never really watched/got into Buffy. maybe i should? would i like it?

(Obviously "those things" are what it takes to get super-involved in any TV series -- comfortable unworried free time -- so possibly what I mean is that Sailor Moon just requires much more of a sinking-in investment than, say, Buffy, which is at least giving you old-fashioned jokes while you pick up the larger thread. Like plenty of anime/comics, an individual Sailor Moon episode doesn't offer much until you've unpacked the character relationships and overarching plots.)

this is a totally uninformed swipe and prob has nothing to do with sailor moon, thank you for your time.

anyways, another thing we're not mentioning is the MUSIC.
i thought the US dub music was fab, but was pleasantly surprised when the original (but different) music was fantastic too, particularly the two extremes of the transformation tunes(US version very floaty and magical, Japanese version kinda rocky with shifting vocal harmonies that make me all warm and fuzzy). even the comical incidental music is fab.
ah, sailor moon just pwns.

I'd take Mars over Mercury anyday

mars was the best sailor scout for sure

although always felt bad for jupiter, like some homely middle child

Sailor Moon folks also did Revolutionary Girl Utena.

The Utena movie is phenomenal.

...pausing..
http://www.otakusenshi.com/images/graphic/transform.jpg
..pausing..
http://www.sailorsystem.com/sm169/sm169-120.jpg
..pausing...
http://1e.img.v4.skyrock.net/1ee/mooncollection17/pics/1285162588_small.jpg
NOAW!!
http://www.smuncensored.com/images/screencaps/smovie-s4.jpg

kelpolaris which sailor scout do you think is the cutest?

i recently started watching the original japanese episodes w/subtitles while i do my hand-weight exercises, so that during the fight sequences i can be like "POW POW POW i too fight on behalf of the moon!!!" i will soon be thirty years old.

anyway watching the originals has been more enjoyable than i anticipated. i know it's old news that the english adaptations are so butchered they border on nonsensical, but even the jokes and interactions between the scouts seem far more human and believable in their original form. plus there's a lot more death and violence and awesome supernatural shit.

also great (tho off-color) is the sailor moon abridged parody series.

Sailor Saturn is the cutest but Sailor Moon is the best (all the later scouts are boring)

i never saw any of the episodes w/ saturn is she one of the lesbian scouts?

i used to love sailor moons so much

the lesbicons were neptune & uranus iirc.

jupiter was my fav when i was a kid before i actually started watching. she had a good color palette going on

i always liked sailor mercury.

when i was a kid ppl @ school called me 'gay' cuz i liked sailor moon more than dragonball z

this is an instance were everyone is right, i think

mars is ~beautiful!!~ imo but i like venus confidence. it did seem unfair that she got her own cat tho

it feels so appropriate that people are linking to angelfire pics in a sailor moon thread

hahahaha was thinking that as well

people on tumblr claiming there is going to be a new sailor moon anime in 2013?? i will believe it when i see it but STILL

I have a gigantic crush on Sailor Mercury

― Jeff-PTTL (Jeff), Wednesday, July 13, 2005 8:39 AM (6 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've expanded my pixel crushes since 2006. Now I prefer Sailor HAT-P-32b.

lol @ kelpolaris post

Used to looooooooooooooooooooove this show at age 15 or so, it was really my gateway into several years of dedicated anime fandom (setting aside a much earlier Robotech obsession). Kind of can't imagine watching any of it now; like DBZ it is LONG and there's a lot of whatnot and filler which was pretty entertaining to me at one point but which I think would be sort of grindingly dull to go through again. Goes back to the whole "having enough free time" thing I guess. I think I can track a major evolution in my sexual preferences from unthreatening mousy nerds to raging tomboys on some kind of Mercury/Jupiter axis. I once maintained an "Anime Babes" page which featured both of them prominently, of course.

I think if I were to revisit any 90s shoujo at this point it'd have to be Escaflowne, which is concise and pretty tightly plotted IIRC. Although maybe too much of a genre hybrid to count, what with the magical dragon robots and all. And hrm...I never did finish Utena, that'd be good to do someday. And when I'm in the retirement home maybe I'll settle in and actually delve into Fushigi Yuugi...

it has been a blast revisiting this show two episodes a week on hulu. i fell in love with it in middle school on the verge of a wider engagement with anime, but the only other person who watched in in my class was this identically nascent genderqueer dude and we really bonded over the show (and, incidentally, dbz, but all of my friends watched that). i thought, similar to doctor casino, that it'd be a slog to get through again, but once the rhythms of the show are established even the slightest deviations in the monster-of-the-week form are oddly thrilling.

the trailer for the new anime is odd; the character designs are more faithful to the manga but the animation is so modern that it creates a strange dissonance in their movements. though it's only a trailer

''Even the slightest deviations'' - ha, I remember that feeling! Like, you knew shit was starting to get real as the season was nearing its end, the bad guys collecting those five crystals from people meant every episode was an EVENT, etc. I also really liked, also in S1, the lack of symmetry or evenness across arcs (such as they were) - the amount of time where they're dealing with Jadeite vs. Zoisite or w/e, some things are twelve episode deals, some things are three... even blatant filler like the two aliens in between the first saga and the proper Sailor Moon R stuff helped add to this totally epic feel.

One of my friends ran a Sailor Moon club in HS and convinced me to come; I was only vaguely familiar with the show. She showed us one of the movies and it was the first subbed anime I had seen - I was entranced. She let me borrow a handful of subtitled episodes taped third-hand on VHS, totally out of order, and there was something really fun and puzzling trying to piece together a show with fragments from different storylines, containing cultural references that were alien to me. I became obsessed and once I had a broadband connection in college, I scoured ftp sites in order to download and watch every episode of the show, but the more I understood the SM storylines and Japanese cultural stuff, the better the translations, the less I enjoyed it. A large part of the appeal was how strange it was, how different the process for watching it was from every other show I had seen. Once I had some familiarity with other anime, SM lost its luster. Little desire to go back and rewatch, but tons of fond memories.

Also Sailor Jupiter was the bomb

"Star Gentle Uterus" was the attack used by Sailor Star Maker in all versions of the Sailor Moon series in which she appeared

what the

ctrl+f "boom anime babes" no results found delete bookmark

That was probably around the time I was playing episodes in the background while doing something else, but I'm surprised I don't remember "Star Gentle Uterus"

http://img1.ak.crunchyroll.com/i/spire4/f8a24efd06e4a52d770ccb7ce87caf651296284132_full.jpg

i mean

ahhha

actual thing here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DU9sQi_wnQ

I mean really

if anyone is interested in the new show it's on hulu http://www.hulu.com/watch/657610

so far it's pretty nice! way more faithful to the designs and rhythms of the manga. the transformation scene is unfortunately ugly as hell. i haven't watched a new anime in five years and i guess ppl are still captivated by unnecessary cg

Moon Animate Make-Up is a crowdsourced group animation project to re-animate an episode of Sailor Moon shot-by-shot in each artist's personal style. From October 2013 to July 2014, over two hundred and fifty animators contributed at least one shot each to assemble a full length parody episode of Sailor Moon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orhh6TZ6qCE

hahaha cool

God I'd forgotten Molly's amazing OTT voice, someone should have just done her as Betty Boop.

amazing that both ile threads about sailor moon were started by nabisco

also whoa i don't remember making this post at all

it has been a blast revisiting this show two episodes a week on hulu. i fell in love with it in middle school on the verge of a wider engagement with anime, but the only other person who watched in in my class was this identically nascent genderqueer dude and we really bonded over the show (and, incidentally, dbz, but all of my friends watched that). i thought, similar to doctor casino, that it'd be a slog to get through again, but once the rhythms of the show are established even the slightest deviations in the monster-of-the-week form are oddly thrilling.

the trailer for the new anime is odd; the character designs are more faithful to the manga but the animation is so modern that it creates a strange dissonance in their movements. though it's only a trailer

― emo canon in twee major (BradNelson), Monday, June 9, 2014 10:40 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

that's pretty otm, neat that i was using phrases like "nascent genderqueer dude" years before i even came out as nonbinary. sailor moon crystal ended up being simultaneously awesome and disappointing: great to see the manga adapted directly because the manga's great, but also... that's all there is? (the manga is also, somehow, less gay than the anime)

i also made that post before i saw the whole thing over the course of 2016!

and i'm rewatching it again! just finished sailor moon r, the makai tree arc fucking suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks

does anybody just straight up weep through the last two episodes of season one every fucking time, like i do

love all your posts itt brad, esp the one you just reposted <3

i oddly remember not hating the alien tree storyline (noted it upthread as blatant filler that still worked for me) but i also can't remember anything about it except thinking that human-form Ann was pretty cute. i think it helped that back then, the US broadcast got like five or eight episodes into the chibi-usa/black crystal stuff and then stopped, looping around to episode 1 of the first season. so at least the tree arc was *finished*. also the tree is like dying on them as the thing progresses right? i think I found that sort of compelling in terms of stakes and dramatic momentum. is there any good business or character stuff for the leads during this period, or is it all on hold until the black moon clan?

there is a straight up amazing episode right in the center of the makai tree arc, episode 51 "A New Transformation: Usagi's Power-Up." the monster is like horror-movie-cool (which, at least for the first two seasons, when this show is at its best, the monsters are fuckin scary), and there's a very strange lackadaisical rhythm to the earlier cherry blossom scenes that makes it stand out not only in the context of the arc but the entire show. a ton of great character moments for usagi too. it makes the rest of the arc look *pitiful*

one of the things i really hate about the makai tree story: the guardians all learn boring new powers that are immediately abandoned once the black moon story begins (during which they learn COOL new powers)

the makai tree ITSELF is cool, like the design of the show never really flags, but the whole cardian plot is such a xerox of season one that i find it soooo tiresome

also i think ail and ann have really boring personalities, their only motivations are energy and wanting to steal usagi/mamoru away from each other (BORING). awful villains

i'm so excited to get into sailor moon s, which i remember as the best season. like "even the filler is good"-good

also i have conflicted feelings about the black moon arc in sailor moon r, as 1) it's the storyline that made me absolutely obsessed with the show as a kid 2) on revisit it seems to tell the story way less well than the manga? like both way too stretched out and way too rushed at the same time. felt sort of the same way this time but enjoyed it more, i mean the time travel element of the story is just outrageous and charming, chibi-usa is great, sailor pluto is amazing, wiseman/death phantom is a formidable and interesting villain, yet... gets nowhere near the emotional peaks of the first season

i think i really hated the "mamoru gets an apocalyptic vision of the future and BREAKS UP WITH USAGI FOR NO REASON" plotline the last time but i just let it ride this time and it really grew on me

venus was too much of a goody two shoes.

― one dis leads to another (ian), Thursday, March 31, 2011 9:21 PM (nine years ago) bookmarkflaglink

this post is hilarious to me because minako does not have much of a personality besides always saying aphorisms incorrectly

she's definitely the weakest link, i remember fanfic REALLY struggling to know what to do with her. you'd think her previous work as a non-transforming vigilante hero would be good for some conversation but nope.

haha i'd forgotten about those half-measure powerup episodes! i think i thought they were cool because something was "happening." also we didn't have the rest of R, so we never got to any better upgrades.

i'd also forgotten about the "moonlight knight" plot, which is...... stupid

it's so dumb!!! the reveal that moonlight knight is some physical manifestation of mamoru's lost memories???? terrible!!!!

thread has inspired me to rewatch the first season again, a couple of episodes a night before sleep is just what i need at the moment

it’s really comforting!

i'm two episodes into sailor moon s and it's just as good as i remembered. everything's kind of at its peak: the humor, the character moments, the sick new sailor moon transformation sequence, maybe my favorite of the show

and for some reason they kept the ending theme from sailor moon r, at least for now, and it's my favorite ending theme so i'm pleased

all of the monsters are so wacky and cool in this season! in the second episode there's a cat monster that emerges from a puzzle and she keeps crumbling into puzzle pieces whenever she's attacked, it's awesome. and the car monster in episode three is hilarious. screech! vroom!

uranus' "world shaking" is the most badass sailor guardian attack

this is the BEST show

lmao chibi-usa's one power, "pink sugar heart attack," is so hilarious

brad you're really selling me on picking this up as my late night fall asleep viewing

i would argue sailor moon s is one of the best seasons of television ever

S was also my favorite season by far. The only season I actually owned on DVD

for some reason i'm only now registering how much sailor saturn's story is like a real fucked up abusive situation

also only now realizing that usagi sent chibi-usa back in time to "make friends with people in the twentieth century" SPECIFICALLY so she'd make friends with hotaru/sailor saturn. as usual, usagi is low-key really smart

friendship saves the world from the apocalypse... again!!!!!!!

really enjoying the rewatch. forgot how over the top cartoony the facial expressions are, like there will be three amazing expressions one after the other in one Usagi reaction shot that completely crack me up. was surprised that Sailor V was a thing from the first episode. also that meme about Tuxedo Mask showing up and then leaving after saying "my work here is done" without actually doing anything is so spot on haha.

ok spoilers for the third season i guess but when pluto saves uranus and neptune from a helicopter crash by STOPPING TIME???? that's the coolest thing i've ever seen

oh fuuuuck sailor saturn is here to kick ASS

i'm rewatching from the beginning again. i never got past sailor moon s on the last rewatch bc i got distracted by 1) discovering sailor moon s was directed by kunihiko ikuhara 2) watching revolutionary girl utena over and over again