Sailor Moon Says!
Outside of the occasional anecdote or relevant personal stories, I generally avoid focusing much about myself or life experiences here on this blog. At its core, Tuxedo Unmasked isn’t meant to be a blog about me, but rather an objective look at the world of Sailor Moon and an in-depth look at the amazing people who made it possible.
But every once in awhile, as I interact with other fans who’ve also grown to become just as — if not more! — passionate about this series as myself, I start to wonder what it is that drew people to Sailor Moon and keeps them coming back for more.
Today I’d like to share with you the story about how Sailor Moon came into my world and how it quite literally made me into the person I am today. My goal here isn’t necessarily to get my story out there, but to encourage a dialogue for others to share theirs!
You have to admit, the English opening was pretty catchy
My relationship with Sailor Moon started in Fall 1997 when it was airing in syndication as a part of USA Network’s Action Extreme Team.1 The first episode I caught was “Jupiter Comes Thundering In,” Sailor Jupiter’s debut episode and the start of the Rainbow Crystal story arc.
Between the awesome art, the deep characters, and the rich story line, I was instantly hooked. What surprised me even more was the fact that when I tuned in the next morning, I found out that the story actually continued from one episode to the next. A serialized story in a cartoon, where each episode built on the last, was pretty much unheard of back at that time. Even today it’s far from the norm.
I happened to catch Sailor Moon during a particularly difficult time in my life. I was 11 years old, my parents were getting divorced, and I was confronted with the adult realities of life mixed with the powerlessness of being a child. Let’s just say that it wasn’t exactly a fun time in my life.
These old VHS covers will always hold a special place in my heart
With all that going on around me, something about this story of love, friendship, righting wrongs, and triumphing over evil spoke out to me. For 30 minutes every weekday morning, my problems were gone.2 Unfortunately, like all good things, this gentle reprieve in my day came to an abrupt end with USA Network pulled Sailor Moon from the cartoon block mid-run, leaving me just my imagination for how the Sailor Scouts would manage to beat Malachite and topple Queen Beryl.
As I’m sure many of you also did, I immediately went to the nascent world-wide web to find out everything I could about this show, and boy was I surprised.
This was a 200-episode Japanese show? They had different names?? There were male Sailor Knights and a Sailor Sun?!? Whoa! Where can I find more?
In those dark, early days of the japanimation fandom, it was really hard to find reliable information. Half of what you read was true, half was totally made up, and another half was a gross misinterpretation/bad translation.3 All you could really do was read as many pages as possible and hope to paint a semi-complete picture of what was going on.
My very first Sailor Moon manga, vol. 8
Fast-forward a couple years and I was fully into anime, manga, games — the whole nine yards. But I wasn’t just satisfied reading about it, no. I wanted to read it for myself. I saw how these characters “voices” changed from one translation to the next and I wanted to know what their real character was. At 16 years old, I decided that I was going to study Japanese and ultimately become a translator.
Armed with my paper (yes, paper) Japanese⇔English dictionary and my copy of Sailor Moon volume 8, I immediately set about trying to translate the manga for myself. It went about as well as you can imagine: not very.
Of all the half-baked ideas I’ve had in life, this one definitely ranks near the top. I won’t bore you with the stories and challenges of learning Japanese, but let’s just say that it’s not something you do “on a whim.”
Fast forward six years and with a Japanese History degree under my belt,4 I decided the time was ripe for me to move to the land of anime, talking cats, and robots — I was gonna go to Japan to reap my fortunes! And by “reap my fortunes,” I mean “move to the Japanese countryside and earn a moderate salary teaching kids English.” It’s very easy to confuse the two, so I wouldn’t blame you if you did.
I did that for a few years while I built up my Japanese skills before making my move to Tokyo in 2011, half a year after the devastating Tohoku earthquake. This is how I got my very unexpected entry into the world of translation – I started out as a document specialist, volunteered to serve as a proofreader for the in-house translators, and eventually was made into a full-time member of the translation team.
The first manga I ever translated
After a few years of this and a chance-encounter with an American manga publisher, I finally broke into manga translation several years ago. Though I no longer read much manga at the time, this opportunity rekindled my love for the medium and brought to mind all of the questions and doubts I had about the translations back when I was a young reader myself. A translator may not be able to set the pacing of a manga, but you certainly are responsible for the tone.
Around 2015, I was doing a lot of soul-searching. Thinking about where I had come from, where I was, and where I was going. I was almost 30 and I wanted to start some sort of project, to refocus my energies on something I was passionate about. Sailor Moon was the first thing that came to mind.
As weird as it sounds, I love digging deep into mysteries and trying to uncover answers with few hints to go on. That’s why I love translation, and why Tuxedo Unmasked is so much fun for me to write. In a way, this blog is a sort of research project devoted to my younger self – my way of answering all those questions I never could quite figure out. Along the way, I’ve met many people I’m honored to call friends.
She’s going to be a fan, mark my words!
Though life is by no means a linear line, I directly credit Sailor Moon with me being where I am in life today. After all, if it wasn’t for that fateful encounter on TV, I never would have learned about anime, never would have wanted to study Japanese, never would have moved to Japan, never would have met my wife, and wouldn’t have my lovely daughter.5
So that, in a nutshell, is my story of how Sailor Moon quite literally changed my life. It’s been a long, interesting road from my first chance encounter with Sailor Moon to living on the other side of the globe, but it’s been a fun trip. Remember kids – you can make your dreams happen.
If you have any stories you’d like to share, I’d love to hear them! I’m always fascinated to hear about what brought people to the Sailor Moon and what keeps them coming back for more.
References:
- See USA Cartoon Express ↩
- I also watched a lot of Extreme Ghostbusters at this time, but the less we talk about that, the better ↩
- Please don’t look into my math on that — it checks out. ↩
- My university didn’t provide a language-focus track, so I needed to major in something related to Japan in order to study Japanese for all four years. I didn’t necessarily care about history at that time, but it seemed a better choice than literature or religion. I eventually did fall in love with Japanese and Chinese history, however. ↩
- Who is secretly named after an anime character, but don’t tell anyone about that. Shhh! ↩
It’s great to see how profoundly an interest in Sailor Moon when younger affected your life’s direction.
I only started watching it for the first time last summer, although I’d intended to watch it for some time before that. I absolutely adored the vivid aesthetic of the first arc, and within no time watched the full series and read the manga. I suppose there hasn’t been enough time for the show to have affected my life’s direction in any significant way, yet here I am on Sailor Moon fansites, so I think it may still yet.
It was my first anime, when I was only 6. And I’m 16 now
So cool to hear your story! I’m glad Sailor Moon was able to help you through a rough time in your life as a kid.
My best friend introduced me to anime in general, but I discovered Sailor Moon on my own. I was 14 and was in the waiting room at my orthodontist’s office. This was back when Toonami aired anime on Saturday mornings. The ep that was playing was “Sailor Mercury Moving On?”, the one where Ami is thinking of going to Germany. Unfortunately, I only saw bits of it cause I had to go in for my appointment. All that really stuck in my head was Ami, or Amy rather, probably because she was the focus of the episode, and also because she had the same name as my best friend.
When I next saw my best friend at school, I told her about it, and she told me more about the show, and that “Amy” was Sailor Mercury. Our group of friends (basically the people we ate lunch with) all pretended to be Senshi for a while after that. I wanted to be Mercury, but she was taken, so I ended up being Pluto. How we knew about Pluto at the time I don’t know, since I don’t think Sailor Moon S had aired in the U.S. yet at the time (or even those episodes of R that Toonami later aired as “Sailor Moon: The Lost Episodes”). But I think I got the role because I was the oldest in the group (I had started kindergarten a year late, cause my birthday is in October, so I was always older than other people in my grade). This is probably part of why Pluto became my favorite Outer Senshi.
Over the years, I’ve gotten into many other anime and manga series. Like you, it’s gotten me interested in Japanese culture and language, though I admit I haven’t committed to it as seriously as you. But Sailor Moon remains in my top favorites (along with my first anime, Pokémon). Through it, I found out about Codename wa Sailor V and ordered that manga in French from Canada, since I took French in school, and it wasn’t officially available in English at the time. Of course, when the SM manga was re-released in English (along with the official English debut of Codename wa Sailor V), I bought that too. Along the way, I discovered PGSM and SeraMyu, giving me new ways to engage with the series, and then we got Sailor Moon Crystal too! It’s been a fun journey, and I think I’ll continue to be into Sailor Moon for a while yet. I can’t say it’s changed my life as much as yours, but I love the story and I am glad I found it!
This was a wonderful and inspiring post, thank you for sharing your story with us!
(And I do absolutely love that feeling of going as deep into the weeds, as far down the rabbit hole, as you can go with a subject you love).
This was really lovely to read! I like to say that Sailor Moon is how I ended up English teaching in Japan too… And learning Japanese. I have wanted to know more about you so this is a welcome read! Looking forward to your future insights.
I discovered the series while I was 16-ish, as it was first airing in Canada (where it was MUCH more popular than it was in the States, having a prime position on Canada’s YTV channel in the after-school section). It was right near the end of the first season, and I became entranced with the grouchy girl with the long, dark hair :).
After seeing bits and pieces of episodes and figuring I should watch it regularly, I soon saw the INCREDIBLE episode about their past in the Moon Kingdom, and I was immediately shocked by how EPIC and amazing this seemed. The show went from “a show with cute girls” to “OMG I HAVE TO WATCH THIS NOW!!”
My love for the show soon led to a love for anime and Japan, which led me on a school exchange in my last year of High School that was a magnificent experience. So much so that I went back a couple of years ago, and enjoyed it even more as an adult.
That’s a really nice story. For me I had that same kind of intense fan appreciation for Sailor Moon and anything Japanese for about 3 years, but then I just burned out on it (too many bad anime shows that weren’t nearly as good as Sailor Moon) and didn’t come back to it for quite a while. I kind of wish I had been the type of person to stick with it and have an interesting life like yours, fully learning the language and living in Japan.
I also had a burnout. Honestly, I wish I’d burned out of it years earlier, I’d have saved so much money…or spent it on video games, I guess…
I tried so many other magical girl series ranging from almost complete copies (Wedding Peach, Tokyo Mew Mew) to bizarre and not really my thing (Arjuna, Corrector Yui) to the amazing but nothing like Sailor Moon (Rayearth, Card Captor Sakura).
By the time Pretty Cure came around, I was kind of tired of the Magical Girl genre in general, except for Sailor Moon, which I watched in some form almost yearly. I’ve still never managed to get into Pretty Cure. I intend to, but…part of me hates it because it gets the budget a new Sailor Moon series deserves and Crystal is only making the series look bad.
I’d love to see some discussions on here comparing Sailor Moon to other series that had a similar premise, especially Wedding Peach.
I was a tad older at 16 going on 17 when I got into it.
As a younger kid, I’d seen the Fox ads and never given it much thought.
My first brushes with anime were on Nick Jr. as a little kid. Of course, back then I didn’t know that my favorite shows: Maple Story, The Little Prince, Grimm’s Fairy Tale Classics The Little Koala, Noozles and the Little Bits (plus several others) were all anime.
But I never knew much of anime until Sailor Moon and DBZ.
I couldn’t get interested in DBZ and didn’t even consider Sailor Moon…sadly, I don’t remember my first episode, though it was a part of R airing on Toonami.
Then one weekend I was sick and had to stay in and they were running a marathon to catch up for the “Lost episodes” in 1999. I was hooked.
By 2000 I was a Sailor Moon junkie and was hungry for more.
The only access I had to the internet was at friends’ houses and it was very limited (and dial-up). Any clip or picture from later seasons was an incredible find for me.
Also, imagine my surprise to find out they were all princesses except for Uranus who was also a prince (but only in Japan since the Chick/Tokyo Pop manga obviously had changed it!)
That was the fault of Save our Sailors. I’m not sure why they felt the need to change things to fit their own bad headcanon. But, they did keep the fandom going I suppose.
When S was announced for the states and it seemed to be a more faithful adaptation, I was head over heels. Then without any fanfare, SuperS began airing. This caught me off guard and I remember running home from a friend’s house to record it, missing the eclipse and then having to struggle to get my job to let me off in time each day so I could be at home to watch it (my VCR was unreliable at recording).
It wasn’t until about 2002 or maybe 2003 that I saw Stars and the wait had seemed unbearable. Like a lifetime…I bought a box set from a totally reputable site called “SailorStars.com” (the domain is currently for sale for only $12,000!)
Upon receiving it I got what I had feared, this was a bootleg. I was afraid at first I’d done something horribly illegal. But I watched it anyway, broken subtitles and all.
From there my love for Sailor Moon has waxed and waned (no pun intended).
Sadly, for my bank account, it also caused me to hunger for more anime and in the early 2000s I spent thousands on anime and manga.
My love for anime has subsided to a much more casual thing, but I still love Sailor Moon and I imagine it will always be a part of my life.
Sailor Moon has been a part of my life since its first airing on YTV on August 28, 1995. Even before that, because I remember watching the ads promoting the new show and being excited to watch that first episode.
I watched every episode I could manage. I woke up at 3am to watch the east coast channels. I bought VKLL tapes from sketchy import stores that contained nothing but bootleg movies. I begged to buy cantonese versions of the manga off a girl in school and I read them with print outs of Alex Glover translations. When I finally was able to get online and gorge on Sailor Moon fan sites, I taught myself HTML and Photoshop to make my own shrine on Geocities. Probably one of the largest contributors to my current career in print. I played Sailor Moon Drops the night my father died, the comfort of those girls helping me through my grief.
The series is my oldest and dearest friend. I don’t think I can truly sum up in words how much Sailor Moon means to me and how much it helped me throughout my childhood and adolescence. I don’t think I’m alone in that sentiment either.
I started getting into Sailor Moon around late-2014(Yeah, pretty late) and it was mainly when I saw that my mom used to have a few Sailor Moon VHS tapes lying around(2 Sailor Moon S VHS tapes and a Sailor Moon S Movie tape). During my early interests of the series, I started watching a Sailor Stars fandub by Fighter4Luv and started getting even more interested to the point of drawing my own characters based off of Sailor Moon and trying to watch the anime on Hulu when nobody was around
Excellent article Tuxedo Unmasked. Sailor Moon changed my life as well. It came to me in a part of my life that was very dark and miserable. It wasn’t easy being a trans kid in the Bible belt and it provided a fun escapism for me. I also love the amazing story line and characters so it was cathartic. I am curious who were these Sailor Knights and Sailor Sun that the internet said in the series that were made up. Also I know I have said this before but I am dying with curiosity but you mentioned on the article on if Naru was going to be a more important character that there were some fan theories and beliefs on a different Sailor Saturn. Being a huge Hotaru fan and lover of obscure Sailor Moon information I would love if you talked about this. Again great article and as always love your work.
I grew up with the original DIC dub and watched it every morning if possible. I was fascinated by the beauty and romance, which I thought at the time only girls could have, and which I wished for. (That’s gender roles for you!) Being a bit of a bus-missing, toast-grabbing oddball myself, and, (as I discovered) sharing Usagi’s star sign of Cancer, it was inspiring to see this far-from-perfect girl, whom I recognized myself in, find the strength to defend those she cared about and loved. I still carry her in my heart to this day.
I credit Sailor Moon with helping me discover my inner self (as dramatic as that sounds). I grew up in a very homophobic family who all thought that watching a show deeply rooted in girl power and the power of love would “turn me gay.” I remember begging my mom to tape episodes for me to watch when I got home from kindergarten. She never seemed to mind that I loved the show, but my older brothers and dad absolutely hated it, especially because I wanted to buy the Irwin dolls. Buying these dolls basically confirmed to the men in my family that I was exactly what they expected, and I was mocked and shunned for it. Of course, I had no idea what gay meant at the time. Once the show stopped airing on the USA network, I largely forgot about it and went about my life until nearly the end of the Toonami broadcasts.
Around that time is when I, too, discovered that Sailor Moon was a Japanese import, but I didn’t do anything with that for a while. Later on, I did a little digging into whatever I could find. Finding out that there were gay Sailor Soldiers was reaffirming to me, even though in my head, gay still meant something bad. After all, if they weren’t allowed to say two of the girls were gay, it must be a bad thing. When I finally came to realize that I was gay, Sailor Moon became something of a safe space for me, in a weird way. I could always come back to it and remember the good and bad times of my childhood. Though I love it in every incarnation I’ve ever seen, I will always remember and appreciate the DiC dub for bringing the series into my life.
This reminded me so much of my own experience, I almost teared up. 😀 Neptune and Uranus, as much as their queerness initially freaked me out, are still my romantic goal.
I got into DiC’s version as a preschool girl. I fell in love with the drawing as well as the dub itself. Sure DiC censored everything, but their dub amplified the fun in believing in magic! It’s thanks to their dub that I’m the children’s artist I am today 😉 author too
I’ve enjoyed reading your experience with the series, as well as reading your SM articles, and also reading other fans experience as well. So I’ll go ahead and share my story too.
I got into Sailor Moon sometime in elementary school, I want to say 3rd grade/1997-98. This was after the series was off USA Network and before Cartoon Network. I found the pink box Dic VHS’s at a rental video chain and that was my 1st introduction to the series. I was delighted to find the series picked up by Cartoon Network. This was fall of 1998 when they played the first 65 episodes, also the same year as the manga was starting to be released. So I collected the manga as well as the western comic book form of the manga from comic shops.
My parents had already divorced, but it was around the time they both remarried (and divorced) and I went through 3-4 moves (or more) and 5 different schools in 3 states in a period of 4-5 years. Sailor Moon & crew were constant friends that I could take with me through it all.
I got to watch the show on tv, faithfully programming the VCR to make sure I didn’t miss an episode. Super fun to get to see the first airing’s of Toonami’s lost episodes as well as the S, and SuperS series that we had only read about on the internet at that point (Save Our Sailors, Geocities, etc.) I also picked up VKLL’s fan dubs from a local comic shop in 2000, before streaming was a thing.
Stopped with the series around when the licensing expired, but when the license was renewed and we got new manga, new dub, and a new reboot series in the form of Crystal, my interest in the series experienced a renaissance as well. I met someone online dating after a difficult breakup and I was about to write them off, but I saw they had the ADV DVD release of SM and was an anime/SM fan and that person and I have built a friendship over the last 6 years, just as the fandom brought me friendship in middle school. We watched the 1st season together and that was my 1st re-introduction to the series after a 5 year gap/hiatus. Saw the movies in theaters last year, and the musical this year. I’ve re-watched the whole series (with the new dub and sub for Stars) for the first time and currently finishing Stars, it feels like everything is coming full circle with the Eternal editions of manga & the Stars dub. (and 20+ years of fandom under the belt =) )
As others have mentioned: the characters were super-lovable as well. I’m one prone to being late, and I see Usagi classed as an ENFP where I am an INFP so we are very similar. I also saw the S season with Uranus/Neptune just about a year before I came out to myself/discovered my own queerness, which can be an isolating experience in middle/high school, but growing up with these characters (as well as strong female characters such as all the senshi!!!) helped a lot. and anything cats = <3
As much misinformation was out there, i sort of miss the early days of anime fandom when all you had was the internet and playground rumours. You got misinformed a lot but there was a certain magic to unearthing those wild rumours.
I remember this was very common in the Dragon Ball community. Me and my friends heard all sorts of crazy rumours about what would happen in the story and would be thrilled or disappointed when the reality actually aired.
I suspect I’m a major outlier as far as SM fans go, at least in terms of how I became a fan.
I’m from the UK where we only got the DiC dub of the first 2 seasons, which frustratingly included the teaser for the third season that never came. I would say i was an SM fan back then. Foolishly I had the misconception that I shouldn’t watch, let alone enjoy ‘a girls show’; I was like 8-10 forgive me. And yet I caught bits and pieces of episodes if they aired before or after something else I wanted to watch or if I was channel hopping.
There were two incidents that made me more open to the series though. One winter evening after Cub scouts, when it was pitch dark outside, I caught the episode where Serena and Darien learn one another’s identities. I had caught enough of the series to grasp the gist of it, but this one episode really engrained itself in my memory. The art. The superheroics. And most of all the drama. I loved superheroes but was still at that age where romance in superhero fiction was embarrassing to me. I think that episode might’ve been the first time I began to see the appeal of it.
The second incident was during a school break, which over here was when the channels would roll out new episodes of their best shows. Every morning I’d awake to check out new episodes of whatever Fox Kids was offering. Since Sailor Moon was sandwiched between the two shows I wanted to see I sat through it and so watched half the Doom Tree storyline each morning. Between it being the start of a new arc and again the drama, I walked away open to the show.
But still not a fan. Still as I continued to catch the odd episode here and there from the Black Moon arc I wasn’t UNinterested. I remember being annoyed that I never caught the final battle between the Scouts and the Evil Adult Chibi-Usa. Equally I felt a twinge of hype over the teaser for season 3, especially since I too had been wondering about the other Sailor Scouts that must surely exist.
Season 3 never came and I moved on. Sailor Moon was at the back of my mind along with countless other cartoons I’d seen as a kid but I didn’t really dwell on it. Then when I was 17-19 I decided to get a bit nostalgic and revisted my childhood fav, Power Rangers. On and off during my final years of high school and my first year of uni I’d worked my way through my favourite seasons. When i finished I took the plunge and checked out a season of Super Sentai, perhaps the first TV I’d ever seen subbed.
When i finished that the summer of 2010 I was gearing up for my second year of university. Having learned the ropes I wanted to try new things that year. Anime was one of the things I set my mind to. I had seen a fair amount of anime but had never seen myself as an anime fan per se. Since I’d finished my Power Rangers/Sentai binge I think that’s why my mind drifted to Sailor Moon as I’d obviously noticed the PR similarities.
A Wikipedia read later and I was surprised to learn just how big it had been in Japan and America. It struck me it was to shojo/magical girls what Dragon ball (Z) (my #1 fav anime) had been to shonen/fighting anime. The fact that it was a story obviously aimed at a female audience also intrigued me. As I said, I wanted to try different things and thought it might be interesting to see how I’d react to a show not aimed at my demographic, but one that shared similarities with something I already liked.
I hopped around some DiC dub episodes, mostly stuff I vaguely recalled (though I made sure to see how that Evil Adult Rini thing worked out), saw the first episode of Cloverway’s S dub and got really interested when I saw the transformation and attack sequences from japan, especially for the seasons we never got over here.
I decided to take the plunge. I’d read the R movie was a perfect place to start the series so I put it to the test, watching it in Japanese, this being the first ever subbed anime I’d seen. I was blown away and promptly checked out the other movies and specials. My first day of my second year of uni I began watching the series proper subbed. I binged the first 2 seasons in under 3 days and through stops and starts finished off S, SuperS and Stars before Christmas. During that time I also discovered a lot of SM music, resolved to check out the live action series, musicals and began reading the old Mixx translations of the manga.
I still remember finishing the last episode. It’s funny because I have this habit of reading the last page of a book before starting it and I had done something similar for SM before ‘committing’ to the show. I saw episode 200 before anything else. Weirdly I think that made me more interested as my mind was racing to figure out how we got from my childhood recollections of the story to this final episode.
Anyway, I thought that I would be bored when I finished the series and saw the second episode again. To my surprise it was an even better experience as I now had grown attached to the characters. And appropriately when I finished that last episode it was yet another dark winter night.
Thank you for sharing your personal story and the photo of your lovely daughter!
I watched the DiC dub when it aired before school while I was in the fifth grade. My friends and I would pass each other notes in class using names of our favorite “scouts”. At some point they moved the time slot so I would set the VCR to record episodes so I could watch them after I got home from school.
The internet taught me that it was originally based on something called a “manga”, so the next time my mom and I went to the mall, she took me to the bookstore where I found the Chix comics. I was hooked and would sit in the aisle to read while she shopped. I got even more into the anime when it started airing on Toonami.
Eventually I discovered Sailor Moon Uncensored which was a site that detailed all of the changes from the original Japanese version to the DiC and Cloverway dubs – this was when I learned that there was an original Japanese version at all, and that there was a final, fifth season that had never been dubbed or released in the U.S. I ordered a bootleg of Stars on Ebay, watched it in Japanese for the first time, and have been a Moonie ever since. 🙂
I’m so thankful for your website and for all of the work you do. It’s resources like your website that keep the legend alive 🙂
Many salutations! I could write a book about how Sailor Moon has changed my life. I graduated from high school in 1996 and started college soon thereafter under the erroneous premise that it was the route to economic prosperity; looking back in retrospect over the past two decades and considering all that has happened to me, I am constantly asking myself whether there is more to life and how I could obtain that.
Sailor Moon’s persistent focus upon the good in her adversaries, the implication that the other eight “uninhabitable” planets of our solar system once housed civilizations like Earth does today, the wiggle room Ms. Takeuchi left at the conclusion of the series to lead into a variety of alternate universes for fan-fiction (of which I composed quite a bit!!!) . . . that helped me mature out of adolescence so I could function as an adult. Unfortunately, the fact that I have a long way to go as a person is driven home by the fact that I wound up in rehabilitation (which instigated a bunch of destructive office politics that led me to leave the program), in an electronics repair study program costing me $4.35K and was a bear to pay back (because my parents refused me the means to dig myself out of that in an attempt to teach me responsibility), unjustly bounced around several apartments because of a treacherous landlord (two incidences of which cost me $4.85K in nocturnal lodging fees!!!), and having to jettison my family of origin because of its absolute demand that I accept my brother’s ex-spouse as family.
The apartment where I am right now belatedly discovered that the tub needed to be replaced which forced me to rent two U-Haul vans — the aftermath of which I am grappling right now; even with its profuse apologies, it does not change the fact that its incompetence cost me a lot of money and time in the jurisdiction of a hostile ex-landlord that has made its volition of homelessness for me quite clear. I seriously doubt that Sailor Moon could fix all that; still, the way that she successfully stalemated Sailor Galaxia drove home the fact that there is ALWAYS an alternative to the lesser of two evils. War does not prove who is right — just who is left at the end. Civil litigation does not prove who is right — just who has the better financed and educated attorney. I have had these principles demonstrated; unfortunately, I am not in a position of political power to put that in practice.
I would love to have portrayed the kind of life Chibi-Usa experiences as the crown princess of Crystal Tokyo — or what life was like during the Silver Millennium; in the former case, we have some clues about the kind of family government practiced with Chibi-Usa — a lot of rules/expectations levied in defiance of her actual development along with there being very little in the way of proactive instruction. I am sure that Neo-Queen Serenity and King Endymion love their daughter; still, they have not been shown to engineer their work schedule to spend time with her. Ditto for the eight Sailor Senshi. So Wise Man/Doom Phantom successfully interjecting himself onto the scene and brainwashing Chibi-Usa the way he did makes total sense. Ditto for the whole below-ground liaison with Pegasus Chibi-Usa practices during SuperS; even if it is part of the plot, it is very sloppy family government for something like this to be allowed to continue unchallenged.
Upon seeing how Brian LS has rewritten the first volume of the “Problem Child” web comic, I have been inspired to do the same with my unfinished alternate universe fanfic “Electronic Fantasy Revelation” which draws upon the manga version of Sailor Moon S which has Kaolinite (now a poikilothermic prophet sage from the planet Pyranina) as the headmistress of the Eternal Boarding House of Mercenary Magic whose faculty consists of the Witches Five — each of whom have a combat attribute in which she specializes along with several pupils known as Mercenary Force Shinobi. The way that the prophet sage Eryeka taps the assistance of Helios (the crown prince of Erusion which is a separate world) and Reenie (the crown princess of Crystal Tokyo, Japan, and Earth) is an exact clone of the liaison Chibi-Usa practiced with Pegasus in SuperS; IMO, there should have been some accountability.
Even though they conclude alongside Eryeka that the prudent thing to do is to come above-ground, Reenie and Helios both get into a lot of trouble with their parents because of the deception and because of the security consequence of Eryeka’s findings about the physiology of Pyranians along with the Eternal Boarding House’s tactics and end objective; even though this gets way out of hand to the tune of nearly 13 mega-meters, the Sailor Senshi do the right thing which is to bring about the evolution of their toddler daughters into children so that they can be trained to fight alongside Reenie to combat the Eternal Boarding House. I have made a lot of headway with the written plot of “Electronic Fantasy Revelation”; still, I would love to make a visual novel of this as well. I used to have a friend that would illustrate for me; unfortunately, I now have to do it myself while also building up my micro-economy. If not for the inspiration of Sailor Moon, I would either be homeless of have killed myself out of despair.