2020 Reflection: Sailor Moon

Sailor Moon was written in December 1991 by Naoko Takeuchi. Sailor Moon is a magical girl series, the most famous magical girl series, whose plot is as follows: in the ancient past known as the Silver Millennium, the solar system was guarded by a set of magical cosmic guardians known as the Sailor Senshi. After they died protecting the solar system they were reincarnated in then contemporary 1990s Japan and resume their battle to protect the worlds from the forces of Chaos. This is about the manga of Sailor Moon, not the 90s anime adaptation. While I like the 90s anime adaptations, and if it was a seperate series it would probably be on my list of my favorite series, it is the Sailor Moon Manga that is my favorite series I've ever seen. How does one properly talk about one's favorite series? How can one possibly be expected to translate the innumerable hours one have thought of the series, how it's changed the course of one's life?

3 Reasons I love it:

How can I explain all the great things Sailor Moon has to offer? If I was to list my favorite x in fiction, half of them would be from this one series. Where do I even start with explaining all the greatness I see in Sailor Moon? I don't know, but I'll do my best to give 3 of the biggest points I love about it. Understand though that I could just keep listing things I love about Sailor Moon on and on.

1: The perfect integretation of the symbolic with the literal. This is hard for me to express normally but Sailor Moon captures the thing that I want most in fiction, the thing that the brief glimpses of it in other series are my favorite parts of those series. Sailor Moon takes thematic conflicts and integrates it into the literal and emotional parts of the scene, such that the spiritual and conceptual backdrop of the story are aligned with the immediate textuality. And these are themes that mean a lot to me, and I feel them stronger then I've felt with any other series. When Sailor Moon unites her identity at the end of the first arc, coming to terms that she may be the tragic princess but she can also be the champion of justice for her loved ones because love allows her to become greater then she was and proudly declades that she is Sailor Moon and Princess Serenity, I FEEL that. When in the fifth arc, Sailor Moon declares that we are all lonely stars wishing to gather as one and jumps into Chaos, which had fused with the source of all things, both literally and metaphorically embracing the chaos of being, the potential for any negative manifestation of darkness that she would have to face, willing to face any future because of her infinite love for the world no matter what face she shows...I wanted to be that! I wanted to live my life by that! That's a code I wanted to change how I am to reflect that. Sailor Moon is a story about how anyone, even someone seemingly unreliable and cowardly can rise up to be a hero for the ones they love and how they can save the world as one comes to love this world of joys and sorrows and like...that's been the influence for me, that has been the story of my life, a lifetime of being down on myself and finding myself despite that rising above where I thought was to help the people I care about.

2: Naoko Takeuchi is, in my humble opinion, the master of tone and pace. I can see a page of Sailor Moon and before even conciously registering what's on the page, I'll know what arc it's from and generally what part of the arc, because the series has such a good ability to create atmosphere and invoke abstract or emotional atmospheres. The series has no filler chapters whatsoever and tells it's stories with a serious tone and a fantastical ability to invoke the often eldritch and otherworldly elements that make up the plot. It does this via abstract or exaggerated artwork, ethereal artwork that emphasizes a watery feeling, and by using astronomical imagery and plotlines, derived from the alien-ness of space.

3: I alluded to this in point 1, but so many of the elements of Sailor Moon from it's themes to it's subject matter correspond exactly to my interests. Sailor Moon is interested in themes of identity, meaning, chaos, predestination, emotional realities, temporality vs eternal-ness. It's subject matters it uses to tell that through include an astronomical and mythological themed science-urban fantasy, superhero magical girls fighting eldritch horrors and their occult minions with an epic cosmic romance at it's heart. 

3 Flaws:

Surprisingly, I actually think it's not that hard for me to critisize this series. There's a big difference to me between "favorite" or "most good" series and "least bad" series, or series with least flaws. A series is good not because of it's lack of flaws, but in amount equal to how well it can get you to forgive those flaws. Obviously that means a series with less flaws is easier to be good because there's less to forgive but there's more to it then that. Sailor Moon is not the least bad series I know, that would be good. It's not the least bad magical girl series I know, that would probably be Princess Tutu. It's arguable which is less bad between it and Cardcaptor Sakura in my opinion. While Sailor Moon is without a doubt the most good series for me, it's fairly easy for me to list some flaws for it.

1: The problem of Sailor Moon that is the biggest problem in my eyes is it's tendency towards deus ex machina or being generous things that are very convenient for the plot. There's a rule in writing that if you have serious (as in non-comedic) magic in your story either the magic has to have very clearly defined rules or it can't be used to solve problems and if Sailor Moon doesn't break the rule then it skirts very close to the line. So much in Sailor Moon makes beautiful symbolic or emotional sense but is basically unexplained from a literal standpoint. There's a point near the end of the first arc where Metaria blinds Mamoru with her presence and less then half a chapter later Sailor Moon restores his sight. Symbolically this is to show how Metaria is the goddess of night who blinds people to those who love them and how Sailor Moon is the soldier of the moon whose light shines through the night and restores us to our sense of self. Literally however it comes out of nowhere and doesn't seem to have much point. There's a point in the third arc where the senshi's power gather in Sailor Moon and she becomes Super Sailor Moon because "their hearts are gathered as one". Emotionally this is to show that while the Outer Senshi protest that they don't believe in Sailor Moon's beliefs, that their hearts are truly with her regardless. Literally however it's never explained, it just happens.

2: Naoko Takeuchi includes way too many characters. Naoko Takeuchi was clearly heavily inspired by sentai when making Sailor Moon, however sentai seasons regularly have ~several dozen episodes each to expand on a cast of 5-6 protagonists and a similar number of villains. An arc of Sailor Moon is on average a dozen chapters and Naoko tries to introduce as many as characters. In the Dream Arc we very quickly learn that the villains including Nelehenia, her subordinate Zirconia, and their 4 minions the Amazoness Quartet. Already that's a lot for an 11 chapter arc, but then the Quartet immediately create 3 more minions called the Amazon Trio and we later learn their group also has Xenotime and Zeolite.... Naoko can't seem to help but introduce characters in these groups of several each which leads to many characters not having signifigant development. To be clear I don't want it to be like the 90s anime where there is a lot of filler, but hopefully the story can be expanded so that there are more chapters to explore characters while progressing the plot in each one.

3: The series is kind of repetitive. Outside the fifth arc, which is my favorite in small part for this reason, Sailor Moon arcs have a very standard proceeding where each Senshi is matched up against one miniboss enemy, that they defeat one by one while investigating what the hell is going on with whatever Humanoid enemy is leading the enemies this time, there's some dramatic fight against the humanoid enemy, only to find out that they were serving a horrible eldritch abomination that is actually an incarnation of Chaos which Sailor Moon defeats after attaining a new power that is connected to whatever the arc is about. This isn't a big problem for me personally but I understand why others might not like it.

Favorite Part:

My favorite part in Sailor Moon's manga is the climax of act 59. Preceeding this is the climax of Galaxia's arc, my favorite villain, where Galaxia sees that the perfect eternal meaning she longed for and searched for was the mysterious power that Usagi had, the love for the temporal. In embracing the temporal, Usagi had found the eternal in the never-ending love one has. Usagi is told she should let the universe come to a peaceful end but Usagi refuses trusting she will always love the universe, no matter the suffering she must go through before leaping into the Galaxy Cauldron, the source of everything, merged with Chaos the ultimate evil, symbolically and literally embracing every possible suffering she could ever have before she is willing to fight for all eternity believing in what she loves. This is what I aspire to be; this world is intimidating, with dark stars, shadowy incarnations of suffering appearing from the chaos, and all the things one loves within it are temporary and bound to end eventually, but in loving them you will find that eternity that gives it meaning.