On Sailor Moon

Almost 30 years ago¹, I sat with my kid sister in our uncle’s garage-turned-spare-room in San Jose, California, watching cartoons. Growing up rural² in the 1980s, “watching cartoons” meant specifically Saturday mornings, as that’s when most/all cartoons were broadcast. Down in the city, with the magic of cable, there were multiple channels playing cartoons every day of the week! To a child, this was downright amazing. (I mean, let’s face it, to me as a teen: still amazing.)

As I said, we were watching cable tv.³ We had stumbled upon something I’d never seen before—anime—and not just any anime, but the first female-protagonist cartoon series I’d watched since She-Ra. Now, please know, I am no DiC lover, I detest the dub, I don’t care that it was “my first” Sailor Moon experience. The initial dub episodes were horribly cut-up, censored and edited, they gave poor Naru a hideous Brooklyn accent⁴ , and in true American fashion, they forced a morality lesson into each one, in the form of the “Sailor Moon Says” segment.⁵

Be that as it may, it was a wholly profound experience for me. I’d never seen Japanese animation, with such different aesthetics. I’d never heard of—never dreamed it existed—the magical girl genre, that there were whole series of comics and shows for girls. All the cartoons I grew up on were episodic, with virtually no continuation of plot threads or any sort of character growth.⁶ Nobody actually died in cartoons. Wile E. Coyote could lift up the 10-ton weight, un-accordion his body somehow, and walk the whole thing off. Gargamel and Azrael would carry on to torment the Smurfs another week.

We sat transfixed in front of Sailor Moon, DiC episode 20 (original Japanese episode 24), “A Friend in Wolf’s Clothing” (“Naru’s Tears: Nephrite Dies for Love”).⁷ Nephrite’s death scene remains as fresh in my memory as that first watching. Naru’s howls of anguish haunted me for months. The show hooked me in one episode!

As I started navigating the very primitive internet of 1996, I searched for Sailor Moon, found a plethora of fansites, started collecting images, bought the Japanese manga, discovered the wonderful world of fan-subs. By January 1997, I learned enough HTML to start planning my own site, a Sailor Moon gallery to end all galleries, focused on my favorite characters: Usagi and Mamoru. On September 19, 1997, I launched Gallery of the Silver Millennium, which I later renamed Serenitatis⁸ in 1999 when I bought my first domain name.⁹

By the time the site launched, I was very much in love with someone whom I saw as the Mamoru to my Usagi.¹⁰ My real-life romance inspired multiple site layouts, but my love for the characters predated it, and survived it. I raised the site up to a ripe adult age of 18 years, then shut it down in 2015.¹¹ Despite this, my love for Sailor Moon burned on. (And on and on, as it turns out. 30 years!) Yes, Usagi is quite silly, and selfish, and immature, and conniving. But when it matters most, she will put herself between harm and a friend—or a stranger—without a moment’s hesitation. Sailor Moon is the kind of person I can only strive to be.

In a happy-ending epilogue sort of way, having found my ACTUAL Mamoru, who encourages me in all passions, I now have my collection of Sailor Moon toys and figures in a display case. In our living room.¹² He doesn’t even tease me about it. (Honestly there’s so many nerdy things in our house, who’s going to notice a display of Sailor Moon figures? Have you seen my LEGO House Atreides Royal Ornithopter? It’s sitting on top of our petrified wood display, part of our giant rock collection. NERDS.)

There’s more I’d like to write about the Japanese manga/anime aesthetic and its influence on my art, but I’ll save it for another post. Until then:

Tsuki no hikari wa ai no message.¹³

1. I wish I had an exact date, best guess is somewhere in 1995, possibly early 1996. ↩︎
2. By which I mean, 3.5 broadcast TV channels and a large antenna on the roof. ↩︎
3. Trying to determine which channel it was sent me down a Wikipedia rabbit-hole. I remember it being USA Network, but I can’t find a firm date of episodes airing before 1997, and by then I had gone down a manga-importing rabbit-hole, owned most of the Japanese tankoubon and was busily downloading and watching the final episodes of Sailor Stars, in glorious 180×120 pixel resolution. No, not kidding. NEEDLESS TO SAY, it was pre-1997. ↩︎
4. Not being Japanese, I really can’t speak to how representative that is of a “hideous” Osaka accent, but that’s the parallel they were going for. ↩︎
5. Plus it made up for all the minutes they cut out of each episode. SIGH. ↩︎
6. I don’t know what that says about Western entertainment at the time, but I suspect, nothing particularly good. ↩︎
7. In long-hindsight, an odd point to come into the story at random, but an impactful episode. There was romance and mystery, actual stakes and consequences and motivations. Even death! ↩︎
8. You are here. ↩︎
9. Back then, you had to pay for two years of registration, at $35/year, from Network Solutions, and there were only three TLDs (com/net/org). A fansite with its own domain was almost guaranteed to be of quality in 1999-2000, because the owner was investing some serious money into not just registration, but also hosting. My first job paid for my hosting bill, among other things. ↩︎
10. Narrator: He was not. ↩︎
11. Time and website burnout aside, those real-life associations were the deeper reason I shut down the website, mere weeks before we made the decision to divorce. ↩︎
12. Perpetually-insecure-and-19 me is soooooo uncomfortable with this still, but I enjoy seeing them lit up and arranged nicely so much. ↩︎
13. “The moonlight carries the message of love.” ↩︎