majestic

There are many of these little callbacks in the season, which I really liked. The episodes were great too, except for the little things, and yes, by that I mostly mean the conflict between the two groups that feels more forced than it was in S. That scene in the theme park where Usagi is eating and Seiya is carrying 6 packages, totally exasperated how Usagi can eat that much was one of the hardest laughs I had watching Sailor Moon. At least I think that was in the theme park episode. Stupid binging, this is so confusing. Sailor Iron Mouse trying to run way from the constantly appearing telephones with the funeral march playing in the background was both funny and frightening at the same time. Also, screw spoilers, ain't nobody gonna read them anyway. Chibi chibi. Chibi... chibi... Chibi? xD Of course we're doing the little sister again, what else (although Chibi-Usa was a cousin, right?)... although admittedly, the one thing I found super hilarious about this particular rehash (although this one is straight from the manga) is how nobody at all does anything more than wonder if she's Usagi's second child or maybe Chibi-Usa's daughter. Another weird girl literally falls from the sky and brainwashes Usagi's parents (well, mother, her father's gone doing whatevever for a while now), the only reaction from everyone is "Ey, whatever, hey, Usagi, you think that one's yours too?" - dunno why, but that amused me to no end. Just another day in Tokyo, huh?

It's not sweet, it is totally insidious and makes American children believe it is okay for small boys to live with three moms instead of a proper nuclear family. 'Tis making kids into the gays, I tells you. Plus something something satanism. I'm sure of it. Oh, that it does indeed. Also... don't watch the next two episodes when you're hungry.

Outside of the finale where she apparently transforms into Shinji for a bit (I hope I'll have enough time for NGE soon) Sailor Stars Usagi is really strong. I don't know if it is just the contrast to SuperS, but that might be my favorite version of her. S had more character time for everyone and the first season was fun in general, but in Stars she's still klutzy and a crybaby at times, but also sweet, caring, does nice things for her friends* (like the aforementioned making an ass of herself to help), isn't a complete dummy and once the other new character shows up (that we all know about, anyway), it shows how much better she got at dealing with these situations. * Speaking about your comments regarding Iron Mouse and her "whatever" when Sailor Moon shows up, that's the sort of thing that I meant with the meta fun where it seems like the show makes fun of its own formula, or like Iron Mouse didn't appear until the obligatory fight scene happens - and even then everything's resolved in a minute or two at best.

The most baffling part is that the manga has a couple of panels that Crystal simply dropped that are more lighthearted and fun. When Usagi and company go to the moon for instance, Makoto stops for a moment, looks at Usagi and says that she's now an actual tsuki no usagi*. Which causes laughter and embarrassment. It's a fun scene that's just been dropped in Crystal so everything is even more dour, serious and melodramatic than the material already is anyway (Usagi spends larger chunks of the previous chapters pining after abducted Endymion). The makers of Crystal went out of their way to make it worse, it seems. *Japanese pun explanation, I once already stated that Usagi's name means Moon Bunny or Bunny of the Moon, and because it is a name it is written Tsukino Usagi, used in a sentence it would be tsuki (moon) no (turn prior noun into an adjective) usagi (bunny), also Japanese folklore has bunnies on the moon (while for us the moon is made of cheese or there's a man in the moon due to it looking a bit like a face), hence the name already being a pun, and this being a pun on a pun.

So, longer answer time. @Bartimaeus I made some more edits to the post above, about stuff and stuff. Reading the two pages made me feel a bit bad about the mean things I - well, we - posted about her in these threads. I'll also admit that I let the fandom parroting what she said colour my perception of her statements, because over the course of the anime rewatch, researching reviews and gathering information for the essay style posts, I grew to despise the manga fanboys, for various reasons, but by far and large for claiming how superior the source material is, which, let's face it, is simply not true except for the more detailed costumes the girls are wearing in the manga (which caused Ms. Takeuchi some problems when drawing and forgetting them, so perhaps the anime had the better idea anyway). It also helps understanding some of the statements she made regarding changes in the anime. For instance, assuming she truly likes manga Rei and considers it one of the good things in it - perhaps not even in the way she actually is or comes across in the manga, but the way she wanted her to be - and the anime turns her into something else entirely, for various reasons, then of course she'd be annoyed by that. I also once read that she wanted to do certain things that happened in the anime but wasn't allowed to by her editor, for instance the girls not dying by giving their energy to Princess Serenity but going out with a bang. There's also a panel that was cut for Crystal where the hologram of Usagi's mother tells her that the source of her strength is not only her heart, love and sense of justice, but also being a girl, and that she should never forget that. In light of that panel, her being annoyed by the Sailor Starlights turning out to be transgender and actually male in civilian live is understandable, even if the change, in my opinion, still was a good idea. We already had a great homosexual relationship, so why not go even further. It would be different if she had complained about the three being actual boys because it diminishes her point about how much easier it was for boybands to sing about love and princesses while being taken seriously (more or less, anyway) in the mid 90ies. But it wasn't, the complaint was specifically about her believing that only women can be actual Sailor Guardians because being women was a source of strength for them, and while Mamoru is a Sailor Earth standin, he's just that. He's not Sailor Earth. The parts where she wrote nigh unadaptable material and I thought she might have done that intentionally out of spite, yeah, no, that was definitely wrong too. Also no wonder she made Saturn's attack sequence go for four pages. That's 10% off the workload. I doubt that she reads this forum, but: Dear Stephenie Meyer Dear Ms. Takeuchi, I'm sorry for the mean things I said about you. Especially the ones where I called you (or implied you to be) an entitled, pretentious artist who got annoyed by the adaptation turning out to be a superior product. Seems like you weren't happy with the manga too. It also can't be easy to have what you consider "shoddy work" and "a rough first draft" to be the one thing that blew up into a billion dollar world wide phenomenon. Hell, you might even feel like I did, that the success of your manga was based more on the anime being such a smash hit than for its own merits. Not sorry about calling Crystal crap. Because it is.

I can calm you down, that's the only episode where Luna and Yaten are a, uhm, thing. And it's not even really a thing thing. edit: That cooking episode was a riot. I mean, aside from the drawings of Haruka and Michiru being really weird, and the hands being strange. Oh, by the way, Galaxia looks bad just the entire season, with the exception of her in civilian form, those are truly nice. But they come up once. Guess the interns did her other appearances. I can't help but loving how Usagi just self-inserts into the cooking show, hogging the spotlight, essentially making an ass out of herself on national TV just because Makoto is so nervous that she drops the eggs for the cake. Or at least that was how I saw it, and Makoto probably too, otherwise she'd have been annoyed at Usagi, right? edit 2: Spoiler for the next episode, as a warning of sorts:

Super quick update before I go back to... work, yay! Yes, if you mean Wamuu, Esidisi and Kars. I've also seen JoJo's balls and he got married to two of the gym gods, but he already divorced one of them. I'm pretty sure I don't need to put that into a spoiler because that makes absolutely NO sense out of context. You were right about things getting very weird.

I'm currently doing my best thousand-yard stare impression while deadlines both important and inconsequential waft by. So much to do, and all of it mind numbing busy work. Oh, right, and that special very high priority project where someone told me last Friday that they'll start with a new customer this week and need an import set up. Ideally on Monday. Sure, would you like some fries with that?

It does excuse/explain the disjointed nature of the manga, and the strange flip flopping between the dialogue and the actions (like Haruka goes from sexually assaulting Usagi to "we always wanted to fight with you" in the span of an act), and the mood whiplash in the panels, but it doesn't do so for the plot points. BodySwitch!Usagi trying to seduce Mamoru, Chibi-Usa musing how she wants to be sexually attractive to Mamoru and later an alicorn, or how Mamoru abducts her, or... the aforementioned assault by Haruka, man, the list just goes on. It does explain why it takes three entire arcs before the girls got a backstory, or why that backstory is sometimes in a separate manga issue / side story. Here are the two pages, the small text is a bit hard to read, but, eh... zoom in a bit, it's workable. Post spoilered, no actual spoilers and stuff, but... not sure if babbling on an online forum falls under fair use of excerpts (again, top to bottom, right to left, in that order, 14 years old refers to when she started drawing, not when she made Sailor Moon, or else there's an error in the translation... who knows). That's one of the episodes I didn't really like all too much, outside of giving some more insights into Taiki. However, I think this is as "bad" as any episode in Sailor Stars gets, outside of the final story mode episodes. Minor spoilerish question: 's all for now, I'll reply some more later I guess (also re: JoJo and stuff)

It's so powerful it breaks diamonds at the merest touch, but is also super poisonous but Minako can just handle it with her bare hands, holding the unsheathed edge. So, beats me if it beats the punny sword from JoJo's. Probably not. Also, no wonder you don't remember it, it only shows up in the manga and in Crystal. The sword Princess Serenity stabbed herself with. Twice. This manga issue had a little note from Naoko Takeuchi at the end where she said she had, at times, to draw 40+ pages in three days to meet deadlines, and sometimes couldn't even remember drawing the panels she later read in the monthly manga magazine Sailor Moon was published in. In other words, this thing doesn't just read like a rough first draft - it is one. Makes the anime even more impressive, and no wonder it deviates from the manga storyline so much. That was probably not even by design, if all you have to work with are storyboards and a hastily slapped together final issue that you can't even ask questions about because she doesn't remember drawing them. If she really was this overworked and still had to make time for interviews and cons and what not, yeah, no wonder she was cranky all the time and complained about everything.

Ah, just reading the part in the manga where they go to Ami's place and whack a diamond with the LEGENDARY SACRED SWORD. Minako actually stratches Ami's marble floor. Not bad. Ami says not to worry about either the scratch in her marble floor or the diamond they just destroyed because her mother has "loads" of them anyway. Gee, a diamond that size... talking about at least a high five figure value here, if not six figures. Not bad, I mean, I guess being a doctor rakes in some sweet cash, but if you can be that blase about trashing a ring that valuable then Ami's mother probably also has a private jet around. Why is Ami going to a public school again? Hey, perhaps that's who Haruka's and Michiru's mystery sponsor is.

@Bartimaeus more talk about Steven Moon S - The musical. I'm confused why you guys all believe that the fuzzy cute animal that doesn't move its mouth when it talks and has unblinking red eyes could possibly be up to no good. Mindboggling!

Was Usagi in the finale really as bad as Shinji sounds, or is that NGE trauma and Usagi-hate by proxy?

Very quick post, the original Japanese seiyu for Shinji was Megumi Ogata. Or in other words, Haruka / Sailor Uranus.

That sounds like I really should finish watching NGE.

On a scale from "extremely" to "unimaginably", just how much does this song rock? Dear god, how do they keep a straight face playing this?

Steven Universe, the musical movie.

To be honest, no. Not even in the German dub which, as I stated a couple of times now, makes Rei even meaner to Usagi. Not just mean, downright insulting at times. Incidentially, in the manga, it's Luna that questions Usagi's fitness as Guardian, she tells Minako and Artemis (through the arcade machine) that Usagi is essentially only half as good as the other three, and Rei more or less calls her stupid. I also know a couple of actual people who are constantly fighting like that but are otherwise inseperable, so it's not completely unrealistic, both in sibling relations as well as romantic ones (depends a bit on how you want to see their squabbling and love for each other) and even friendships. The Japanese version, provided the subs were halfway accurately translated, takes a lot out of the edge by the way Rei addresses Usagi. She does that without any honorific, and it's not done to insult Usagi. And that's just the talking, never mind the concern the two show for each other whenever something bad happens. There's a reason for Michiru's observation about the two, even though I kind of disagree with reading romantic subtext into it, but that's just me. I've said that before, with Rei's lonely upbringing and her general lot in life living alone with her grandfather in a Shinto shrine, being an outsider because her abilities scare people, it makes enough sense for her to latch onto Usagi as a sister that she never had, and it's perfectly normal to be both more forgiving and more critical of our loved ones than of other people, contradictory as that may seem at a first glance. Usagi and Rei may be the characters I can relate to the least, but they're great. It took me a long while to really appreciate Usagi and even though I felt really bad for her in R and wanted her to be happy, she was mostly annoying up until S, and never mind SuperS. The rest I chalk up to early installment weirdness. Like Rei being Minako at her school festival, or her pinching Ami to get her to back down. Or the transformation pen, or Ami slapping Usagi, and a couple of other things that happen here and here. It's par for the course for a show that was written by the seat of the writer's pants, trying to adapt rushed material and probably barely ever could get script reviews and revisions done. In a way it's a wonder it turned out to be as good as it did. I love it, warts and all, and I'll probably never get tired of talking about Sailor Moon. In some ways the manga is in the middle between the first anime and Crystal. Take Makoto's introduction, in both Crystal and the manga Makoto saves Usagi from being run over by car, in the anime she saves her from three almost JoJo-esque gym gods (hehehehe) trying to intimidate and shake her down. Anime and manga Makoto is friendly to Usagi after saving her, Crystal Makoto looks stern and tells her to pay more attention. In both the manga and Crystal a teacher is accosting Makoto for not wearing the proper uniform, Crystal Makoto angrily rebuffs that, while manga Makoto just tells the teacher that the school has no uniforms that fit her. Manga Makoto also needs to defend her hair color because the teacher thinks she dyed it. In all the versions Umino is spreading rumors of Makoto. In the manga, the reader can probably guess by now that they're not true, in the anime we already know they're false, because even though Makoto is super strong, she doesn't fight without reason, and in Crystal... in Crystal Umino seems to have a point, given her belligerent behaviour so far (even though she saved Usagi). Both Crystal and the manga have her throw back a baseball super hard that lands near her in a somewhat jerky-looking move o demonstrate her super-strength that naturally isn't in the anime because why bother, she's already beaten up two gym gods. So that long excourse is there to show that Crystal doesn't just look bad, but made weird adaptational choices where they would not have been necessary and left things unadapted that should have been (namely all the silly narrating of things that happen on the screen). The manga sure feels rushed, because it was. Hey look, it's almost another essay...

It's fair to say that her being mean to Usagi wasn't such a big devation from the source material, even if the 90ies anime probably blew it out of proportion. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that fans of the manga that complain about certain 90ies anime things are wrong. Although, I guess that's going to be dropped now. Minako showed up, and they all got her memories back. If Crystal stuck as much to the manga as it appears to have done, the rest of the acts are going to be about Usagi and Mamoru melodrama, ridiculous moon bases and a murder-suicide attempt. Still, much to my surprise I'll have to admit that the manga is definitely better than Crystal. It's not good by any stretch, outside of the character introduction chapters, but it's slightly better. But... the real barn burners are coming up now that everyone is assembled and the "story" can kick into overdrive.

Well, I can relay any first hand experience soonish, I guess, what with me now really reading the blasted thing. Fun fact: So far it's better than Crystal*, because certain things just work better in a comic than on screen, and even if everything looks and feels rushed, the manga's pretty in its own way. Very much unlike that Crystal atrocity. Except... everyone looks the same. The only way you can tell the girls apart is by looking at what they're wearing and their hair. Guess that's one way to explain why nobody but Usagi and Ami wear the Juban middle school uniform. *Faint praise, anyway. The stupid plot beats are obviously still here. I'm really looking forward to seeing Usagi stab herself, or the Moon supercomputer that's still running after everything was blasted apart. That's going to be hilarious, because not only does the computer still work, there are also ruins on the moon... and two arcs later it was shown that Sailor Saturn cleansed the ruins of the Moon kingdom and the ruins of Earth by casting DEATH REBORN REVOLUTION on it all. That's some move there, Hotaru. I guess you missed something. edit: Rei's a real winner in the manga too. Comes across a video rental place called "DARK" and monologues: "Dark? I have a bad feeling about this place." Well no **** Deanna, you're onto something here, I think. edit 2: I've been reading comments about how anime Rei is way too mean to Usagi, but her manga incarnation isn't nice to her either. At least not before she's revealed as Princess Serenity. Usagi even complains about Rei being mean to her. Snort.

That's going to be so much worse that just her using the Moon Rod. About Shinji, well, yeah. I saw the first two episodes of NGE. So nothing changes with him in the other episodes? Heh.

I just realized something. On its own, when taken out of context of the badly paced complete finale, the final episode of Sailor Moon is one of the best final episodes of any animated series or TV show that I've seen, and while I'm totally fanboying this anime to the point where the pacing of the five episodes before that doesn't really bother me all that much, I think that opinion isn't entirely born out of being a stan. Would I have liked a better paced finale, and maybe an episode or two wrapping everything up, like in S? Yes, probably. Would it have been nice if that finale as a whole felt planned out and revised a couple of times like the filler arc in the beginning was? Oh, you bet. Was there ever any chance for that to happen? Probably... not. The final storyline episodes feel a bit like they were a first draft that got shot (well, animated) because time ran out (just like in SuperS). That makes the whole matter worse, huh? The fact that the Nehelenia filler arc, regardless of the questionable creative decision to immediately revive a villain that was just defeated, which was probably planned, written and revised before it even went into production prior to airing the final season, feels like the only time a longer stretch of story episodes is actually really... quite good, instead of just there. All the other story beats that are good (more or less) are the mid season two or three parters. Especially the one where Minako goes full cray cray and works hard on being attacked by the Death Busters. Ah, well. That's about all, I think. Time to let it rest for a while now. Should probably go watch that SU movie.

Those last five episodes of Sailor Moon before the final one really bothered you, huh?

What bad thing could he possibly be up to? Seriously...

Manga!Ami has a crush on Motoki too. I'm guessing Motoki is really hot stuff, huh? No wonder Reika is jealous as hell all the time.