majestic

Horsey does kiss Chibi-Usa early in the manga, so that puts it out of "faint" immediately - but hey, maybe the writers had more sense this time around. On the other hand, maybe it's not that weird when the Helios reveal comes earlier. Or maybe they skip the horse part entirely. That would be something. By the way, I was looking for a document today, and incidentially came across this in one of my archive boxes for old stuff I don't want to throw away: Too bad it got damaged, and someone scotch taped on it. And that statement comes with you not having seen the two really awful scenes in the first two episodes that really drive home how terrible of an experience that was (unless you didn't skip them, but I think you did, after all you watched them after the season, I think... or in the middle, anyway, long after you started skipping scenes). The other scenes were a lot less, uhm, I don't want to say rapey because they always were, but the assault victims at least mercifully passed out in later scenes. Except for Minako, she just kicked their butts. But that was to be expected. It's even worse because they actively mentioned being targetted by the Death Busters as a terrible experience that Minako should really not try to go through just so she doesn't feel left out, and that was "only" a regular physical attack with some pain attached. It would have been better if they had just dropped the entire idea, but if it has to be in there, then for the love of god do something worthwhile with it. So it's the SyFy of animation. I'm still stuper salty that they cancelled Dark Matter and let Killjoys go on. DM hat the better ratings, better reviews, everything, but cost more to make. Good job. Don't you mean rose? That's because deep in your heart, you know you want to watch Sailor Moon with us. I have faith, faith in the fragment of interest that is still there, in your heart! Yeah, so quoting Usagi here doesn't make total sense, but anyway...

That's glorious, whatever it is... "God, can you go bomb an abortion clinic or something?" "When that wonderful president finishes stacking the Supreme Court we won't have to."

@ShadySands you kind of keep reading this thread and liking random things whenever I mention Star Trek. How about you take a break from watching bad YA stuff on Netflix and join us in watching Sailor Moon, which was made for... uhm, wait. Don't let that talk about rape gangs and horse pedophilia fool you, that's just a small part of it. Really! *cough*

25% for each ticket, but I guess what you actually want is the probability of not winning at all with 4 lottery tickets with a 1:4 chance, which is 0.75^4, so you have a roughly 31% (bit more) probability of having all four lottery draws come up as a bust. On average, you'd win at least once in 69 out of 100 tries when having four lottery tickets. The probability of winning with all four tickets in a row is 1 : 256 (1/4^4). That means for your attack scenario, you'd miss the first hit in 20% of all cases, and the second hit in 50% of all cases. In the end, your total probability of missing both attacks is 10% - seems logical enough, right? You miss 2 in 10 on your first try, and on average have a 50% chance of hiting the second one. Likewise the probabiltity for hitting with both attacks is only 40%. This assumes perfect random number generation, of course.

Funny you mention that. English accents don't bother me at all, but German ones often do, the further they move away from what I'm used to, the more uncomfortable they become to listen to, even if there are just slight traces of it, like with Usagi's first voice actress in the German dub.

Oi, Molly is bad. And Nephrite's civilian name is Max? It's almost as is if the first season finale and the filler arcs were planned a bit better than the others. That's a given for the filler arcs, obviously. I've also wondered why there's a filler arc particularily for R and Sailor Starts, and not S or SuperS, and the one reason I can come up with is because both Black Moon and Stars remove main characters right from the beginning. Which I initially thought was made just to spite the anime team, but now I'm convinced she did that to reduce the amount of work she has to do (or rather, the amount of characters she has to write dialogue for). It's not just shows. Stephen King, and his German equivalent Wolfgang Hohlbein both made successful careers out of writing fun to read books with mostly lousy or lackluster endings. The cluster just hugging itself was indeed a bit anticlimactic, but that's endemic to this type of situation, I think. Once you show all conventional means to be exhausted, all you can come up with is fantastic or improbable, and that's just hard to do in a satisfying manner. To be honest I didn't want to include any of the episode with the Trio where they go after one of our protagonists. Minako's episode was fun, Ami's had nice moments. Rei's was terrible, and Makoto... uhm, no, not talking about that. By now we already know that I thought it was a great episode for various reasons, but I can't into Makoto torture porn and I can't recommend an episode that is just cruel with no real point - this isn't Outer Limits, it's Sailor Moon. Maybe if they spent a couple of episodes dealing with their experiences, then it could have been worthwhile, but as it stands, the season even giving the Amazon Quartett a different way to check out dream mirrors, oh boy. Talk about making things worse in hindsight. Yeah, speaking of Helios... Uhm: Well, that's one way to say that it's two films about a nine year old girl falling in love with a winged unicorn who can't really decide between wanting her father or some hunky horse lovin'. I wonder if one of the two films will include the scene where she's watching her mother, wishing for an equally beautiful body so that the above mentioned father would finally find her sexually attractive. All that and more, coming to Netflix soon! Yaaaaaaaaaaaay. Spoiler: This is so bad. People are going to watch this on Netflix and will never again check out anything Sailor Moon related. Out of all possible things Sailor Moon to come to Netflix, this will easily be the worst. The WORST. Even if it turns out to be a good adaptation, has some good animation for a change (though I doubt that) or better writing, no matter what you do, even if you change half the storyline from the manga, at the end of the day it will be a little nine year old with pink hair pining after a horse. I, what, how, why. As if it wasn't bad enough to be ridiculed for liking Sailor Moon as a teenager because it's a girl show, soon you won't even be able to mention it because people will think it's some weird horse eroge anime. I've been checking out various anime "providers" if there's a fan-sub version of Sailor Moon Eternal to be found once per week or so. Looks like there still isn't, the scene really failed on this one. Not even one with low quality video and audio. At least I can stop trying. There's no point, I'll see it soon. I guess that means I can even watch it with the Viz voice cast, so that's... something, at least. Gotta look at the silver linings there.

Who knows, I mean, look at this hairdo, there's a little black criminal just waiting to burst out. /racism reference to the BLM discussion in the political thread It's pretty funny, but was also a major disservice to the anime, I'd say. Dub changes can be really interesting, I think we've talked about that before, there are films with Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill that were turned into comedies (they were always supposed to be funny or parodies, but not like that) in the German dubs, and they were hugely popular. There's a fun anecdote where one of the directors once said they had to reshoot a scene with a little stunt several times, and the one time the stunt landed properly the actor involved forgot his lines, and started to cry. Director supposedly asked why, and the actor said: After all these tries, now I forgot what I was supposed to say. And the director just went: "Don't worry, the Germans will fix this in the dub." To explain that a bit, these movies were actually shot without having any given original script and dialogue language. They always featured actors that only spoke either German, Italian, English or Spanish and often couldn't even talk to each other. So they just had stand-in dialogue, even the Italian "originals" were mostly dubbed. I have no idea how the films turned out to be this good, considering what a mess producing them must have been. It's another one of the manga holdovers that should have just been left out. The are suspicious of the newcomers in the manga up until they realize they are fellow Sailor Senshi too (and not of the bad kind). Like everything that happens as story beat in the manga, Sailor Stars carried that with them until the very end. There are two times the writers were able to make up their own storylines - the R and Sailor Stars filler arcs. The R filler arc has a one and a half episode resolution that wasn't bad, but not really anything special either, even though it was - and that is something I remember really clearly - the very thing that really got me into Sailor Moon back when it first aired. Back then I expected that a superhero show, even if it were all girls, would just burn down the tree and be done with it. But no, they just loved it away. In a way, while I really fell in love with the show again, the parts that I thought were the best kind of weren't any more, i.e. Hotaru's arc in S and the filler arc of R. The Stars filler arc was pretty good, yes, and not just because it followed SuperS. It was also written by the same two guys that made most of the final six episodes. It looks like every single season past the first one had the same problem at the end - being tethered to the source material and the writers doing what they possibly could do with it, with middling success. I wonder if there were contractual obligations to fulfill. I can see Toei demanding that every epsiode has a fight scene because studios are sometimes like that, but I don't see why they thought they'd need to stick with the manga storyline framework and try to make it work in every season past the first one. S and Stars deviated relatively much anyway, but the holdovers are still there and drag it down. Or maybe they were just scared of the bad rep because the changes didn't sit so well with Ms. Takeuchi. I think repeating the themes is there because it was, at least, supposed to be a show for kids and (early) teenagers. I'm not sure it was at any point past R, but that's a different topic. Season one's finale is objectively, and that means as objective as you can get, the best. It's the most concise, doesn't suffer from pacing issues, gives everyone something suitably impressive to do - even Ami, I mean, don't get me wrong, her defensive power was often the only reason they managed to get out of problematic situations, but making her do something important on her own that was still completely in character for her was pretty great - and has some much needed and major character development for Usagi. S had the Professor, but his storyline and the actual story ending wasn't part of any character examination or had themes, they were just a backdrop against which the philosophical conflinct between the Outer and the Inner Guardians played out. It made the season much stronger overall, but it left the finale without the same impact that the first or last season had. Sailor Stars feels like they tried to have a big, interesting ending with a much larger thematic exploration than usual, but it didn't work out so well due to pacing issues and the disjointed nature of them teleporting around hither and tither, and everyone dying on their own was in there to make a point about working together, but it felt so... forced and contrived. I really liked the final episode, so I'd agree and put it down as the second best ending of a season. As far as series endings go, this wasn't so bad. KP is right, a nice breather episode and better pacing before would have been good, but can't have everything. As far as crowning moments go, for longer running shows, I'm more than happy with endings that aren't completely terrible. There's no need for them to be the crowning achievement. It's great when it happens, but really rare anyway. SU spoilers: I remember we were talking about making top episode lists after being finished watching Sailor Moon, and then wondering how I would even come up with a top 5 episodes of SuperS. There are three episodes I can come up with that were good, for different reasons, and a few half-decent ones that wouldn't even be on a short list in any other season. There's the dentist episode, which was really fun and found something where Usagi and Chibi-Usa worked together in a non-obnoxious way that very much felt like a season one episode without forgoing characer development or adding inane amounts of fighting over Mamoru or anything else, and Ami's and Rei's power ups. The half decent ones would be either the maturity festival episode or the other power up episode, or maybe one of the first few. They're all not quite there. I know you have some problems with Minako being completely crappy to Makoto (why is it really always Makoto? ), but that could have been a nice episode. SuperS has also some funny episodes that would otherwise not be so bad, but simply being in SuperS made them horrible. Like the episode where the girls are trying to find out who Chibi-Usa's boyfriend is. That would have been much funnier without the albino rhino. That scene where Mamoru and Chibi-Usa are in the restaurant and everyone's creeping ever closer under cover was pretty nice. Kind of like that totally insane shot of everyone hiding behind the waitress with Rei looking for them.

That's so true, we can sit here and debate how bad the relationship between Mamoru and Usagi is or isn't, how it was intended, what was changed over from the source material and whatever else about it, but one thing is for sure: That final scene sure deserved to be done by someone else. It's even weirder because, while the character models are the same, the prior scene on the rooftop looks much better with its moody sunset lighting. I still remember the subtitles for the scene where the girls talk about how Usagi never told them anything, and Rei - in our subs - says: "I can't believe that she never said anything, I feel horrible!" and I just checked the dub, Rei is wondering why Usagi didn't confide in her sooner (not them, her specifically). Sure would be interesting to see what the original Japanese said, but from what I recall "That, ..." is a more common turn of phrase with different meanings based on inflection and context. Subs (and by extension, some dubs) sometimes really are an issue when they become too literal. "What am I not getting, Ami?" If that scene hadn't made me laugh the way it did I would complain about it. I mean, Rei outright tells her to tell Seiya she's not interested. Usagi can be airheaded and obtuse at times, but not like this. Haruka and Michiru should have wished for writers that wouldn't have needed their forced conflict to make the ending work. SU stuff: Regarding that why and how did Galaxia know Mamoru would have a Star Seed but not the others, I think that was supposed to be because he has Earth's Star Seed. Not entirely sure, it's just a plot point that wasn't really thought through... like so many of them. What did you think of the finale compared to other season endings? I'm disappointed, not even a single tree in this painting. Just TREE on the license plate doesn't cut it. Show ran just past midnight here. I used to stay up super late just to watch it when I was younger. Bob Ross is just awesome. So many episodes, and he makes the same "beating the devil out of the brush" joke every time and laughs about it. 😄

Guilty as charged. Even when I'm doing a rewatch of something I like, I never skip bad episodes. Not even Move Along Home or Let He Who Is Without Sin... when rewatching DS9. I might leave the series lying around for a while before getting back to it, but skipping an episode? Dear god, no. Which is also why I'm not sure I can skip SuperS, should I ever watch Sailor Moon again. I might talk about it, but actually doing it? Uh, that's hard. Oh, don't mistake me posting half a ton about what she's saying as not being cool with it. I find it amusing. I also went over the phone call ten times and I'm still not sure what the second half of the conversation is supposed to be about. I even looked online for transcripts, but at best they say "unintelligible heavily accented German", it's just the German equivalent of having fun with Japanese Engrish (which was very funny in the Sailor Moon S episode with Mamoru's supposedly English older friend, who opened the conversation by saying HERRO or something like it).

It's the only thing available on Netflix where I watched NGE, so that's good to hear. I noticed that they also re-dubbed the German version of Neon Genesis Evangelion. That might have bothered me too if I had ever seen it with the original dub and tried the new one (I watched with subs now). Asuka has one more funny scene earlier where her stepmother called from Germany and she talked to her on the phone. Sounds like they stopped bothering to coach the VA on pronunciation or the EVA startup sequence worked better because it wasn't supposed to be a natural sounding conversation. I also doubt Asuka would say "Auf* Wiederhören!" ("until we hear from each other again" or more literally "upon rehearing**") to her stepmother before hanging up, even if she doesn't like her. That's a formal goodbye that you would use in a professional conversation at work or after talking to someone you don't know. It's the telephone call (or radio) equivalent of saying Auf Wiedersehen, which replaces sehen = to see by hören = to hear. *Auf is a preposition that is usually translated as at, upon, to or onto, depending on the context. If it's not used as preposition, it means up or on (mostly on). **technically im Wiederhören or beim Wiederhören would be the grammatical German progressive form, but German progressive expressions are so awkward that nobody really uses them (certainly not in speech, sometimes in writing - but for speech, if it is ever used at all, interestingly enough, a progressive form is used that is grammatically wrong... which is kind of hilarious when you think about it - precisely because the correct form is incredibly stilted and sounds wrong), and most of the time ongoing activities are expressed in a lexicalic manner and inferred from context, i.e. to say I have been working all day we'd usually not use "Ich war den ganzen Tag beim Arbeiten" but would say "I habe den ganzen Tag gearbeitet" - I have worked all day. Nevertheless, Wiederhören is what you would use to express an ongoing activity, hence the -ing. Well, no wonder Mark Twain once said that you can learn English in 30 hours, French in 30 days, and German in 30 years. I absolutely adore them, really. Especially if they leave plot points hanging that were somewhat interesting. Doubly so if they don't resolve anything. Bah.

More complaining and some spoilers for Stargate SG-1 ahead.. Still, I guess I'm going to watch EVANGELION DEATH (TRUE)² first, recap or no. That's the proper order of things. Yes, yes. But not today. Well, maybe today, but not now, anyway.

That certainly was something, but not what I expected. I've known that the end of NGE was controversial and somewhat surrealistic, so much that "Gainax Ending" has become the anime synonym for Lynchian endings in movies. However, I expected an ending, to be honest. Something that resolves plot threads in an unexpected way that initially seems to make no sense, like the ending of Mulholland Drive, for instance. But that's not at all what this was. It wasn't an ending to anything, it was a two part episode exploring the character themes present in the anime where Shinji overcomes his own insecurities, levels up and puts some character points into self esteem, what with the metaphorical cracking of the egg (world) at the end and everyone congratulating him, with a prior solipsist detour and an exploration of its varieties (which I won't comment on, because I have a very low opinion of solipsism). And even that is somewhat unfinished, because Rei III and Asuka don't get their second parts (as teased by episode 25), although we can assume they manage too, they're functionally the same as Shinji both in and for this particular character exploration anyway, so a repeat would have been pointless. Level ups for everyone! Yay! Uhm. Great. Here's the real kicker, that was a really good two parter episode, but a complete failure as an ending. F, no points for effort. Time to watch the movies, I guess, even if I can't shake the feeling that they'll just double down on the nonsense and will claim "hey our last two episodes were really intended as the ending, because the Human Instrumentality Project has begun now and that is its result!"

It was. That entire episode wasn't so bad, I mean, except for the obvious problems of SuperS. Usagi being super annoyed about food (that was the lemon pie episode, right?) is even something that's in character for her. Her reaction to it was completely overblown, but what can you do. Not sure what the dub had there as dialogue, but the subs mentioned baby and or very young Usagi pictures specifically. Chibi-Usa should know that all of those would be back home. I mean, in her home time. It's not like she left Tokyo. Nobody leaves Tokyo in Sailor Moon, except for Minako. Or so she claimed, at least. edit: Well, unless when going to strange enemy dimensions or the North Pole, but those don't count, right?

Good thing you looked at Germany. That's at least much larger than Austria... uhm. *blink* Every frame nation is so dense, there's so much going on. Hehehe. But yes, that's true. We're more people in a much smaller area, but nowhere near as bad as certain East Asian countries. Considering how long it took me to realize that Asuka and Shinji have exactly the same problem with diametrically opposed coping mechanisms I'm kind of afraid I'll be left sitting bereft and in bewilderment of what's going on. At least I'll finally know what the memes were all about. I hope. That is one of the weirdest and quite frankly worst non-assault/non-pedophile scene in SuperS. First of all, given all the time Chibi-Usa was around, there should be plenty of pictures of her, then she has the faked pictures (although Luna claims they aren't fake, I think) and Chibi-Usa knows she's from the future and there wouldn't be any baby pictures of her, so why the hell is she wondering why there are none? Why, SuperS, why? Why not make at least one script revision? Seriously. What were you, a 90ies attempt at making Star Trek: Discovery?

Well, that was wrong. On the bright side, I wrestled access to the TV and my Switch away from my nephew, whose school opened as of today. Which means more JoJo to come soon. I hope. I mean, I already saw the Cyborg, that was pretty much as glorious as I expected it to be.

But that is hard and requires effort. I want to unabashedly stan this anime and be as obnoxious as the people who do the same for the manga. Hey, now that you mention it, then we could cut out Black Lady entirely (note for any other readers of this post who have not watched Sailor Moon: "Black Lady" is not what you think it is), and that's a plus in of itself, . I was going to say no at first, but then I realized that Black Lady never really worked in the anime as much as she did in the manga - creepy stuff aside. Following Death Phantom makes sense insofar as Chibi-Usa wants nothing more than to finally grow up, then she blames herself for essentially ruining the world, killing her father and encasing her mother in a crystal sarcophagus. In the anime her age is never talked about, only that she blames herself for the destruction the Black Moon wrought on Earth (or Crystal Tokyo). That's what the writers might even do if they had known where this went beforehand. You could replace the breakup plot with showing that Usagi matured a bit with her confrontation at the end of the first season, remove the (co)dependency issue, make everyone behave nicely to Chibi-Usa in the way they should while ALSO removing all the insane Electra complex stuff that is going on, then just cut Black Lady out and nothing of value would have been lost. Because DEATH PHANTOM works... or doesn't work, that depends a lot on how much you like evil energy beings that want to destroy everything (as I have learned, there are people who find these sort of villains clever and interesting, oh dear me), with or without Black Lady. In the context of an early 90ies Japanese animated series, given the circumstances and sensibilities of the aforementioned times, I'd - personally - find a racist issue to be "less" bad than a 9 year old in a grown up body that dominates the will of her father and turns him into her personal sex slave lover. In the same way I don't mind Uhura answering the space phone in Star Trek and think complaints about it are ridiculous. Especially in light of Star Trek: Enterprise that degraded the black guy on the crew to the token crewmember that's there but often doesn't even get lines to speak. That's not to say that I would have liked it, and I'd probably sit here and complain about it as much as I do with the problems of Haruka sexually assaulting Usagi in the manga. I... hope that's clear. Maybe I am just a racist. SU spoilers, KP click on your own peril. Also contains SM finale spoilers. But indeed, it's good to know that KP sees the similarities too. That makes Rebecca Sugar a fellow liker of Sailor Stars, which is fine by me. Maybe we should really update the Steven Universe wiki to include that. You know what? I'm almost done with Neon Genesis Evangelion (the original anime, that is) and Shinji has finally done something that made me really dislike him: Not even trying to console Misato after Ryoji's death. Because hey, Shinji, you're right that it wouldn't help any, but for the love of god, at least try. That is what matters, you waste of space. I'm also pretty confident that Usagi would never do that. Anyway, why do all these special organisations and secret societies have German names, other than "German sounds ominous"? Wait, I think I just answered my own question. Thanks to the Netflix episode blurbs that I've seen I also expect Asuka will die soon. Why else would the description say that a fifth child will come to take over EVA-02. Good job Netflix. Sometimes the timeframes invovled are really scary. To think that there was a time where I followed Stargate SG-1 for 10 years is insane. On the other hand, the time investment is what keeps me away from watching shows that I think I would like, like Supernatural, which is on like its 200th season by now. Character attachment isn't a factor for me when binging. Keeping the episodes apart is, but that is or isn't an issue. It kind of is when you spoil someone who cares for spoilers. I mentioned it before, I think, but what I miss about weekly releases isn't the weekly release as much as the social component involved, and that's something that kind of died out for me anyway now that the family is scattered about a bit more than it used to be. Gone, just like our evening card games. I miss those too. I wonder about that sometimes. I have really fond memories of certain things I've watched as a kid, but when it comes to anime in particular, these were always daily shows. Because usually they were bought when they had finished their run, dubbed German and then aired with copius reruns for a while. It certainly made the shows look a lot longer than they actually were. Bismark for instance, in my memories that was a sprawling show that took AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGES to finish, and in reality it was like 50 episodes long. It was also the first space western I've seen.

Very quick reply because I need to try and catch some sleep now (more on the other points later): You know what's really funny? If Chibi-Usa turning into Black Lady was some blackface related racist story beat it would have been less bad than what it actually was (at least in the manga/Crystal).

I'm always uncertain if I shoud let how much I am nowadays in awe of how good the anime was in spite of the many issues they must have ran into while adapting the manga factor into talking about the more problematic bits of the show or not. Putting Usagi in a situation where Mamoru breaks up with her because he seemingly doesn't think their past life matters enough to be carried over to the present (which is a perfectly understandable sentiment) so that her almost hate filled jealousy of a nine year old girl that is both suffering from trauma and all alone has at least some basis in reality and doesn't make her completely unlikable like the manga does - was that a good idea now, with the source material in mind, or was that bad because it establishes Usagi's emotional co-dependence on Mamoru? Obviously it's bad insofar as it makes their relationship worse. But was it overall better to have her be more likeable, at least until Toei screwed everything up in SuperS? I'd like to say probably, but I'm really not sure. Looking back at this the best solution would have probably been to make Usagi not behave like that towards Chibi-Usa at all, but how would you then justify the way the season ends? What reason would Chibi-Usa have to follow DEATH PHANTOM and become BRACK RADY if Usagi behaved like she should have towards her? It's even worse when you realize that Usagi treats her enemies better than Chibi-Usa. In the manga, that's not an issue, for anime Usagi it sure would have been. Should I be critical of that, or should I consider it excused as the best possible course of action given the circumstances? I... don't know. It's fine with me too. It's a concept that wasn't truly thought through anyway. Much of this comes from Naoko Takeuchi not expecting to make more than one story arc in Sailor Moon. That Chibi-Usa shows up at the end of the first arc was scribbled in to have a sequel hook. I might not have liked the initial arc of the manga, but it was a complete story that could have stood on its own. Like the first season of the anime. It could have ended the way it did, with the hopeful note of the two cats that they might reestablish their friendships even without their memories. Could have also cut the end a bit to make it needlessly cruel, imagine if the entire anime would have ended directly after Usagi's ending narration without showing that her wish came true. Outer Limits couldn't have done that better. When you look at the episodes that he wrote for SuperS there is one thing that stands out. They're all without the incredibly stupid jealousy Usagi exhibits towards anyone who even looks at Mamoru (although she gets irritated by Fish-Eye the first time she sees him make a move on Mamoru she later just helps him, being confident that he's no match for her - not sure where she got that confidence from in this season, but uhm, yeah). He's also credited with the season development, and I think some parts of Sailor Stars might have been picked up from his story development documents. He wrote that episode and this scene after... making the Fish-Eye episode where he wants the little football player to score a goal inside of him. Who wouldn't be frustrated as hell after having to write that? While I'm not, I can understand the sentiment. I'd still say Sailor Moon holds up regardless, simply because its cast is different from what you'd expect from an anime like that, but I'm pretty sure by now that you'd most likely wouldn't enjoy it in the same way we did. Or I did, at least.

There is a Sailor Moon version like this that came out in 2014 called Sailor Moon Crystal. It's Sailor Moon completely free of all filler parts. It was panned by critics and fans alike. It's bad with a capital B - and that is before we even get to the atrocious looks of the anime. Ugh. What a dumpster fire. I don't know what you would expect from a super sentai / magical girl crossover shojo anime. And no, the scenes are usually a couple of minutes each. Like this one, where the Minako is looking expectantly gif is from: Also, for everyone else, I just realized that this is I think the only shot we get from Makoto's home in the show. See, her liking plants in SuperS isn't totally out of the blue because it was forgotten to be mentioned in R. I mean... they did forget to talk about it, but Makoto's room sure is full of plants.

For real now? There was a proposed sequel that's been stuck in development hell for a while.

I'll address these both in one paragraph, makes it easier and more concise. First of all, let me ask you a question, would you really have liked more focus on Mamoru and Usagi as a couple? Because that is what Crystal does, and you know how that ended. There's a possibility that the original anime writers could have made something out of it, something interesting, but in reality they were barely capable of juggling all the threads and giving all the characters something to do. It's the fundamental limitation of writing an ensemble cast show by the seat of your pants. It's a bit clear that the anime writers dropped the ball on this one. While - and I've said that time and again, like a broken record - the source material isn't free of problems, it does make a few things a lot clearer. Mamoru isn't "mean" to Usagi in the way he is in the anime, not beyond their first meeting, after which he is just mysterious and calls her bun-head when they meet. Usagi is also immediately attracted to him. Mamoru is too, and there are the problematic bits of this, while Usagi tells the reader that ("Why is my heart pounding?"), Mamoru gets to show his affection by being a complete creep. The thing here is, it is kind of excusable for an early 90ies work. The tropes used are still in play today, you just need to read any of the romantic young adult literature that's out there, or worse, adult "romantic" literature. Talking about these would be a book, not just a longer post, in itself. There are apparently still a lot of men and women who think that certain gestures are romantic instead of creepy as long as there's enough attraction between the people involved. Now for the together because they were together. In the manga, the girls also get their memories of their former lifetime back. Presumably that happens in the anime too, but they never really talk about it. Crystal adds a certain non-canon part to this that was Naoko Takeuchi's original intention that never really manifested because the manga's creation was under similar time constraints that the anime was, namely that Endymion's entourage were paired off with Serenity's. In Crystal, at least, the girls not only get their memories back, but also their past feelings with them. In the manga, while that only happens to Mamoru and Usagi because the past romance was left out (and later changed for Rei to always have included a vow of dedication and celibacy to Serenity) it's at least very clear that their feelings for each other simply resume from where they left off in the past. If we take the anime on its own, it's not at all clear. In the end, it looks like they stick together because they're supposed to, especially when you factor SuperS in. Which I would really argue that, beyond what happens in the power up episodes (for character development reasons), we really should not. The scene KP mentioned where Mamoru looks visibly uncomfortable justifying his relationship with Usagi to Fish-Eye were incredibly uncomfortable to watch, because there is no reason at all to deal with Usagi's nonsense in SuperS. I think that the scene, written by Yoji Enokido*, who also worked on Neon Genesis Evangelion and Revolutionary Girl Utena, is also there to make Mamoru his AND the audience's stand in that is left in bewilderment at what they're actually having to write and watch in this season. Mamoru doesn't know why he's in a relationship with Usagi at this point any more than we, the audience, know why we're watching this dumpster fire, Mr. Enokido doesn't know why he's writing this (and ends up quitting at Toei). Who knows, maybe it really is love, but it really also is because it is love carried over from the distant past. *Added for emphasis insofar as that Sailor Moon usually isn't that subtle, unless in episodes written by him. Further explanation (just hidden in spoilers because post long enough, amirite?): When it comes to romance she's in the same boat as Ami, Rei or Minako, but she sure served as a punching bag at times. Minako's story with Alan is perhaps a tad more tragic, but not when viewed through Makoto's issues. Minako has issues too, but they're different. And then there's her SuperS assault episode which is easily the worst of the core cast's. Not the worst episode, but the worst experience any of the five have to go through (even though the trophy for having the most horrific assault scenes goes to Unazuki and Reika, oh boy).

Two paragraphs might not be an essay, but it sure starts like that. You've already thought their relationship through and came to what we could call an abstract. All that's missing is... a more detailed explanation and some citations. The only ones of the core cast that even have a relationship other than Mamoru and Usagi are Haruka and Michiru, and they clearly have a much better relationship than the former two, xenophobic as they are at times. Secondary characters, well, there are Usagi's parents and Naru with her Umino. They seem to be happy, but they are barely around after R. Rei with Mamoru was odd, and it always seemed Mamoru dated her because he had nothing else to do, not because he seemed to be very interested. For a while I thought Rei did that to annoy Usagi, but she seemed to have really cared, with her offering the temple for him to stay at after she ruined his room and being really annoyed at Usagi for her insinuating that she might try something (and also, like everything in this utter waste of a season, Diana goes and makes it SUPER CREEPY by offering to be Mamoru's chaperone, insinuating that she expects Rei to hop on top of him the moment they're alone). That leaves a lot of other side characters that never went anywhere, like Yuichiro, Makoto's Kenji and Ryo. I'm not sure why Ryo was dropped*. He knew Ami was Sailor Mercury, they shared common interests and Ami never expressed anything more for someone else. Except fangirling after composers and the Three Lights. I also just made the mistake of googling a bit for any other side characters I might have missed, and found a list of fan-shipped couples that could have been. I want to scour the Earth of people who think that any of the Inner Senshi in the anime are supposedly coded to be lesbian or have lesbian subtext (there is subtext in the manga for Rei and Minako). They don't and aren't guys, please stop that. Chibi-Usa has two potential relationships, one of which I don't want to talk about, and the other is Hotaru, which requires way too much mind-bending to make it work. I recently came up with an idea for one last examination post, and that's character arcs beyond Usagi. The short gist is that, if we allow the SuperS power up episodes to stand there while ignoring the rest of the season, we can reasonably conclude that almost everyone's arc is kind of closed... except Makoto and her senpai. It would have been really nice to give Makoto an episode in Sailor Stars where she finally frees herself of that. Sure it made for a fun running gag (and I answered one of my earlier questions if Makoto and Ami ever talked to each other alone - yes, they did, in early R when Makoto talks about how Ali/Ail could be the Moonlight Knight and Ami asks if he reminds her of her lost love. Makoto initially says no, but then says both love music, and Ami just falls over in embarrassment). So they do talk to each other, but they fail the Bechdel test in the process. So yes, two actual couples in the core cast, two side couples that don't really show up after R, and lots of "what if?"s. For a show about five girls fighting for love and justice, that's not much, is it? There is a non-canon manga side story where the daughters of Ami, Rei, Makoto and Minako try to befriend Usagi's second child. I'm going with that. Yep. *I mean, in-universe. It's perfectly understandable why the writers dropped that.

That's the clip I saw yesterday that made me comment on Usagi's voice in the DiC dub. Because it sure sounds like there's an age difference here, just between middle age Usagi and her teenage boytoy. Oh, and welcome to the Sailor Moon Essay Club. Here's your membership card, member #2. Shiny and gold, like Ami's. Heh.

But it's only like 60 hours (200 episodes á 24 minutes, net runtime between 18 and 20 minutes). Less if you skip all the stock footage. No, seriously, that's fair, in that case you'd probably really wouldn't enjoy it. The best parts of Sailor Moon are (in)arguably the slice of life parts where you just follow five funny teenage girls doing... a whole bunch of silly things, and sometimes they study, get turned into giant tennis balls, deal with children that (literally) fall from the sky and when they're not busy with anything else they save the world. Heh. Sounds like Puella Magi Madoka Magica could be more your thing, that's technically the same genre as Sailor Moon, just a completely different take - and it's short (12 20 minutes episodes or two 2h runtime films, depending on what you can stream or want to watch - films look better, but are the same thing). Whelp, we tried. Looks like the Sailor Moon club really is coming to an end. Sorry, can't help with that. Future Boy Conan looks like something I could easily have liked, but it never got a German dub, so it's really missing from my "seen in childhood" list of anime (that interestingly enough is really full of Takahata's work, but a lot less Miyazaki for some reason - guess not depressing enough for children? ). Nadia was on TV, but at a time when I was still watching Attack No. 1, so, yeah. Might be a good idea to put them both on the "to watch" list.

True, but we're also kind of trying to convince LC to watch, so psssht!