30 Day Sailor Moon meme...Day 3
Mar. 3rd, 2011 02:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
azuriteSo it's Day 3/30 in my attempt at doing the 30 Days of Sailor Moon meme and it occurs to me that maybe I ought to make a tag exclusively for this? So I will, and I'll go re-tag the previous entries. All two of them. :P
See, saying "recently" implies I'm still active with the fandom and discovering new things. Part of me says "Yes, I am!" but Sailor Moon as an anime and a manga (and actually, as a live action AND as a musical, too) has been over for YEARS.
But all things considered, as you get older and look at those fandoms beloved as a child with new eyes, you can get a new respect for characters. If you look at my favorite characters based off of who stars in my fanfics, then it seems like Usagi is a pretty continuous favorite. And she is, in that she's the heroine of the show, the one we're meant to connect with the most, the "star," so to speak.
But I've recently liked a lot of Venus history and her stories; she's almost second in terms of development to Usagi, despite her being the last of the Inner Senshi to show up. But she has her own manga series (Code Name: Sailor V) and was active as a Senshi before any of the others (even Neptune, I think, who was canonically stated to have become active before Uranus).
It's funny, because her design would lead you to believe SHE was supposed to be Sailor Moon, rather than the odangoed girl we came to know as Usagi, Princess Serenity, and so forth. And maybe she was...at first. But Sailor V didn't get finished until after the Sailor Moon anime and manga concluded, so we didn't even know Venus' whole origin story until then. It was pretty interesting then, in the meanwhile, that we saw this new Senshi with crescent moons all over her, pretending to be the Princess, and manga fans at the time wouldn't have known any better. Wouldn't it have been such an interesting story if Venus HAD turned out to be "the" Princess after all? (As if being THE princess of Venus is worse off than being Princess of the Moon? That system is still a little weird. What about all the moons of the other planets? How many "Moon" Princesses would Saturn have, after all?)
I've got this Venus-centric fanfic on the backburner that I'd love to return to. See, Venus dealt with the Dark Kingdom (specifically, a division of them called the Dark Agency) and their gem-named soldiers before she ever met up with the other Senshi and dealt with Kunzite et. al. And there was that whole "forbidden romance with a mysterious stranger...who turns out to be a bad guy (but he wasn't always)!" thing, and that was a lot more alluring to me than the "destiny" Usagi and Mamoru had, after it got repetitive. The fanfic kind of explores that, because I feel Venus got kind of shafted in that respect. Not that "a happy ending" has to mean getting married, having a cute baby princess heir, and ruling the world. That might work fine for Usagi, but I don't see that as being suitable for Venus/Minako....
What's amazing about the Sailor Moon fandom as a whole is that you have such a wide cast of characters with such a variety of personalities, motivations, and possible "endings." Even with stories with defined beginnings, middles, and ends, there are still a lot of unresolved aspects, and that's where fanfic and meta come in. So the series may have ended in terms of new content, but fandom lives on, as this meme is proof of.
I love discussing different aspects of Sailor Moon, creating things for it, reminiscing about it...it's wonderful. That I can have different favorite characters from "then" to "now" is also pretty cool.
See, saying "recently" implies I'm still active with the fandom and discovering new things. Part of me says "Yes, I am!" but Sailor Moon as an anime and a manga (and actually, as a live action AND as a musical, too) has been over for YEARS.
But all things considered, as you get older and look at those fandoms beloved as a child with new eyes, you can get a new respect for characters. If you look at my favorite characters based off of who stars in my fanfics, then it seems like Usagi is a pretty continuous favorite. And she is, in that she's the heroine of the show, the one we're meant to connect with the most, the "star," so to speak.
But I've recently liked a lot of Venus history and her stories; she's almost second in terms of development to Usagi, despite her being the last of the Inner Senshi to show up. But she has her own manga series (Code Name: Sailor V) and was active as a Senshi before any of the others (even Neptune, I think, who was canonically stated to have become active before Uranus).
It's funny, because her design would lead you to believe SHE was supposed to be Sailor Moon, rather than the odangoed girl we came to know as Usagi, Princess Serenity, and so forth. And maybe she was...at first. But Sailor V didn't get finished until after the Sailor Moon anime and manga concluded, so we didn't even know Venus' whole origin story until then. It was pretty interesting then, in the meanwhile, that we saw this new Senshi with crescent moons all over her, pretending to be the Princess, and manga fans at the time wouldn't have known any better. Wouldn't it have been such an interesting story if Venus HAD turned out to be "the" Princess after all? (As if being THE princess of Venus is worse off than being Princess of the Moon? That system is still a little weird. What about all the moons of the other planets? How many "Moon" Princesses would Saturn have, after all?)
I've got this Venus-centric fanfic on the backburner that I'd love to return to. See, Venus dealt with the Dark Kingdom (specifically, a division of them called the Dark Agency) and their gem-named soldiers before she ever met up with the other Senshi and dealt with Kunzite et. al. And there was that whole "forbidden romance with a mysterious stranger...who turns out to be a bad guy (but he wasn't always)!" thing, and that was a lot more alluring to me than the "destiny" Usagi and Mamoru had, after it got repetitive. The fanfic kind of explores that, because I feel Venus got kind of shafted in that respect. Not that "a happy ending" has to mean getting married, having a cute baby princess heir, and ruling the world. That might work fine for Usagi, but I don't see that as being suitable for Venus/Minako....
What's amazing about the Sailor Moon fandom as a whole is that you have such a wide cast of characters with such a variety of personalities, motivations, and possible "endings." Even with stories with defined beginnings, middles, and ends, there are still a lot of unresolved aspects, and that's where fanfic and meta come in. So the series may have ended in terms of new content, but fandom lives on, as this meme is proof of.
I love discussing different aspects of Sailor Moon, creating things for it, reminiscing about it...it's wonderful. That I can have different favorite characters from "then" to "now" is also pretty cool.
