Earlier this year I had my somewhat chaotic post about my mind changing on the issue of comparing the Sailor Moon 90s Anime to the Manga/Crystal. I have now come to a somewhat more coherent conclusion.
The core overall story is always more solid in the Manga/Crystal, there is a lot less (in the writing) to nitpick and some of the emotions simply land much better. That said a lot of the "filler" you only get in the 90s Anime is still vital to why I'm a Sailor Moon fan in the first place and is material I still treasure to this day.
Sailor Moon is the founding franchise of an entire Sub-genre, the Magical Girl Warrior (Mahou Shoujo before Codename Sailor V were not warriors). Like a lot of franchises that started genres it doesn't always fit what is expected of said genre a generation later. Sailor Moon never feels like a Deconstruction of what the genre it created became the way some works do. All of what I consider the core elements of the Genre are in early Sailor Moon somewhere when you combine the Manga and the 90s Anime. But some of them are not a part of Sailor Moon as consistently as they are future examples of the genre.
That creates a scenario where something that is pure "filler" in the context of Sailor Moon could become important to the genre as whole. And I think that is exactly the case with the Doom Tree or Makai Tree arc which spans the first 13 episodes of Sailor Moon R.
This Arc is pure Filler, it's based on nothing in the Manga and what makes it arguably not skip-able in the context of the 90s Anime version of the story could have easily been solved by a single episode.
However as an installment of the Magical Girl Warrior sub-genre, it is the beginning of the redeeming of the villains being an important part of the formula. With Sailor Moon that was never really a thing in the Manga. And earlier in the Anime there was a redemption of sorts for Nephrite but that wasn't in any way prompted by any actions of the actual Magical Girls, it just sorta happened.
This would not be the last time Sailor Moon did it, we see something similar in the R movie and it would be done selectively with villains of the Black Moon Clan and the Death Busters. It is mainly in Sailor Stars where Sailor Moon really starts seeming like the rest of the genre in this regard. But we have no way of calculating how dependent these later developments were on the existence of the Doom Tree Saga.
Outside of Sailor Moon this was becoming standard for the Genre as early as Wedding Peach in 1995, the Makai Tree saga aired on Japanese television in the Spring of 1993. And the future lead writer and co-creator of Wedding Peach wrote 3 episodes of the Doom Tree saga.
So never underestimate the value of good filler.
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