Why I'm excited for The Ribbon Hero.

I'm very conceptually a fan of the concept of taking something once big but since overshowed by what it's influenced and reimagining it in a way that draws on those more well known works it influenced.

This is what I would like to do with adaptation of various Paul Feval works.

The Ribbon Hero is looking to be a wonderful version of that concept.

Osamu Tezuka's Ribbon no Kisha/Princess Knight was a precursor of The Rose of Versailles and the entire Magical Girl Genre and Revolutionary Girl Utena and via them Steven Universe.

This movie coming to Netflix this August is looking to indeed in conversation all of that, and I'm thrilled. 

I don't have a problem with Anime LARPers.

I can absolutely relate to being conceptually a fan of something I can't engage with directly whether it's Video Game franchises with an interesting Lore but the actual Gameplay is unplayable for me personally like Mega Man and many RPGs and most Visual Novels.  Or foreign media that still lacks any kind of English Language localization like some Paul Feval novels, most adaptations of Feval Novels and similar French Pulpy Novels, La Seine no Hoshi or the Pre-School Days Overflow Games. 

However beyond that strict definition of a Fandom LARPer (someone literally presenting as a fan of media they haven't engaged with directly), LARPer as an insult in the Anime community is also becoming functionally synonymous with terms like Tourist. It's about what it means to say you like Anime as a concept. 

I should be clear that on the subject of terminology to me Anime Fan and Otaku and Weeb are not perfect synonyms. Though in the context of specifically Western Fandom discourse for the purpose of this discussion the nuanced distinction between Otaku and Weeb doesn't matter. An Anime Fan is anyone who is a fan of at least 5 distinctly different Anime and identifies as liking Anime. However an Otaku is someone who even when they don't like certain trends of Anime will never view them as things that should be gotten rid of, there is no room for Antishippers in Otakudom. 

I want new Anime Fans, or even long time ones who've remained very limited in what they've seen, to watch more and expand their horizons. But in my opinion talking down to those people, calling them culturally illiterate or tourists or LARPers is counterproductive, you're just making them hate the culture and pushing them away.  Politely recommend them shows similar to what they already like, or from the same creators, and/or what your personal favorites are, but let them take their time. 

I've currently completed over a thousand Anime and partially watched nearly 300 more. But there was a long time, from like 2005 to 2014, when I'd seen less then 50 and still referred to myself as liking Anime, not using the words Otaku or Weeb only because I hadn't heard them yet. Looking back on that now I know there is a lot I used to be wrong about, but I do not view that younger version of myself as lying about liking Anime. 

What's changed about Tourist discourse in the last like year is a massive increase in even the perceived Left Wing of the Anime Fandom doing it.  What's interesting there is how it's the Left Wing who is truly putting it's emphasis on wanting more people to watch more older Anime, while the shows the Neo-Reactionaries are mad at you for not watching are recent seasonals. Like definitionally you would expect the opposite. 

Thing is as a Leftist Anime fan who has seen more older Anime then most of these Reactionary Vlogers. Most of the Anime I like are products of Genres and Trends that took off in the 90s and 2000s so only a very small percentage of stuff from the 60s and 70s or even 80s feels significantly relevant to my tastes. 

There are two Genres of Anime in particular whose fandoms have a tendency to get really angry about anyone saying anything about them if what they've seen is still only a few of the most well known shows.  Mecha and Magical Girls. As someone who is an enjoyer of both genres, with more then mere entry level familiarity with both, I also find this troubling.

Yes it's annoying when people talk like experts on something they have a small sample size of. But being factually mistaken on the history of a genre of fiction is not the worst thing in the world.

And some of the opinions these people think can only exist among people who've seen very little I think they are massively underestimating the validity of.

On the subject Mecha, I only feel more vindicated in calling Evangelion a Deconstruction the more of the genre I watch, not less. A lot of disagreement on what Anime can and cannot qualify as a Deconstruction is more predicated on disagreement on what a Deconstruction is then a given Genre's history. 

I still hold the view that no Magical Girl show qualifies as a Deconstruction. However not every Video on Madoka's role in the history of the genre that makes fans mad is at all appealing to that term specifically. 

I agree that Pretty Cure monopolizing the market has more to do with the lack of Shoujo Manga based Magical Girl shows in the last 15-20 years then Madoka. But the basic opinion that Madoka disrespected the prior history of the genre is not going to go away simply from knowing the prior precedent for darker takes exist. 

I also disagree with the claim that Anime is more mainstream now then it used to be.  But that's another string of topics. 

I'm gonna link to two nuanced yet opposing YouTube Videos.

Carbio-kun's I Have no Taste and I must Larp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ9ynYK7qTI

It's Blythe's Gatekept Fandoms ar ethe Worst.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72Fx0rM2GDU&t

Update: Here's a 3rd one.

Framing The Narrative The Truth about Anime Tourists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5mHu3UsFwY

Magical Girls are my favorite Genre of Anime yet my Favorite Anime isn’t one

Conceptually how I’d define what I like about Anime in general and how I’d define what I like about the Magical Girl Genre specifically are almost exactly the same.  No single Genre embodies what I love about Anime as a whole more than the Magical Girl Warrior.

Yet the Magical Girl Genre has had some bad luck that holds back every specific example of it from similarly perfectly embodying all of that.  The status of being my Favorite Anime has changed a few times since I first had one at all, but it’s never once been held by a Magical Girl show or movie.  In fact I often feel like I’m forcing myself even by usually having one in my top 10.

Now I love this Genre unconditionally so much that even its Mediocre or fatally flawed entries give me a lot of Joy.  And there are plenty of near perfect examples that I love more than most Anitubers seem to love their favorite Anime.

The first problem is the classic standard form of the Genre is a show that airs for a full year which is inevitably held back by a bunch of mid or sometimes even bad one off Monster of the Week episodes. Now do not misunderstand me, my favorite episodes of these shows are also usually one off monster of the week episodes with little if any bearing on the overarching plot.  But the more opportunities you give a show to drop the ball the more they eventually will.  

On the other end of the spectrum the shows that have only one Cour lack fun one off episodes which are conceptually part of the Genre’s appeal.  And the few two Cour shows that do exist have something off about them.  None perfectly follow what I have deemed the ideal 26 Episode Anime Structure.

Some great Magical Girl anime are held back not because they did anything majorly wrong but because I feel they could have been better. From Pretty Sammy’s TV Anime to Pretear to Yuki Yuna Is A Hero.

There are a handful I have given a 10 out of 10 rating to. But I’ve given a lot of 10/10s and so it’s a steep competition to stand out among them.  To people who think I shouldn't give them out so easily I say 10/10 means a Masterpiece, I happen to feel a lot of those exist but they are still a minority of the total of what I’ve seen.  Point here is the few Magical Girl Anime I’ve given a 10/10 still have steep competition to be something I’d rank as a personal absolute favorite.

Sailor Moon R: The Promise of The Rose is probably the best movie installment of the Genre (certainly the purest form of Sailor Moon).  But the non Magical Girl Anime Films it’s most directly competing with are other annual tie in movies to ongoing TV Shows, a sub type of Anime films many don’t treat with respect, but Pokémon 3 Spell of The Unown is a movie I consider a near perfect masterpiece by any standard, and Detective Conan has four movies I consider not just great among Conan films but Masterpieces of the Detective Genre in general.

The thing is, many of my absolute Favorite Anime are not part of the Magical Girl genre but they feel connected to it in some way.  Noir has been the most consistent holder of the top spot and I already did a post on its climatic Sailor Moon reference. A lot of my favorite Male Protagonists are characters who personality wise practically are male Magical Girl Protagonists.  There are several reasons I’m confident the Fate/ Franchise wouldn’t exist without the Infinity Arc of Sailor Moon.

Interestingly since I started writing this the title has started to become less definitively accurate as I’ve also been doing a bunch of Fate/ rewatching in May of 2024.  And so have come to view Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya as possibly my favorite Fate/ Anime and my Favorite Magical Girl Anime and maybe even a contender to dethrone Noir.  However that may not stick if my mood changes later and a different franchise becomes my current main hyper fixation.  

But also I’m hesitant to unconditionally endorse Prisma Illya as a Magical Girl show while the 3wei arc is still incomplete even in the Manga.  If it fully delivers on the promise made by episode 9 of the 3wei TV Anime and what I’ve heard about certain character deaths don't stick then it can easily become my ideal Magical Girl Saga, but right now that’s still an IF.

Wedding Peach had an All Star writing staff

[Update December 8th: I'm now worried the entire premise of this past was based on misinformation.  Regarding Terada's perceived connection to Zelda]

Sailor Moon has been very influential

Now you may be thinking, "Why are are you making thar the title of a post as if it's even remotely controversial, of course a show that founded a Genre and was one of the 90s' big three was influential".  But I think Sailor Moon's influence is wide enough that it's still underappreciated, that it has had an influence on Anime that are not at all the kinds of shows you'd expect to have Sailor Moon homages in it.

Take for example my favorite Anime Noir.  Noir is a show about professional assassins, it's a fairly dark show inspired by Film Noir and Luc Besson films.  One of the pivotal pillars of the Girls With Guns genre.  Not a show you'd at all think would have any reason to make overt homages to a show made for little girls in the prior decade.

Well it has a meta reason, Mireille Bouquet is voiced in Japan by Kotono Mitsuishi the voice of Usagi Tsukino/Sailor Moon herself.  But she's had a very prolific career actually so I don't expect casting in-jokes to be part of every Anime she's in.

Now I have a unique history with both Anime as a whole and Sailor Moon in particular, Sailor Moon is one of the few Anime I'd already partially watched even before I watched Noir.  But the emphasis there is on partially, I don't think I'd properly watched the actual first season finale of Sailor Moon till I was already using MAL.  And that's the thing, that first season finale has the Sailor Moon moment that I suspect Noir was referencing in it's penultimate episode.  So when I finally completed the Dark Kingdom saga, I watched a certain scene play and was instantly reminded of Noir. 

So since I'm talking about such late in the story developments, I have to put a Sailor Warning here before going further.

Sailor Moon Musicals are difficult to recommend

At least difficult for me to decide which to recommend first.

I'm talking about the old run of Musicals from 1993-2005, those are retro and legendary as this piece of the franchise we Western fans knew little about for a long time but are now about as easy to watch as the show itself.  The new ones don't interest me as of yet and they're harder to find online anyway.

Usually when a fan decides to start checking out the Musicals they either start with the actual first Musical, which was an underwhelming prototype mostly, or they go right to the Last Dracul Musicals because as soon as we hear that exists we think "Sailor Moon vs Dracula as a Musical, how can I not start here".

Now I love the Last Dracul Musicals, they might just be my favorite single saga of the entire franchise.  But some people don't, I've listened to two Sailor Moon podcasts, Sailor Business and Love and Justice go on about how they hated it.  Maybe I'm just more into Sailor Moon going absolutely insane then the average American Moonie. 

But I also wonder if the problem here is partly the first Last Dracul Musical simply not being the best entry point to this particular version of Sailor Moon.  It is after all from what I can tell a much longer and more convoluted story then the prior Musicals, and it's sequels only escalated things further, because there is a lot more going on in this trilogy then just Sailor Moon vs Dracula.  

At first the Musicals were pretty much just glorified bonus episodes of the current/most recent season of the 90s Anime which occasionally reference Manga details, and that can be fun but what really makes these Musicals infamous is when they start doing their own thing.

Kaguya Shima Densetsu is the first Musical that is basically it's own original story with original antagonists, and it's a shorter musical compared to the Draculs.  So I figured that might be the perfect sweet spot, the ideal entry point.  But I just watched the Spring 1999 version and my feelings are mixed.

I mostly enjoyed the entire first half.  But then the fact that the Senshi are left unable to transform for much of the runtime starts making it drag.  This one also just didn't sell me on it's original characters as well as the Dracul saga did so I quickly got bored when the focus was on them.  Still the songs that are performed by the fully transformed Senshi were all bangers.

I'll check out more in the future and hopefully find a more ideal entry point.  There are also other versions of this Musical, maybe they somehow fixed my issues with it.  It'll take awhile to find out though, these aren't the kind of thing I can just spend all day watching, a good Musical kind of drains you, while a disappointing one makes you question why you liked the genre in the first place.

What movies I've seen recently.

The most recent movie I've watched is Morbius and it was good, I think the best live action theatrical Superhero movie since Endgame, it's refreshing to see one that isn't about the a plot to destroy the entire city or world or universe and also isn't a semi self parody.

The first almost 40 minutes were flawless, then when it became clear Milo was gonna be the villain I felt that could have been handled better.  Giving them the ability to Fly when they don't grow wings was stupid, and I didn't like the fridging at the end, but plenty of flaws comparable to those exist in great movies.

I think the hate this movie gets is mostly just the weird hate boner much of Internet fandom has developed for Jared Leto.  What flaws this movie did have were not on Leto at all, he was great.

I also re-watched The Batman, and I still think it's decent. I had commented before on it being the most like a Film Noir of any Batman movie so far, and it is.  But a pure Film Noir would have ended during the scene of Batman talking to Riddler in prison, a good Film Noir ending would have ended on Batman reacting to the revelation that he inspired the villain, and Riddler's hysterical reaction to learning his idol doesn't approve.  It even had already had a full feature length runtime.

The final act with the plot to drown the city is the typical Superhero movie BS, and I increasingly feel Batman is exactly the Superhero who doesn't need that.

I also finally watched Cloud Atlas, it was a great movie, but the best Wachowski film is still Speed Racer.

Sonic The Hedgehog 2 was also great fun, I highly recommend it.

The Anime films I've watched I'm pretty sure I've already talked about on this blog.  Except maybe the latest Prisma Illy movie, that was pretty good, didn't disappoint, but I am getting annoyed at the cliffhangers and wondering when this Arc will finally end.

Incase I hadn't mentioned it anywhere, I also saw Redline and it was phenomenal.

I now own the Heaven's Feel movies on VUDU, I may give them a rewatch in the near future.

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and Family

Occasionally when it comes to Nanoha the opinion is expressed that the first movie which redoes the plot of season 1 is the superior improved version of that story.  I have to strongly disagree.

It certainly seems plausible for a 1 cour show with a pretty basic plot and arguably some filler to be refined into a movie,  I feel like you could probably fan-edit season 1 into a decent movie.  But the official Movie remake we got choose to add some stuff it shouldn't have and made some unfortunate choices in what to cut.

What was added was a fully dramatized backstory for Precia Tstarossa, Fate's mother.  Why Precia is doing what she's doing and is the way she is was perfectly inferred in the original show, the movie feeling the need to flashback to all of it is exactly the kind of thing that makes me hate "Show don't Tell".  In this context it distracts from the fact that this story isn't about Precia, it's about Fate as a victim of Precia's abuse, it confuses the emotional resonance of the story to make us sympathize with her too much.

Lily Orchard has a YouTube video on Zuco of Avatar The Last Airbender where her thesis is that Zuco was never actually a villain who needed to be redeemed of anything, his nominally fighting for the bad guys is a product of the abuse he was subject to, and so she hates the way most people talk about Zuco.  Thing is even this interpretation of Zuco is something actual Anime had already done far better, because he was basically just Fate Testarossa's story from season 1 of Nanoha, Fate is never actually a bad person, just in a bad situation, she never seeks to hurt anyone, she's just seeking the Jewel Seeds without even knowing what her mother plans to use them for.

Lily also expresses the opinion that it would be fundamentally problematic to write a story where a victim becomes an abuser themselves, I don't agree with that but Fate's story would meet her standards, in Arf she had someone she has authority over she could have abused and she did not.  But Lily would hate the movie version because she hates when a show or movie asks us to sympathize with an abuser's sob story.

Now as far what the movie cut from season 1, the only thing I really miss is the removal of Nanoha's family. 

Nanoha began as an AU spin off of a Visual Novel where Nanoha herself was just the Imouto character.  So I imagine when making the movie it was easy to assume including the other characters of that VN were just Easter Eggs for it's fans and not relevant to the story at hand, but that assumption was wrong.

In Clearandsweet's video on the first episode of Madoka Magica, Nanoha's pilot is one of the older Magical Girl pilots he makes comparison to, after all they are directly connected by Shinbo.  One point he makes is that the lead Magical Girl in a show usually comes form a pretty stable healthy family while the supporting characters tend to have less ideal family situations, then the lead provides them with the family they need by essentially adopting them into hers.

And so that's why these two complaints I have about the Nanoha movie go together, Nanoha's good family situation is supposed to be a stark contrast to Fate's horrific one.

Fate/Kalied Liner Prisma Illya is the Most Anime

This show is Anime's most Memetic Franchise taking on it's most thematically important genre.  And all draped in the most unapologetic Otaku Degeneracy you'll find outside of literal Hentai.

So it's really definitely NOT for Normies or newcomers.  But once someone starts self identifying as an Otaku, their reaction to this show is how you should test them.  If they can't accept it the first time they try it, they might be able to latter after sliding further down the rabbit hole of Weeb Degeneracy.

The big climatic moment of 2weiHerz I consider one of the best Eucatastorphes in fiction and a perfect example of how the Magical Girl Genre and other Anime line up with my understanding of The Gospel. And this moment was set up with a lot of intense emotional build up.

And yet it did that in-spite of the first half of the season being all Slice of Life Fanservicy nonsense.  The kind of fanservice that I usually prefer shows to tone down.  But in one that does everything I love about Anime this well I consider it more then worth it, and kind of wouldn't want it any other way.

And since it's also Pride Month, this show is really really Yuri, filed to the brim with Yuri.  And it also has an episode devoted to Fujoshi.

What I love about this show was already there in season 1, and it stayed for 3wei, and the prequel movie was also decent.  I can't wait till I get to see the upcoming movie.

I want someone to make some fanart of Illya and Miyu recreating the "who's got you" moment from Superman:The Movie, fans of season 1 should get why.

I also do mostly like it's English Dub cast, it always takes some getting used to after spending most of my Fate/ watching time with the mostly LA based Aniplex cast which is usually my ideal.  However there is one character where I prefer her Prisma Illya English voice to the Aniplex one, and that's Lady Luvia Edelfelt.  You simply can't beat Shelley Calene-Black at the Ojousama voice.

Unfortunately the Dub stopped after 2weiHerz.

If the whole thing was redone with the standard English Fate/ Cast I would watch it, their Luvia isn't bad.  But the thing is the titular character is so different in this universe I almsot think she shouldn't have the same voice.  Stephanie Seh certainly can be a Magical Girl protagonist, she has become The Definitive Usagi Tsukino to my ears.  But Prisma Illya while having the same core as all Magical Girl protagonists, has a certain Vibe to her that has me thinking the most fitting Sailor Moon VA would be Terri Hawkes.

Basically, this show is pure concentrated Otakuness, and I Love It.

Update May 2024: As an addition to this thesis I've argued Miyu is the ultimate Kuudere.

https://mithrandirolorin.blogspot.com/2024/05/miyu-edelfelt-supreme-kuudere.html

Sailor Moon's Solo Adventures

In many ways the 90s Anime version of Sailor Moon is closer then The Manga to what the Magical Girl Warrior Genre would become.  Not so much because the Manga was unknown, in Japan Manga is more widely consumed then Anime.  It's more because for awhile almsot every other Anime in this sub-genre had overlapping creative staff with the 90s Sailor Moon Anime, either writers or directors or both.

However there is one area where even the most blatant 90s Anime imitators will follow the Manga structurally.  And that is how when it's a 3-5 person team, that team will be fully assembled by episode 5 or 6.  Wedding Peach, every PreCure season about a team rather then a Duo, and even the other time Sailor Moon's Dark Kingdom Arc was given a massively expanded adaptation, the Live Action show commonly referred to as PGSM.

I imagine the more individualist perspective of many western fans think there should be a decent time period of the title character working alone, especially since the title of this show is of an individual protagonist not the name of a team like Pretty Cure.  But what makes Usagi Tsukino a character worth building a 200 episode saga around is how good of a Friend she is.

Now the Sailor Moon 90s Anime didn't make this decision because of any western individualist values, but because the Anime was being made concurrent with the Manga, and the Manga makes one episode a month instead of 4 or 5 (if this was a YT video a certain Gintama clip would be used as B roll here).  The irony is Takeuchi made Sailor Moon a team based story rather then the Solo Heroine Codename Sailor V was because Toei wanted a team to sell more toys.  But once that decision was made she kind of built the entire Lore of Sailor Moon around her being a Heroine who has helpers.  

Still in-spite of everything these solo adventures aren't entirely bad.  Of the 6 episodes in question 3 I consider above average must watch episodes, and there's only one I kind of hate.  I don't want to talk about the one I hate (it's the Fat shamey one), but I shall briefly discus the 3 I recommend.

First is the 3rd episode of the show overall, but second episode of the DiC Dub which gave it the more memorable name of Talk Radio (the other two are oddly enough both episodes DiC skipped).  And it's also the first episode written by Katsuyuki Sumisawa as well as the first directed by Takenouchi Kazuhisa.

Sumisawa is my favorite writer of the Sailor Moon Anime, and why starts with him getting the best first impression here with this episode being way better then either of the two that came before it.  It is arguably the episode where the 90s Anime first finds the formula that is going to work for it, and I think this writer and director are perhaps both responsible for that.  This director is one of the two who leaves after the Doom Tree Saga and I think that loss did permanently effect the show's overall quality.

Next would be the Chanela episode which was episode 5.  Things happen that make it arguably not filler, but either way it's a lot of fun and quite hilarious, perhaps topping Talk Radio to be the best episode up to this point.  I also kind of recommend it to anyone who enjoys The Trouble with Tribbles.

The final one is Episode 6, the Smooth Jazz episode.  The second episode written by Katsuyuki Sumisawa and the first directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara, and thus their first time working together.  Ikuhara as episode director and Sumisawa as writer are similar in that they've done a lot of my all time favorites and none of the worst episodes.  In total half the Ikuhara episodes of season 1 would be written by Sumisawa, they make a pretty good team.  Their last episode together would be the one that properly introduces HaruMi in Sailor Moon S.

This episode is plenty enjoyable even to watch without those meta motives, it was the most unique episode so far.  But for fans of Ikuhara's distinctive style you can definitely see hints of it already forming here.

Wedding Peach and Pokemon.

Two years ago I commented on this relationship in a post that now feels fairly disorganized.  Wedding Peach is in my opinion one of the most underrated Magical Girl shows, so I want to keep reminding Pokémon fans why they should check it out.

Both the Wedding Peach and Pokémon Anime were produced by a studio called OLM which stands for Oriental Light and Magic.  As far as individuals go that begins with Producers Iwata Keisuke and Shūkichi Kanda.  But the creative key player was director Kunihiko Yuyama and his right hand Norihiko Sudo (who would go on to direct Comic Party and ToHeart2).  

Takeshi Shudo and Junki Takegama, two of the top Writers on the Pokémon Anime, weren't Wedding Peach alumni, but they had worked with Yuyama previously on the Minky Momo franchise.  They are probably the most important creatives working on the early Pokémon Anime who weren't involved with Wedding Peach.

Sayuri Ichiishi was a Character Designer for Pokémon and an Animator on Wedding Peach who was promoted to co-character designer for the DX OVAs.  Other important overlap would include Art Director Katsuyoshi Kanemura, Sound Director Mima Masafumi, Photography Director Motoaki Ikegami and then Norihiro Yoshikawa & Tsuyoshi Watanabe who drew backgrounds.

In recent years my revisiting of the early Pokémon Anime has frequently gone along side my enjoyment of Suede's Pokemon Journey series on YouTube.  The main differences between my opinions on Pokémon and his are that I'm less critical in general, I'm notoriously easy to please especially where Pokémon is concerned.  The second episode is a good example of one where I can't relate to any of his criticisms, I enjoy it's chaotic structure.  However the ones he considers the best are generally also ones I consider top tier, and the ones he seems to most dislike are generally ones I would not recommend as being good first impressions, at least as far as Kanto and early Orange Islands go. In one video done looking back on the Kanto era he specially talked about what he liked about early Pokémon's backgrounds and as I said above two key background artists came from Wedding Peach.

Suede particularly likes to praise Yuji Asada as a Storyboarder and Msaaki Iwane as an Animation Director, especially them as a team.  On the subject of Asada I'm envious of his ability to know enough about Animation to know specifically what to give credit to the Storyboards for, remember usually the Episode director is also who does the Storyboards.  Asada also worked on Wedding Peach, he did the Storyboards for 8 episodes the first of which was episode 3 and the last of which was the penultimate episode.  While Iwane didn't get promoted to Animation Director till somewhat deep into Pokémon, he was working as an Animator before then, and even back in Wedding Peach the episodes he worked on were usually the same ones as Yuji Asada.

Suede mostly only seems interested in naming the writer of an episode he's reviewing when it's one of the two I mentioned above who weren't from Wedding Peach (at least when covering Kanto).  However Yukiyoshi Ohashi is a former Wedding Peach writer who's Pokémon episodes tend to also be ones Suede likes, seemingly specifically for their writing.  On Wedding Peach it's not till episode 5 we get one he wrote, which is quicker then their Pokémon debut being episode 7.  Ohashi also wrote a lot of Macross 7 and three episodes of Cutey Honey Flash which is interesting.

However the other Wedding Peach writer to come over to Pokémon was Hideki Sonoda, and at least in the very early period of Pokémon his episodes tend to be ones Suede considers not well written, for reasons I consider understandable even if I'm not as hard on them.  However Sonoda must have gotten better because he co-wrote the 3rd movie, Spell of the Unown, which Suede and Linkara seem to like me consider the best movie by a significant margin, then he was the sole writer of the next several movies, some are better then others but I enjoy all to some degree, I don't currently know what Suede thinks of Heroes and up but I tend to favor the odd numbers all through that first decade.  Sonoda's pre Wedding Peach experience was mostly Shoujo stuff, so perhaps doing a Shonen like Pokémon was something he needed more time then other writers to adjust to.  His first Wedding Peach episode like his first Pokémon episode was the 4th.  Sonoda may have also just been more suited to Shoujo then Shonen, some of the shows he worked on before Wedding Peach were Mahou no Star Magical Emi, Attacker You! and Hikari no Densetsu.

Some other overlap between Wedding Peach and Pokémon creatives include Yoshitake Fujimoto and Toshiaki Suzuki as Directors/Storyboards, Izuma Shimura another Animator and Hisashi Kagawa who also worked on Sailor Moon. [Update 2026: Naohito Takahashi was a Wedding Peach Storyboarder who didn't work on early Pokémon but did work on 2010s Pokémon.  He also directed To Heart in 1999.] 

I can understand why even some Magical Girl fans have trouble getting into Wedding Peach, it certainly starts off not seeming all that unique, in fact the way it uses wedding related Tropes can at times remind me of one of my least favorite Sailor Moon episodes, you really have to give it time to find it's footing.  Episode 6 played an important role in selling me on the show, that's twice the usual 3 episode test and still a ways from when it really gets good.

I wish the show had also been Dubbed by the same people who Dubbed Pokémon, the same voice actors at least.  I know to some people "you'd prefer 4Kids" sounds like the most offensive thing ever.  But I will take cringy censorship/localization decisions with VAs I like over a more strictly faithful script with weaker VAs any day. The Wedding Peach Dub was distributed by ADV but doesn't seem to have the same Voice Actors usually associated with old ADV Dubs either.  If the Wedding Peach Dub VAs are people I've liked in other Dubs, I wasn't able to recognize them.

Update June 2022: Suede's Pokémon Journey is gone.

I'm actually way late in making this update, given it happened not long after I made this post.  It's frustrating I was planning to make this months before I did and always planning to use Suede's series as a key reference point, and then it was suddenly gone.

Good news is he's going to try starting over in a new format. it will take over a year to redo all of the Kanto episodes I had in mind writing this, and that's IF it doesn't also get taken down.

https://www.youtube.com/c/SuedesPapermonJourney/featured

Update December 2022: There is a Torrent that should contain all the episodes now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1ap4HGmyiA

It's also worth reminding people how episode 26 of Seude's Pokémon journey (which fortunately has a re-upload on YT at the moment) is what informed me of the Wedding Peach and Pokémon connection in the first place, I was already a fan of this now obscure show so learning this connection inspired me to dig deeper.  

This episode was one of the Hideki Sonoda episodes which again Suede was pretty critical of and I'm inclined to agree that Celadon should have gotten a whole mini-arc.  It did make sense to use Erika's Gym as the opportunity to explicitly homage their prior show, it being the Girl Power Gym was already established in the Games and most Wedding Peach girls were named after Flowers, plus a literal Peach based Pokémon would probably also be a Grass Type.

Thinking about Suede and the Erika episode again has reminded me that I didn't discus the voice actor connections in this post.  I consider the behind the scenes talent more important to explaining why the Pokémon Anime was the way it was, especially given how Japanese Animation is done differently then in the west since the voice work is recorded after all the Animation is done.

Still the voice of Momoko, Kyoko Hikami being the voice of Erika in both her original episode and the 2017 I Choose You movie is a cool connection.  In 2017 it's safe to say few would have noticed or cared if Erika had a different voice, plus her being the only Gym leader to get a Cameo in the film was kind of random itself.  I think Kinihiko Yuyama might have been intending that film to be his swan song originally and that working with the star of Wedding Peach again may have been the whole reason Erika is even in that film.

But she's not the only Voice Actor the two shows have in common.  The two male leads of Wedding Peach are also the Japanese voices of Brock and James (Takeshi and Kojiro), and the third most prominent human male character in Wedding Peach shares a voice actor with Todd Snap (but he's perhaps most famous for being the voice of Shinichi Kudo the true form of Detective Conan).  Each of the other three Love Angels would also get to be a one off Pokémon character eventually but they took longer.  The voice of Aphrodite was eventually cast as Brock's mother Lola.  It may also interest some to know that the voice of Sailor Moon, Kotono Mitsuishi was a Wedding Peach antagonist and a few Pokémon characters.

Update March 2023: And now Suede's journey is being restored via Google Drive Links on Patreon.

https://www.patreon.com/m/87441/posts

https://www.patreon.com/m/87441/posts?filters[tag]=Pokemon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B-_p8MMRpg

Update April 2023: And it's finally up on the Internet Archive, this link leads to the first 34 episodes but more are uploaded as well.

https://archive.org/details/SPJ-Season1-Suede

MahouShouJune Week 1, including Sailor Moon Eternal initial thoughts

Well I started my MahouShouJune Anime viewing on the first of the month by finally watching the first episode of Action Heroine Cheer Fruits.  It was not what I expected but it could be a fun show.

I watched the first episode of To Your Eternity and it was interesting, not sure I’ll watch this one to completion but I think I might know who to recommend it to.

I decided to check out the first two episodes of Mysterious Nile Girl Thutmose on YouTube, a Live Action Toei Tokusatsu Superheroine show that aired in 1991.  It’s predecessor in the Toei Fushigi Comedy Series from 1990 La Belle Fille Masquee Poitrine created by Shotaro Ishinomori I’d already watched the first two episodes of on YT sometime last year, since it’s now a well documented influence on Codename Sailor V and Sailor Moon, both the Manga and 90s Anime.

This show looks interesting, some of the Music feels like what you’d hear in a vaguely Egyptian themed Video Game level or dungeon.  And it has some special effects that feel right out of Ghostbusters. But it’s also amusing to me how when you combine the Toku Transforming Hero formula with an Egyptian theme, you definitely wind up with something that looks like you could put it in the Fawcett/DC Shazam mythos.

I then watched episode 15 of Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, this and Corrector Yui I'm taking my time going through.  I feel like I’d enjoy it more without the Sinbad character.  The reason I prefer this to the other 90s Magical Thief show Saint Tail is having a girl playing the Zenigata role which suits my Yuri bias.  The only thing I conceptually prefer about Saint Tail is that it has more of a Robin Hood element.

Speaking of Corrector Yui, I could not finish episode 5.  First of all I may just have to accept that I actually dislike this Dub cast.  But more so this episode’s moral quickly started feeling like the worst fake environmentalism.

The main event for this post however is that I watched both Sailor Moon Eternal movies as soon as I could on June 3rd.  They were very good, the difference between this version and SuperS is night and day.  Everything frustrating about the 90s Anime version is gone.  Yet I still can’t help but feel like this version could have benefited from at least a half hour or so more runtime.

The Dub while having the same cast as all the prior Viz Dub content was approached differently.  Now they’re including Honorifics, which is generally my preference, but seeing them suddenly included here after all of Crystal not using them felt a little jarring.

Sailor Moon seems to have originated the Toast of Tardiness trope.

That I seem to be the first person to propose this theory is interesting.  Because AniTubers putting together montages of famous examples of this trope in videos mostly about something else seem to know they can’t find an older example, if there is one it must be some super obscure old High School Anime forgotten by everyone but someone working on the 90s Sailor Moon Anime, and thus Sailor Moon was still clearly what popularized it.

The origins of this Trope is worth investigating since it’s actually NOT accurate to real world Japan.  In Japan, even casually walking while eating is considered Taboo because it’s disrespectful to the Labor put into producing it.  I learned about this interesting fact from reading the article linked below this paragraph.  Some things are common in Anime precisely because their Taboo in real life, but this is an oddly specific thing to be rebellious about, so there must be more to it.

https://honeysanime.com/editorial-tuesday-anime-and-real-life-running-with-a-slice-of-toast-in-their-mouth/

Project A-Ko does feature the lead running to school late, and shows her eating some food earlier, but not at the same time.  So maybe it played a role in inspiring this visual, but it’s not fully formed.

Here’s the thing I find interesting.  Every example of this cliché since the Spring of 1993 has either been in a pilot episode, or a parody of what a Generic High School Anime pilot looks like (such as it’s use in the finale of Neon Genesis Evangelion), or both at the same time like Attack on Titan Jr High.  But for Sailor Moon it’s not originally a pilot trope, it’s in no version of Usagi’s origin story, not the Manga or the 92 Anime Pilot or Crystal’s.

In Sailor Moon we first see this happen in episode 39 Let’s Become a Princess: Usagi’s Bizarre Training, which in the DiC Dub was episode 37 and titled Little Miss Manners, written by Shigeru Yanagawa and directed by Hiromichi Matano.  This gag actually bookends the episode appearing at both the beginning and end.  

However a few months later the first episode of Sailor Moon R, the beginning of the Doom Tree Saga, and episode 47 of the show total (41 of the DiC order), is very much a reboot, it’s like a new pilot repeating many beats of the original pilot.  But now the running late with Toast in Mouth is added, being a visual that must have stuck with someone after seeing it in the Princess episode.  

This episode was named Moon Returns: The Mysterious Aliens Appear and by DiC The Return of Sailor Moon.  It was written by Shigeru Yanagawa and directed by Kazuhisa Takenouchi (it would be this exact same combo who would end the Doom Tree Saga).  So the common denominator here is Shigeru Yanagawa.

Given that homevideo was only starting to take off in the early 90s, it wouldn’t surprise me if for a while after that episode aired in 93 many people misremembered this visual as having also been in Sailor Moon’s pilot, like an Otaku Mandela Effect.  And in turn influenced what High School Anime pilots are “supposed” to be like in their collective subconscious.

I consider this an interesting example of how Sailor Moon has been an influence beyond just the Genre she started or Shoujo in general.

Another example would be how many Teachers in Anime are basically just Miss Haruna, like Miss Yukari in Azumanga Daioh and Mis Kuroi in Lucky Star.

Or heck even Noir which uses it’s Golden Pocket Watch with an Iconic sentimental Melody near the end in exactly the same way, and by a Blond character voiced by the same Seiyu in Japan.

Mahou Shoujo is the most important Genre in all of Anime

If there is a thesis to what I will be doing for MahouShouJune 2021 it’s that statement.  I don’t expect to prove it beyond any reasonable doubt, but superficial arguments will be made.

The reason I feel this way is because I feel a lot of Anime that do not fit even one element of the technical definition of being a Magical Girl Warrior show, are kind of just trying to do the same thing but with different tools.  Like 50% of Trixie’s old “Otaku Hero’s Journey” premise was basically the same as the Magical Girl’s Journey.

People half jokingly sometimes say they want to see a Magical Boy Anime.  But the thing is I would argue your standard male Anime protagonist is often basically a Magical Girl protagonist simply not a girl, and sometimes not Magical.  We even see it in some of Japan’s Live Action media considered related to Anime in it’s appeal.  The protagonist of Kamen Rider Fourze is basically a Pretty Cure protagonist but male.

And that’s part of why what qualifies as this genre is so often debated.  It’s precisely because I know how to see the Mahou Shoujo influence everywhere that I am, It seems, more pedantic than most about what I will actually classify as a Magical Girl show.  

Utena is a show most Magical Girl fans will probably also like, but it doesn’t count as one.  Kill la Kill’s reasons for why it doesn’t count are virtually the opposite of Utena’s.  And when I once tried to explain that if all it took was having a “girl” who is in some way “magical” then you could technically count Slayers as an obvious absurdity, someone told me they do count Slayers, and at that point I lost all hope.

A lot of the time the argument for something like Utena qualifying on more than just a Technicality is that it appeals to the same people for similar thematic reasons.  But to me all Anime has a similar appeal.  Every Anime that I significantly like, I on some level like for at least one of the same reasons I like the Magical Girl genre.

Basically if any male Otaku who insists the Magical Girl Genre has no appeal to them still exist, they’re going to have to face the fact that the Anime they do like has been directly or indirectly influenced by Mahou Shoujo.  Because the great pillars of 21st century Seinen Anime are clearly the product of people who were watching Shoujo in the 90s.

Sailor Scout really is the best English Translation of Sailor Senshi

That's my Magical Girl Hot Take for June 2020.

First of all the choice I dislike the most is Sailor Guardian which has now been forced upon us as the official translation because older Naoko Takeuchi now has control over the localizations and simply used Google Translate to determine the most "literal" translation.

Here is the thing about translating art that a lot of people don't understand, the aesthetic aspects of art can include word choice, and in the early 90s she did not choose the word Senshi over other Japanese words she could have used solely for what it literally meant, how it sounds and on paper looks was also important.  And I don't think how alliterative it is paired with "Sailor" was ever a coincidence.  I'm sure Digi-nee understands that with the Lexical vs Lateral dichotomy she's developed.

As a Millennial who's been at least peripherally a Sailor Moon fan for as long as any American could have been, I grew up in a climate where those rejecting the DiC choice of Sailor Scouts preferred to say Sailor Soldiers, that was the partial name of a number of old role-play forums and Yahoo Groups.  But my reason for preferring Scouts to Soldiers is that on paper Soldiers is a much larger word then Senshi while Scouts is the exact same number of letters.

There are also the mega-weebs who go "don't translate it at all, just use Senshi even in English".  And that is my position on a lot of key Japanese terms especially when Dubbing explicitly Otaku oriented works.  That's how I feel about Miko and all the Honorifics and Sibling terminology and the Deres and Otokonoko and even Baka at this point.  I also more or less feel the same about Kami, it does not in fact perfectly equate to god/God.

But Sailor Moon isn't an Otaku Anime, it's a kid's show first and foremost, and so we ought to make it as easy for kids to understand as possible, but without engaging in the Queer erasure the DiC dub was guilty of, or the deorientilization of old 4Kids dubs.  So for that reason translating Senshi to some kind of equivalent English term is necessary.  But my position on Miko doesn't change when it's used in Sailor Moon, I feel like that one will prove self explanatory in a way Senshi won't, or rather you don't necessarily need to know exactly what it means for what Rei is at the shrine to make sense.

The main objection I keep hearing to using Scout is that it's somehow derogatory or demeaning.  I feel like that attitude is bound to be offensive to actual soldiers who served as scouts in real world militaries, like my dad who was a US Cavalry Scout.  Scouts are typically those actually on the front lines, which makes it a pretty decent analogy to the function Magical Girl Warriors are usually serving in all the Monster of the Week driven shows.  Also my dad was stationed on the Iron Curtain in Bavaria during the Cold War, so he was a Scout quite literally serving as a Guardian patrolling a border.  But I think a major reason that's the word DiC choose in 1995 was because it would be relatable to kids via things like Girl Scouts and Cub Scouts, and that relevance still exists.

My Nostalgia for the aspects of the old Dub that aren't completely horrific are certainly an influence on my preference here.  But I have provided a legitimate justification for it.  And so I will continue to use Sailor Scout and Sailor Scouts without hesitation going forward, though probably still using Senshi a lot too.

Wixoss is the only Card Game Anime I've watched.

And I know full well that is not an ideal first impression of the genre.

I've also still only watched what has been Dubbed of it, so two seasons and zero movies, and I'm slowly losing hope any more will ever get dubbed.

As it's own stand alone show I quite enjoy Wixoss, it's dark yet still optimistic and very Gay.  What bugs me on a Meta Level however is that it is essentially trying to be the Madoka Magica of a sub-genre that doesn't exist yet.

"But there's a lot of Card Game Anime, Mother's Basement did a whole rant video on them" you may say in response.  Well yes there are but they are all Shonen. I am NOT a supporter of the narrative many AnimeFeminist.com contributors spread that the Dark Magical Girl genre is some inherently misogynist message about "punishing girls for wanting things" when the same "be careful what you wish for" moral is in a lot of male oriented media and is always what "Deconstructions" are based on saying.  However in this case it does unsettle me a bit that the only entry in this Genre where Girls take center stage is the Dark "this Wish Fulfillment is actually a Nightmare" take.

What Wixoss is at first kind of pretending to be (but the Madoka vibes were always there so don't pretend you were ever fooled) is a premise I'd like to see simply played straight.  The idea of there being this really popular Card Game, that everyone keeps saying is mostly played by boys, but the magical real secret game is one only girls are invited to.  That could be a cool fun premise that could also provide some subtle nerd culture social commentary.

And as far as the issue Mother's Basement has with Card Game Anime, imagine if this Girl centric one was the first to give him what he wanted, that'd be awesome.  I would have advised him to add to the video a comparison to how the Pokemon Anime eventually gets better at depicting fun interesting strategic battles.

And yes, the fact that I'm much more likely to watch an Anime where the main characters are mostly or entirely girls is the main reason Wixoss is still the only Card Game Anime I've watched.  Though back in the day my radical brand loyalty to Nintendo kept me from trying anything perceived as competing with Pokemon so Yugioh like Digimon were more ruled out by that.

Sailor Moon in Japanese

Of the major pillars of the 90s American Anime Fandom, of the Anime that American Millennials are Nostalgic for, Sailor Moon is the only one I've watched a significant percentage of in Japanese.  I've heard clips of what Japanese voices sound like in DBZ and Pokémon and other stuff in YoutTube videos.  In some cases all I've seen of a franchise in Japanese is stuff the localizations skipped.  But generally stuff I've watched Subbed is stuff more recent or never got an official if any English Language localization till recently if at all.  And is all stuff I watched pretty much within the last 4 years.

Most of it happened because of the Hulu Revival, I watched the first few episodes on there as well as most of Crystal, then the Sailor Jupiter introduction for the sake of the research for that old Sailor Jupiter post I made.  And other random examples till I eventually just flat out watched Sailor Stars and season 3 of Crystal as they went up on Hulu.  But some I'd seen even before that, I remember looking for the R movie online because it was the only movie not at my video rental store and the Sub was all I could find (I have now also seen both Dubs for that movie though).  But I later much more intentionally chose to seek out some Subs for Sailor Moon S.

Looking at the reasons why, I feel like I'm probably not alone in that.

With DBZ the Dubs were viewed as very good, so while there was a niche of people watching bootlegged VHS fan subs even before the rise of Internet streaming, those of my generation mostly weren't interested.  Some people I've heard turned to bootlegging more out of impatience then any issues with the Dub.  But for me even when I did start learning these shows came from Japan it never occurred to me that Japan would be that far ahead of us.  I only in the last few years realized the earliest DBZ episodes were already nearly a decade old when they first aired on Toonami.

With Pokémon when I did first start learning that a lot of stuff was changed I didn't really care much.  I already knew certain Mario stuff was different in Japan so I accepted it as part of how Nintendo does things.  I'm certainly not gonna play Pokémon in Japanese so why bother watching it in Japanese?  And I'm pretty sure 90% of Pokémon fans trying to look smart by telling you about the differences are just repeating what they read on Dogasu's Backpack and Bulbapedia, if they're not spouting long debunked rumors about Butterfree.

There are two things that made me more interested in seeking out Sailor Moon in Japanese then many other Anime that I was often generally more into.

Even though I have nostalgia for the DiC voice actors I always knew on some level they weren't really good the way DBZ and Pokémon's Dub voices were.  And for the Cloverway stuff I found some of them outright bad.  And no it's not just because they were Canadian (something I didn't know at the time) the Futari Wa Pretty Cure Dub holds up and I always knew that one was Canadian.

And then there is the fact that I knew even very early on some Sailor Moon censorship changes were specifically about erasing LGBTQ representation.  The 4Kids Dub of Pokémon if anything did the opposite however unintentionally.  Even with Hun oddly enough, if that character simply had a male voice I may not have thought of them as Androgynous, but the Dub voice hardly sounds blatantly female, they actually sound pretty ambiguous.

So because I've always been interested in LGBT subjects even though I wasn't always the full vocal supporter I am now, I had an interest in wanting to experience the Japanese Audio of Sailor Moon that I still don't have for any other classic show.  And lots of people were obviously far more invested in that aspect then I was.

Now my most recent earlier this year experience with Sailor Moon has been pretty exclusively the new Viz Dub since most of it is out now and I love all of the VAs they're using.  But I remain a fan of what I've heard of the show in Japanese.  And when I can finally find a way to watch the first Sailor Moon Memorial I will, I'm quite curious about that.

So I'm partly making this post because I want to learn if there are indeed others for whom this is the case, or had a similar yet different experience?

But also if it is true that this is the case, what could that information be useful for?

Well if you're someone trying to convince people you know to watch more stuff in Japanese.  My first advice is don't be a judgmental Jerk about it, respect that they enjoy stuff you don't and try to convince them to watch more Subs in addition to not instead of the Dubs they like.  Don't accuse them of disrespecting the original intent or make ablest comments about being unable to read, you will only make them mad at you.  For me it's often easier to follow a Sub when I've already seen it dubbed and know the gist of the dialogue already.

After that figure out what stuff they are already a fan of the Japanese audio for (every Anime fan has probably watched something Subbed by this point) and try to recommend them stuff that has the same Seiyu they like in different roles.  And in this case Sailor Moon may be the place to start.  Of course even the most purely 4Kids Pokémon fans are fans of Ikue Ootani's voice, but guess what, she was also on Sailor Moon as Nyanko Suzu/Sailor Tin Cat during Sailor Stars.  I wonder if she'll reprise the role if Crystal ever gets that far?

Some people might be surprised to learn how much other work the voice of Usagi Tsukino herself did considering how in the West we're used to Iconic TV Superhero actors getting too type cast to have much success doing anything else.  But Kotono Mitsuishi has actually done quite a few other roles and not just obscure random throw away stuff.  She's three different human Pokémon characters including Domino one of my favorites, I still haven't watched Mewtwo Returns in Japanese but I might someday just to see if she can be as memorable as Kerry Williams.  She was also Excel in Excel Saga.  And she's mother fraking Mireille Bouquet a lead character in my absolute favorite Anime Noir, I did watch Noir in Japanese once in late 2016 but didn't know this at the time, it must show her range cause I never once went "she sure sounds like Sailor Moon".  She was also Misato Katsuragi on some little show called Neon Genesis Evangelion.  And she was one of the more fun villains on Wedding Peach.  She was the title character of Maze, and she was Juri on Utena (I suggested earlier this month Juri's dub VA was the main reason that Dub is looked on poorly, how ironic to now learn she was filling in for possibly the biggest Seiyu of them all).  Back to her Pokémon contributions, MAL doesn't list this one but she was also Ditto (Metamon in Japanese) in at least two episodes including it's Anime debut.  Oh and she provided narration for Eromanga-Sensei.

Apparently more Noir voices were Sailor Moon alumni.  My favorite character Chloe was Ami Mizuno.  I'm starting to wonder if it'd be easier to list shows that don't share a Seiyu with Sailor Moon?

Since Dogasu cares so much about convincing more people to watch Pokémon in Japanese, he should perhaps write something specifically on how much Seiyu overlap it has with Sailor Moon.  Jessie/Musashi was Himeko in the S movie for another example.

Update December 2nd 2023:  Case Closed???

I've got big into Detective Conan a few years after writing this, I've watched everything Dubbed that exists but also countless hours of Subbed content.  I'm not sure how much that makes my opening statement less true then it was since I don't know how much traction it's old Dub got or even if it aired soon enough to really part part of Millennial Nostalgia.

But it's what I talked about near the end that is really relevant.  Kotono Mitsuishi voiced the character of Kir aka Mizunashi Rena who is introduced in episode 425 an episode that still doesn't even have a fan Dub, then is in a Coma for over 2 real world years till the Clash of Red and Black.  And finally got to do something significant again earlier this year in episodes 1077-1079 and Movie 26 a Sub of which finally surfaced online at the end of November 2023.

However the Japanese Seiyu Detective Conan has made me a fan of it Minami Takayama the voice of the title character.  I like both of Conan's official English VAs and the two FanDubs I've heard are fine as well.  But Minami's talent at giving Childlike Conan and true Conan distinct voices while still also sounding plausibly like a little boy is amazing, I'm will to designate her the Bud Collyer of Anime.  I was hoping to find out she was also someone on Sailor Moon but so far no luck, unless someone hasn't been properly added to MAL yet.

Update December 5th 2024: Turns on the subject of shared VAs between Sailor Moon and Detective Conan became pretty awkward not long I after added that update. Fortunately Mamoru has a different Japanese VA in Crystal/Eternal/Cosmos, Kenji Nojima, who's also voiced two one off Detective Conan Characters.  

Further Update: And now Zero's replace VA on Detective Conan is Yoshiyuki Kono who was also a one off character in Sailor Stars. 

Magical Girl Anime as the Cure to Toxic Masculinity.

I’m not gonna claim to be a Cis-Het Male who is or has become completely immune to Toxic Masculinity.  I do have a temper that I sometimes lose control of.  But to a typical dude bro who’s offended by the phrase itself, I’m definitely a Beta Cuck.

I have had an attraction to certain media that is presumed in the mainstream standards of American Society to be “for girls” almost my entire life.  Also in the more traditionally male oriented stuff I like I frequently find many of the female characters the most relatable and/or likeable.

The thing is Sailor Moon may very well be the first.  I have memories of watching the show early Sunday mornings on the UPN, meaning before it’s Toonami run and before Buffy was ever on TV.  And I never watched any Buffy till 2000, likewise Xena I didn’t get into until it was already airing its last season in 2000/2001.  And the chick shows I got into that are considered even weirder for a guy to like mostly came much later, besides maybe Party of Five but even that I didn’t catch till Scream 2 was already on home video.

My relationship with Sailor Moon was rather complex.  There was a time when I thought of it as a guilty pleasure, for some reason more hesitant to admit to liking it then Buffy and One Tree Hill which I talked about on my main IMDB account but used a sock puppet for posting on the Sailor Moon board.  That went away over time of course.

Also for a long time being into Sailor Moon didn't much lead to me watching other Magical Girl Warrior shows.  I caught some Wedding Peach during the same era I got into Noir partly because it's Dub was being made and promoted at the same time by some of the same people.  But I didn’t complete that show till last year or maybe the year before.  For some reason I heard of Saint Tail on some website and was interested but never really tried to watch any of it.

It was in 2014 that began to change, my interest in the Sailor Moon revival is what brought me to Hulu and then the recommendations Hulu had on the Sailor Moon pages lead to me checking out both Madoka Magica and Utena, and then other Anime not so closely related to the Magical Girl genre like Rose of Versailles.  And from there I dove down even further and have now seen countless hours of Pretty Cure and then most recently the stuff I talked about at the start of this month.

The fact that I cared about Sailor Moon enough in 2014 to be that interested in the revival had a lot to do with how into Pretty Little Liars I was, I knew there was overlap between those fandoms because of my Facebook friends.  What I’m not so sure on is to what extent having that past history with Sailor Moon was a factor in my being open to PLL in the first place.

I really feel like I became the true Feminsit and LGBTQ ally I am now from watching PLL and engaging in it’s Fandom for seven years.  My thinking on those topics used to be more “centrist” for lack of a better word.  But now I feel I’ve become as radically Lefitst as a Cis-Het Male can be on those topics.  And reading everything Heather Hogan said while talking about PLL was a factor in moving me on that path.  However, the fact that I watched Utena and then read VraiKaiser’s analysis of Utena in the midst of that period also sped things along.  And Utena I probably wouldn’t have watched without knowing it’s connection to Sailor Moon.

I’m sure there are many with experiences similar to mine.  The thing about the Magical Girl Warrior is that even the most properly Shoujo incarnations have the ability to appeal to guys, girls, and others who wouldn't usually watch girly stuff because they’re essentially Superhero shows.  And then the versions presumably marketed at men do not lose the feminine heart of the genre.  If there are a lot of people watching only the late night Anime Magical Girls and not the Shoujo ones, I think it’s more the massive number of episodes you have to plow through then being turned off by them being even more girly.  In fact that issue is why completing Wedding Peach took me so long and why I still haven't finished most not Dubbed Pretty Cure seasons or the two Magical Girl Thief shows I'm interested in.

There is also of course the cynical assumption that many guys only watch these shows because they like looking at girls in short skirts.  Ironically my personal tastes tend to find them Sexier in the Shoujo shows.  The characters in Nanoha, Madoka and Yuki Yuna are cute but not sexy.  If you wanted to ask me which Magical Girls are even sexier then the Sailor Scouts I’d point you to Wedding Peach.

The thing is Magical Girls aren’t the only girly media where the girls are Sexy.  Every actress on OTH and PLL is a pretty damn attractive and some friggin Lifetime movies are among the Sexiest films I’ve watched.  But your typical dude insecure in his masculinity isn’t gonna actually watch those shows or read those books to Fap to them, there’s no need when a simple Google Image search will provide more than enough pics of the actress in question.  No, anyone actually watching a Magical Girl show likes the product they’re seeing beyond that.  At first it may be just for the Superhero stuff, and for some it may stay that way.  But there are many for whom watching this stuff has opened their minds to a more feminine perspective.

There are plenty of times when these shows address masculinity in an interesting way.  Like the Pretty Sammy episode with the hyper masculine delinquents.  They make an effort to help normalize guys being feminine and girls being masculine which undermine certain more cynical assumptions about the genre.  Many Feminist love that Be A Man song from Mulan as an unironic celebration of the positive traits society codes as Masculine, in a way the Magical Girl Genre has plenty of moments that can be just like that.

The Sailor Moon and Wedding Peach Anime are connected.

Kazuko Tadano is a Character Designer I'm a fan of.

I still prefer the basic character designs of the Sailor Senshi in the 90s Anime over the Manga and Crystal, and she was the Character Designer for the first two seasons and the R Movie.  I was relived to learn this Character Designer was a woman, I would feel quite uncomfortable with preferring how men changed the designs of a female Mangaka. You could still argue she was designing them to fit the tastes of Sato and Ikuhara, which is an interesting issue to think about given how one of the episodes she also helped animate was Episode 21 - Protect the Dreams of Children! The Friendship Bound in Anime.

None of her replacements as the Sailor Moon character designer had the job as long as she did.  They were probably all hired to mainly follow the lead she set, which is a job I'm sure no artist wanted to do long term.  But they were good at it so I give them all props.

I have a long history of saying the only Magical Girl Warriors who look even better then the Sailor Scouts (I still call them that sometimes, fight me) are the Love Angels of Wedding Peach.  And guess what, the Character Designer for that Anime was also Kazuko Tadano (Sayuri Ichishi shares that credit for the OVAs but not the main series).  Now I currently have no idea what the Wedding Peach Manga looked like and so can't express an opinion on if these Anime designs are also better then the Manga.  But the point remains that she's made all of my favorite Magical Girl Warrior Character Designs.

This wasn't the only staff the Sailor Moon and Wedding Peach Anime had in common.  Hisashi Kagawa for example worked on both of them and Pokemon.  Does knowing about this common staff help or hurt the desire to argue that Wedding Peach can stand on it's own and isn't just a knock off?  I don't know, but it certainly should help in convincing people who like Sailor Moon to give Wedding Peach a chance.

Digibro likes to argue that you should care more about common creative staff then who has the official branding.  Does that mean Wedding Peach is better Sailor Moon then the actual Sailor Moon airing at the same time?  It mainly aired concurrent with SuperS the often least highly regarded season of Sailor Moon.  Ikuhara was still series director but he had less actual control then he did for S and the R Movie and his frustration with that is why he quickly left to go get started on Utena.

I sometimes wonder if for both Hollywood Movies and Anime we often give too much credit to the Director and not enough to the Writer of the Script/Screenplay.  I mention this here because the main Director of Wedding Peach wasn't a Sailor Moon alumni (instead he'd go on to do Pokemon) but at least one of the head writers was, Sukehiro Tomita.

Sukehiro wrote the Scripts for 15 episodes of season one, 13 episodes of R, 7 episodes of S and the Screenplays for both the R and S movies.  The generally least liked movie is the only one he didn't write, I have some fondness for Black Dream Hole but it is the weakest.  The R movie was the best under Ikuhara, but it seems the Director changing didn't cause as much of a quality drop as the writer changing.

I don't currently know if anyone else can be said to have written more episodes of season one.  But I made a Semi-Filler Free guide to Season 1 of Sailor Moon and only two of his episodes didn't make it and only one is among those that barely qualified.  He wrote 12 episodes that are almost impossible to justify skipping including the first and last episodes.   So if you're someone who outright prefers the 90s Anime over the Manga and Crystal (I used to at least for season one but I've become more balanced on the issue) he may deserve just as much credit for that adaptation work as Sato and Ikuhara.  Still he didn't write all of the non filler, you will miss stuff watching only what he wrote.

He also wrote plenty of stuff that at least follows the formula of a Sailor Moon filler episode, including some of what set that formula.  So if you like the 90s Sailor Moon Anime mainly for the filler with no counterpart to anything in the Manga (like me) then he also likely wrote something you enjoyed.  One of my personal all time favorite Sailor Moon episodes is Episode 26 - Bring a Smile to Naru's Face! Usagi's Friendship which is also one Ikuhara directed.  In fact I want the Viz Dub of that episode played at my funeral instead of any religious sermon, just play this and read 1 Corinthians 15.

During the Doom Tree Saga he wrote three episodes, the best of which is the Snow White one, the one who's localization would create one of my favorite Memes.  He wrote 10 episodes for the Black Moon saga, which seem to include most of the most watchable ones (I'm not big on that arc in any version).  He wrote only 7 for S but they include some major stand outs, like the one where Minako goes nuts donating blood.

He scripted 16 episodes of Wedding Peach including the first two and the last two.  But he's also credited with the "original story" which I'm not sure what that means in a Manga adaptation.  Did he also help write the Manga?  Or come up with the basic outline of how it was changed for the Anime?  I don't know enough about how this stuff works.

Most major Wedding Peach creative minds not connected to Sailor Moon would go on to be heavily involved in Pokemon, so if you're nostalgic for 90s and early 2000s kid's Anime they all probably made something more well known you like.

I have a fondness for Wedding Peach that long predates my knowing about any of these connections it has to Sailor Moon and Pokémon.  Even if it is a rare occasion of an Anime I like where I can't recommend or even much defend the Dub.  And also in-spite of it having less Yuri then any other Magical Girl show I've watched which I'd expect to bother me more then it does.

As far as comparing it to Sailor Moon goes it's only really fair to compare it to single "seasons" not the whole show since Wedding Peach didn't get equivalent sequels, not in Anime form at least, just a fun 4 episode OVA epilogue which is if anything most like the Doom Tree Saga as filler material.

I would easily pick Wedding Peach over R and SuperS and maybe even Stars.  But S is definitely a better product, while comparing it to season 1 is the really tough comparison.  Sailor Moon's greatest strength is that it has some single episodes that by far top anything else I've seen in Pre-Pokémon TV Anime.  However Sailor Moon does have some hard to defend episodes that are arguably worse then Wedding Peach's worst episodes.  And I say that as someone hesitant to call any episode of Sailor Moon completely irredeemable.

I wonder if Wedding Peach had an overlooked influence on the future of the genre?  It predates PreCure in having Pink be the main color of the MC.  I could maybe think of other things that make it proto-PreCure. 

Tomita would go on to return to Toei for Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, where he did Series Composition and Scripted 13 episodes.

The Shockingly Shoujo Roots of The Pokemon Anime.

In my post about 1992 I mentioned that Wedding Peach homage in the Erika episode of Pokemon as indirect evidence Pokemon might have been influenced by Sailor Moon and linked to Suede's corresponding Pokemon Journey episode as that's where I first learned of this piece of trivia.  At the time I made that I didn't recall exactly what Suede had said about it so I've since re-watched it and done some more research.  Suede was actually quite understating the connection, it goes beyond just one common staff member.

Nintendo didn't just create their own animation studio out of thin air when they decided to make an Anime for Pokemon.  But they did interestingly choose a then young and up and coming one called OLM (Oriental Light and Magic).  Wedding Peach was OLM's first TV Anime having previously only done a couple of obscure OVAs.  And this is technically still the Studio in charge of the Pokemon Anime to this day.  The creative staff of the two Anime by no means completely overlap, but quite a bit of overlap does exist, from series director Kunihiko Yuyama to Yuji Asada (Suede's favorite Storyboarder), Hideki Sonoda (who previously worked on Shoujo projects like Attacker You! and Hikari no Densetsu), Sayuri Ichishi, Norihiko Sudo and even the Sound Director and Photography Director as well as the two OLM producers.

Wedding Peach was a successful show at the time, regardless of how many critics may see it as the most egregious Sailor Moon copycat, and it seems the success of Wedding Peach was a major factor in how they got the Pokemon gig, it seems to have been the biggest thing they'd done prior to Pokemon.

As far as using this as evidence of Sailor Moon possibly directly influencing the Pokemon Speak trope.  While as a fan of Wedding Peach I sometimes get defensive of the idea that it's just a Sailor Moon knock off, there is no doubt in my mind the people who made Wedding Peach must have been watching Sailor Moon.  And I've found there is indeed some staff who worked on both Wedding Peach and Sailor Moon, but I've yet to find a single person who worked on all three (besides Voice Actors but they aren't the creative staff), like Sukehiro Tomita who was a key writer for Wedding Peach and had previously worked on the first three seasons of Sailor Moon and the first two movies, also Wedding Peach's character designer had previously worked on Sailor Moon including the R movie.  That means past Sailor Moon staff and future Pokemon staff were working together, sharing ideas and talking about stuff.

Knowing about this interesting connection between Wedding Peach and Pokemon makes me oddly want to see Wedding Peach characters added to Super Smash Bros.  Maybe one of those people who make Smash Mods can do a Wedding Peach one?

OLM has recently started doing Live Actions stuff, including it seems one of the few Live Action incarnations of the Magical Girl Warrior Sub-Genre, the Girls x Heroine! Series.  I hope there's a legal way for me to try watching that.  I actually don't know if they were involved in making Detective Pikachu at all.

The fact that some of Pokemon's original Japanese voice cast had previously done Wedding Peach and/or Sailor Moon is also interesting.  Though perhaps not that surprising, Japanese Seiyu get around just as quickly as Dub Actors, more so even since in Japan this industry isn't divided between two different States, it's pretty much all recorded in Tokyo.

Let's start with the one Japanese Pokemon voice everyone can recognize, Pikachu.  Ootani Ikue had previously been Sailor Tin Cat in Sailor Stars the last season of Sailor Moon which ended a few weeks before Pokemon went on the air.  The voice of Chibi-Usa was the Japanese voice of Sabrina the Saffron Gym Leader.  And Usagi herself has been three different Pokemon characters including Domino in Mewtwo Returns, and she was Potamos one of the more entertaining Wedding Peach antagonists.  While the main female leads of Wedding Peach only did occasional if any Pokemon voice work, the two male leads of Wedding Peach became the Japanese voices of Brock and James.

But perhaps most relevant to how I started this is that Momoko the main protagonist of Wedding Peach was also the Japanese voice of Erika on both the series and in the recent reboot movie.  Why is Erika the only Gym Leader featured in that movie?  I enjoyed it cause Erika was kind of the most misrepresented in the original series and her scene in that movie felt much more like who she is in the Games.  But the staff may have simply wanted to work with their original star Seiyu again (and yes some of the staff was still the same, particularly the main director).  She was also Aitwo (Amber Two) in the origin of Mewtwo add on to the first movie, so maybe she'll be in the upcoming remake as well?

Takeshi Shudou was never involved in Wedding Peach or Sailor Moon it seems but did create Magical Princess Minky Momo which also had Junki Takegami as a writer and Kunihiko Yuyama as the director.

Update: I found someone who worked on all three of Sailor Moon, Wedding Peach and Pokemon.   Hisashi Kagawa who's mostly credited as an animation director or "key animation" and occasionally Character Design.  He's worked on a lot of other stuff too, he really gets around.

And another person Wedding Peach and Pokemon have in common is Art Director Katsuyoshi Kanemura.

Satoru Iriyoshi had previously worked on Goldfish Warning! the predecessor to Sailor Moon's time-slot, and then Ghost Sweeper Mikami and Marmalade Boy which were in the future Pretty Cure Timeslot.

Yukiyoshi Ohashi was a Pokemon writer who'd previously worked on Cutey Honey Flash, Mahou No Angel Sweet Mint and some Akko-Chan reboots.  And it as turns out they also wrote a lot of Wedding Peach, Shikichi Ohashi is the same person, AnimeNewsNetwork is just confused.

Massaki Iwane made his debut as an Anime Director doing Pokemon where he's become a fan favorite.  But he had previously done Key Animation for 7 episodes of Wedding Peach starting with the third.  Often ones that were also Yuji Asada episodes.