Sailor Moon/Manga-Only Tropes

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The tropes found in the manga version of Sailor Moon.

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• Babies Ever After: It's hinted that Usagi's pregnant with Chibi Usa by the time of her wedding.
• Beyond the Impossible: Unlike the anime, the power level of manga Sailor Moon, and, to a lesser extent, other characters, is (relatively consistently) insane. For a quick comparison, in the anime Usagi cannot reliably resurrect the dead, to the point that she does her best to not let Hotaru sacrifice herself against Pharaoh 90. In the manga, their solution to the Pharaoh 90 problem is to let Hotaru kill everyone on Earth, so that Sailor Moon can then resurrect everyone but the villains.
• Berserk Button: Several, both comedic and serious. Venus' one is pressed hard when you try killing Sailor Moon. (She was not her closest body guard for nothing...)
  • On the more comedic side... telling her she picked a trashy colour for lipstick makes sweet, ladylike Michiru... angry.
• Betty, Veronica and Archie Switcheroo: The Infinity Arc had Haruka hitting on Usagi while Michiru hit on Mamoru. Mamoru has become the Betty while the mysterious Haruka who rides a motorcycle and kisses Usagi while they're both in serious relationships seems to be the Veronica. Turns out that Haruka and Michiru, Sailor Uranus and Neptune respectively, were investigating Sailor Moon to help stop the Silence. They apologize to her and Mamoru for the deception. Mamoru and Usagi also forgive each other when they mutually confess, acknowledging that they may be in love, but sometimes other attractive people will come their way.
• Bifauxnen and Ladette: Haruka Tenoh and her rival Seiya Kou play the trope straight.
• Blind Idiot Translation: The original English translation of the manga by Tokyo Pop (previously Mixx Entertainment) made many, many mistakes, especially where names are concerned. For a few examples, Kaolinite is given the title "Magnus" (large) instead of "Magus" (mage), Ptilol becomes "Petite Roll," and the Boule Brothers are translated too literally into the Artificial Jewel Brothers. Particularly sad is when Hotaru quotes passages of a William Blake poem. The translators apparently didn't recognize it despite the credits given in the story itself and retranslated the Japanese translation into English. Then they made the exact same mistake when a Yeats poem appeared in the manga.
  • There's also obvious instances where the suffixes -kun, -chan, or -tan are used and the translators warped that into some really painful nicknames.
  • And in the case of Minako, bordering on Les Yay, as the manga translators translated 'V-chan' as 'V-babe'. Considering how often the nickname was used in the manga by most of the Senshi at one point of another, it became truly hilarious.
  • "Mugen Gakuen", which translates to "Infinity Academy", was translated as "Infinity College". The school is intended for kindergarten through high school, not college students.
  • The current English translation of the manga by Kodansha USA has its own blunders, as it translates everything rather literally and often produces sentences that no normal English speaker would use. And they get a number of the character's names wrong. For example, Queen Metaria's name was spelled two different ways within the same volume (once correctly, once using the "Metalia" mistranslation). They also misspelled the name of one of Rei's crows as "Demos". Most infamous was rendering Jupiter's attack as "Spark Ring Wide Pressure", a mistake none of the previous official translations have made. Basically, while they're better by comparison to Tokyo Pop (so far), Sailor Moon fans are often left to wonder if a competent translator will ever handle this franchise.
• Body Horror: Between burning/melting/decaying people and bad guys with Lovecraftian superpowers, the manga's full of it.
• Body to Jewel: No, not the heart crystals, the Silver Crystal is made partly of Usagi's tears. Also, the Pink Moon Crystal appears this way.
• Character Development: Much more of it than in the anime for the main characters (much less for minor characters and villains, as the result of the manga being much more concise).
• Did Not Do the Research: Sailor Tin Nyanko goes undercover as a foreign exchange student... from Libya of all places. She's pasty white, and doesn't even remotely act or dress like she's from a country with a conservative Muslim majority. Her name is also Japanese. Whether Takeuchi or Tin Nyanko failed to do the research is anyone's guess. She dies in her first appearance anyway, so there's not much time to contemplate it.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: In Stars, Princess Kakyuu has quite a bit of page time and character development, as she spends all of her time encouraging and helping Sailor Moon throughout the bad times. Then suddenly, during a fierce battle in the sailor crystal garden, she decides it'd be awesome to tell everyone she's a Sailor Senshi, transforms into Sailor Kakyuu, then proceeds to get stabbed through the chest by a blunt, rounded staff. The bad guys quickly harvest her Sailor Crystal, and Sailor Moon completely snaps.
• Eldritch Abomination: The anime Daimons were humanoid female monsters made from mundane objects, the manga Daimons were monsters that fused with humans (They also used some animals like dogs and cats), if the infusion turned out right (which was rare), it would result in a perfect Daimon (Kaolinite and the Witches 5 are examples of perfect Daimons), when it turned out wrong (Everyone aside from Kaolinite, the Witches 5 and Professor Tomoe and Hotaru), the result is a monster that easily fits the Nightmare Fuel category, just look at them
  • Virtually all of the Big Bads could also be considered this.
• Expy: The series is both a spinoff and reboot of Codename: Sailor V, so several characters (Usagi, Umino, Naru, Luna) are expies of ones from the earlier series (Minako, Amano, Hikaru, Artemis). But then Minako and Artemis make the jump into Sailor Moon proper, marking one of the rare instances of expies encountering each other as something more than a joke.
• Five-Man Band: (From the Guardian Senshi's point of view, at least.)
  • The Hero: Usagi
  • The Lancer: Minako
  • The Big Guy: Makoto
  • The Smart Guy: Rei
  • The Chick: Ami
• Homoerotic Subtext: Usagi gets hearts in her eyes when she meets each of the new Senshi.
  • This is later taken to an extreme when Haruka kisses Usagi multiple times in the early parts of the Death Busters Arc, in both her Uranus and Haruka identities. This actually creates a brief period of friction between Usagi and Mamoru, though they eventually admit what happened and move past it. The kissing is also how Usagi figures out Uranus' identity as Haruka.
• Humanoid Aliens: During the Stars arc, Galaxia has a flashback in which there are people with heads shaped like fish.
• Ignored Epiphany: In the manga, Beryl briefly muses about how she has sold her soul to Metaria, but thinks there's no going back.
• Let's Get Dangerous: Don't piss of Venus by threatening Usagi. Ever!
• Lovecraftian Superpower: Wiseman grants Esmeraude and Saphir magical arms/hands that definitely qualify.
• Myth Arc: The purpose and destiny of Sailor Moon and the Silver Crystal develops through all five arcs.
• Never the Selves Shall Meet: In the Black Moon arc, the titular character feels faint in the presence of her future self, Neo-Queen Serenity, and her body becomes transparent; her Silver Crystal also loses its power under the influence of its future counterpart. At the end of this story arc, Neo-Queen Serenity tries to resist the temptation of talking to her past self, since it may result in the history being changed... fails, and goes to meet Sailor Moon anyway. They don't touch, but manage to say goodbye to each other in person. The story also involved Prince Demand attempting to bring the world to an end by bringing together the two Silver Crystals, which would have caused a temporal paradox and unmade time itself.
• Psychic Dreams for Everyone: In the Infinity arc, everyone dreams about the impending doom and disaster Saturn is supposed to bring.
• Really Seven Hundred Years Old: Pretty much everyone in the future is affected, with Crystal Tokyo itself stated to be "a generation of ageless people". In the manga, it's stated that Chibi-Usa is over 900 years old - one day, she simply stopped growing (this is apparently linked to her lack of powers, and she seems to resume aging when they're unlocked). Neo Queen Serenity hasn't aged a day since she gave birth to Chibi-Usa at 22 (presumably, the other Senshi and King Endymion stopped aging around the same time), even though it's been nearly 1000 years. Additionally, though her exact age is unknown, Queen Serenity (Sailor Moon's mother in her past life) is stated to have the appearance of an 18 year old, and the race of the Silver Millennium are said to have life spans of about 1000 years.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: The sheer scope of spaces is repeatedly ignored throughout the manga, mainly because this particular universe runs on Rule of Cool rather than physics.
• We All Live In Japan: In the "Princess Kaguya" manga arc, Himeko mentions being denied a place on the Luna Shuttle's team because the NASA scientists thought a young woman like her "should just get married and settle down." While in Japan such attitudes toward young women are still fairly prevalent, in the U.S. getting married at Himeko's age (early '20s) would be considered rather young. It would be especially unlikely that she would hear it working at NASA, because the years of extra training and education required to get there would push the average marriage age even higher.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The cats are the last of Usagi's allies to be killed off in the Sailor Stars arc... and unlike the Senshi are promptly forgotten about, never shown to be resurrected and never mentioned or alluded to during the ending. But they must have been resurrected or Diana would never have been born.
• Wham! Shot:
  • You think this is going to be a cutesy magical girls story where a teenager learns to fight monsters and protect her friends. Then Zoicite comes up with a near-foolproof plan to lure Sailor Moon into a trap, and successfully gets her in a chokehold. Tuxedo Kamen can't attack without hurting Sailor Moon, watching with helplessness. So do the Senshi. Just as it seems Zoicite will kill Sailor Moon, a crescent beam incinerates him. It's Sailor V!
  • The Chaos Galaxia arc starts with Usagi seeing off Mamoru at the airport, as he gives her an engagement ring and promises he will be back soon from studying abroad. Then someone shoots Mamoru in the back, and it's confirmed that this killed him. Usagi blocks out the memory because it was so traumatic.