Sailor Moon/Quotes

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


One of the things about looking at series from the past: It's good to remember the historical context.
There had been magical girls, before this. They transformed into pretty clothes and granted wishes (that generally went humorously wrong), or transformed into duplicates of their older sisters to find out if the boy that they had a crush on liked them. Pure Shoujo.
And there were superhero shows. Some of them even had a token female character that wasn't a stay-at-home love interest.
And then there was Sailor Moon, in which the clumsy, awkward girl who has hopeless crushes on the cute, unattainable guy teams up with her BFFs to blow the living crap out of demons with their magical powers.
Nobody else had done this before.

It was groundbreaking.
—"Unka Josh", RPGNet forums, 8/17/2009 (in the [In Which I Watch Sailor Moon] thread)

What I find fascinating about the series is that it really is girl power in action. It does not take traditionally "masculine" action tropes and simply gender swap them, no, and it does not deny or condemn the attraction of the pretty princess fantasy. Instead, it takes all the "feminine" girly stuff like frilly princess dresses and pink unicorns and makes them into implements of power. The hypothetical girl in the audience is being told that she can be as girly as she likes and still dream of growing up into power and responsibility. Feminine articles are not shackles or playthings to be eschewed, or tools good only for obtaining the approval of men -- they are treated as cool and desirable things, in and of themselves.

Boy craziness is even part of this, in the way they make the knightly romance fantasy an active one. The girls wanna be swept off their feet by a handsome knight, and, damn it, they're gonna go out there and find that handsome knight and make sure he does it.

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