Sailor Moon V
Sailor Moon V (full title, "Sailor Moon V: The Dark Adventures of the Sailor Scouts") is a long-running series written by Troy A. Stanton, dating to the mid-to-late 1990s. It is an AU fanfic which diverges slightly from the canon timeline early in the first season, and then goes completely off the rails after Beryl's defeat.
Easily the worst thing about Sailor Moon V is the story's name, which not only breaks a cardinal rule (in some purists' minds) of Sailor Moon fanfic by using the dub name for the Senshi (as does the rest of the story), but also conjures up images of poorly-written lemons and darkfics. Admittedly there is sexual content and the story is darker and much more serious than the anime is, but the story never even nears the hopeless lows for which other fanfics are famous. And far from being a poorly-written lemon, Sailor Moon V ranks among the finest fics in the Sailor Moon fandom, and certainly the largest.
The first of several divergences in the plot occurs just after Sailor Mercury is awakened, when Beryl dispatches Commander Tolaris of the Negaverse Dragoons on a recon mission to Earth. Things take an unexpected twist when Tolaris runs headlong into Ami Mizuno not long after arriving on Earth and takes a liking to her, which winds up screwing with his mission priorities in predictable ways.
The second divergence occurs when none of the Senshi die facing Beryl's minions and Sailor Moon retains the Crescent Moon Wand at the end of the first season. It's at this point that the author throws the canon script completely out the window, choosing to retain the first season's focus on the conflict with the Negaverse rather than moving on to new foes. Beryl's position has been taken over by the dangerously competent General Rune, and while she's content to leave the Senshi alone and lick her wounds for a while, Earth is still in her crosshairs. At the same time, rumors begin to trickle in out of the far corners of the Dark Kingdom that the legendary General Nop'tera and her troops have returned from a long war with a neighboring dimension, and while Rune has a well-established political power base, Nop'tera is the highest-ranking General in the Negaverse, and the throne is hers by right of succession. Meanwhile on Earth, Ami's association with Tolaris comes back to bite her in a manner nobody ever expected, setting off a slowly-escalating chain of events that threatens to bring the Scouts back into conflict with the Negaverse... and possibly other powers far more dangerous than any mere denizen...
On the surface it may sound like a fairly typical divergence fic, but the story's greatest quality lies in the depth of the plot and the massive amounts of world-building the author put into his universe. Far from being the Dark Realm of Evilness(TM) that it was in both the manga and the anime, Stanton's version of the Negaverse is an entire planet in its' own right, richly detailed in culture, history, and geography, and the denizens are, if anything, even more memorable than the world itself is. No longer is the war between Earth and the Negaverse a conflict of black and white; there are as many heroes in the Dark Kingdom as there are on Earth. Sympathetic characters are everywhere, even in the highest echelons of the Dark Kingdom's military forces.
The continuing conflict with the Negaverse is hardly the only attraction to this fic, however. The story is rife with sub-plots ranging from Ami coming to terms with... certain changes in her life... to political intrigue in the Negaverse military, to a cosmic power struggle and many more besides. Chekhov has also apparently misplaced an armory somewhere around here, because there are almost literally dozens of guns waiting to go off.
The story appears to be dead at the moment,[when?] but it should definitely be noted that Stanton has always had an extremely slow posting rate, and the chapters he does post are usually tens of thousands of words long.
The full story can be found here.
- Exclusively Evil: Subverted with the Negaverse denizens. Turns out all the guys the Scouts fought throughout the first season were soldiers in Beryl's army, and many denizens are either sympathetic towards the Scouts or simply ambivalent.
- Back from the Dead: Tolaris, Jadeite and Serena. One of the numerous Chekhov's Guns lying around seems to indicate that Nephrite is due for one of these as well.
- Big Bad: General Rune seems to be this at the moment, but recent chapters have hinted that she might be a Disc One Final Boss.
- Blessed with Suck: Nearly all denizens develop some form of superpowers around the time they hit puberty, but this almost always results in a Superpower Meltdown while the poor kids try to learn how to control their new abilities. Less than half of all denizens survive puberty because of this.
- Chekhov's Gun: Tons.
- Darker and Edgier: It's not exactly Sailor Nothing, but it's still a lot more serious than either the anime or the manga.
- Dead Fic: Not quite, but it is on life support. Troy has a history of going months and years between updates and allegedly has a job with the Department of Defense that eats up all his writing time, but he does have the dreaded "I haven't given up on it, I swear!" line in his latest update.
- Disc One Final Boss: General Rune... maybe.
- Fanfic: Has fanfics of itself, namely "Review of Sailor Moon V" by Horosha, wherein the "real" Senshi somehow get their hands on Troy's fanfic and discuss it amongst themselves.
- Fan Service: In the second chapter, we have Ami in the shower, Ami dancing nude, girl on girl kisses, Ami biting Leda and Mina...
- Foreshadowing: At one point, Jadeite muses on the possibility of Serena becoming regent of the Dark Kingdom by virtue of being Darien's wife (Darien having been marked by Beryl and the Negaforce to be the next king in the first season). At some other point, we meet
Chibi-UsaRiniRenee, back from the future by accident... and she has a jet black inverted crescent moon mark on her forehead. - Half-Human Hybrid: Serena.
- Heroic BSOD: Serena has a truly spectacular breakdown after she watches Rune kill a doppelganger of Darien, thinking him to be the real thing.
- Heroic RROD: Even worse, the shock of the event triggers Serena's Chaos Factor at the worst possible moment, eventually leading to her death. Thankfully she gets better.
- Heel Face Turn: Tolaris and the Dragoons.
- Horny Devils: Susan, though she doesn't act like one.
- How Do I Shot Web?: A particularly nasty version, coupled with Puberty Superpowers. Most denizen adolescents wind up accidentally killing themselves in the process of learning to control their powers.
- Kiss of the Vampire: Ami's bite is noted to have different effects on different people; for instance, Leda describes it as feeling like a deep full-body massage, while Mina finds it more... stimulating.
- Lemon: Stanton has a series of spin-off lemons stored away from the main story on his website, but the main story occasionally features sexual content, including one full-blown lemon between Ami and Tolaris in the second chapter.
- Love Redeems: Tolaris... kind of. It's more like "Love Provokes Heel Face Turns" in his case since it would be quite a stretch to call him evil even when he was working for Beryl.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: The biggest twist in the entire series: Serena is half-denizen.
- Mid-Season Upgrade: A non-mecha example that doesn't quite fit Shonen Upgrade. Luna and Artemis gain some extra energy and offer to use it to give the girls a choice of new spells or new uses for their old spells shortly before a trip into the Dark Kingdom. The girls wind up choosing the second option, and get the rarely-seen "filler attacks" from the R season's Doom Tree arc, i.e. Venus's Crescent Beam Shower, Jupiter's Supreme Thunder Dragon, etc.
- Noble Demon: General Nop'tera, who would gladly leave Earth and the Scouts alone if she had any say in it and completely blows her top when Rune's interrogation techniques traumatize Serena.
- Our Vampires Are Different: You have traditional Terran vampires and their Negaverse counterparts, but Ami is different from both groups on account of her "mixed heritage."
- Puberty Superpower: Subverted with the Chaos Factor; most denizens don't survive puberty because they can't figure out How To Shot Web.
- Shout-Out: Tons, and from many sources. For example:
- Negaverse denizens apparently speak a dialect of Klingon.
- Venus hysterically points out a bird native to the Negaverse that is almost identical to a Chocobo.
- Nop'tera's fleet is named after the Red Wings of Final Fantasy IV fame. Ditto for the Dragoons.
- Serena's angelic transformation sounds a lot like the ones from Diablo.
- Song Fic: Sort of. Mina and Artemis perform a duet of Phantom of the Opera for the others during a sleepover. Songs used to set the tone for a chapter are entirely absent, but this troper doesn't know if we have a trope for characters bursting into song in-universe.
- Superpowerful Genetics: The so-called Chaos Factor, a pair of latent chromosomes in a denizen's genetic makeup that activate during puberty and rewrite the denizen's DNA with unpredictable results. Those who survive the process usually end up with some form of superpowers, but not always.
- Supervillain Lair: Nephrite's cathedral. Ends up becoming a favorite hang-out for the scouts and the Dragoons after Tolaris is revived.
- Spell My Name with an "S": Stanton insists that Renee's name is pronounced "Rih-NAY", not "REE-nee". Also, the use of the dub names in general, especially "Leda" replacing "Lita".
