I have sometimes argued that Sailor Moon fans give Tuxedo Mask a bad rap, treating the character as if he is utterly useless when he in fact makes an important contribution to the Sailor Moon saga, albeit in a role that becomes more peripheral as the story advances. Because of my unorthodox view of this subject, I recently made a tongue-in-cheek comment on Twitter. Then, to my surprise, all hell broke loose—and I’m not sure that’s a metaphor because some of my interlocutors act as if they’re demon-possessed. This is not the tweet I would have selected to go viral, but beggars can’t be choosers:
Let me remind everyone complaining about this that the game is based on a cartoon about a girl who screams and cries until a man comes to save her. https://t.co/nCWh2Dws65
— D. G. D. Davidson (@DGDDavidson) May 18, 2022
To give some context, @t_unmasked is an account dedicated to Sailor Moon trivia. It revealed that an old Sailor Moon video game had two modes, hard and easy, which it facetiously listed as “boy” and “girl.” It’s not clear what joke the game’s designers were trying to make; possibly, and indeed most likely, they were referring to the fact that, in the Sailor Moon universe, girls have the most powerful magical weapons. But another possibility, assumed by @t_unmasked and most of her readers, is that the designers were implying that girls are bad at video games.
My cheeky comment was supposed to point out that, contrary to the beliefs of many of the franchise’s American fans, such a joke would fit right in with Sailor Moon’s sense of humor, as I’ll explain below. But nobody understood what I meant, and @t_unmasked’s followers quickly dogpiled me, ranting and raving like a pack of banshees.
I was flabbergasted by this response because I thought what I said was obvious, being right there in the show. But @t_unmasked, to my surprise, went so far as to claim my comment was “factually incorrect,” as if empirical science had refuted my opinion about a Japanese funnybook.
And that was the nice, civil response. Most of the responses I got were more along the lines of, “I HATE YOU YOU BASTARD YOUR MARRIAGE ISN’T REAL YOU’RE GOING TO DIE ALONE JUST SAY YOU HATE GIRLS I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YUUUOOOOO!!!1”
I started this blog because I noticed that discussions of magical girls were, let us say, philosophically monolithic, so I thought a fresh perspective was warranted. Since I write in a niche genre and am bad at SEO, I get few interactions. Doing my own little thing in my own little corner, I sometimes forget that a lot of you are crazy.
I’m Right and You Know It
What I said was correct, as can easily be demonstrated by turning on the television. It is as if my accusers are watching Sailor Moon from a parallel universe. Or getting it confused with Disney Star Wars.
I’ve discussed this before, so allow me to quote myself. Here is the outline of a typical climactic battle from an episode of Sailor Moon:
- A monster attacks.
- Sailor Moon transforms.
- Sailor Moon talks smack.
- Sailor Moon gets her butt kicked.
- Tuxedo Mask shows up and throws a rose at the monster.
- Tuxedo Mask delivers a stirring speech.
- The monster gets distracted.
- Tuxedo Mask shouts, “Now, Sailor Moon!”
- Sailor Moon performs her finishing move.
- The end.
Tuxedo Mask rescues the sailor scouts so often, even I get frustrated by it, and I’m not a feminist, nor am I offended when a guy rescues a girl. It’s just that if a girl is going to put on a superheroine outfit and launch into a hammy monologue, I expect her to walk the walk after she’s talked the talk. The sailor scouts usually talk big and then spend most of a fight running around and screaming until a man shows up to tell them what to do.
Some of my accusers admit that this is a typical pattern but claim I am wrong anyway because the show breaks the pattern during important episodes and switches to a slightly different pattern in later series. They apparently think the words always or only are somewhere in my tweet. This is “fact check” style argumentation, admitting a statement is true but then pretending it contains qualifiers that would render it false.
Since we all agree that this is a typical pattern in the show, the question of whether my tweet is factually correct hinges entirely on the meaning of the word save. Throwing a rose-shaped dart that prevents a monster from killing someone and gives that someone time to extricate herself and fight back fits the definition of save in ordinary language.
Of course, when we have this discussion, we should make clear that we are talking about the anime series from the Nineties. The reason it uses this recurring pattern is because it needs to pad out the story to reach the required episode count. The original manga gives Sailor Moon a much clearer character arc, but the anime keeps her childish, whiny, and needy for considerably longer, both for the sake of humor and to reach a certain length.
Why Sailor Moon Is Not Feminist
Now to explain the deliberately provocative title of this post: I intend this brief essay as a spiritual successor to my earlier write-up, Why The Powerpuff Girls Is Not Feminist.” The Powerpuff Girls appeared in America at approximately the same time that Sailor Moon was making waves in Japan, and the two franchises have some notable similarities.
It should be obvious that I am not claiming that Naoko Takeuchi (creator of Sailor Moon) and Craig McCracken (creater of Powerpuff) do not consider themselves feminists. Nor am I claiming that many or most of the people who worked on their franchises do not consider themselves feminists. That would be silly. What I am claiming is that neither of these titles adheres to the increasingly rigorous and increasingly illogical demands of feminism in the twenty-first century. Both franchises, in fact, have episodes explicitly mocking feminism. I have previously discussed the episode from Powerpuff Girls, so I will now discuss the one from Sailor Moon:
These are panels from the Sailor Moon comic, specifically a stand-alone short story published in English for the first time by Kodansha in its 2013 release of the complete manga. In case it’s unclear, what is happening is that Sailor Chibi Moon is confronting a villainess who is hypnotizing the women of Tokyo to convince them to pursue careers instead of marriage and children. However, it turns out that this villainess is merely bitter about her own troubled marriage, and she reconciles with her husband in the end.
A few years ago, in another Twitter spate, I had an argument with a feminist who could not comprehend this chapter. She described it as something inexplicable, from out of left field, that is somehow dissonant with the rest of the franchise. I attempted, patiently, to explain to her that this is satire—specifically, satire of beliefs that she herself holds. She appeared unable to understand what I was saying: In her mind, satire is for other people, for the evil Christians and white men. The notion that her own ideas could be satirized simply couldn’t fit in her brain.
Now a reader might object, “But how is this possible? Doesn’t Sailor Moon have clear feminist themes in some places?” Yes, it does. Of course, it also has multiple writers across its various versions, so we should be unsurprised if its messaging is not entirely consistent. But I see no inconsistency between this and, say, the hamfisted grrrl power speech that the sailor senshi deliver to Jadeite in the animated series. Sailor Moon comes from the Nineties, a brief period of time when feminists were capable of laughing at themselves. Sailor Moon can laugh at feminism because it knows better than to take itself too seriously. And that is why a joke about girls being bad at video games fits quite comfortably into this franchise.
What Is Happening Here?
So why did my mundane and obvious comment catch anyone by surprise? I think it is because, over the last two decades, we have turned consumerism into a substitute religion and our entertainers and corporations into a priest class. That is why businesses make statements on political topics that have nothing to do with their products, and why hamfisted messaging is increasingly common in television shows, comic books, and novels, as if these were religious tracts and sermons instead of works of entertainment. That is why Millennials had, not just a moment of disappointment, but a crisis of faith when they found out that J. K. Rowling did not agree with the Current Thing in all its particulars: They had tried to turn her children’s novels into holy books only to discover that their prophetess was a heretic.
So why is anyone angry when I point out that Sailor Moon does not fit the rigors of third- (or is it fourth now?) wave feminism? After all, it was written in the Nineties when this newfangled form of feminism didn’t even exist, so we should not expect it to adhere to the standards of current fads. But feminists, like all progressives, live in an eternal “now” where there exist neither the past nor any foreign cultures in which people have different worldviews and assumptions. That is why they tear down statues, because the great men of previous ages did not live up to the niceties of the present.
American fans are desperate to make Sailor Moon, like Harry Potter, one of their works of scripture, so they simply ignore any of its elements that do not fit their increasingly narrow paradigm. I have been subjected to the odium theologicum because I dared to interpret holy writ in a heterodox way.
What to Do About It
I offer this in a spirit of charity to everyone who screamed at me on Twitter, but those people are unlikely to read this blog, so I also offer it to anyone else who happens to stumble upon this and read to the end. There exists in every religious tradition and every worthwhile philosophy a concept called detachment: To be detached is to be unconcerned with material things such as possessions or entertainment franchises.
Detachment is easy to describe but difficult to practice, which is why its greatest practitioners are rightly recognized as superlative men. Socrates, as described by Plato, was entirely detached. The Hindu saints who owned nothing but a loincloth and begging bowl were entirely detached. Br. Lawrence, whose contemplation of God remained uninterupted even while doing the dishes, was entirely detached.
You and I will never reach that level, but we can still practice detachment in small things: Give up a meal once a week, quit a bad habit, watch less television, and refuse to be disturbed by Twitter hot takes. If a bad opinion about Sailor Moon causes you to fly into a rage so intense that you wish the opinion-haver to die alone, then Sailor Moon has a hold on you it shouldn’t have, and it will ultimately make you miserable. It is, in fact, making you miserable already—because rage is a kind of pain.
The stories you consume should be for one of two purposes only—for edification or for the relaxation of mind and body, and you should indulge the latter only in moderation. If you are buying the figurines and the Funko Pops and trying to build your life around a story, then that story owns you, and you should not consent to be so owned.
At this point, of course, some of you will look up my profile, find out I’m Catholic, and go, “Hurr durr muh sky fairy if God real why peepee feel good checkmate theists.” Yes, I know; I’ve heard it before. But that, at least, is a story that has stood the test of time, that built Western civilization, and that will still be here when you, I, and all the cartoon shows are forgotten. If you are going to dedicate your life to a story, you must choose one with a similar pedigree.
