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.