Sailor Moon Review

It is about time I made another one of these blogs. I recently read through the entire original Sailor Moon Manga for the first time, including things like the Snow Kaguya Christmas Special, The Exam Wars, Chibiusa’s Picture Diaries and the Sailor V Prequel series, so I wanted to detail my thoughts on it. 

So Sailor Moon is a magical girl series, this is a genre I have seen a fair deal of, especially in recent years, but this one is something I am comfortable calling the most well known one that exists so it was cool to actually get to it. After reading it, yeah I can plainly see why this was so impressive when it came out and why it's still so popular and inspirational to other series today. The series is at once a relatable story that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and a deep elegant epic. It is at once a very stereotypical magical girl show, but also a super innovative and interesting one. For example this series takes place on Earth, in Tokyo, with Japanese school girls who start with mostly normal lives, but unlike a lot of other magical girl series they don’t really Do much of the slice of life civilian stuff that would be considered filler. The series is focused, tight and driven to the magical stuff that we signed up for but it never feels restrictive in that way. It actually makes great use of its setting because it takes you on a journey from the completely relatable and mundane, progressively to the cosmic magical space angels dealing with the fabric of the universe at the end. One of the major themes in this series is Connection, how everything in the universe is connected to each other, everything is created from Star Seeds and the like. So by doing this they are actually showing us this connection, all the cosmic beauty they are doing is connected to normal people, and we know this cause we literally witnessed them go from normal people to Eternal Senshi.

Since this series is mostly plot focused, meaning it's much more an ongoing story than an episodic one, let’s look into that. This series is divided into 5 primary arcs, the most famous being the Dark Kingdom Arc and the pretty much universally accepted as the best being the Stars Arc. This series has Really good plots overall. The Sailor Moon Manga, not counting side material which, while good, isn’t really in these arcs is only 60 chapters long, this means each arc has roughly 12 (often less) chapters to tell its entire storyline, and every single time I was blown away with just how much interesting worldbuilding and cool moments. There's a Lot to set up with some of these, the senshi have to give entire groups of enemies from different times, dimensions and galaxies, all of which are lead by some sort of eldritch monstrosity, and that’s In addition to the fact that they generally introduce new allies in every arc. Yet they still have time to show a bunch of cool stuff that fits into the universe perfectly, like seeing crystal Tokyo in the future, or show that there are sailor Senshi in other galaxies. The plots themselves are all about conquering different aspects of evil and darkness and showing how they are flawed and cynical views that don’t hold up to the net positives of the universe, And from what I saw every single arc there is an even stronger more challenging dark world view to overcome, and I don’t me physically. Each one of these is represented by a monstrous chaos star, yes but just look at how the other characters are affected by this. Arc 1 only has Beryl swayed to the dark ideology, but arc 2 It’s a stronger ideology that you can see Chibiusa fall to, next arc the outer senshi all fall for it, after that the Amazoness Quartet do and finally the last arc where Galaxia, One of the single most intelligent and powerful beings in the entire series, is ultimately someone who fell for the most powerful dark ideology, and pretty much managed to convince everyone she came across beside Usagi to her side of it through some means, hell even Future Usagi fell for it. But even that got overcome in the end.

It was actually pointed out to me that every single arc's villain is trying to accomplish pretty much the exact opposite of what the last arc's villain was, and I think that’s beautifully done because of the theme of connection. These villains Goals do not connect to each other at all and that means they’re wrong on a symbolic level.

This series also has a lot of really cool twists and awesome moments. One twist I thought was really well done was at the End of the Dream Arc where it’s revealed the entire arc Took place while time itself was frozen. This was one of those draw dropping twists which I totally did not see coming, but the second I learned that I could immediately think of a bunch of stuff that set that up, and or made more sense now because of it.

Also, and pardon my French but, this series had some serious balls like I was blown away! This series has body horror, child murder, characters actively having sex, and pretty much all the characters die at least twice. It felt very mature and real and gave real steaks to everything that was happening.

Speaking of Characters, this series has its fair share of those. And with the exception of a few one off villains I would be willing to say every character in the series is Quite well done. A statement I’ve heard on this series, which I have come to agree with, is that every single one of the senshi is a strong enough character to carry their own show, yeah I could Really see that, in fact Minako already did that considering the prequel, yet despite her having the most screen time of the Guardian senshi through that, she doesn’t feel any more significant than the rest thanks to their character development, which I felt was especially strong in the Exam arcs. My fave Senshi were Makoto, Hotaru and Minako. But even my least favorite I still consider really cool. I love how all of them have different mythological connections, Venus is the goddess of love, Rei has Shinto powers, connecting different mythologies or religions from over the world makes the series feel like it has all encompassing worldbuilding.

The Villains were also REALLY strong on top of that, even Pharaoh 90 had a presence to be feared. My Fave Chaos Star often bounces between Death Phantom and Nel, NTM Galaxia who is just like, elevated in her writing compared to the rest of the series.

To go into more minor characters, I really liked the Mooncats, probably Diana most cause she's as cute as a button and all, The Amazoness Quartet were a very well done concept that made a ton of sense to me once I figured them out. Though I feel the most underrated character in the series would be Sailor Kakyuu.

Got to say, Really great character right here for only being in a handful of chapters but I think that is a testament to just how good the Stars arc was. Kakyuu is basically serving as a in between character to Galaxia and Usagi, she has significant personality traits of both, she's kind and loving, flamboyant and radiant, and she's got traits they do share in spades like being elegant and a powerful great leader. Worked simultaneously as a Foil to Galaxia as she's like her but has the opposite ideology, and an inspiration to Usagi as she's been through everything Usagi has and probably worse in fighting Galaxia and is clearly less powerful, but she still not only leading the rebellion but is still Smiling.

There's a lot of things like that in this story. The Symbolism, Themes and Mood are so strong even I can pick up on them. In every Arc of SM they just has a Really strong atmosphere that I got right away. There was an awesome Urban Legend mysterious otherworldly feel to the Black Moon arc that the horror fan in me went bonkers for. But there was also a mystical, wondrous and fascinating feel to the Dream arc that made my inner child go bonkers.

This series is strong in a lot of aspects, that’s not to say it's perfect though. The time travel in the series leaves a lot of plot holes. I often felt that the Guardian Senshi got Jobber’d with their very spotty win/loss record and Usagi’s kill stealing. Naoko would often repeat ideas like making the guardians fight a hench-villain once per arc, or throw in some ideas that didn’t go anywhere or make much sense like Haruka wearing a pseudo tuxedo mask outfit. Sometimes the villains would do things for the sake of just being edgy. But really all of these are negligible flaws that are easy to overlook, the most glaring one is probably the time stuff, but the arc with most of that, the Black Moon arc, is easily one of my favorites!

Overall I would say Sailor Moon is a great series more than worthy of its status, I am not normally a Manga guy but I have seen quite a bit of the anime and I would definitely recommend reading this over it, they are pretty radically different stories and this version is much more high quality and easier to get into and finish. Out of all the MG Series I have seen I would be willing to say it's in my top 5 and I would overall give it a solid 8/10.