Sailor Moon influences on this generation?

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Is Sailor Moon mostly for girls?

Are you a female Sailor Moon fan?
4
31%
Are you a male Sailor Moon fan?
9
69%
Are you a Sailor Moon fan that identifies as something else?
0
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Total votes: 13
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takenoko
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Sailor Moon influences on this generation?

Post by takenoko »

Looks like there's going to be a book about that:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interes ... men/.88224

I know there's some Sailor Moon fans here. How has Sailor Moon affected your life?
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Re: Sailor Moon influences on this generation?

Post by Saejima Kouga »

First off, I want to say I'm a little bit perturbed at how that article and book are aimed at women only.

As a child watching Sailor Moon Classic and Sailor Moon R, it was interesting to see that a superhero can be a regular person and have bad grades, get hurt, or lose a fight.

As a teenager watching Sailor Moon S, it was the first time I saw gay characters in a positive light. They weren't dying of disease, or doing drugs, or victims of hate crimes. They were actually pretty amazing and they were the most powerful of the whole team. They reflected that gay people can be cool, can be powerful, and can be successful--which was not something shown in the 90s and pre-2004. And really, isn't something we see much even today.
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Re: Sailor Moon influences on this generation?

Post by Lunagel »

Saejima Kouga wrote:First off, I want to say I'm a little bit perturbed at how that article and book are aimed at women only.
Well to be fair the anime and manga are pretty heavily heart star sparkle girl power so don't fault the man for writing a book about how the anime reaches its target audience. Writing a book on how it influenced guys a) should definitely be a separate book entirely and b) probably wouldn't sell that well tbh, the fandom is pretty heavily 90 percent female.

Honestly I can't help but feel it's a quick cash in on the returning popularity of SM but I haven't read it, so who knows?

For me, SM was my first manga and it really opened me up to reading more comics, even American ones, whereas before I had prefered print literature. It was a unrepentantly female fantasy and I enjoyed the drama and especially the wide variety of characters.
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Re: Sailor Moon influences on this generation?

Post by VerusMaya II »

Sailor Moon started literally everything for me. My first anime, which lead to my first manga, which opened up huge worlds to me. It was also my clear path into fandom; Sailor Moon original senshi fansites were a dime a dozen back then, and I made many good friends online that I still keep in contact with to this day. The series is still very dear to my heart - I have 2 complete manga collections (the original English release, and the newer re-translated one), and the full anime on my external harddrive (which I recently rewatched). No magical girl series has quite compared.

I can't speak to how viewing the anime as a child (it aired when I was in 2nd grade) affected me without some deep introspection, as it's been so long that it's simply me now. However, upon my recent rewatch, I was stunned at just how powerful the show was, and all the positive messages and situations it portrayed. I couldn't even begin to make a list, almost every episode had something worthwhile to say!

It also made it easy for me to get into toku, I think. The color-coded team members can probably trace its origin to sentai, for all I know.
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Re: Sailor Moon influences on this generation?

Post by takenoko »

Are Sailor Moon fans mostly little girls? At least in America, I definitely feel like there's a healthy mix of both.

As one of the older members, Sailor Moon was definitely a breakthrough for anime for my generation. As a young teenager in high school, it was a way for me to watch anime, albeit Cananadian dubbed, after school. I doubt it was the first anime that I had seen, but it was the first one where I felt like I knew it explicitly came from Japan. And yeah, it opened the way for other anime, manga, comics, etc.

I think I also watch Ronin Warriors at the time, and really liked that as well. Then we saw a bunch of other bad dubs, 3rd-4th gen vhs tapes, Fushigi Yuugi, Evangelion, etc. At the local comics shop, we opened a subscription box for the Sailor Moon comics that Mixxzine (before they turned into Tokyopop).

At our high school, there were definitely a lot of girls who watched Sailor Moon. But I feel like there was a significant number of guys who watched it too. I remember walking int he hallway and seeing a poster with a hand drawn Sailor Moon on it and thinking, "Wow, it's that popular?"

Something to keep in mind was that when Sailor Moon was airing for us, we only had the first two series. Or one and a half. By the time we got out of high school, they hadn't acquired the rights to finishing Sailor Moon R or beyond. But a lot of stuff is weird and incremental like that, which gets lost in history after something gets completed. I basically just want to remind people of what an old man I am.

I just felt like this was the first show that was explicitly aimed at girls that both guys and girls were enjoying, for my social group at least. Also, there's a poll now. Please participate, would you kindly?
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Re: Sailor Moon influences on this generation?

Post by Lunagel »

You're going to get skewed results cause this site is mostly dudes XP

Abroad, sure, I'm sure there's more guys and it's probably more like 30/70 or 40/60, but in Japan it's pretty solidly in female territory and heavily marketed to girls, hence why the Japanese author writing in Japan for a Japanese audience focused on the wimmenz.

I'm not saying you can't like it if you're not a girl, just saying you're not the target audience.
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Re: Sailor Moon influences on this generation?

Post by VerusMaya II »

Lunagel wrote:You're going to get skewed results cause this site is mostly dudes XP
Yeah if you wanted a legit ratio you might have to go elsewhere, though even then certain sites attract certain genders more than others. /shrug
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