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HOW TO FIX SAILOR MOON S

OR: talking about narrative problems in 20-year-old animes

So I just finished rewatching S. Actually I think that was the first time I ever watched all of it, and definitely the first time I watched it all in the right order 8’D And man, it’s a pretty great season in a lot of ways! It had a lot of stuff I enjoyed—the villains were fun and pretty different by Sailor Moon standards, Chibiusa was fukkin’ badass, and, of course, the Outer Senshi are better than everything. But maaaaan, did it have some funky writing problems. The point of this post is basically to talk about those, and maybe try to puzzle out some ways they could’ve done things better.

1. Explain the Holy Grail a little more than “barely at all”
Seriously, for a plot point that the entire season revolves around, we know waaaay too little about this. Sometimes it’s fine if not everything is explained in full detail, but I think in this case the audience is given too little to properly, you know, care. It also didn’t fit all that well with the show’s already-established mythology. Are the Tailsmans and Grail Moon Kingdom things? If not, where did they come from? It felt like all of this was just sort of dumped in to make the stakes really high (the world will be destroyed if the Grail falls into the wrong hands!!) without the slightest attempt to make it work as part of a larger story. (Same with the Messiah; more on that later.) The fact that the location of the Talismans was resolved so conveniently doesn’t help—“oh, the Outers had them all along without knowing, okay! Let’s move on.”

They could’ve fixed a lot of that by tying the Talismans and the Grail more explicitly to the Outer Senshi and their mission. I mean, maybe that’s what they were trying to do? But it felt pretty vague. It would’ve made more sense, I think, to explicitly state that the Talismans and Grail were Moon Kingdom artifacts meant to empower the Outer Senshi in their battles against invaders from beyond the solar system. The Grail, then, could’ve been Saturn’s Talisman—a super-powerful artifact befitting her terrible role as a destroyer of worlds, but one also capable of great good, hinting at the fact that Sailor Saturn isn’t just about wrecking everyone’s shit. That would also explain why Usagi could only use its power imperfectly; it wasn’t meant for her at all.

2. Introduce Hotaru a lot, lot sooner.
Goddamn, but this would’ve solved a ton of shit. Hotaru is a critical character, but she’s introduced so late that a lot of the explanation of why she’s important feels rushed and doesn’t have the impact that it should. Bring her in really early on—like as soon as Professor Tomoe starts talking about why the Death Busters want the Grail. Give us a couple of episodes to get to like her, but foreshadow that there’s something dark going on with her through her weird powers and relation to the bad guy leader. Then, bam, reveal her as the vessel for the baaaaad Messiah. Get that out there early enough, and it makes the ongoing conflict between the Inners and the Outers make a lot more sense! If we knew earlier on that the Outers wanted to kill Hotaru before she could awaken, there’d be no need to take the awkward, forced “well you guys just suck” angle that the show resorts to once the stuff with the Talismans has been resolved.

While we’re at it, clarify Sailor Saturn’s role as a Senshi a little better. That could also be done by introducing her sooner; by the time the Sailor Saturn stuff starts coming up, there’s barely any time to explain what the shit her deal is other than “SCARY POWERFUL.” Here’s how I see it: the Outer Senshi are supposed to be badasses who fight the big threats from the outside, right? And Saturn is the last planet before you reach the worlds of the Inner Senshi, right? So establish Saturn as a “last resort,” a fucking nuke meant for enemies dangerous enough to get past Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus. The setup could be that the other Outers only dimly remember her as a scary world-killer, thus explaining their willingness to kill a fellow Senshi. But it would turn out that she was more gentle, probably deeply conflicted about her role as a superweapon, etc. etc. etc.

3. Fuckin’ Messiahs, man, how do they work
This ties in with the above point about explaining Saturn better. The Messiah needs to be explained better too! Where does this story come from? Like the Grail, we have no idea why the shit this concept even exists. Isn’t Sailor Moon already a messiah figure, basically? And, well—I guess she turned out to be the good Messiah, but again, it was all done too vaguely to really hit home in a properly dramatic way. First she wasn’t the real Messiah, and she was just holding onto the Grail until they found the real one! But then she was the real Messiah! uh ok

I know I’m beating a dead horse here, but an earlier introduction of Hotaru (and her evil alter ego, Mistress 9) would’ve gone a long way towards making this work better. Establish early on that Mistress 9 is the messiah figure for the bad guys and that their god is Pharaoh 90. Fuck yeah, evil Lovecraft science cult! Also, maybe Mistress 9 could be aware of Hotaru’s Saturn powers. She could’ve explicitly chosen Hotaru as a vessel because she wanted those powers for herself. This would’ve dispensed with the really weird, awkward introduction of Hotaru as the Messiah of Silence that we got: after many episodes of Professor Tomoe talking about how they need to find the right person to give the Grail to, Mimete just sort of piped up and said “oh, you know who I think would be good?” It seemed like they had only just figured out that Hotaru would work, even though the subsequent scenes of Tomoe talking to 9-in-Hotaru implied they’d known it was her for a while (unless we were meant to think that they set up the creepy throne room right then??). That was a really confused bit of writing.

Here’s another idea: have all the Messiah talk come from the bad guys. The refrain of “WE’VE GOTTA FIND THE GOOD MESSIAH” always just felt like a distraction, and no one ever actually seemed to, well, look. The Outers were too busy stalking Hotaru, and the Inners were too busy fighting the monsters of the week. Forget about Usagi as the good Messiah; that’s what she already is, and throwing a new title on her seemed redundant. Just use her ~powers of light and love~ as a foil for the destructiveness of Mistress 9. If there had to be a good Messiah, it should’ve been Hotaru—the BIG REVEAL could’ve been that she was a savior as well as a destroyer, maybe, idk. I think I kind of like her better as having an explicitly destructive role but a personality that made her conflicted—even tormented, gasp!!—about it. You know, the good old “great power, great responsibility”/”I never asked for this!!”/”we gave you this power because we knew you wouldn’t abuse it” trope. Corny, but just the right kind of corny for Sailor Moon.

4. More screentime for the Witches 5
Haha, this one is partially a personal preference thing, I admit—though I think it’s pretty easy to argue that every witch after Mimete got the shaft in a big and bad way. But I love henchmen in Sailor Moon in general and the Witches 5 in particular, and I think they could’ve stood a lot more fleshing out. At the very least, they should’ve kept the explanation of them from the manga: that they were perfect, high-powered Daimons. As it was in the anime, they were just sort of … there …

I would’ve had them come in at the very beginning, start with Eudial hunting Pure Hearts, etc. etc. Kaorinite would be around as Tomoe’s second-in-command, and they could all be vying to take her place. They’d all fail, though, and Kaorinite would end up being one of the last bosses of the season (and we’d skip that whole pretty pointless, minimally explained thing about her dying and coming back).

5. What the fuck did “we’re seeking a different world” even mean, I mean really
This ties back into my problems with how the Outer vs. Inner conflict was handled. This line gets bandied about a lot as explanation for why the Outers think the Inners suck, but … what is it actually about? What’s the world the Outers want like? Because as far as I could tell both teams were fighting for a peaceful world, they just differed strongly on how to get there?? Like, fuck, you could do an entire season about this alone if they’d actually bothered to go into it—the Outers having a vision of the future that conflicts with Crystal Tokyo and GOING ROGUE or some shit. That could’ve been amazing! Instead it was a throwaway line that didn’t really mean anything!

welp that’s all the shit I can think of for now!! I’m sure there’s more but this is already annoyingly long