Guys! I'm still a cool, responsible grown-up! Don't walk away! (Wait! Other guys--I'm still a cool, carefree kid! Come back! Aiiiiiieeeeeee)
"Day 6 - Favorite superhero and why"
Surprising no one.
I was really into Sailor Moon as a young teenager, but not because of the dubbed anime. I first learned about the series while web-surfing one night, eating peanut butter cookies and listening to Space Oddity on repeat. I saw manga pictures first, then moved on to obsessively reading all the episode synopses at Hitoshi Doi's website. It was at least a year before I was able see even a single episode, and though I had a brief fling with the version of the show in English, its laughable, obvious, embarrassing, sometimes offensive inferiority was already known to me from my research on the internet. I didn't have access to any of the Japanese episodes (this was before Youtube) and couldn't afford to buy much of anything, but I read translations and downloaded music and drew fanart. I did get a T-shirt, and one volume of the original manga (which we found in Hawaii). Later, I taped over a bunch of my dad's movies (sorry, Dad!!), and later than that Heath bought me the first four volumes of the English comic. I created a website for a massive planned fanfic with my own cast of Senshi characters, which never got off the ground but which garnered a minor fanbase anyway because I networked like crazy and the internet is weird that way.
Anyway, after a while I sort of got over it and obsessed over things I had more access to. Fast-forward to college, when I started spending a lot of time on Wikipedia. I was attracted to my ability to fix grammar and add information on a whim, and eventually I wound up migrating over to the section on Sailor Moon. Seeing that it needed a lot of help (because most of its fans are, like the characters themselves, giggling schoolgirls), and because I still had this massive store of useless information saved up in my brain from when I was younger, I decided to dive in. Long story short, I ended up founding a special "WikiProject" task force, personally rewriting almost all the articles (some more than once), researching every freaking thing I could find about the manga, anime, live-action series, musicals, soundtrack, video games, cast, etc. etc. etc. etc., and generally putting in enough time and edits and discussion to be nominated and then voted in as a Wikipedia administrator. It was totally insane. It was totally awesome. Then I got pregnant and became allergic to internet drama, so I logged out one day and never logged back in. In some ways I miss it, and in other ways I am terrified to even peek at it again.
So yeah. That was all just to explain what I mean when I say "favorite". XD I don't know whether I'm more deeply proud of my work or deeply mortified about its subject--I guess it depends on who I'm talking to and whether they seem unimpressed. (Whatever the case, being an admin does look pretty sexy on my resume, even though in reality it's a pretty thankless job.)
"But why, Rachel?? Why!?!?"
The obsessive part came from being 11, and later from wanting to justify having been 11 (while simultaneously practicing my writing/editing/researching/committee-running), so I'll leave that aside. But why the original attraction?
The main reason is that I really, really like pantheons. As a little kid, I was really into Greek and Norse legends, and into systems of classifying the elements. Organizing reality into discrete chunks, and then splitting those chunks up among humanoids with thematically appropriate character designs, is a trope that hits my brain right in its happy spot. I don't really know why, but if that's gonna be your happy spot, nothing lives up to it like Sailor Moon does. The creator, Naoko Takeuchi, thought of absolutely everything. From name kanji to birthdays to color schemes to powers to the flowers they like, every single friggin' thing about the characters is subtly sorted to match their planets--astronomically, astrologically, Greekly, and Japanesely (and sometimes even morely). It's completely amazing. (Also, Naoko is adorable and one of my favorite creators of anything. She makes me want to make things, too.)
And the characters are so exciting! They're three-dimensional, and have complicated relationships with one another, and there sure are a lot of them. They are happy and angsty and silly and tragic and sexy and stupid. They have interesting problems. They don't always solve them. They try their best.
It's also just a high quality franchise. The actors' performances are above top-notch (in Japanese--in English they're hilariously terrible), the art is usually gorgeous (especially in the manga), the music won a bajillion awards, and the video games are fun. But that's true of a lot of other things, too. What really grabbed me and captured me and refused to let me go was the characters. They are both awesome and sorted into multiple highly complex elemental compartments, so I was doomed. I also really like how specific the costumes are. :P
Keen observers may note that I am now running a webcomic which features a large number of women with elemental powers (although I'm subverting the trope as hard as I can). That comes from a lot of places, mainly the Muses, but I'd be lying if I said this wasn't an influence, too.
Hmm. I feel like this was mostly a lot of embarrassingly pretentious rambling. But it's gotta be better than just going, OMGoober, Sailor Moon! She's awwesomex0rs!!!!! LOL~ ^___^;;_v
...Or maybe it's totally not. And I didn't even explain why I like it/her/them! I dunno, man. Read the manga. It's not that long. It's pretty and funny and plotful and good.
