Category Archives: sailor moon

MMF: Makoto Kino

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When I thought about what I wanted to write about for this month’s Sailor Moon MMF, I decided I wanted to get away from my two favorite senshi, Minako and Hotaru, mostly as I’ve discussed them to death. (You can argue I’ve done the same with Setsuna, but I reserve the right to come back to her later this week anyway.) So I started to wonder if there were senshi that I liked but hadn’t really delved into why I liked them in great detail. Makoto was the first that came to mind. Because really, she’s terrific.

Introduced at the end of the first re-released volume/halfway through the first season of the anime, Makoto pretty much makes an instant impression. She is 5’6″, which given she’s 14 and Japanese, is really significantly tall. She also has many of the features and clothes that a fan of Japanese shoujo manga would instantly associates with ‘yanki’, or a girl in a gang – she has ‘wavy’ hair (the manga goes to great pains to have her note that it’s naturally that way and not a perm), she wears a long skirted school uniform, a carryover from her old school, which one could easily hide weapons in (it’s noted she’s so tall the school can’t get her a new uniform right away – in fact, she doesn’t get one till high school). And of course she’s rumored to have been expelled from her old school for fighting. (Apparently Takeuchi’s original plan was for Makoto to actually *be* a yanki, but her editors told her to dial it back.)

Of course, we eventually find out that Makoto is quite feminine, and loves to cook and do gardening. The interesting thing about this, though, is that this is not followed by her explaining everything else is a misunderstanding. She does fight at school – she fights bullies picking on others. And even though she gets ostracized by her classmates for her scary appearance and tendency towards fights, she’s not going to stop doing this. This becomes even more obvious when she awakens to her role as a senshi, Sailor Jupiter. She takes her role of protecting her princess, Sailor Moon, very seriously, and does not hesitate to treat youma exactly the same way she would treat a bully. Makoto hates injustice as much as the rest of the senshi, and if she can use her height and strength to stop it, well, that’s fine.

I feel I should also mention something else – of the entire inner senshi, Makoto is the only one with no parents – or even parental figure – at all. Takeuchi actually gives us this information offhandedly in a comedic side-story – Makoto gets terrified when she hears an advertisement for an airline, and tells us her parents were killed in a plane crash. Now, Ami and Rei also have parental issues – Ami’s parents are separated, and Rei’s mother has died and she’s estranged from her father. But Ami does at least live with her mother, and Rei has her grandfather. Makoto, from what we can tell, lives alone. How she manages to swing this we’re never quite shown – one fan idea is that she’s given enough for an apartment and necessities from a distant family member – but certainly it does give another reason why she’s good at cooking.

And then there’s the old boyfriend. Now, the manga briefly touched on this in her debut, but the anime began to use it as a running gag. And then once fans got a hold of it and began using it in fanfics… let’s just say that if you ask Sailor Moon fans about Makoto, one thing they will always discuss is that “she always things every guy reminds her of her old boyfriend”. A constant source of humor, it also underscores the loneliness in Makoto’s life. From what we see, Makoto was devastated by the breakup (this is even more true in the anime – the manga downplays it somewhat by having her awaken to her destiny) and is having a lot of trouble getting over it. Sailor Moon is not a series short of girls wearing their hearts on their sleeves, but even among those Makoto stands out.

Again, among the Inners, Makoto has a tendency to be “the normal one”, who can play straight man when any of the others go insane. One can argue Ami also fills this function, but Ami is a “genius type”, whereas, height notwithstanding, Makoto is far more easy to identify with as “one of the girls”. We usually find Makoto talking Usagi and Rei down from a fight (anime only – manga Rei rarely gets that hotheaded) or trying to walk Minako and Usagi back from a harebrained scheme. But as a character, she’s just as notable. Showing female readers and viewers that you don’t have to be either a ‘tomboy’ or a ‘girly girl’, but can feel free to love aspects of both. Oh yes, and also feel free to take no guff from any bullies who might be picking on your friends. Makoto is a fantastic part of the core Sailor Moon cast.

And she’s ‘talented’, too. (Sorry, had to get that in there.)

Sailor Moon Manga Moveable Feast: Call For Entries

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It’s time for December’s Manga Moveable Feast, and this month’s topic is Sailor Moon. It’s a manga that I tend to talk about at the drop of a hat, and so I immediately volunteered to be the host for this month’s event.

(A brief warning: there is really no way to make this discussion spoiler-free. I realize there are people who, with Kodansha’s re-release, are coming to the series for the first time, and I apologize to them. But Tokyopop’s complete manga and four of the five seasons of the anime have been out in North America for years and years. And I also want to gush about the Outers later on. So you have been warned: this will spoil the series.)

In college, I vaguely seemed to have Sailor Moon on the outskirts of my attention as one of those cute Japanimation cartoons the kids were talking about. As I got into anime and manga via Ranma, I began to note there were several fanfics that had him meeting up with Serena/Usagi (delete where applicable) and their cohorts, but nothing that really drove me to find out more. It was really when Mixxzine began to appear, serializing the story, that I started to realize just what it was that was making children and adults talk about this phenomenon.

There’s really so much to talk about. The strength of the main cast, who are all decidedly feminine and yet will not hesitate to kick anyone’s ass if so required. The manga (and anime) examining what it means to be a defender of justice and how, unlike other previous magical girls, this is not something that they happily give up when they grow up and get married. Usagi and the others are not just magical girls, they are the future rulers of the entire planet. And despite all of that, the manga also shows us that they are not only free to pursue their dreams, but are actively doing so. The sheer brutality of both the manga and the anime – I know that when people actually saw the ending of the first season uncensored, a lot of tears were shed; and let’s not even talk about the manga, where one volume began with Usagi staring at the reader as her flesh melted off her head revealing her skull beneath. (She got better.) And there’s any number of things that can be said about Haruka and Michiru, who managed to break several barriers both here and in Japan. Even when censored into ‘cousins’, you could see who they really were.

Obviously I can’t say all these things myself. Nor would I want to, when there are much better writers out there to do so. I will chip in during the week for an essay or two, but this is a call to bloggers, readers, or interested parties to write about the series.

A few things to note:

1) Obviously this is the MANGA Moveable Feast, but I feel that when you’re discussing Sailor Moon, especially in North America, where most of us saw the anime first, you inevitably find yourself discussing both, even when they differ. In fact, especially when they differ. As a result, please feel free to mention the anime as well. And you can also talk about Sailor V, of course.

2) As I said before, you may discuss the entire series. You may want to, as I did, put a quick note at the top if you’re going to be getting into the nitty-gritty of the Black Moon arc or the Starlights arc. But it’s not required.

3) I realize the manga is being reprinted and not entirely available yet, and that the anime is also out of print, but it goes without saying: please do not link to scanlation sites or torrent sites.

4) If you don’t have a webspace or blogsite but want to contribute, just let me know.

To participate, you can either post your article on Twitter, making sure to tag it with the hashtag #MMF so that I will see it (I am @Toukochan on Twitter, you could also add my name to the tweet); or you can email the link to my attention at gaffneys at gmail dot com. (Sorry, spammers suck.) I will post daily links as is the custom. The MMF runs from today through January 1st.

I look forward to seeing everyone’s awesome articles, essays, reminisces, or just plain old gushing.

And now, post-MMF, here are all the daily links in one handy page:

Day One
Day Two And Three
Day Four
Day Five
Day Six
Day Seven

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Vol. 2

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By Naoko Takeuchi. Released in Japan as “Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon” by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Nakayoshi. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

(There are spoilers for this volume in the review, please be aware.)

The first thing I noticed about the new volume of Sailor Moon, which contains half of the original Vol. 2 and half of 3, was how nicely it bookended itself. The volume opens with a dazed Usagi, waking up in Mamoru’s apartment, stunned to find out that he’s really Tuxedo Mask. And some two hundred and forty pages later, we end with the menacing cliffhanger of Usagi staring stunned at the same Mamoru, eyes now dark and with a menacing sneer on his face. Both of these things were highly predictable, but Takeuchi has a way of taking the most cliched plots and making them fascinating anyway.

Of course, in between those two set pieces, there’s a lot of stuff going on. First off, we get the arrival of our fifth Senshi. Takeuchi was not relying on her readers having read Code Name: Sailor V, so Minako gets introduced as if we’re meeting her for the first time. Which is a good thing, as Sailor V readers must have been confused by this serious, no-nonsense girl they thought they knew as a hyperactive ditz. (Remember, Sailor V was still less than halfway done at this point – the serious backstory for Minako was done retroactively after Sailor Moon ended.) In this case, I think Takeuchi realizes that the story is at a point where she needs Minako to be the experienced leader, rather than the genki flake. (That will come later, though never as much as the anime.)

So Minako is here to be the Senshi with long experience in fighting evil. The setup with her pretending to be the Princess is actually very well-thought out and sensible (I smell Artemis’s hand behind it), and even once the Princess’s true identity is revealed, note that it’s Venus who gets to be King Arthur and pull the huge sword out of the stone. (This does lead to the one ‘Mina-chan’ moment of the manga, where she drops the sword in the middle of Ami’s swank apartment complex lobby.) Unfortunately, this is a plot rather than character based manga series at this point, so Ami, Rei and Makoto get far less to do this time around except exposit. Though Makoto does manage to get briefly controlled by the enemy – it’s far more realistically done than Mamoru, and thus more disturbing.

There’s also a lot of destiny in this volume, most of it involving Usagi. A lot of this volume and the next is concerned with the past repeating itself – both the Senshi and the villains are worried about that, for different reasons – and how much fate controls our lives. There’s definitely a Romeo and Juliet vibe to the past life of Serenity and Endymion, though it’s unclear why their love is forbidden except that they come from different worlds. (Also, note Endymion being the leader of Earth – which helps explain why there is no Sailor Earth in this series, only in 70,000 fanfics on the Internet.) Seeing Endymion killed by the forces of evil is not particularly surprising, but seeing Princess Serenity stab herself with a giant broadsword IS. Takeuchi has never been shy about showing us blood and horror (witness Usagi’s dream of Mamoru’s melting skull, and Luna later on getting thrown so hard against a wall she almost bleeds to death). You can see why folks would like to fight Destiny repeating itself.

There’s also a lot here about the corrupting power of evil, something we’ll see time and time again in this series. Metallia is shown as a gray amorphous blob of pure nasty, and almost all the villains taking human form are shown to be possessed or controlled in some way, be it Beryl (who went on an archaeological search for Metallia’s seal, so was admittedly asking for it) to the four male Generals (who, like our heroes, appeared to have been reborn on Earth, but sadly were abducted and turned before they really knew what was going on.) Kunzite almost manages to throw off the spell for a bit – it’s clear that he’s dedicated to Mamoru over Beryl, at least till she pours the evil back into him – but for the most part it’s meant as tragedy, showing us the power and ambition that evil can command. (Note Beryl’s desire to take power for herself – and overthrow Metallia. Villains who turn against their masters is another thing you’ll see a lot of in this series, even if it doesn’t amount to much here.)

Kodansha’s presentation is pretty good. I noticed a typo or two, but for the most part the translation is very smooth. It’s not adapted as much as Tokyopop’s was, which works in some ways and not in others, but that is the nature of such things. Usako and Mamo-chan are both used here, with an endnote showing how they derived from the original names. This translation also keeps Takeuchi’s habit of having Usagi’s name represented by a bunny drawing – which can take some getting used to, I will admit. I wish the extras in the back had been translated – yes, they’re in teeny weeny script, and translating writer scrawl is always hard, but still. I also heard there are 4 ‘mini-comics’ that were left out of this edition. I checked to see what they were, and they all seem to be variations on Takeuchi saying ‘oh my god my old art is so bad’ and ‘deadlines are HAAAAARD’ and the like. So they would have been nice to see, but are not remotely essential.

Honestly, by the end of this volume I was feeling wrung out. There’s so much drama and emotion going on, in such a small amount of pages – remember, the anime took around 36-37 episodes to get to this point in the manga. Volume 3 will see the wrap-up of the first arc, and it should be a doozy. Let’s hope that destiny can be fought – well, except the destiny of true love conquering all, of course. That can stay.