“Sailor Moon is not a good show,” I said to my partner some weeks back. “I mean — I don’t know if it’s a good show. I haven’t seen it since I was sixteen. I have no idea if it holds up.”
“That’s fine,” she said.
“No, listen. It’s badly animated, and formulaic, and so melodramatic. We don’t have to watch it.”
“When have I ever been picky?” she said. She’d known for years that Sailor Uranus and Neptune’s alter egos were the first example of a gay couple I’d ever seen. But for whatever reason, we’d never dug into that corner of my adolescence until that night. Sailor Moon wasn’t part of her lexicon. It had never been a common point of reference.
“I’m just saying, we don’t have to watch it,” I said. I really wanted to watch it.
“I know,” she said.
“We can just watch a couple episodes. We can just skip to Uranus and Neptune.”
“But I don’t know who the other characters are. We’ve got to watch a bit of the first season, at least.”
A bit of the first season. As if we both didn’t know how these things go.
Between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, Sailor Moon was my jam. I never settled for the English dub, with its missing episodes and kissing cousins. I was a completionist, and in the pre-YouTube days of dial-up internet, that meant every penny I earned from extra chores and babysitting went toward bootlegged VHS copies of the subtitled version, purchased via money order through some sketchy GeoCities site. I never thought to question the legality of this. Sailor Moon was serious business.
I was so excited to be sharing that part of my past with my partner. Haruka and Michiru were an important touchstone, yes, but they hadn’t been the only draw for me. I had loved that world, and all the characters in it — especially my former heroine, Sailor Jupiter. After years of hearing me proclaim Jupiter “the best,” my partner would finally see why. She would get it.
Except that she didn’t. And neither did I.
I remembered Jupiter as the toughest of the bunch, the one who threw punches first and asked questions later. Out of combat, she retained her role of devoted guardian, standing up against bullies one moment, sharing her lunch the next. Her love for her friends was fierce, but it came through in her actions more than her words. She protected and nourished them, for she needed them, desperately, even though she could take care of herself. She was sweet and smart, courageous to a fault.
That’s how I remembered her. That’s not how she comes across in the first two seasons of the show. When she appears on the scene, all she can talk about is the handsome senpai who rejected her. I blinked when I saw it. I hadn’t remembered that at all. I grinned nervously at my partner. “It gets better,” I said. I was partially right. The show got better. Jupiter didn’t. When asked to describe her, my partner said, “Moping over ex, can cook, uh…is tall?”
My heart sank. I was baffled. Where was the Jupiter I remembered? Was she in the manga, which I had read between bootleg deliveries? Or worse, was she my own creation, the result of adolescent fanfiction calcifying into actual memory? Was my love for Sailor Jupiter nothing more than wishful thinking?
It wasn’t until we hit season three that I realized my mistake. It wasn’t Sailor Jupiter I had loved. It was her civilian identity, Makoto Kino. As soon as the episode title “Cold-Hearted Uranus? Makoto in Trouble” appeared on screen, a long-forgotten synapse fired. I leaned forward.
“What?” my partner asked.
“I think I watched this one a million times,” I said.
She smirked. “Oh, really.”
I shook my head, frowning at the screen. “Not like that. I…I’m not sure. I don’t remember.”
The episode begins with Makoto confessing to Usagi (Sailor Moon) that she works hard on her culinary skills because “boyish girls need to be good at something like cooking.” It’s painfully clear what she means. Tomboy Makoto doesn’t feel qualified for womanhood, which she equates with wifeliness. Usagi attempts to make her feel better by praising her looks and telling her she’s “feminine enough.”
They step off the curb, right into the path of a speeding motorcycle. Makoto throws herself onto Usagi, knocking her out of harm’s way. The driver pulls off her helmet in a panic, asking if they’re all right. It’s Haruka — gorgeous, androgynous Haruka, appearing in a wash of sparkles and watercolors.
And Makoto’s world just stops.
Let me take a moment to explain Haruka Tenoh. Haruka Tenoh does not have time for your gender binary bullshit. She passes as a man, is often mistaken for a man, and doesn’t correct strangers when they use male pronouns. Haruka knows she’s a woman, and that’s good enough for her. There’s a wonderful moment in a previous episode when Minako (Sailor Venus) flips her lid after learning that the smoldering dude she’s spent the day stalking is not what she expected. Haruka just raises her eyebrows and smiles. “I never said I was a man,” she says. In other words — that’s your problem, not mine.
Back to Makoto, standing dazed in the middle of the street. Haruka ties her scarf around Makoto’s wounded hand, offering heartfelt apologies. Makoto manages to choke out a few syllables, and somehow refrains from swooning as Haruka zooms off with a wink and a cheeky blown kiss. Usagi swoops in like a hawk. “Mako-chan,” she says. “Even if she’s really attractive, Haruka is a woman.” Makoto bolts out of her reverie. “Of course! It’s nothing like that!”
They stare at each other. They laugh, loudly. Too loudly.
I think it’s very common for adolescent girls-who-like-girls (or who knows, maybe everybody) to go through the experience of meeting someone amazing and being unable to parse whether you want her or want to be her. Emerging hormones are confusing as hell, and the line between admiration and attraction can be a tricky one even when you’re not in the throes of puberty. The episode never confirms whether or not Makoto feels that way about Haruka, which works, because Makoto is fifteen. She doesn’t know, either.
After the motorcycle incident, there’s all sorts of nonsense with heart crystals and talismans and the Holy Grail, but none of that’s important. None of that is why fifteen-year-old me watched this episode so many times that twenty-eight-year-old me still knew exactly how each upcoming line of dialogue would sound, even though I don’t speak Japanese. All you need to know is that after a day of searching for excuses to meet Haruka again, Makoto wins the teenage jackpot: she spends the afternoon hanging out with her and Michiru. In their car. And it is the best.
A monster shows up, as expected. It’s after Makoto’s pure heart — or, to be more specific, “your pure heart that looks up to your ideal woman.” There’s a fight scene. The good guys win. Everybody goes back to civilian form (which has the same effect as Clark Kent throwing on a pair of glasses), not knowing they’ve all been fighting together. In a very sweet moment, Makoto binds Haruka’s injured hand with the scarf she’s been meaning to return. Makoto’s blushing, Haruka’s touched, Michiru’s smiling at both of them. And we get it. Makoto gets it. She understands the place Haruka has in her life, and crush or no crush, romance isn’t it. In two lines of internal monologue, she spells it out: “Haruka is wonderful after all. I hope I can be a wonderful woman like her someday.”
Epilogue. We see Makoto inside a clothing store. She’s wearing a dapper skirt-and-vest ensemble, complete with a jaunty scarf around her neck. She poses for the mirror, tossing her hair like Haruka does, blowing a cheeky kiss. Freeze image. Cut to credits.
If you had asked teenage me why I dug that episode so hard, I would have told you that Makoto was my favorite, and that I loved seeing her develop a friendship with Haruka and Michiru, who were awesome. I would not have had the ability to break it down further than that. But I have the benefit of hindsight now. I know the journey I had started on then. I know the things I would learn in the years to follow. As I watched that episode for the first time in twelve-or-more years, I could remember what I had felt back then. Comfort. Kinship.
In twenty-five minutes, Makoto goes from feeling inadequately feminine to seeing that there are infinite ways to be a woman. Haruka knows exactly who she is without needing anyone to confirm it for her. Seeing that in action changes everything for Makoto. And it might have for me, if I had listened more carefully.
Those same years that I was buying bootlegs, I wrestled with two conflicting facts: I liked girls, but I was supposed to like boys. There was no doubt in my mind that I was a woman, but I didn’t quite fit into the neat little box meant to go along with that. Some days, I wore a skirt. Some days, I wore boxers. Some days, I wore boxers under a skirt. I experimented with makeup, boys’ jeans, high heels, combat boots. A few years down the road, I would wear a late Victorian ballgown to prom, and a shirt, tie, and slacks for my senior portrait.
I imagine teenage me, wearing baggy pants and lacy shirts, unsure if I wanted to flaunt my boobs or hide them forever, refusing to admit that guys just weren’t my thing.
I imagine that same girl watching Makoto, with her tomboy swagger and her pink rose earrings, blushing furiously in the backseat of a car belonging to the most glamorous couple ever, feeling awkward and shy and unsure of herself, wishing with all her heart that she could be just like them — not in looks or behavior, necessarily, but in confidence.
I imagine me as I am now, sitting with Makoto at her kitchen table, in an alternate universe where Crystal Tokyo never happened, where she put her transformation stick away in a drawer and went on to have an ordinary life. She’s about my age, probably a little older. She’s got a boyfriend, or a girlfriend, maybe. She pushes a cup of tea and a slice of cake across the table. She asks me what’s wrong.
I say, “I worry that I’m not what a woman is supposed to be. I don’t know if I’m doing it right.”
She cocks her head. “Still?”
“Sometimes.”
She reaches into her pocket, and pulls out her phone. She finds a photo. It’s Haruka and Michiru, at their wedding. Suit and tie, dress and lace. Both of them beautiful. Both of them everything you could ever want to be.
“Your problem,” she says, pointing at the happy couple, “your problem has always been that you see them as either/or. They’re not. They’re opposite ends of a spectrum. You and me, we’re in the middle.” She glances at herself, then at me. She laughs. “I mean, look at us.”
And I look, at our long hair tied back in a practical way, at our mouths that roar, our cheeks that blush, our hands that love to knead bread and play rough. Of course Makoto had appealed to me as a teenager. Of course she had made sense to me. She was me with superpowers and a cosmic destiny. All grown up, she and I no longer needed to try on clothes or pose in front of mirrors. We’d found our balance. We knew who we were. The difference was, I was still judging myself over what I saw. She’d broken that habit many years before, in the back of a yellow sports car.
Makoto looks at the photo and smiles. “They’d be the first to tell you that being masculine doesn’t make you less of a woman, and being feminine doesn’t make you less powerful. And whether you’re gay or a woman or both or neither’s got nothing to do with it. You are who you are.” She looks up at me, and the smile turns sad. “Why don’t you know that? We told you so. You watched us. You loved us.”
I forgot.
I forgot about Makoto, and Haruka, too, right at the time when I needed them most. I moved on from Sailor Moon just as the boxes became unavoidable. Fifteen, sixteen, you’re sometimes still a kid. You’re free to play. Seventeen, eighteen, you’re trying to be an adult, and that comes with rules. I’d been told what a woman was, and what a lesbian was, but neither definition worked for me. And for years — a decade, almost — that gnawed at me. Half an hour of anime hadn’t been enough to break through the things the real world made me swallow. I had not understood the lesson right in front of me, the one I had watched again and again without knowing why.
I wish I’d remembered Makoto. I wish I’d remembered her at seventeen, when some classmate I didn’t even know shouted “dyke!” at me as I walked down the hall. I wish I’d remembered her at twenty, when a college acquaintance — herself gay — looked at the fancy party attire I’d felt so pretty in just seconds before, and said, “I didn’t know you were a dress lesbian.” I wish I’d remembered her at twenty0four, when I came out to my father, at the point when he yelled, “you’re a normal, attractive woman!,” hitting the syllables hard, as if I didn’t understand, as if I had ever in my life questioned that fact. I wish, instead of falling into self-hating silence, feeling like I was some sort of mistake that didn’t fit anywhere, I’d remembered Makoto, forever dancing at a crossroads, and Haruka, who gave her the courage to be okay with that. I wish I’d said what Makoto’s ideal woman had said, with raised eyebrows and an unflappable smile.
I never said I wasn’t.
[Image via Sailor Moon Wiki and FanPop]
Tags: androgyny, anime opinions, gender bullshit, geocities, lgbt, sailor moon, sailor moon completionists, subs vs. dubs, taking tv shows very seriously as adolescents
Aw, this is just great.
AGREE
So good. Tearing up at my desk. I really wish I had any sort of influence when I was a teenager telling me that there isn’t just one way to be a woman.
I love this so, so much. I also watched Sailor Moon as a queer teen — I’m in my early 30s now — and that couple was a huge touchstone for me. I’m so glad that this post exists. Thanks, Becky, for writing this. & thanks, Mallory, for tweeting about it so that I would come look at it.
VKLL got so much of my money as a tween/teen. Now I don’t have a VHS 🙁
YES. Sailor Moon was my very first fandom (#geocities). This was wonderful and reminded me why this show gives me ALL THE EMOTIONS.
Has anyone here watched the live action version (PGSM)? The special effects are super cheesy, but it might be my favorite variant of the canon. Also it will make you intensely ship Rei/Minako.
PRINCESS SAILOR MOON WILL FUCK YOUR SHIT UP. God, I love that show so much. And it’s still a tragedy of my life that Rei and Minako never kissed.
COOL SENSHI DON’T LOOK AT EXPLOSIONS
OMG, the live action show is so banana-pants-crazy!
I love this and I love this fucking website (in a gay way)
uh sailor moon is the BEST show
but that aside, this was absolutely lovely and that ending squeezed my heart in the best way.
(HARUKA/MICHIRUUUUUUUUUUUU OMG)
I took away so many good things from that show, although I never purchased the tapes. I just couldn’t afford it!
I go into a table flipping rage whenever a young person now says they can’t afford to purchase anime or manga. It’s so easy to get now! You don’t have to import it! You’re not dropping $25+ on one vhs tape with two episodes! It’s cheaper and easier to get than ever, thanks in HUGE part to the people who dropped mad cash on it ten years ago, and you can’t afford it? FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.
Has anyone seen or read Ouran High School Host Club? It’s utterly amazing.
I haven’t read it, but the tv show was indeed amazing. Even if Tamaki is a total (endearing) idiot.
Next can we talk about Utena
YES let’s talk about Utena
Oh my god, we have to talk about utena. I joined a fencing team and turned out good at it for Utena.
turns into a car
gathers everyone up to drive to the land of Roses and Fencing and Weird Silhouettes and Tiny Monkeys and Fabulous Hair.
Do you know? Do you know?
kashira kashira
gozonji kashira?
Someone recommended Utena in a different article a few weeks ago and I was kind of already looking for something to watch so I started watching it on a whim and OH MY GOD, IT’S THE BEST. Like, obviously it’s great for its amazing characters and depictions of sexuality and explicitly feminist bent, but it’s also completely batshit insane? In the best way possible! This is legitimately one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen. I mean, I was just watching the episode [spoilers, I guess?] where the entire plot is “what if Nanami just started wearing a cowbell, guys” and I get to her nightmare sequence where her brother is feeding her hay and selling her to a butcher? And the entire scene is scored by a japanese language cover of Dona Dona? The yiddish song that uses a slaughtered calf as a metaphor for the holocaust? And then, of course, the episode ends with Nanami turning into an actual, literal cow and Utena has to bullfight her with a red sweater and a pitchfork.
To say nothing of the show’s baseline premise, which is, more or less, girl attends middle school that has a secret dueling forest with a spiral staircase that leads up to a platform with a floating upside down castle above it where students pull magic swords out of their classmates while someone sings about Sodom and the apocalypse. I LOVE THIS SHOW SO GODDAMN MUCH.
I haven’t watched Utena since early in high school, so I also have no idea if that show is good or not. But I always thought of it as a step about Sailor Moon in plot and pushing gender/sexuality boundaries. The movie though, wtf. I mean on the one hand Utena/Anshi are together and naked, which is what you’ve wanted for years, but on the other hand everyone is weirdly angular and their hair is wrong and there are piles of cars everywhere and everything makes even less sense than it did before.
I’m not too familiar with Sailor Moon, to be honest–I have vague memories of watching episodes of it with my sister and cousins, but I was kind of young at the time and I don’t think I was paying too much attention to the plot, so I can’t really speak to whether Utena is a step above. (Although, I had the exact same mental image of Sailor Jupiter that the author talks about here, as the brave, ass-kicking protector of the group, before she rewatched the show as an adult) But as someone who’s currently making his way through Revolutionary Girl Utena for the first time as an adult, I like it a lot.
You’ve just convinced me to give Utena a try. Bravo! (I think the character design put me off when I was a wee one.)
Ahh! I’m excited for you and I’m not even through the series, myself, yet. Hopefully you enjoy it as much as I am right now!
This gives me so many, many, many feels. See also: Shoujo Kakumei Utena, which was the director’s followup to Sailor Moon. ALL the feels. Like, I am sitting here having the Toast Has Made One Weepy At The Office need for tea.
…. which, I seriously bootlegged A LOT of stuff out of Chinatown Centre. Magic Knights Rayearth? Utena? Slayers? All of the above! It was the only way to get stories about brave tough maybe-gay ladies. That and Better Than Chocolate. The anime served as a beautiful counterpoint to what could be achieved with live actors.
I’m not crying at my desk, no sirree… (sogladmybossisn’tintoday)
Sailor Moon is the best. I “moved on” to other anime eventually (and then out of anime fandom completely – though I just started watching again thanks to a friend) but it will always, always have a very special place in my heart.
“cousins.” yeeeeep.
Sometimes I see headlines on here and I think, “eh, that’s probably not for me, I’ve never [watched Sailor Moon, fill in whatever here], I probably won’t get the references.” But then I also think, “has The Toast ever led me astray?” And I read it anyway, and I love it every damn time.
“I think it’s very common for adolescent girls-who-like-girls (or who knows, maybe everybody) to go through the experience of meeting someone amazing and being unable to parse whether you want her or want to be her.”
I also have never seen Sailor Moon, or really any anime at all – but lines like this are why I will read every article on here, just in case. This completely happened to me, and I did not realize until years later that it was probably the first stirrings of a bit of bisexuality in high-school-me, but also simply that this girl was the coolest, and nicest, and my life would be perfect if I could be even a tiny bit like her. So, suspicion confirmed, Becky Chambers! (Also, I forget if I had ever mentioned this on the toast/hairpin before, so let’s pretend it’s the first time: happy coming out day, everyone!)
This makes me weep for my own illicit fansubbed VHS tapes of Sailor Moon S. <3 <3 <3
“Why don’t you know that? We told you so. You watched us. You loved us.”
it’s RAINING on my FACE. Oh, this is so sad and wonderful. Well done.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaa!!! I looooooooooved Sailor Jupiter as a tall, awkward, not-traditionally-girly teen! <3
THIS WAS ME. I wasn’t a Serious Fan; I watched Sailor Moon at a much younger age (like my friends and I “played Sailor Moon” in the schoolyard at recess), on TV dubbed in English. I don’t think Haruka and Michiru ever made it on the air. I remember being excited/scandalized/titillated when I found out later that they existed.
But loved Sailor Jupiter for similar reasons: her character was like mine, somehow caught in the middle of being “a tomboy” but loving dresses… and all the other reasons you described. Hearing about this episode, from parts of the series I never saw, makes me identify with her even more.
This awoke SO MANY LONG-AGO MEMORIES IN ME. I only saw this show a handful of times as a kid — I don’t even remember if it was dubbed or not — but I remember being FASCINATED by the blonde who was always wearing suits, and whether or not she was male or female and had a cousin or a girlfriend. Oh, my feelings.
Oh my goodness! Becky Chambers, AKA my FAVORITE WRITER FOR THE MARY SUE!!! I’m so happy to see you in other places of the internet. Your Mass Effect article was the reason I gave Mass Effect a try, and also the reason I was able to fall in love with that game (and spent entirely too much money on all the DLC). I am happy to see that you also spent your tween and teen years living the shoujo life.
Jeez, this is such an insightful article. I Feel Pretty Strong Ways about the ways that people talk about Usagi…but that’s a rant for another time.
SAILOR MOON.
I would book it home from middle school to catch the 2:30 PM broadcast of (what I didn’t know was a terrible dubbed, botched version of) it.
I wanted Sailor Mars’ kickin’ priestess outfit and ability to set everything on fire.
GUYS! I am constantly wanting to talk about Attack on Titan/Shingeki no Kyojin with anyone who will listen, so: Christa/Ymir, amirite???
P.S. I realize there is reddit and anime forums out there, but I like you guys so much more. I’ve already been talking my husband’s ear off about this and need to spread the love around a little more.
Ah! Yes! Christa/Ymir! I assume you’re caught up on the manga? Because also Reiner/Bertholdt, right?
I like the show a lot but the pacing got really weird after the first six episodes (but holy SHIT, those first six episodes, right??). And it does seem to be pretty pro-military. But for all of its issues, I think I’ll be sticking with it for a while because it drives home the visceral fear of the giants so well. It would’ve been easy to just make them stereotypically scary, all big and angry and brutish or whatever, but the approach that the author took, making them these sort of smiley, happy, grotesque idiots, is so much more terrifying and effective.
OMG, yes to Reiner/Bertholdt! (I am totally caught up on the manga. I mean, Reiner, you may be fooling yourself about Christa (because everyone loves Christa) but
this scene from the manga pretty much lays it all out.
I do agree that the pacing is a bit off/slow but there is just so much ground to cover about this world, so I think I’m letting it go. Also, I saw an interview recently that the creator of the show/manga got his idea for the gait/behavior of the giants from a run in with adrunk guy at an Internet Cafe, which is both hilarious and pretty dark.
That first link of yours just redirects to this page. But I assume you’re talking about the scene where [big spoilers!] Reiner and Bertholdt have kidnapped Eren and Ymir and Reiner’s shown to be… kind of crazy? I sort of interpreted that as his attraction to Christa being part of his manufactured personality that started to creep in while they were living in the walls, but it’s ultimately fabricated and he’s really just gay.
Actually the first link was supposed to be this. Weird. I wonder if it’s an imgur thing..
Oh, right. Haha yeah, that scene was definitely the more obvious tip off. But it’s what led me to my theory above!
I just hit that thumbs up button SO HARD. (also trying to avoid manga spoilers, so lalalaaaaa *hands over ears*)
but seriously, SnK is the first anime I’ve watched in probably 10 years. I’m totally smitten.
OMG. Why are you not reading the manga as we speak?
This is honestly the first anime/manga that I’ve followed while it’s still in the process of being made. All of the others (Cowboy Bebop, FMA: Brotherhood, Samurai Champloo) were all vetted through Adult Swim or other entities. It’s kind of an exciting experience for me.
haha, my friend and I are trying to watch the anime unspoiled so our reactions will be completely unsullied. it’s HARD. especially with the wait until next season. 🙁 we’ve been coping by channeling our energy into making terrible MS paint/photoshop edits in the meantime, but I really feel like I might cave eventually. maybe I’ll drag her down with me. (to be fair, I’ve read up to… chapter 18? I think?)
and same here! it’s a totally new experience for me.
That was beautiful. Thank you.
gozonji kashira?
this spoke to me so, so much.