Since the whole quarantine started, I have been watching/rewatching a bunch of anime that was on my list. I recently finished Sailor Moon (original Japanese), and ever since I finished the final episode, I have been thinking about everything Usagi had to sacrifice. I kept thinking about how a normal fourteen-year-old had to protect the planet with a few of her friends. When someone mentions sailor moon to some people, the first thing that they will remember is a crybaby wearing a sailor outfit with magical abilities, but there exists a much darker meaning behind the whole story of Usagi Tsukino.
When I watched sailor moon, I couldn’t believe how different the English dub and the Japanese sub were. I always remember the dub from my childhood as a happy and magical experience, but now that I am older, I get a more profound message from the Japanese version. I will only talk about the ending first season since all five of them are similar, but it is the first one where death was in the picture.
At the end of the first season, the sailor scouts have to fight the DD girls, which are much stronger than the scouts. The scouts die one by one protecting Usagi, which surprised me since I do not remember them dying at all. All of their deaths hit Sailor Moon, but the one that shook her was Mars’ death. Throughout this show, Rei (Mars) and Usagi resembled sisters, since they were always bickering and liking the same guy, so when Rei killed two of the DD girls by sacrificing herself, I cried even harder.
One by one, they died, and Usagi insisted on handing over the Silver Crystal to protect them, but she couldn’t. At the final battle, Sailor Moon faces off against Queen Beryl and asks her fallen friends for help in saving the world from destruction. In every season, the same message is repeated over and over, “I am the pretty guardian who fights for love and justice.” This line, or rather the word “love,” contains a deep meaning in every fight that Usagi fights since she fights to protect people she cares about even when she gets hurt. Sailor Moon died at the end of the battle and wished for things to go back to normal, to the says where she was not a Sailor Guardian, to the says where she had no worries over fighting for the sake of peace.
I cried in every season, but the first one was where I knew that this show was going to break me. I love it so much, but I still think about how much pressure these girls had to live with.
