Summer Premiere Week is upon us, meaning I’ll soon be hard at work panning the simulcasting stream for gold nuggets. But before we turn our eyes ahead, let’s take a quick look back at the Spring season and see how it held up.
Oh, and this is a spoiler-free zone, so please read through and keep your eyes peeled for a series that catches your eye.
Change can be good or bad, depending on your point of view. Thankfully when it comes to Korra Book 3, it’s pretty much all good.
Conflicted Josei is conflicted.
This week’s episodes saw a heavy focus on romance, and those tend to be the moments when I enjoy Sailor Moon the least.
In the game of crystals, you win or you die. Er, sort of.
A lot of Stuff happened this week and I went a little wild on the recaps, so I’m going to skip the usual opening retrospective and just jump straight to the episodes. H’okay? H’okay.
The Sailors set sail on more ‘ships than one this week.
I’m starting to look at Sailor Moon as a kind of magical girl sitcom, where its strength lies not in its story but in its humor, complications, and–most importantly–character interactions. And, like so many shows both before and after it, SM relies on the pairing tactic: throwing two characters into a room (or boat) together and seeing what happens next.
The planets are finally starting to align.
This week Hino Rei stormed onto the scene as Sailor Mars, and her timing couldn’t have been better. While I did warm up to Ami a lot this week, her character seems to be a blend of intelligence, naivete (she’d never played video games OR gone window shopping until she met Usagi), and just plain niceness, which makes her great back-up for Usagi but doesn’t really create much tension.
And as fun as this show is, it’s in desperate need of some tension. Our villains haven’t been a real threat recently, and while Luna and Usagi do squabble some, they’ve gotten so used to each other that it’s all pretty good-natured bickering at this point. We needed Mars to bring some proverbial as well as literal fire to the show, and it looks like she’ll do just that.
While Usagi and Rei are very different girls, they’re both strong-willed and stubborn, which should lead to some conflict–and, hopefully, to character growth both in and out of their scout uniforms. And while I’d rather their entire relationship NOT be built around Tuxedo Mask, I must admit that a little romantic rivalry WOULD be pretty entertaining. Just… keep it as a side dish instead of a main course, please.
Luna caught her first water-type!
Like most origin stories, Sailor Moon is really a pair of tales: one is about the junior high student Tsukino Usagi, and the other is about the hero-in-training, Sailor Moon. Usagi hangs with her friends, struggles with her grades, and argues with her mom. Sailor Moon hangs with her magic cat, investigates mysteries, and works to resolve conflicts.
Both make a lot of mistakes, to be sure, but one is portrayed in a much more positive light than the other, and it’s no surprise that the Sailor Moon stories interest me more than the Usagi ones. So watching her spend an episode getting mad at her friends and Luna for not helping her become a STAR! is much less interesting than watching her help a jazz musician defeat a bat-lady.
Fortunately, the creators must have sensed that the Usagi Show was flagging and picked this exact moment to bring in a new character.
But we’ll get to that in a minute.
So we’re all in agreement that Luna is the best character on the show, right?
I’ve been trying to take notes while watching, and I swear 50% of my bullet points this week were some variation of “Luna is such a Boss.” She’s focused, sharp, cool-headed, quick on her tiny cat feet, and has some of the best expressions in the series, managing to look both catlike and human at the same time.
For Usagi, Luna is the voice of reason in a world of pleasant but ineffective adults. And for Sailor Moon, Luna is the coach, shouting instructions from the sidelines and teaching our young protagonist How To Hero. (“Quit relying on others!” Luna cries when Usagi looks around, waiting for Tuxedo Mask to help her. Like. A. Boss.). Luna makes Usagi just plain better, and we can already see that progress in these two episodes.
Moon Prism Power, Make Up!
So I know episodes 5-6 came out yesterday, but this post is just for last week’s batch (1-4). It turns out that trying to launch a blog while moving to a new state isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds, so I’m behind. I’m hoping to have a post for episodes 5-6 later this week, and then I’ll be able to blog the new episodes as Viz (re)releases them on Mondays.
Also, this was a hefty chunk of episodes including the pilot (henceforth known as “meet ‘n’ greet” posts), so it’s on the lengthy side. Future posts should be much shorter.
And now, on with the show!
I have a confession to make: I never watched Sailor Moon as a kid.
Like I said: Shocking.
The Josei Next Door 