I watched Sailor Moon as a child and absolutely loved it for all sorts of reasons. I think it was the first time I ever watched a female heroine who actually had adventures herself instead of taking the backseat or being the eternal damsel in distress (even if the first season does suffer from this a bit) and that really resonated with me. With all that, though, said heroine simply drove me absolutely insane at almost every given opportunity. I truly hated Usagi but fortunately the other characters all made it up for her insufferably bratty ways. It probably did not help that I was much younger than Usagi in-universe and could not conceive how a teenager could be more of a crybaby than anyone my age I knew.

Later I watched it as a grownup, in its entirety and in Japanese and fell in love with it all over again. I still dislike Usagi and I doubt that will ever change. I understand that she does grow a lot and there are moments when even I am rooting for her but her character just does not appeal to me. I also understand that the series has its own inner logic that demand everyone to be willing to let the entire universe die instead of even contemplating the possibility of killing Usagi but it always maddened me.

Speaking of Luna and Artemis, fun fact: the Portuguese dub managed to switch their genders. I suspect this was done accidentally (it did change Zoisite into a girl as well but that may have been deliberate) and it is very fortunate that they went for a male/female pair, despite gender flipped. Otherwise it would have been very difficult to explain some later developments down the line.

When I was a kid in elementary school I had this shy interest in Sailor Moon that only went as far as glances at the Sailor Scouts character guidebooks (anyone remember these?) and reading StarS volume 1. After reading this volume I told my guy friends something like "that Sailor Moon stuff is actually cool." But they didn't show much interest. So many years down the line I have decided to watch all 200some episodes of the original anime since I feel like I missed out by not watching it as a kid. After watching 94 episodes I'm enjoying it and loving Sailors Jupiter, Mars, and Uranus. Now that I know there are live action adaptations of the series I'll have to check those out later on.

maridaberri wrote:

Nocturnalux wrote:

I watched Sailor Moon as a child and absolutely loved it for all sorts of reasons. I think it was the first time I ever watched a female heroine who actually had adventures herself instead of taking the backseat or being the eternal damsel in distress (even if the first season does suffer from this a bit) and that really resonated with me. With all that, though, said heroine simply drove me absolutely insane at almost every given opportunity. I truly hated Usagi but fortunately the other characters all made it up for her insufferably bratty ways. It probably did not help that I was much younger than Usagi in-universe and could not conceive how a teenager could be more of a crybaby than anyone my age I knew.

I cannot relate to this enough. I started watching Sailor Moon when I was twelve and it instantly became my favorite show at the time. I like seeing badass girls fighting to save mankind. Much like you, I could not stand Usagi but I loved literally all of the other Sailor Scouts. I remember going on and on about my hatred for Usagi. Also, now that I'm an adult, she doesn't bother me as much but she still bothers me. Yes, she's cute and funny at times but far too often she is downright annoying. A big part of my annoyance towards her was her rivalry with Chibiusa. How can she be so jealous of a child.?

I could, to some extent, understand Usagi's initial very negative reaction to Chibiusa. True, it is very immature (but the Freudian undertones are delicious) but Chibiusa starts out being so utterly insufferable that in Usagi's shoes I would probably have dumped her on Tokyo bay with cement shoes. Chibiusa is in a very difficult situation but unfortunately she is like the distilled manifestation of everything that was ever wrong with Usagi plus smugness and an ability to fake a cute kid façade to endear herself to others and turn them against Usagi. Oddly enough, Chibiusa's advent made me appreciate Usagi more. I used to say that Chibiusa would make a great ad for contraception.
Unlike Usagi, I never came to care even one whit for Chibiusa and only tolerate her. It does not help that Chibiusa's token boyfriend has even less a presence than Mamoru. She only becomes passable when Hotaru is involved.

The series is terrific.  Also, if anyone hasn't checked out the new Viz dub for it, it's really quite good.

As far as Crystal goes, if anyone hasn't watched it, skip to season 3.  The animation in the first two seasons is rull bad.  They use CGI for the transformation sequences, but they forgot to give them all bones, so it looks like trash.  And the rest of the animation is weirdly off-model a lot of the time.  Season 3 fixes most of the animation issues, and the fight scenes are a lot more dynamic.  I'm curious if anyone else has thoughts on it.

Also, I don't know if I am just imagining things, but looking at the images from the preview screenshots of the next season it looks like the art has improved a lot also. Maybe that's because it's a movie series? I hope that when they (hopefully) make Stars that the animation continues to look nice!