All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
The tropes found in the manga version of Sailor Moon.
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Tropes A–F
- Amusing Injuries: In Act 1 of the manga and Sailor Moon Crystal, Usagi first meets her cat familiar via stepping on the cat's spine, tripping and faceplanting on the sidewalk. When Usagi gives Luna a kiss to the mouth, the cat returns the favor by maniacally scratching Usagi's face (the marks from which disappear after a single scene) then leaping away none the worse for wear after her bandages are removed.
- Artistic License – Geography: Sailor Tin Nyanko goes undercover as a foreign exchange student... from Libya. She's pasty white, and doesn't even remotely act or dressnote like she's from a country with a conservative Muslim majority. Her "Nyanko Suzu" alias is also Japanese. Whether Takeuchi or Tin Nyanko failed to do the research is anyone's guess. She doesn't stay in that guise for long and discards it quickly, though.
- Artistic License – Physics: Sailor Pluto's frequent 'spacetime is warping.' In physics, spacetime is everywhere, and mass warps it. Maybe she did intend to mean 'a new star is born,' or 'we have to completely get rid of that,' but it's also possible the terminology is being misused.
- Artistic License – Space:
- The Lover of Princess Kaguya: When the titular comet disappear from astronomers' view, they believe it got too close to the sun and burned up, which is reasonable enough. But then a supposedly-brilliant scientist says that if the comet burned up, there should have been a rain of shooting stars. While shooting stars can come from solid particles left behind by comets, they have to enter the Earth's atmosphere to show up as shooting stars; space is big and breaking up near the sun won't do it. Later on, Kaguya says the Earth is 4.5 million years old, rather than 4.5 billion.
- A similar error appears in the Dead Moon arc. Hotaru makes a miniature recreation of the universe, which Haruka says "right now, it's at 46 million years; complete simulation of our solar system."
- Babies Ever After: It's hinted that Usagi's pregnant with Chibi-Usa by the time of her wedding.
- Back from the Dead: Unlike the anime, the power level of manga Sailor Moon, and, to a lesser extent, other characters, is (relatively consistently) insane. For a quick comparison, in the anime Usagi cannot reliably resurrect the dead, to the point that she does her best to not let Hotaru sacrifice herself against Pharaoh 90. In the manga, their solution to the Pharaoh 90 problem is to let Hotaru kill everyone on Earth, so that Sailor Moon can then resurrect everyone but the villains.
- Berserk Button:
- Several, both comedic and serious. Venus' one is pressed hard when you try killing Sailor Moon. (She was not her closest body guard for nothing...)
- On the more comedic side, telling her she picked a trashy colour for lipstick makes sweet, ladylike Michiru angry.
- Bifauxnen and Lad-ette: Haruka Tenoh and her rival Seiya Kou.
- "Blind Idiot" Translation:
- The original English translation of the manga by Tokyopop (previously Mixx Entertainment) made many, many mistakes, especially where names are concerned. For a few examples, Kaolinite is given the title "Magnus" (large) instead of "Magus" (mage), Ptilol becomes "Petite Roll," and the Boule Brothers are translated too literally into the Artificial Jewel Brothers. Particularly sad is when Hotaru quotes passages of a William Blake poem. The translators apparently didn't recognize it despite the credits given in the story itself and retranslated the Japanese translation into English. Then they made the exact same mistake when a William Butler Yeats poem appeared in the manga.
- There's also obvious instances where the suffixes -kun, -chan, or -tan are used and the translators warped that into some really painful nicknames.
- And in the case of Minako, bordering on Les Yay, as the manga translators translated 'V-chan' as 'V-babe'. Considering how often the nickname was used in the manga by most of the Senshi at one point of another, it became truly hilarious.
- "Mugen Gakuen", which translates to "Infinity Academy", was translated as "Infinity College". The school is intended for kindergarten through high school, not college students.
- The 2010a English translation of the manga by Kodansha USA has its own blunders, as it translates everything rather literally and often produces sentences that no normal English speaker would use, including one instance of overly-literal translation when Usagi calls Motoki, "Motoki Big Bro!", when they could have simply used the appropriate suffix ("-Niisan"), given they already use -chan, -kun, etc. Then there are the spelling errors that tend to litter the translation. And they get a number of the character's names wrong. For example, Queen Metaria's name was spelled two different ways within the same volume. They also misspelled the name of one of Rei's crows as "Demos". Most infamous was rendering Jupiter's attack as "Spark Ring Wide Pressure", a mistake none of the previous official translations have made. They also revived a common fan mistranslation, "Death Ribbon Revolution", for Sailor Saturn's key attack in the finale of the Death Busters arc. Then there's Sailor Moon using three different invocations during the StarS manga instead of, "Silver Moon Crystal Power!", which she had used consistently in the Mixx / Tokyopop version of StarS. Basically, while they're better by comparison to Tokyopop for not inventing new names or completely rewriting dialog on a whim.ns were often left to wonder if a competent, consistent translator will ever handle this franchise.
- The popularly circulated "Miss Dream" scripts are filled with grammatical and spelling errors, in spite of the writer's insistence on her accuracy and her being quick to brag that she's a professional translator. In particular, right in the first chapter, she blunders Haruna's nickname of "Haruda" by translating it as "Ms. Hard" and claiming "Haruda" is a pun on how hard her classes are. "Haru da" simply means "It's spring", which is Usagi making a cheeky pun on Haruna's last name of Sakurada (cherry blossoms). Essentially, "Sakura da haru da" would translate literally as "Cherry blossoms, it's spring!" The English word "Hard" is written in romaji as "hado", not "haruda." She also can join the long line of fan translators that "translates" "Four Kings" as "Four Generals", because the latter is the fanon name for the group. Normally scanlations are not worthy of note, but due to the site's popularity as an English news source and the fact it still posts copyrighted material for free, most people that read the manga in English will actually read the Miss Dream scripts instead of any other translations.
- When it came time to bring over the Eternal Editions, they decided to make a new translation entirely. Fan consensus is that while the Eternal Edition isn't without its own issues, they're very minor problems that don't ruin the story, and thus it blows all previous translations out the water, so it's averted at last, to the point that the "Naoko Takeuchi" Editions, released afterwards, keeps the same translation and even lettering as the Eternal Editions, with some minor tweaks.
- Bloodierand Gorier
- Body Horror: Between burning/melting/decaying people and bad guys with lovecraftian superpowers, the manga's full of it.
- The Body Parts That Must Not Be Named: Sailor Star Maker has an attack called "Star Gentle Uterus", but the first English translation censored the last word into "creator".
- Body to Jewel:
- The Silver Crystal is made partly of Usagi's tears. The Pink Moon Crystal appears from Chibi-Usa in a similar manner.
- Literally with the Shiten'ou. They all become their namesake jewels.
- Cassandra Truth: In Act 8, when the normally late-sleeper Usagi is up before 6am because of nightmares, she tells her dad she's up early because she's Sailor Moon. He just assumes Usagi's joking around.
- Clever Crows: Sailor Mars has a pair of crows named Phobos and Deimos (named for the Moons of Mars and essentially Mars's sentries - kind of like Evil-Detecting Dog + Defence.) Let's just say that, in the manga, they aren't ordinary crows... They're shapeshifting aliens from the planet Coronis whose job is to protect Sailor Mars.
- Creator's Culture Carryover: In the "Princess Kaguya" manga side story, Himeko mentions being denied a place on the Luna Shuttle's team because the NASA scientists thought a young woman like her "should just get married and settle down." While in Japan such attitudes toward young women are still fairly prevalent, in the U.S., such gender attitudes were largely extinct, especially in NASA which had plenty of married and unmarried female astronauts and scientists. In particular, Sally Ride had already become the first American woman in space a decade before the story ran and at the time of her NASA career was married to another astronaut. Furthermore, legal protections against such blatant gender discrimination would end in an easy anti-discrimination lawsuit.
- Darker and Edgier: Despite the sugary sweet art style, the original manga is quite grimmer and more violent compared to both it's animated incarnations.
- Dropped a Bridge on Him: In Stars, Princess Kakyuu has quite a bit of page time and character development, as she spends all of her time encouraging and helping Sailor Moon throughout the bad times. Then suddenly, during a fierce battle in the sailor crystal garden, she decides it'd be awesome to tell everyone she's a Sailor Senshi, transforms into Sailor Kakyuu, then proceeds to get stabbed through the chest by a blunt, rounded staff. The bad guys quickly harvest her Sailor Crystal, and Sailor Moon completely snaps. In fact, by Stars, all the Senshi and Mamoru, characters who have been developing throughout the series, are all killed off easily by the villains in the final arc.
- E = MC Hammer: Ami writes down such equations in one of her first appearances, foreshadowing her role as the genius among the Sailors.
- Eldritch Abomination:
- The anime Daimons were humanoid female monsters made from mundane objects, the manga Daimons were monsters that fused with humans (they also used some animals like dogs and cats), if the infusion turned out right (which was rare), it would result in a perfect Daimon (Kaolinite and the Witches 5 are examples of perfect Daimons), when it turned out wrong (everyone aside from Kaolinite, the Witches 5 and Professor Tomoe and Hotaru), the result is a monster that easily fits the Nightmare Fuel category.
- Virtually all of the Big Bads could also be considered this.
- Eternal Villain: In the manga storyline, Chaos is this trope, as the source of all evil in the galaxy and orchestrator of all of the bad stuff that happens over the course of the series. Queen Metalia, Death Phantom, Pharaoh 90 and Queen Nehellenia (or Nehellenia's cursed mirror in the 90s anime version) were nothing more than embodiments of its will and it is the entity pulling Sailor Galaxia's strings for much of the story. Sailor Senshi exist across the galaxy and have all been engaged in an epic battle against Chaos. Even after being defeated by Sailor Moon, Chaos has survived, and one day it'll be back to likely fight against the Sailor Senshi for eternity until it finally wins.
- Expy:
- The series is both a spinoff and reboot of Codename: Sailor V, so several characters (Usagi, Umino, Naru, Luna) are expies of ones from the earlier series (Minako, Amano, Hikaru, Artemis). But then Minako and Artemis make the jump into Sailor Moon proper, marking one of the rare instances of expies encountering each other as something more than a joke.
- Queen Nehellania's role in the backstory of the Moon Kingdom with her cursing Princess Serenity on the day of her birth makes her eerily similar to Maleficent.
- Fictional Political Party: Rei Hino's father is a politician from the Democratic Liberal Party, a word-switch on the Liberal Democratic Party, the dominant party of Japan's post-war period.
- Family-Unfriendly Violence:
- Five-Man Band: (From the Guardian Senshi's point of view, at least.)
- The Hero: Minako, as she was the first senshi.
- The Lancer: Rei, the stubborn one.
- The Big Guy: Makoto, the athletic fighter.
- The Smart Guy: Ami, the nerd.
- The Heart: Usagi, the caring and sensitive one.
Tropes G–R
- Genius Loci: A group of enemies in Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Short Stories refer to themselves as this by name.
- Handwriting as Characterization: At the end of the Black Moon arc of the manga (and Crystal), Neo Queen Serenity sends her daughter Chibiusa back to Usagi and Mamoru in the 20th century to complete her Sailor Guardian training along with a note. Her handwriting is cutesy and somewhat childish (she even signs the note with a little doodle of herself), showing how despite her regal demeanor, she's not that much different from Usagi, her present-day self, deep down.
- Homoerotic Subtext:
- Usagi gets hearts in her eyes when she meets each of the new Senshi.
- This is later taken to an extreme when Haruka kisses Usagi multiple times in the early parts of the Death Busters Arc, in her Uranus identity. This actually creates a brief period of friction between Usagi and Mamoru, though they eventually admit what happened and move past it. The kissing is also how Usagi figures out Uranus' identity as Haruka- since Usagi dreamt Haruka had kissed her, and later Haruka got in her face confrontationally.
- Also, in the last two arcs Rei and Minako grow rather close and intimate.
- Humanoid Aliens: During the Stars arc, Galaxia has a flashback in which there are people with heads shaped like fish.
- Ignored Epiphany: In the manga, Beryl briefly muses about how she has sold her soul to Metaria, but thinks there's no going back.
- Let's Get Dangerous!: Don't piss off Venus by threatening Usagi. Ever!
- Lovecraftian Superpower: Wiseman grants Esmeraude and Saphir magical arms/hands that definitely qualify.
- Magic Skirt: Despite short skirts being part of the Sailor Guardians' uniforms, they always stay in place no matter how much action is going on.
- Murder by Cremation: How Jadeite meets his demise at the hands of Sailor Mars.
- Myth Arc: The purpose and destiny of Sailor Moon and the Silver Crystal develops through all five arcs.
- Never the Selves Shall Meet: In the Black Moon arc, the titular character feels faint in the presence of her future self, Neo-Queen Serenity, and her body becomes transparent; her Silver Crystal also loses its power under the influence of its future counterpart. At the end of this story arc, Neo-Queen Serenity tries to resist the temptation of talking to her past self, since it may result in the history being changed... fails, and goes to meet Sailor Moon anyway. They don't touch, but manage to say goodbye to each other in person. The story also involved Prince Demand attempting to bring the world to an end by bringing together the two Silver Crystals, which would have caused a temporal paradox and unmade time itself.
- Noodle People: The girls are of the fashion-illustration inspired, long-limbed and willowy bishoujo look when drawn by Naoko Takeuchi, and are quite leggy in proportion to their body size.
- One Cast Member per Cover: The 2011 re-release of the manga includes a different character on each volume cover. In order, they are: Sailor Moon, Sailor Mercury, Sailor Mars, Sailor Jupiter, Sailor Venus, Sailor Chibi Moon, Sailor Uranus, Sailor Neptune, Sailor Pluto, Sailor Saturn, Sailor Chibi Chibi Moon, and Princess Serenity with Small Lady and Chibi Chibi.
- Orwellian Retcon:
- Along with more standard panel redraws, a few occur in the 2003 Updated Re-release of the manga (published stateside by Kodansha in 2011), some of which carry over to Sailor Moon Crystal.
- During Act 2's Crystal Seminar story (which introduced Ami), an instance of a floppy disk from the original 1992 version was replaced by a CD-ROM in the rereleased version. Also, to be consistant with the tokusatsu version that was airing at the time, the "sailor senshi" are referred to as "guardians".
- An unnamed fog attack in the manga (referred to as "Sabao Spray" in the first anime) was changed to be called "Mercury Aqua Mist", to tie in with the live-action version. Sailor Moon's first scepter was also redrawn to have a crystalline top.
- Sailor Jupiter had a flower-themed belt added to her first uniform in redrawn panels, a detail that Takeuchi had originally wanted to include on her but had never gotten the chance to.
- Potty Emergency: Usagi has one in Act 31.5 while visiting Hotaru, much to Chibi-Usa's embarrassment. She makes it, though her absence from the room at this particular moment does have some consequences.
- Psychic Dreams for Everyone: In the Infinity arc, everyone dreams about the impending doom and disaster Saturn is supposed to bring.
- Really 700 Years Old: Pretty much everyone in the future is affected, with Crystal Tokyo itself stated to be "a generation of ageless people". In the manga, it's stated that Chibi-Usa is over 900 years old - one day, she simply stopped growing (this is apparently linked to her lack of powers, and she seems to resume aging when they're unlocked). Neo Queen Serenity hasn't aged a day since she gave birth to Chibi-Usa at 22 (presumably, the other Senshi and King Endymion stopped aging around the same time), even though it's been nearly 1000 years. Additionally, though her exact age is unknown, Queen Serenity (Sailor Moon's mother in her past life) is stated to have the appearance of an 18 year old, and the race of the Silver Millennium are said to have life spans of about 1000 years.
- Recursive Translation: In Act 44, Hotaru quotes a portion of "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats. However, the Mixx Entertainment localization team apparently did not recognize the reference, so in their official English release of the volume the lines are instead directly translated from the Japanese.
Tropes S–Z
- Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: The sheer scope of spaces is repeatedly ignored throughout the manga, mainly because this particular universe runs on Rule of Cool rather than physics.
- Trauma Button: In Stars, Usagi gets hit with this hard when forced to recall Mamoru being vaporized in front of her, causing her to have a breakdown.
- Thousand-Yard Stare: As a result of the aforementioned trauma, Usagi sports these when talking about how Mamoru would be sending her mail from the States.
- Undying Loyalty: This applies to all the Senshi's relationships with Usagi, but Minako/Venus's stands out because only she was aware that she was bound to protecting the Princess and the Moon Kingdom by fate. The fact that the fate of the Moon Kingdom rested on her shoulders as the Senshi's leader served to further this trope.
- Updated Re-release: The manga was reprinted in 2003 to coincide with Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon. It featured updated artwork and dialogue, and the chapters were reorganized into fewer volumes. These reprints were later used for Kodansha USA's 2011 stateside retranslated rereleases.
- Verbal Tic: Most of the Big Bads/incarnations of Chaos start their sentences with the phrase "Ooh".
- Wedding Finale: The Grand Finale of the manga ends with Mamoru and Usagi's long awaited wedding, with all the main Sailor Senshi in attendance. It's implied that their Kid from the Future Chibi-Usa has been conceived.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: The cats are the last of Usagi's allies to be killed off in the Sailor Stars arc... and unlike the Senshi are promptly forgotten about, never shown to be resurrected and never mentioned or alluded to during the ending. Logic (and hope) dictates that they must have been resurrected or Diana would never have been born — though the Stars arc did feature a lot of hints that the future was being erased and nothing was written in stone anymore, so the possibility is always there that she in fact wasn't born. Additionally they're last seen before this recovering from injuries in the care of Usagi's mother, who also isn't mentioned....
- Wouldn't Hit a Girl: Subverted during the Infinity Arc. When Haruka throws Mako while they're sparring, Minako says "Hey! How dare you throw a frail girl full-force?!" To which Haruka coolly replies that gender shouldn't matter and it's not okay to lose just because one's a girl. Ignoring, the fact that Haruka's a woman, Mako is hardly a 'frail girl' and much like Minako, can fight evenly with any male villain, so it's a moot point.
- Younger Than They Look: Chibi-Usa's friends Naruru and Ruruna look and act like ditzy teenage kogals, but they're actually in third grade.
