Reviews Manga / Sailor Moon

True example of YMMV — aside from the first season's finale, S is generally regarded as the best this show has to offer, and with good reason. Not too sure about the first season having great villains, either; the background is interesting, but the only characters who have anything resembling depth are Nephrite and Zoisite. In other seasons, the villains are far more quirky and layered.

IIRC, none of the directors liked Mamoru; Sato shelved him in R's filler arc, and Igarashi killed him off entirely. It isn't right to single out Ikuhara, especially since the R movie (easily the most Mamoru-centric bit of work in the anime franchise) was his work.

Edited to correct factual errors: Ikuhara directed a handful of episodes in the first season, so his work on R was far from the start.

A debate on this subject is tiring and I frankly have different things I'd rather do.

My opinion stands that Sailor Moon and most of it's aspects got weaker and weaker with each passing season, including S.

Let us agree to disagree greatly upon this matter and leave it at that.

I'd be fine with this, except that you deleted the comments for no good reason, and made baseless assumptions of certain staff members which you presented as facts. That doesn't strike me as a decent thing to do.

Sigh.

The "no good reason" behind the comment deletion was that they were beginning to choke this page; it was becoming like a forum thread, and I don't want that.

Maybe I didn't make that reason clear enough. If so, I apologize.

If you really want to continue the debate, PM me instead and we'll resume.

And lastly, "baseless assumptions"? No. I present here this Ikuhara interview, where he point-blank admits to wanting to kill of Tuxedo Mask several times.

http://uranime.nekomusume.net/misc/ikuhara_interview.iphtml

I have plenty of things to back up what I say about the "certain staff members", and I'm not the only one who has made these claims.

Please stop acting like everything I say is invalid or baseless just because you happen to dislike what I'm saying. It makes you look like an annoying fanboy. If you disagree with my opinion and wish to say so, that's perfectly fine. But acting like I'm uninformed and have no idea what I'm talking about is really pissing me off.

Ikuni is known to be tongue-in-cheek in his interviews — if you take everything he says seriously, then you might as well believe that he's an alien from Planet Kashira. Moreover, if you're using only that as evidence to claim that he hated Mamoru, then it's a pretty flimsy argument. Where's the bit about him being "a known shipper of Usagi and Rei?"

Please stop acting like everything I say is invalid or baseless just because you happen to dislike what I'm saying. It makes you look like an annoying fanboy.

There Are No Girls On The Internet.

Ikuni is known to be tongue-in-cheek in his interviews — if you take everything he says seriously, then you might as well believe that he's an alien from Planet Kashira. Moreover, if you're using only that as evidence to claim that he hated Mamoru, then it's a pretty flimsy argument. Where's the bit about him being "a known shipper of Usagi and Rei?"

Tongue-in-cheek or not, the statement confirmed his distaste for the character. He might have not actually wanted to "kill him off", at least not in the literal sense, but the point stands that he disliked him. The Usagi/Rei stuff actually is more of an assumption based on what he put in the show itself and his...favorism of Rei's character.

There Are No Girls On The Internet.

Annoying fangirl. Whatever.

What happens in the story isn't the sole whim of the director, either. It's influenced by a number of staff members, especially when it comes to something as popular as Sailormoon. Treating it otherwise is the result of conflating overblown internet rumors with reality.

I don't think I should have to look up all the names, so fine: I'll place the blame on Ikuhara, Igarashi, and the entire staff for running the damn thing into the ground.

I'm getting tired of your habit of deleting comments (in this case, editing out half my response), particularly when you don't agree with them. If you can't carry on a discussion, let's drop it.

^ You're probably not going to believe this (and frankly, I don't care) but the editing thing was a total accident. I thought I was making my response but I actually edited your comment that I was responding to instead. So I'll admit, that was totally my bad.

I find it funny that you're now saying we should drop this, which is exactly what I said we should do already.

My opinion still stands and always will: the original anime is the best, R was an excellent follow-up but things took a decline in direction starting there, S is mediocre and overrated, Super S is a terrible mess, and Stars is absolutely abysmal. The entire anime franchise went to heck because the staff strayed too far from Takeuchi's original ideas. And if I have names to blame (like Ikuhara and Igarashi), I will blame them because of their part in the problem that I'm criticizing. And that. is. that.

Wow is this review full of false information!

1. Junichi Sato never "left". He stepped down as series director, but he was always on the show all the way through Stars, including continuing to write episode scripts. Kunihiko Ikuhara was the only one that actually left, but he was always heavily involved in the direction of the show even when he wasn't the series director.

2. If Kunihiko Ikuhara hated Mamoru so much, then why did he keep giving him so much damn character focus in that arc and portraying him in a sympathetic light? Yea the plot was stupid, but he was clearly aware that just having the main characters be in perma-happy mode would be dull and he made an attempt to create more tension in the relationship. Notably, Takeuchi thought this way too given that there wasn't a single story arc she wrote that didn't involve Mamoru dying, getting brainwashed, dying AND getting brainwashed, or in one story arc, potentially engaging in infidelity when he suspected Usagi was being unfaithful. Oh yea, and Ikuhara was the guy that wrote the first movie, which is the ONLY movie that gave Mamoru a lead role and was deeply focused on fleshing out his relationship to Usagi as well as his largely-ignored back story.

3. Speaking of Mamoru dying, you know he died in Sailor Stars the manga in the FIRST chapter, right? The anime didn't invent that.

4. I could point out your inability to read sarcasm in an interview in which Ikuhara also claims that Mickey looks at his watch because it holds the secrets of the universe, but that would be too easy. I could at least point out you blatantly ignored everything he said about Mamoru except the joke about wanting to kill him. You know, since he says in the same stupid paragraph that his complaint wasn't that Mamoru existed, he was just tired of having to write typical anime romances because he felt they frequently suffocated the main characters and what made them interesting. You might note that when he left the show, he made Utena, which deconstructs romance to hell and back, and later did Penguindrum, which had none. Even Haruka and Michiru were largely downplayed to an extent - their relationship isn't so much a traditional romance as it is an actual married couple having to lift each other through terrible situations. There's no doubt they're in love, but the characters interactions are less about the love and more about what they bring to each other.

5. Hey, you know Chibi-Usa was a main character, right? Like, literally, in the Dream Arc, the person that Helios was looking for to save Elysion? The most important person in the story, more so than her own parents that she believed herself inferior to? Anyway, if Ikuhara "favored" her, then maybe he wouldn't have depowered her to the point where she was either using joke powers or just served as a buff for Sailor Moon. Oh, and maybe he'd have actually done the full story arc with her from the end of the manga where she turns into a Sailor Senshi? But oh yea, since you just used "The Wesley", I guess you wouldn't know much about what character favoritism is.

By the way...you did actually read that interview, right? Here, I'll help you out:

''Q: Ikuhara-san, Utena and Sailor Moon are two of the most popular anime amongst yuri fans. Do you intentionally include shoujo-ai subtexts in your work?

A: No. I'm still able to make a story where it's between a boy and a girl. But I feel irritated to see my girl getting together with some other guy. I've tried to kill off Tuxedo Mask in Sailor Moon many times. But no matter how many times I tried to kill him, he gets resurrected so I only get angrier. So I decided it would be way better if the girl just didn't have a boyfriend to begin with. Of course I'm just kidding. In reality, if I have a guy in the show, the love relationship gets to have a bigger role than the show. And that would be an interesting element, but I wouldn't want that to make that the scene-stealer of the show. Most other shoujo shows are in that direction. It's about who-and-who are getting together, or who-and-who are breaking up. I thought it would be a loss if that would be the big motif just because a girl was the main character. I think there could be more shows with other motives than that.''

See that part I put in bold? It might have been helpful to read that entire answer instead of reading the words "kill off Tuxedo Mask" and erupting into a fanboy rage.

Though the two versions of Stars were very different, at least the anime version has a happy ending. The manga version is just depressing and a major downer, because Usagi is eventually going to lose everyone and have to continue the fight alone against Chaos, possibly forever. And Sailor Moon Crystal will probably go the manga route as well, assuming it runs that long.