The Male Hysteric

I’ve begun watching Sailor Moon Crystal and have just gotten past Minako’s introduction. Unlike the 90s anime, this seems to be following the manga very closely, though I had never actually watched too much of the 90s anime despite reading all of the manga.

I’m not in love with the animation of Crystal compared to the 90s anime but I don’t hate it as much as I thought I would — there’s some bits of it that feel kinda Utena-ish that I can appreciate.

Watching this again it still strikes me that even though this series is like 30 years old, still nobody really does gender quite like Sailor Moon does gender and I find that very interesting. Like unlike a lot of other girl series Sailor Moon feels more like a true gender reversal where feminine power is the only real power to be taken seriously and masculine power is always secondary even though it exists. And that seems to be because the series really takes soft power seriously — the villains are constantly doing their work through media, word of mouth, urban legends, etc, so the idea of associating power exclusively with militia-cosplay just isn’t a thing here.

Like a really fascinating thing that was in the original comic and is in Crystal is Zoisite disguising himself as a woman to be a gemologist on the news to brainwash people. Just putting this into text shows how bizarre it is to think of even now, a man disguising himself as a woman to be taken seriously as a professional and none of it being a joke at all, just being a part of the dastardly villain plan, and it’s not even remarked upon at all. And all the previous grunt monsters were also women at this point, so there seems to be logic here in that being women allows the four kings to get close enough to people to do their villainy, and at this point Zoisite decided he had to take things into his own hands and therefore the only logical thing was to disguise himself as a woman to do it himself.

And part of what’s so weird about this is that this is how it was in the original manga — just not remarked upon at all. His characterization was changed dramatically in the 90s TV series, making him more effeminate and Kunzite’s gay lover, and then altered even more so in international dubs changing his character to be a woman to erase the gay relationship. But none of this is in the manga, and therefore none of this is in Crystal, where he similarly gets little characterization. And honestly leaving the female disguise unremarked upon says more interesting things about gender in Sailor Moon than recreating Zoisite as an effeminate gay crossdresser does.

I remember reading somewhere that part of Takeuchi’s explanation for the inspiration of Sailor Moon is that even if she wanted a man to protect her she just didn’t see much out there and how they mostly seemed pretty useless, while the women around her were the real doers in her world, so she wrote her comic to reflect that. And I guess it’s weird because that’s also how I viewed things as a kid, and lingers on today, too. Probably explains a lot of of my issues now.

I’m still disappointed Crystal didn’t include groom disguise Usagi, though. That was a favorite of mine.