The Four Ayakashi / Specter / Phantom / Negamoon Sisters
While there’s no official (or even in-universe) connection between the Dark Kingdom and the Black Moon, Ms. Takeuchi continued reaching back into her roots in mineralogy and family history in gemstones when naming the members of the Black Moon Clan. But things aren’t exactly so clear cut with the Ayakashi Sisters. So what, exactly, is the mythological background behind Rubeus’ four underlings?
Fighting evil by moonlight, riding coasters by daylight…
After over a year of setting out to explore the hidden side of the Sailor Moon universe and explain the real-world connections that were never properly discussed, it may or may not come as a surprise that my interests in the world range from the extraordinary — such as who is the most powerful of the Sailor Soldiers — to the utterly mundane — like why no one wears seat belts. Today we’re going to explore something that’s been gnawing at me for years: just what theme park was Yumeland based on?
The Masked Belle Poitrine
Over this past year of exploring all of the hidden histories and minor intricacies in the world of Sailor Moon, one point that we’ve continuously come back to is that nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems. Much like an onion, there are layers and layers of neat bits of trivia. So in honor of the one-year anniversary of this blog, I’d like to go back way to the beginning: what was the inspiration behind the magical girl known as Sailor Moon?
Proto Sailor Moon?
The internet, as I’m sure you know, is home to a great many bizarre theories, half-baked connections, and misunderstandings. But for every ten poorly-considered campaigns to buy breakfast pastries to save your favorite anime, there are at least one or two legitimate pearls of wisdom to be found. Today I want to take a look into a Japanese fan theory making the rounds on the internet that Ms. Takeuchi was inspired by the 1985 cartoon She-Ra: Princess of Power1 when she made Sailor Moon.
Is Hotaru the Original Moe?
For anyone who has been keeping up with anime terminology and slang popularly used in the otaku sub-culture (both in Japan and abroad), you have no doubt run across the term moe. Probably quite often, in fact. Though the term itself mostly is used to refer to the sense of adoration or affection toward a given character, it can also be used in reference to a character (or actions by said character) which would elicit such reactions. One of the popular theories is that the term was first inspired by Hotaru, which is what we’re going to look at today!
Magic Knights (Not Cars) Rayearth
In a word? The connection between automobiles and the characters, locations, and even magic spells in CLAMP’s Magic Knight Rayearth (MKR) series is “thorough.” In a phrase? There’s basically nothing in MKR which is doesn’t in some way connect back to car brands or the companies which manufacture them, either Japanese or foreign. Though the purpose of this blog is to investigate the mysteries of the characters and world of Sailor Moon, this is a topic that’s interested me for awhile and I figured it’d be worth taking a quick dive down this rabbit hole. If you’re interested, please do read on!
The Original Sailor Team
While it’s easy to look at the Sailor Moon series now, in its long history spanning nearly two-and-a-half decades, and to say that its monolithic success was basically guaranteed. I mean, when you look at its legacy – an immensely successful five-year run for both anime and manga, a long-running musical, a television drama, and countless other product lines – it’s hard to not look at it with our 20/20 hindsight and say that the series was destined to end up this way.
But is it really that simple? When you take a look at some of the decisions Ms. Takeuchi and the animation staff made, there’s some room to wonder if some emergency plans were made to cut the series short, specifically before Makoto made her appearance. Let’s take a closer look!