adventuresofcomicbookgirl:

fo-u-nd:

robotbrothersid:

trungles:

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adventuresofcomicbookgirl:

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trungles:

robotbrothersid:

I want to agree with this, but one of Sailor Moon’s other main elements and atributes of her “power” is beauty. Yeah.  : /

Agreed. The character of Usagi also concurrently trivializes intellect in the strangest ways.

Unfortunately. : / I get that they’re trying to highlight that it’s trying to highlight that she’s a good person, and even the most average of people can be meaningful, etc. But still, there’s a lot about Usagi that sends mixed messages about women in power.

Then again: Japan.

Oh I guess you didn’t delete.

Wow, first of all, way to be racist as fuck.

Second, Usagi may not need intellect to succeed (though she’s far more logical and strategic in the manga than the anime- and PGSM actually outright says she doesn’t really work hard to help herself hence the poor grades, but when it comes to working hard to help others, she can do basically anything) butttt the show doesn’t say women in power can’t be intellectual. AmiSetsunaHarukaMichiruChibiusa are all pointed out to be incredibly smart and good at academics. 

I mean, shounen heroes generally aren’t very book-smart either, even worse than Usagi a lot of them (at least she studies sometimes) but they don’t get any shit. Not every girl can be a super genius, and the point of Usagi was to encourage girls who are incredibly flawed they can still be a hero.

I apologize for that coming off badly, I meant simply that Japan is often very bad with it’s media messages for women and their roles.

As for the rest of my statement, I stand by it. There may be other stronger female characters in the show (which I’m glad to see), but the centre of the show’s story and most powerful character is Usagi, thus she becomes the forefront of any message the show might have. This gives a rather shaky example for feminine power.

I’ll go ahead and say that it is not inaccurate to say that Japan is sexist. It is - believe me. Only around 1% of the country’s corporate execs are women, and the labor laws tend to disregard some basic tenets of women’s health issues. That is certainly not to say that is worse than sexism anywhere else - the U.S. is still pretty grievously misogynistic, and the stats are analogous. Japan’s historical discourse on gender is necessarily very different, and it comes to light in the way its media is presented.

I understand the social discourse of Japanese imports as products of their time and cultural contexts, and I can appreciate that Sailor Moon is a product of the 90s - it’s got that watch-me-fight-monsters-in-my-tiny-skirt-and-impossibly-long-legs version of faux-feminism that pervaded purportedly well-intentioned tropes of girl-power.

From an academic lens on superheroes, Sailor Moon comes out of a communal-collectivist culture. A recurring trope of the show is that her power stems from the support of her friends and family. It would be difficult to critique Usagi’s character as an individualistic figure the way we tend to try to do in Western cultures.

Sailor Moon broke boundaries and various ways - it is a wildly successful media franchise that was created and orchestrated by a woman, Naoko Takeuchi, whose cast was comprised of mostly women. Rumiko Takahashi is the only other manga author I can think of who can make that claim, being one of the most successful people in the business, and many of her stories follow the same highly gendered tropes as Sailor Moon.

A retrospect of Rumiko Takahashi’s work will reveal that the context of some of her earliest works, Urusei Yatsura, dealt with the tensions between new and traditional roles of women in contemporary Japanese society in much the same way as Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon - they both employ female heroines in very small clothes doling out all kinds of supernatural kickass. Urusei Yatsura predates Sailor Moon by at least a couple decades, but its brand of hyperfeminine, borderline pandering flavor of girl-power has remained relatively unchanged. 

But let’s think about it in terms of an even broader, cross-cultural historical context. Siegel and Shuster’s Superman was created and popularized after the Depression and just before the first world war. He became a vehicle by which new immigrants could envision themselves as powerful contributors - he is an allegorical figure of the American Immigrant Dream after WWI. Captain America, with his decked out star-spangled shield and unrepentant Americana, was similarly a vehicle for popular American anti-Nazi sentiment. 

Likewise, after the Second World War and, most importantly, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan’s allegory that would carry them through that immense collective cultural trauma was Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, a diminutive figure who could fight the enormous mechanical horrors and atomic terrors. Our superheroes carry the weight of fighting our allegorical monsters, and they each tend to correspond to a need of the time.

I actually think that Sailor Moon is a reaction, a cultural byproduct of the concurrent misogyny in 1990s Japan and the internalized belief in a cisgender, gender essentialist notion of womanhood. Japan is moving, in different but analogous ways, through its cultural landscape in terms of contending with patriarchy in a lot of the same ways many other places in the world, including us in the U.S. It would not be okay to pretend that there are no problematic elements to the show, but I find value in that it comes out of a place and time that informs our own. 

It’s a complex discussion that needs a little more thought than derailing accusations, and I don’t think that it’s wrong to note that Japan legitimizes a lot of unchecked sexism, too.

I’ll always love the show and the books, but I’d be a total idiot to deny that it falls into sexist tropes that are prevalent in anime.

But then again: the 90s.

Thank you, Trung, for doing the brainwork I am too worn to at this moment x____x

trung, thanks for doing the heavy lifting here, so now i can just say this one thing.

if someone’s okay with the status quo, then they’re not going to point out evils/injustices.  that person isn’t likely to be called racist for what they say, but only because they never open their mouth about anything except to put food in it.  and yet they perpetuate lots of evils by being silent (intentionally or not).  shy acknowledging that this was no big surprise coming from 90s japan is the opposite of sitting there being okay with the status quo.  i mean, shy expresses distaste for sexist elements of japanese media, and someone wants to call shy out for calling stuff out?  huuuuhhh???  how bout call out the people who can’t be bothered to critique the media they consume?

but while we’re at it, how bout i split some hairs just because i’m feeling annoyed that someone got all aggro with shy?  (if you want to critique, critique.  don’t attack the person.)  plus i believe i have an important distinction to make about the way shy’s comment was made versus how it was construed.

japan is a country, which is a political/governmental entity.  the people who live there share a nationality, not a race (and the traits people associate with “race”—physical morphology—are diverse & varied throughout japan, just like in the rest of the world).  disliking the way a nation-entity conducts itself is VERY different from having a broad sweeping dislike for all the people who reside there.  if, when referring to the fact that china censors internet content, i say, “you know, china…”, i’m not being prejudiced or discriminatory in any way, and i’m not implying like or dislike for the people who live there.  i’m expressing disappointment with a state of affairs in a particular location.  same thing applies to someone acknowledging sexism in japan.

wow I really like that you decided to make a huge multi-paragraph screed at me that goes on a wild journey through your view of history or whatever and didn’t address any of the actual points I made? Seriously, Captain America?  Thank you, I certainly get that you can use big words. Nice essay on life and the universe.

I’ll just link this post because I’m tired of arguing about this. I certainly don’t believe Japan should be free from criticism, but maybe you should look in your own backyard before you start waxing poetic about sexism in countries you have entirely no context or say in? Honestly, I was just blindsided by your generalized and inappropriate statement.

Deciding Sailor Moon is a “cisgender essentialist notion of womanhood” ignores the fact that many of the characters deviated wildly from an essentialist gender binary. The Starlights could be read as trans*, especially in the manga, and at any rate, however you read them, they did not conform to essentialist womanhood. Not to mention Haruka specifically saying gender didn’t matter to her and refusing to conform to their standards. That’s not even going into the varying personal expressions of the other girls. So idk where you have any ground to stand on.

You’re the one who just had to respond to a macro using a positive thing about a series to illustrate a point with criticism that had no actual basis in reality and then derail the discussion when that was pointed out. 

Sailor Moon can be criticized and has it’s flaws, yes. But your criticism is has no basis and is uninformed and wrong, so.

Oh wow I like that female characters can only be “strong” if they get straight As. And that in a show about a BUNCH  of women that gives a wide representation we can only focus on the main character for some reason.

This is why Sailor Moon will be one of my favorite animes forever. It’s first show to say to me okay to be girly, you can still be strong.