adventuresofcomicbookgirl:

chonklatime:

roxanneritchi:

hariboo | adventuresofcomicbookgirl:

I also posted some scans from the masquerade ball chapter! I utterly adore this page by the way. Look at the umbrella and dress! How cutely Mamoru clings to Usagi! How he acknowledges that she rescues him a lot without shame!

I do rant a bit about Mamoru being a creeper here, but I mostly forgive him. He didn’t have a mama to raise him right, and Luna called him out on it. MAYBE HE JUST READ SLEEPING BEAUTY TOO MUCH AND THOUGHT IT APPLIED TO DRUNK LADIES TOO.

#tuxedo mask is a dork YES HE IS. The dorkiest of dork. He only THINKS he’s cool, but really he would have only died A MILLION TIMES without Usagi and the girls.

I’ve always loved their identical :O expressions at the umbrella popping out, though of course they have different reasons: Usagi’s stressing because she’s trying to save Mamoru from dying, and Mamoru’s like OMG AN UMBRELLA! :O!!!!

Also, yes, manga Mamoru is like the KING of dorks. Ha ha, look how ~suavely~ he thanks her for saving his life yet again. I love that he fills the role no small number of lady love interests in shounen manga fill: emotional support, occasional back-up, frequently in distress. And you know what? He’s cool with it.

Y’know, I love Sailor Moon as a whole for just that reason: it sort of turns gender roles on their heads (particularly if you consider the time and place it was written in).  The girls have a wide variety of personalities, as opposed to being the standard gentle, quiet damsels-in-distress; and the men are just as likely to need rescuing as the women.  Mamoru puts on this cool, suave act, but really he just wants to get a chance to hang out with this girl he thinks is cute and nice, and then when he does get together with Usagi he is generally useless but really wants to support her.

Sailor Moon as a whole is great at this.  There’s this scene in the Stars arc, where…was it Seiya?…one of the Star Fighters scoffs at Rei and Minako for giggling over a boy, and they instantly snap into serious mode and tell him, point blank, “We don’t need any men”.  Plenty of people took that as shipping evidence between the two, but I interpreted it as a sort of summation of Sailor Moon’s theme: that you as a woman are plenty powerful all by yourself.  That your desire to be with others does not necessarily negate your strength as an individual person, or vice-versa, and that’s okay.

Ugh, I could talk about gender roles and feminism in relation to 90’s manga all day, so I’ll stop here.

IA! I loved that scene, did a little screed on it .

Okay, the image is technically off topic to my blog here, but this discussion of female gender roles is appropriate to the guardian senshi, so meh. You’re getting it anyways.

P.S. I took that Rei and Minako scene as exactly what you said myself. On the other hand, I also see it as telling of how prevalent alternate sexualities were in the manga as —just there. The homosexual pairings in the outers through all media and the anime-only version with the Shitennou are well-known. Less explored is the general bi-sexual vibe from most of the inner senshi (who were, oddly enough, board straight in the anime) and transgender issues presented in Stars. I’m actually a little disappointed there was no exploration of gender switches over the multiple lives—particularly since Naoko has noted that she had meant to go into Shittenou/Senshi relationships (evidently as hold-over from the prior lifetime) but couldn’t make time for it. Of course, I’m biased to find past life romances effects on reincarnated persons more interesting, but that’s what I have “Please Save My Earth” and “NG Life” for.