Spy…

Spy, starring Melissa McCarthy…

I can’t believe I’m saying this.

I think I kind of…liked it.

Arguably, the writing of Spy was more true to satire (than, for example, a show like Family Guy which I am not a fan of). I read Spy initially as the kind of fiction that isn’t necessary meant to degrade fat women but more draw attention to fat stereotypes and machismo. It shows a fat woman being tough, capable, confident, calling out b.s. to an extent, and getting over a guy she’s attached to who obviously sees her in a not flattering light romantically.

There was a joke about Black people in there that pissed me off but I even thought that was handled in a way that I could deal with at the moment when McCarthy’s character says, “That’s not appropriate” and it was over.

Not to sing the film praises or those of Melissa McCarthy or anything. I never wanted to see the movie because of that trailer they played to death on television  around its release date of McCarthy getting that that motorcycle stuck in the wet cement. I assumed it was just another two-hour, thinly veiled attack on fat women using a desperate fat woman to do it. I would stare at McCarthy on that freaking scooter stuck in that concrete with absolute woe and burning contempt.

But even I laughed when I gave Spy a chance. I was glad to just be able to see a comedy, starring a fat woman, and for once just fucking laugh.

Eternal Seduction by Jennifer Turner: A sort of review

I got tired of it sitting in my queue so here it goes

I got this book free on my new Kindle Fire, which was given to me as a gift. I have no money and, most importantly, I have no money to waste on badly written books, so I’m all for the freebies for right now.

Let me tell ya, there was nothing about this story that made me think “eternal seduction”—I mean, looking at the plot itself and the characters.

• The Cover—a sketch of my impression:

Pasty, thin white people with problems. A hint of goth, roses, and morbidity. Instant pop media vampire story, spun right off of Stephanie Meyer and probably that Twilight nonsense. A simple recipe. I am not impressed.

When is the romance industry going to stop with these stupid covers??? *pulling out my hair*

But there was almost a jewel under the cover. It turned out to be a few steps above that Twilight nonsense.

• The Heroine

My attitude about the book began to change with finding out that the heroine’s name is Logan, which is typically used as a masculine name. Not bad, Jennifer Turner.

I read the second part of the dedication: “And to Logan and Kerestyan, who decided to break the mold and not be the classic hero and heroine…thank you!”

So, you think so, Jennifer Turner, whoever you are.

Logan Ellis is also homeless. An interesting attempt. (It didn’t stay interesting for long.) Logan Ellis, again, another interesting thing to note about the character’s journey.

• Fatphobia/Fat Hatred

Nobody likes feeling like the main character would say or ugly, bigoted things about their body or eating habits if they were somehow to extract them from the book and meet them in real life.

 “…When the fat girl stuffing her face in the corner fully recognizes food gives her the comfort she can’t find in anyone else.”

It was supposed to be some kind of profound moment so I was caught off guard considering that Logan, the main character, is a skinny bitch character, a homeless starved heroine addict who chose to live on the streets. At first, I thought she was charming but as I continue reading, she’s just becoming abrasive. That comment didn’t help my perception of her. I definitely don’t appreciate her stereotype here at all and she pairs it up with example of sexism and promiscuous men, prefacing the comment with “The moment you realize all your worst fears are true”.

But that comment and how it’s set up within the context of the story really put me off. As if of course we’re all lonely misanthropic fat girls sitting in corners huddling our foods around us and shunning people.

I visited her website and was surprised to find that Jennifer Turner appears to be a plus-size woman, like myself. That’s if the photo under the author’s section is at all recent. Politically and intellectually, I don’t understand why she would choose to write a thin character who would make a comment that, to me, sounds fatphobic, out of the blue like that when the character is trying say something important.

Whatever, after the words were said, the whole book lost its shine for me and it went downhill from there in a combustion of disappoint and barely expressed ire. The suspension of disbelief was dismissed and the good faith in the character was totaled beyond all recognition.

• The Love Interest of the Heroine

Kerestyan a pretty unusual name for me. I like it.

Kerestyan seemed pretty interesting up until the point that Logan made her fatphobic remark and I lost interest in the book. My favorite scene was the in the kitchen scene, unf.

• Preternatural “Plastic Surgery”

So after about two decades or so of wrecking her body with heroine, you’re telling this bitch gets a pass once she receives the privilege of becoming a servio? Get. Out. Of. Town.

In the same vein as the fatphobic remark made by Logan, the heroine, it seems that eternal thinness is the beauty standard for vampires. Give me a break. This metaphysical/magical “plastic surgery” adds a whole layer to my understanding of the bigotry inherent in the body image message of this book.

• Drug Trafficking in New York

So you’re telling me that after living for thousands of years, these vampires can’t figure out how to heavily mitigate drug trafficking in one primarily human city?

Sounds like the limitations of the human imaginations to me. That’s a fail, Jennifer Turner.

• Homelessness

Only presumably liberal white artists would choose to portray a story in which the white main character actively chooses to be homeless and actively chooses to be on drugs.

I feel like this was a poor decision on the author’s part and was somewhat mocking of people who are born into poverty and homelessness.

• All-Seeing Old Dude

Spare me. The all-seeing, all wise master vampires who reigns of from on high? Throne and all? The author could’ve missed me with this one. I was, overall, not impressed. The whole “very old vampire family presented as a gang/organization with selective recruiting” was another fail.

Issued: Lord of the Rings pt. I

I haven’t finished writing everything I have to say about Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, which I have both read and seen the movie for, but this is half of it. Once the entire commentary is finished, I’ll will post it together under the drop-down menu of ISSUED, but for right now, it shall be in post format only under Part One and Part Two. ~MsQ

 

Since I typically don’t read them and yet they dominate the fields of horror and fantasy, I am glad to add the first male writer, JRR Tolkien, to the Issued series.

Don’t get it twisted—I really liked Lord of the Rings and its expansiveness. But I also liked Harry Potter and the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series and it didn’t stop me from criticizing them.

1. A mountain-load of research: Not to give this Eurocentric piece of literature too much credit but what must be appreciated about Lord of the Rings and all its related readings is the sheer amount of work, imagination, and willpower that must have went into it. I couldn’t fathom how to create languages other than the ones I speak at random when I’m feeling out how the character speaks or says things.
2. Whiteness and blondeness as light, power, purity, beauty, and goodness: As typical of most (white) writers in fantasy fiction, there’s this obsession with light and whiteness as good, power, and beauty and light (inherently all these things at once) that is presented in Lord of the Rings. Why did Gandolf the Grey have to become Gandolf the White. What’s up with Shadowfax (a white horse) being the lord of all horses. Why is the most spirited and badass hero(ine) of the story pale as milk and blond (Eowene). Why’s the most powerful elf-lady blonde as the palest blade of hair and white as Wonder Bread. Don’t deny it, you know its true. Keep in mind that the flour used in many things, if not all of them, that are baked are bleached so that they are white. I think this is interesting when looking at symbolic and metaphorical representations and imagery of whiteness, blue eyes, and blondeness in the LotR movies and literature, etc.
3. Darkness as ill-favored, grotesque, and evil: There are, of course, no people of color in the LotR triology. There’s a sharp contrast between white folks and inhuman dark things. Well, unless you count the men in scarves and turbans with their faces covered in the Oliphant scene, I think that’s about as close as we got to seeing people of color in the movie. Oh and those guys were evil and working for Sauron.
4. West vs. East: Maybe I don’t know enough to say too much on what bothers me about this theme in the movie, but I know that the Eurocentric West is always antagonizing and exotifying ‘the East’ in many American and European modes of discourse, especially literature and film. So I find it interesting that all the white folks in the “West” are portrayed as the heroes and all the creepy, violent, dark-skinned, evil stuff comes from the “East”.
5. Ladies of Lords: Why is it that all of the powerful women in the story are the daughters of powerful men? Where are the common folk in this?
6. The Wealthy Hobbit Saves the Day: In the same vein as the brief but poignant ‘Ladies of Lords’ section of this article, the attempted hero is not to just any hobbit, he’s a wealthy hobbit living comfortably with his wealthy uncle. NOTE: Let us not forget that Frodo is an orphan and his story isn’t all peaches and roses, and that he is portrayed as being exceptionally kind, spirited, and intelligent. But—yet and still.
7. Rings and Staffs as Ties to Power: There’s a lot of commentary here, which I think is also evident in Rowling’s Harry Potter, about material things like rings and wands and staffs tying people to and representing power. I find this both interesting and vexing. Why does power lie in material objects? If someone has a certain natural powerful, wands and staffs and rings and such should be unnecessary. Yet the object gives us something tangible to see and ground us in the story as we contemplate the necessity of the object and its meaning and symbolism.

~MsQ

Revisiting Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer 2: Black folks

This is what I wrote initially, please read to the end for the post script. My displeasure here shows.

Shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer are just like wounds that I can’t stop picking at because they never heal anyway no matter how long I leave them alone. Days, months, years, a decade. Doesn’t matter. When it comes up, I like it until I remember why I started hating it.

I’ve been unfortunately reliving Buffy with my sister, who has all the sociological awareness of a teaspoon. She doesn’t care about herself let alone Black people’s history or positions in society so its kind of pointless talking with her about the finer points of racism in a show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Why? She goes into her everything’s-not-‘Black-and-white’ mode, a fallacious argument given the context considering the fact that for seven seasons, 144 episodes, the majority of the Buffy cast is white and Black folks/people of color rarely appear and when they do they end up dead, with the exception of Robin Wood, the butt of some latently/overtly racist fun-having humor, sex objects, or doomed to disappear into set extra/side character hell.

Bones I just pick with portrayals of people of African descent:

• The First Slayer
• Kendra
• Robin Woods
• Nikki Woods
• Forest
• That evil demon woman played by Ashanti

But I’m kind of satisfied that this happened. It forced me into the mood to update this blog.

The sooner we stop trying to make racism out to be an arbitrary anomaly, the sooner we can really educate people about it for a better future.

UPDATE: Later, we talked about our disagreement and my sister explained that television is her escape from her own problems and even though she may be aware of issues of racism in what she sees and hears. All my sociological analysis ruins for her. I just stopped watching near the end of the series and refused to continue and that hurt her feelings because she wanted to watch it with me. I remembered why I wasn’t thrilled about the final season in particular period, especially that situation between Spike and Robin Woods.

I get that. I do but that doesn’t change my low tolerance for television entertainment drenched and sopping in ads pumped full of racism, sexism, classism, etc. We cannot continue to actively support the media that oppresses us.

Evermore,

~MsQ

Revisiting Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer

As a kid, I was happy to sit down for forty-four minutes and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel every evening. This was back when I had hope for television and their potential for creating great shows.

My sister and I have recently begun trying to get back in touch with why we loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Watching the show now, I realized something I never wanted to see as a kid:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its producers have never been very kind to characters of color nor has the show ever had any permanent 3-dimensional characters of color. Even the supposedly Black female slayer, Kendra, didn’t survive the third season.

This is a trend that carried over to Angel. As a matter of fact, the first extras we see in the show who plays parts of any significance is a Black guy dressed as a loan shark demon creature whose harrassing Doyle and the other one is a lonely body-snatching demon. Gunn was a Black male stereotype from f*king hell created by white producers!

Not to mention the ever-lurking presence of white British European power, oppression, and authority presented in Giles, Wesley, and the Watcher’s Council itself. Let’s not forget also that the only [Black (British) woman]/woman of color who appears in the show by the fourth season with any amount of screen time is Gile’s little sex friend.

Buffy and Angel are funny and entertaining in some ways, even thoughtful, and I still enjoy it enough to watch some of it, but in other ways…not so funny or entertaining or thoughtful at all.

More to come?

~MsQ

My thought pool on the LKH Anita Blake series

Thought I’d go ahead and stick it all in one post:

Issued: Laurell K. Hamilton

My Anita Blake books laid to rest in storage

the god of abvh is white

Anita Blake Half-Latina!?–Who knew!

Does Laurell K. Hamilton ‘like’ Black people enough to include them more in ABVH?

Three Memories of Laurell K. Hamilton/Anita Blake that I’d like to Share

Laurell K. Hamilton: Admiration the Furthest Thing from Understanding?

ABVH Tight Bod Superiority Complex

Toying with Whiteness and ‘darkness’

Polyamory in Anita Blake–*thumbs up*

Bestiality in Hamilton’s Anita Blake series

Anita Blake series Inconsistencies

Bitch Feminism and Anita Blake, #1 Bitch?

 

Black Butler, European British motif

So I picked up a new anime today, Black Butler.

The truth is I kind of think its funny, occultish, and interesting, despite its exaggerated, supremacist European motif. I’m not surprised because many Japanese manga and anime artist seem to think anything white/European is the best thing on the planet. What I can’t stand for is the ever-present supremacist British attitude of Ciel as the main character.

Reading the English subtitles, which may or may not be accurate, I noticed in episode 13 that Ciel described the men from India as “Indian savages”. Considering all this bullshit talk coming out of England about Black folks and western Europe/Britain’s history with colonialism and their use of this word towards people of color, I wasn’t happy or impressed with its use in the subbing or Ciel’s attitude towards the Indian immigrants.

The funny thing about this show though is that they take hits even at other white people. So far they’ve made Italians and Irish out to be villians while Britains remain pure of Englishmen…smdh.

Japan needs to work ont their issues with racism towards [other] people of color so it stops popping up all over place or at least represented in a light that makes me believe their aware of what their doing.

~Truly,

MsQ

Inglorious Bastards, film

If at all possible, I have some of the same issues with Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards—my sister made me watch it—that I have with his Kill Bill movies, if not more.

 

1. The graphicness of the violence is at Tarantino’s usual level, though it isn’t unbelievable. Still gross though.

2. The use of Native/indigenous/Native American/Indian/American Indian references is most offensive. (I never know which race/ethnic phrasing is preferable, or rather “PC”, to use.)

3. Of course, they took two or three shots at Black people as a race, the only Black person in the film being male and French and the lover of a white Jewish woman (Emmanuelle).

4. There were three women in the film, though two of them appeared the most frequently. All the women are either being used for sex or they are women who, in my opinion, aren’t allowed to live because they are deceiving men. There was that disgusting scene with female French interpreter in her leopard hair piece and that one Nazi guy—brief but like most disgusting sex scenes left its mark on my memory, like Forest Gump (the sounds were enough… =_=). Then there was Bridgette Hammersmark and Emmanuelle Mimeux, who were both killed in the film by violent German Nazi men. Bridgette was a German spy for America and Britain. Emmanuelle was a blonde and blue-eyed Jewish woman, who sought revenge against the Nazis and paid for it with her life. Bridgette was strangled to death after she was found out and Emmanuelle was shot to death though her revenge was successful even if she wasn’t alive to see it.

 

I just got through watching the movie so I’m not ready to go in-depth about the film, but I’m grinding my teeth over it a bit. I wonder what Jewish, Native, and German audiences thought about it….

the god of abvh is white

I promise, I’m getting to the end of my rope talking about Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake stuff, as far as overall commentary goes. There’s a lot to talk about, its a long series, but I’m getting tired of it and am taking a break from reading the series and buying it.

People love to portray gods, angels, goddesses, and Jesus Christ as white people and this explains why some of them believe white folks are god’s chosen people and everybody else is scum. I don’t believe for a second for that ancient Egyptians all look like white Europeans, no offense to all the white people who have ever played Egyptians in movies. I think that kind of religious idealism only works in literature and is contrived in film.

Practically everyone in the Anita Blake series is white because Laurell K. Hamilton is white and interacts probably mostly with white people. Therefore, in the ABVH universe, if the god/creator is white then it only stands to reason that the majority of the people in her created world are white. The characters are created in the likeness of their god, which would be Laurell K. Hamilton.

Every now and again, somebody like Bernado, Jamil, Shang Da, Jade and Vivian (*rolls eyes*), Yasmeen, and Raphael pop up, but only at Hamilton’s whim. There are neither consistent nor regularly appearing characters. That’s if they’re aren’t already dead, raped, tortured, or mutilated as sufficient to Hamilton’s liking.

Of course, by the reckoning and conception of the god of ABVH, Black people do not typically become vampires. Perhaps we should be happy. Who wants to see pasty, ashy, bloodless Black people? Only white folks look good that way apparently. We’re not called ‘people of color’ for nothing. Still, what I find lamentable is that Hamilton, as the god of ABVH, couldn’t figure out a better way to portray Black vampires, as opposed to almost scrapping them from the story all together. Examples of solutions: They have a gene that protects them from the worst of vampirism, like the discoloration when they haven’t fed. They’re usually a different kind of vampire than the typical European brand (which is the explanation that I go with in my writing, tying them in more culturally with Black history as I understand and sense it). The pale ashiness just doesn’t show up on them the same way. I don’t know! Any of these explanations would have worked for me but she just decided to make it so Black people don’t seem to catch vampirism, period. On the other hand, she had no problem making it easy for them to be infected with lycanthropy. So she can see them as animals, but not as something so classically reserved for the European as vampires, huh?

That is just quintessentially ignorant and white racist right there.

There is a constant reinforcement of white middleclass American and (romantic) European motifs, primarily French and British, in Hamilton’s universe. Maybe it is not so much that she can’t write Black characters or that Anita just seems white, but more that she has built a world in which people of color are excluded and made fodder by default.

Writers are the gods of their own literarily crafted worlds. They are limited only by the reach of their own minds and imaginations and experiences, and sometimes by the demands of the market for those who are published. Obviously, some people imaginations can’t reach that far. And then again its not so much an issue of the imagination as it is white people just not “knowing how to write” people of color in a genuine, not-so-racist way. And maybe they just shouldn’t. That is why they are the gods of their own world and in that world representations of people of color reflect their own pathologies about people of color rather than presenting real persons who inhabit and exist within these worlds.

I’m pretty sure she’d shrug and give some insensitive answer to this line of thinking, but, hey, what can you do. She writes what she writes and I think what I think about it.

 

ever more critical,

Ms. Queenly

Issued: Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon [Anime Adaption]

Please keep in mind that this article is about the anime based off Takeuchi’s work and it assumes that for the most part the anime and the manga match up.

“Thinking about how this sort of thing works, I am reminded of an AMV I saw last night on my iPod (see above) which focuses heavily on the “magical girl” transformations of Sailor Moon especially. The emphasis on women already being fairly strong, but also transforming into forms that aren’t overly sexualizing or animalizing seems to be more admirable. Though it is a bit problematic for the show to essentially conflate images of lithe, short-skirted, and magical lip-stick-wearing teens with beauty, purity, and heroism, it seems also a possible source of empowerment considering that these women fight for themselves, for others, and for each other using the power of their hearts, their wills, their agencies. The whole heart crystal thing is beautiful, in that it offers a way to be true to ones feelings and emotions without relegating them to some crystallized “essence” of femininity. There are still some things wrong with the portrayal of the Sailor Scouts, but I think there are a lot of things to appreciate about a story coming out of a birthing feminist awareness and desire to depict women’s agencies in manga and anime. I wish I could see some more of it (remembering that I was young when I saw it first…I even cried when it ended its run on CN). The matter of transformation is certainly important, authors use the transformation to tell us more about the characters inner qualities, the exposure of their potentials and an idea of secrets revealed. Kubo did no favors to Sun Sun, Mila Rose, Apache, and Halibel in their transformations (even though their toughness and determination was a nice breath of fresh air), Takeuchi at least allowed women to be more positively “transformed” into versions of themselves expressing outwardly the emotional, mental, and spiritual powers that are internal at all times, though she still has some issues of stereotyped “beauty” and “valor” to work out there.”

This article has been in my thoughts but came about after a correspondence I had with a good friend of mine on the topic of Halibel Tia, Mila Rose, Sun Sun, and Apache from Tite Kubo’s Bleach. I asked if I could post part of our conversation (the eloquent and sincere commentary above) and my friend agreed.

I consider this to be a tribute to what I both love and hate about Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon dubbed, edited, and somewhat torn apart for American television. I was so excited to learn, on Wiki for what its worth, that there’s a Sailor Moon revival in the works. All the years I saw Sailor Moon anime collection on sale, subbed and dubbed, and never scrapped up enough money to get it–how I regret that! By the time I realized that most anime comes from a manga, Sailor Moon the manga wasn’t even available anymore. I will be using the terms Sailor Soldiers and Sailor Scouts in this article although I prefer Soldier since Scout makes me think of little girls in berets trying to sell me cookies. 0_0

1. blond hair, blue eyes AGAIN?: This is the same issue I have with Naruto and it doesn’t help that Sailor Moon and Sailor Venus look so much alike and are popular characters. Why are white characteristics consistently being mapped onto main characters, presenting them as the essential aspects of magical messiah-like characters? I admit, I like the brightness of the colors, but I don’t like what they potentially present on these pale-skinned heroes. Why’s the blond with pacifistic powers gotta have the top spot?
2. By the purity of their hearts?: I understand it in a metaphorical, metaphysical way but I don’t think Sailor Moon’s power would be able to combat real violence. I’ve seen it and experienced it in my life so that part of me that has experience more than my share of hard knocks is unimpressed with the pacifistic sentiments in the show. In order to save yourself and others, there may come a time when force is necessary.
3. Love, love, love the transformation: I don’t care if it’s the same every episode, I just like to see them. There’s something in those representations of power that I just love, that transcendence of normality. I felt like I was transforming with the girls, into a powerful self that could fight evil and dish out justice.
4. slut-shaming: The villains were often portrayed as skanky in revealing outfits with fuller, curvier figures, often showing  cleavage (though some of Sailors did, too).
5. Uranus and Neptune, cousins?–Oh please!!!: They are so totally not cousins and I hated how Disney censored their relationship because it’s not heterosexual. This is the epitome of the lies suburban white folks tell their curious kids at the dinner table when they ask about two women/men kissing. I think they’re beautiful and I always have. As a matter of fact it confused me even more when I tried to understand whhhy they were being presented as cousins instead of lovers.
6. Villains outfits again: I actually like the villains outfits and actually find them brighter, sharper, cooler, more mature, and sexier than the Sailor Scout’s/Sailor Senshi (Soldiers) uniforms sometimes.
7. Young vs. old: With the exception of Luna and Queen Serenity, who appears to us in cat form for a vast portion of airtime between the movies and the anime, women past their tweens are largely villainized in the series. This could be read as a metaphor for how age sometimes comes with the loss of one’s dreams and spirit, bitterness, and a negative sense of disillusionment. Even with this reading, I find it kind of disappointing that only royalty and their servants, and, as my friend said, long-legged “lithe, short-skirted magical lipstick-wearing teens” can be good role models for young women and represent “beauty, purity, and heroism”.
8. Sailor Stars: Not that I really minded, but I had to watch the Sailor Stars season in Japanese because American producers thought it was too complicated and risqué for their closeted audiences. This trio has a lot of significance for me and I’ve heard some transgender folks referencing the Sailor Stars as well. I would have liked to have seen it brought to America in English. Considering how they botched, censored, and edited the other seasons though, I don’t know how great it would have been….
9. Sailor Mercury and Sailor Venus: All the other Sailor Soldiers, with the exception of Sailor Moon herself, had physical powers—Jupiter had lightning, Mars had fire, Neptune had water, and Uranus could crash like an earthquake. But Venus had…what? Love? And Mercury had, like…bubbles 0_o
10. the moon as female: It’s both positive and potentially negative that the moon is portrayed as female. The representation of the moon is rooted in many myths but in a few words, its beauty, paleness, remoteness, and its relationship to the Earth. Mamoru (Prince Darien) represents earth and Usagi (Princess Serena) represents the Moon. In a negative way, the moon and earth metaphor reinforces not only heterosexist norms and Eurocentrism, but maintains certain ideas about beauty and women.
11. Tuxedo Mask is the worst male archetype: There is definitely a European motif in Sailor Moon, starting with Tuxedo Mask, his tuxedo, his mask, his gloves, and his top hat. He literally appears to save the day when Sailor Moon is being an idiot.
12. Saturn is the emo one–with her goth, lace-up fetish boots: Sailor Saturn probably has the most awesome power, seeing as how she can end the world by lowering her glaive. Too bad she doesn’t appear very often and everybody spent most of the series confusing her with Mistress 9.
13. makeup compacts, mirrors, nail poilish, lipstick, pendants, butterflies, hearts, bubbles, flowers, crystals and jewels, unicorn, earrings, tiaras, gloves, ribbons and bows, sailor fuku, short skirts, pumps, boots, and high heels: that’s all I’m saying….
14. Pegasus and Mini-Moon: One thing that bothered me about the relationship between Mini-Moon and Pegasus is the fact that it is contingent upon her innocence as a child. In the episode where Mini-Moon becomes a teenager and Sailor Moon is turned into a child, Pegasus would not answer Mini-Moon’s call with the crystal bell. As if every adult has no innocence and no dreams, he does not appear to her in this form.
15. Essentially Feminist: As central as guys are to the majority heterosexual characters in the show, Sailor Moon is a show about girls and women running things, not guys running countries and planets. Otherwise the show would be about Mamoru running Earth instead of the moon queen and princess of the Moon. Take that Kubo’s Bleach and Kishimoto’s Naruto!