tw sexual assault

Since Sailor Moon is the coming of age story of the heroes journey of a bunch of girls and the many obstacles they face as they grow and become powerful, it makes sense that one of their villains would go for sexual assault and domination, since that is a reality girls have to live with. And like all their obstacles, they overcome it and move on by valuing and believing in themselves and their power, and understanding  real love in all it’s forms. They cannot be owned. The sexual powerplays of predatory men lose to the personal strength of girls and women.

As I made obvious in my comparison, both the manga and anime versions of the storyline had the themes of owning yourself and defying those who try to strip you of your personhood, but I prefer the manga because I feel the changes in the anime made the storyline a bit more cliche and less subversive of common sexual assault tropes in media, and I prefer all the focus on Usagi because I could care less about Dimande and his side of things. I feel the themes were huger in the manga, ans Usagi was more of a badass so that helps.

Dimande is not the only villain that represents a sexual threat, in the anime at least the Amazon Trio functioned as a metaphor for that, specifically going out of their way to attempt to coerce and seduce women (or in Fish Eye’s case, men) and when they were inevitably rejected or they simply felt like it, they would take them by force instead- chaining them up, forcibly extracting their beautiful dreams making noises of pleasure as the women/men screamed and pleaded no (getting very flushed and passing out afterwards) and usually telling the victims they “deserved it”. And always, the Senshi would appear and kick the monster of the Week’s ass before the Trio could make good on destroying the person’s beautiful dream, and the person could inevitably recover and move on, retaining their worth as a person.

This not only happened to all the victims of the week, but ALL the senshi (save Chibiusa- and the outers weren’t in this season) AND Mamoru, as Fish Eye was one of his many stalkers.

My favorite example of the metaphor of violence and recovery has to be Minako’s incident- she was double teamed by both Hawks Eye and Tigers Eye after they attempted to seduce her, only to find in a burst of irony she was actually using the two of them back. So they, of course, tell her she deserves to be assaulted and have her beautiful dream violated for two-timing them. Minako’s eyes are blank and pained as they invade her mirror, and she pants at them “Don’t…my dream will crumble..” Her girls arrive to rescue her and Artemis wakes her up, at which point she starts SHAKING with rage, snarling that they’ll regret breaking her innocence and then she LITERALLY BREAKS THE CHAINS they restrained her with and shoves her dream back into her chest, shocking Artemis like whoa. Then she goes after them as Sailor Venus, yells at them so much they get frightened and releases an awesomely animated “burst of crescent beam anger” that sends them running and screaming. Mina is a bamf. And afterwards, she says to Artemis “Sorry I let those guys fling me around” and Artemis replies she really didn’t and in the end she flung them around. And Minako vows to keep on with her dream.

Rei was also assaulted on account of ignoring Tigers Eye, Ami gets assaulted for rejecting him and he tells poor Mako that she deserves to be assaulted for “trusting someone she only danced with”- and Mamoru is also assaulted after rejecting Fish Eye.Usagi’s assault is the only one that is a pure mission without any of those connotations behind it. All girls (and guy) recover and keep their dreams intact and keep their personal power and don’t buy that they deserved what happened.

So yeah, Sailor Moon: proves you can actually tackle the subject of sexual assault with care without having your characters actually full on raped which often just turns out to be gross and badly handled. LEARN FROM THAT, OTHER MEDIA. Sailor Moon shows women can overcome anything. I love it a lot and so I ramble about it. THE END!!!!