Sailor Moon - Legacy

Legacy

The anime has been cited as reinvigorating the magical girl genre by adding dynamic heroines and action-oriented plots. After its success, many similar titles immediately followed. Magic Knight Rayearth, Wedding Peach, Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Fushigi Yuugi, Pretty Cure, and The Vision of Escaflowne have all owed much of their basis to the popularity of Sailor Moon. Sailor Moon has been called "the biggest breakthrough" in English dubbed anime up until 1995, when it premiered on YTV, and "the pinnacle of little kid shojo anime". Matt Thorn notes that soon after Sailor Moon, shōjo manga began to be featured in book shops, as opposed to fandom-dominated comic shops. It is credited as the beginning of a wider movement of girls taking up shōjo manga. Gilles Poitras defines a "generation" of anime fans as those who were introduced to anime by Sailor Moon in the 1990s, noting that they were both much younger than the other fans and also mostly girls.

Fred Patten credits Takeuchi with popularizing the concept of a Super Sentai-like team of magical girls, and Paul Gravett credits the series with "revitalizing" the magical girl genre itself. The series is credited with changing the genre of magical girls—its heroine must use her powers to fight evil, not simply to have fun as previous magical girls had done.

In the West, people sometimes associated Sailor Moon with the feminist or Girl Power movements and with empowering its viewers, especially regarding the "credible, charismatic and independent" characterizations of the Sailor Senshi, which were "interpreted in France as an unambiguously feminist position. " Although Sailor Moon is regarded as empowering to girls, and feminist in concept through the aggressive nature and strong personalities of the Sailor Scouts, it is a specific type of feminist concept where "traditional feminine ideals incorporated into characters that act in traditionally male capacities". Whilst the Sailor Scouts are strong, independent fighters who thwart evil (which is generally a masculine stereotype), they are also ideally feminized through the transformation of the Sailor Scouts from teenage girls to magical girls which heavily emphasizes on jewellery, make-up, and their highly-sexualized outfits (cleavage, short skirt, and accentuated waist). The most notable hyper-feminine features of the Sailor Scouts (and most other females in Japanese girls’ comics) are the girls’ thin bodies, extremely long legs, and, in particular, round, orb-like eyes. Eyes are commonly known as the primal source within characters where emotion is evoked – sensitive characters have larger eyes than insensitive ones. Male characters generally have smaller eyes and do not contain a sparkle or shine in them like the eyes of the female characters. The stereotypical role of women in Japanese culture is to undertake ‘romantic’ and ‘loving’ feelings; therefore, the prevalence of hyper-feminine qualities like the openness of the female eye (in Japanese girls’ comics) is clearly exhibited in Sailor Moon, as well. Thus, Sailor Moon emphasizes a type of feminist model by combining traditional masculine action with traditional female affection and sexuality through the Sailor Scouts. Its characters have also been described as "catty stereotypes", with Sailor Moon's character in particular being singled out as less-than-feminist because her favorite class is home economics and her least favorite is math. The series creator has said she based Usagi on herself, and is meant to reflect her reality.

Sailor Moon has also been compared with Barbie, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. While Buffy creator Joss Whedon has not indicated if Sailor Moon was any influence on his series, he has briefly name-dropped the show.

James Welker believes that Sailor Moon's futuristic setting helps to make lesbianism "naturalized" and a peaceful existence. Yukari Fujimoto notes that although there are few "lesbian scenes" in Sailor Moon, it has become a popular subject for yuri parodic dōjinshi. She attributes this to the source work's "cheerful" tone, although she notes that "though they seem to be overflowing with lesbians, the position of heterosexuals is earnestly secured".

In English-speaking countries, Sailor Moon developed a cult following amongst various anime fans and male university students, and Drazen considers that the Internet was a new medium that fans used to communicate and played a role in the popularity of Sailor Moon. Fans could use the Internet to communicate about the series, using it to organize campaigns to return Sailor Moon to U. S. broadcast, and to share information about episodes that had not yet aired, or to write fan fiction. In 2004, one study suggested there were 3,335,000 sites about Sailor Moon, compared to 491,000 for Mickey Mouse. NEO magazine suggested that part of Sailor Moon's allure was that fans communicated, via the Internet, about the differences between the dub and the original version. The Sailor Moon fandom was described in 1997 as being "small and dispersed". In a United States study, children paid rapt attention to the fighting scenes in Sailor Moon, although when questioned if Sailor Moon was "violent" only two would say yes, the other ten preferring to describe the episodes as "soft" or "cute".