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sailormoonandme · 1 year

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In my observations, there is a certain fandom narrative that has been perpetuated over the years regarding the adaptation of Sailor Mars from the manga into the original 1992 anime. In my travels through this fandom for the past 10+ years, that narrative essentially boils down to this:

In the manga Sailor Mars/Rei Hino hated men and was uninterested in relationships with them. The anime changed this because the men in charge of it were being sexist.

I...respectfully disagree with this narrative for various reasons I want to discuss in this (probably very long) post.

Now, before I go on, a confession. I’m not going to pretend I have extensively researched this by checking out old interviews or anything, nor am I an expert on the production of anime or manga. So, if anyone has some important info I am unaware of please let me know so I can be more informed for the future. It may be that you have this tidbit of info that completely upends everything I have understood about the topic in question. With that out of the way...

Regardless of the topic under discussion, the single most important thing to bear in mind when talking about the relationship between the Sailor Moon manga and anime is that it was incredibly atypical compared to most manga and their corresponding anime adaptations.

In the majority of cases, a manga will begin publication and then, if it finds sufficient success, will be picked up to be adapted into an anime. More often than not, the anime will be aimed at the same age and gender demographic as the manga and both will be released at roughly a weekly schedule. Or at least, this is the case for the most popular anime you have probably heard of. Moreover, the anime will likely begin a solid year-two years after the manga began, giving the anime production staff plenty of material to work with.

Let’s look at two examples. The first chapter of Dragon Ball was released on 3rd December 1984 and the first episode was released on 26 February 1986. The first chapter of One Piece was released on 22 July 1997 and the first episode was released on 20 October 1999. In both cases, very little was changed between the manga and the anime, they are almost word for word, shot for shot identical, exempting filler of course.

None of the above was the case with Sailor Moon. The Sailor Moon manga was created specifically for Toei to turn it into an anime before even a single page was drawn of it. This is because Toei and Takeuchi had actually agreed to work together after the success of Takeuchi’s Codename: Sailor V manga, which was a predecessor to Sailor Moon. At some point along the way it was also decided the anime would be aimed at a younger and broader audience than the manga. Whilst the manga essentially exclusively targeted tween-teenage girls, the anime primary (but not exclusive) audience would be pre-tween girls, boys of about the same age and then their presumed older siblings and parents, in that order of priority. In other words, the anime, whilst still being have female audience at the forefront, was aimed to catch families too.* Furthermore, whilst the anime would be released weekly, the manga would drop monthly.

Thing is, Sailor Moon Chapter 1 was released on 28 December 1991 and Sailor Moon episode 1 was released on 7 March 1992! That’s an INSANELY small amount of time from a manga to anime adaptation to be working with, even if Takeuchi was giving them relevant info before completing the chapter herself. Anime episodes, naturally, take a long time to make and longer than a manga chapter might take to be created from scratch.

These are all critical factors in understanding why the 1992 anime is different to the manga on most fronts. Whilst they do not account for every difference, they do account for the vast majority when you bear them in mind for your analyses. Such is the case for Sailor Mars.

So, lets put things into a bit of a ‘timeline.

28 December 1991: Sailor Moon Chapter 1 is released

28 January 1992: Sailor Moon Chapter 2 is released, introducing Sailor Mercury. I do not actually have confirmed release dates for manga chapters, so I am going to be presuming that each chapter was released on a consistent monthly schedule.

28 February 1992: Sailor Moon Chapter 3 is released, introducing Sailor Mars.

7 March 1992: Sailor Moon Episode 1 is released, which adapts Chapter 1

28 March 1992: Sailor Moon Chapter 4 is released, featuring the trinity of Moon, Mercury and Mars as a team, without any new additions to the Sailor Team.

28 April 1992: Sailor Moon Chapter 5 is released, introducing Sailor Jupiter. There is something more relevant in this chapter but I we will return to that a bit later.

2 May 1992: Sailor Moon Episode 8 is released, which adapts Chapter 2

16 May 1992: Sailor Moon Episode 10 is released which adapts Chapter 3

23 May 1992: Sailor Moon Episode 11 is released. This is the first filler episode featuring Sailor Mars and establishes much of her characterisation and relationship with Sailor Moon going forward in the anime

15 August 1992: Sailor Moon Episode 22 is released, which adapts Chapter 4

15 September 1992: Sailor Moon Episode 25 is released, introducing Sailor Jupiter to the anime. It has very little in common with Sailor Moon Chapter 5. Perhaps a mere two or three scenes are adapted at all.

Not how there is less than a month between Chapter 5’s release and the release of Episode 10, and just under a month between Chapter 5 and Episode 11.

Why is this relevant?

Because Chapter 5 is the very first time Rei expresses any kind of negative opinion towards men.

Now, I might have missed something, but skimming through the rest of the Dark Kingdom arc, I couldn’t find Rei ever mention anything about men again in that arc., certainly not along the lines she mentioned in chapter 5** Rei’s attitude towards men/relationships is also unmentioned in the Sailor Moon Materials Collection:

Not only does Sailor Mars look different in the Materials Collection, but there are some specific details that never crop up in the manga or anime, such as Mars occasionally not wearing gloves and being able to shoot lasers from her nails. This is because the Materials Collection predominantly contains early notes Takeuchi had dreamed up for Sailor Moon, not necessarily stuff that wound up in the final product. This demonstrates how Takeuchi had not intricately plotted out details of her characters or story ahead of time. A more poignant example is the fact that, even as late as the release of Chapter 2, Takeuchi intended for Ami to be a cyborg, establishing a hint to this when Ami observes Usagi playing an arcade game.

What does all this mean though?

Well for starters, I think it is HIGHLY unlikely that the anime staff had read chapter 5 of the manga when they began scripting Episodes 10-11 which established Rei’s anime personality and dynamic with the other characters. There simply would not have been enough time for them to have done that. Furthermore, there is no evidence to suggest that, at the time she created Chapters 3-4 of the manga, Takeuchi herself had settled on the idea of Rei’s attitude towards men/relationships being an important aspect of at the character.***

Lets also consider that Sailor Mars was the Senshi of fire, an element commonly associated with passion and love. Whilst there is a wonderful irony that the Senshi of passion rejects romantic relationships, it isn’t an idea that is immediately obvious. That is to say, nobody reading Chapters 3-4 would presume Rei was a downer on relationships with men, or mistrustful of men in general. From the anime staff’s POV, the idea that the fire character was interested in love and romance was likely a very safe bet.

Not to mention, if we are all being brutally honest here, it isn’t as if Manga Rei’s attitudes towards men/relationships (as presented in Chapter 5) were somewhat atypical. Whether in 1992 or today, most people (regardless of sex or gender) do not hold an intrinsic distrust/dislike for the people of another sex/gender and wholesale reject the idea of having relationships with them. Whilst an important component of Sailor Moon was the diversity of female personalities present within the narrative, Rei’s attitude towards men/relationships was not common even amongst the other female protagonists of the story, Usagi herself being taken aback by it. It was unique enough in fact that Takeuchi wrote ‘Casablanca Memory’ as a wholesale origin/explanation of how and why Rei had such attitudes in the first place.

In light of all this it isn’t really fair to hold the anime staff in contempt for establishing that Rei felt an attraction to Tuxedo Mask or to men in general, especially when they likely did this to generate conflict and character dynamics for the show’s utterly essential filler episodes. By the time the staff read Chapter 5 they were more than likely deep into production on various episodes that were written with their interpretation of Rei in mind. To course correct at that stage likely would have been needlessly difficult and expensive, if it was possible at all. Not to mention it’d involve explicitly contradicting how they’d established Rei up until that point. And doing so upon the basis on what Rei said in some side comments in a chapter that wasn’t even about her in the first place? I think that was a big ask of the anime staff for the sake of fidelity to the source material, especially given how stressful and time consuming anime production is at the best of times.

I think these production realities also help explain all the other ways in which Sailor Mars differs in the anime and the manga. For the most part, AnimeRei’s personality is not an unreasonable extrapolation from how she was portrayed in Chapters 3-4. Her very first interaction with Usagi involves her instinctively attacking the blonde bun-head and knocker her unconscious. In Chapter 4 she chastises Usagi for being late and is embarrassed by her antics at the Masquerade. When talking to Luna in that same chapter her dialogue can come off as bossy and self-important.

Whilst these moments are not typical of Manga Rei as a whole, for the anime staff who had to generate filler episodes and who were seeking out character dynamics, these moments likely stood out to them. Combined with the fact that the Senshi of fire who’s guardian planet is named after the Roman God of War, you can see how they arrived at the idea that Rei had a fiery personality and would come into conflict with the lead character a lot. Given that the anime had to generate episodes with Moon, Mars and Mercury, that dynamic was probably quite appealing to them as it gave each girl a clear cut personality archetype to bounce off of one another and could be applied to any situation.

Usagi was the goofy clutz.

Ami was the shy genius.

Rei was the bossy hothead.

Sure, the show could still have worked with Rei’s manga persona, but it would have been more difficult. Manga Rei’s somewhat stoic and serious persona doesn’t generate plot or conflict easily and (if we are being honest) in a three person team likely treads on some territory that Ami’s character covered anyway. And again, that is presuming the anime staff were aware of what Rei’s personality would ultimately be like in the manga. Based upon even her first three chapters that isn’t entirely clear. It is only was the arc and series built up that we understand Manga Rei’s personality. But without that wider context I feel it is all too easy to read Chapters 3-5 and misunderstand that, as she could be interpreted as rather ‘neutral’ if you get what I mean.

Now, even with all this said, surely there would have come a point where the anime staff had read Chapter 5 and were in a position to write scripts from scratch that respected Rei’s attitude towards men/relationships? Perhaps such a point existed before they had Rei and Mamoru begin dating. If not then, then surely well before Yuichiro was introduced as Rei’s love interest, right? So, don’t both examples represent an open and shut case of the anime staff disrespecting Takeuchi’s vision?

Perhaps so…or perhaps again, production realities come into play here. The idea that Rei liked men and was interested in romantic relationships with them was established as early as her first episode where she clearly had a crush in Tuxedo Mask. In Episode 12 (Rei’s third ever episode) she drags Ami onto a ship for the explicit purpose of finding dates, even going to far as to try and pick up men who were on the rebound.

As mentioned elsewhere, it would have been awkward to have squared Rei rejecting relationships with men after instances like this. But even if you do not think so, I propose that by this point the anime staff had at least begun to go adopt the idea of the anime being a looser adaptation of the manga. By the time Rei began dating Mamoru they had already kept Jadeite around longer than he had been in the manga, writing him out in a wholly different way, and also introduced Nephrite in a very different manner as well.

Remember, production realities meant that the non-manga based episodes were the anime’s lifeblood. Orientating the show to accommodate them had to be top priority, hence why Jadeite stuck around longer and why Nephrite’s gimmick involved the stars rather than his shadow. In other words, the anime had already begun to become its own thing, with its own lore and own character dynamics in play. Indeed, the Nephrite arc is utterly fuelled by this. Zoistie’s rivalry with Nephrite. Nephrite’s relationship with Naru. Mamoru blacking out and transforming into Tuxedo Mask. These were all critical story elements of the Nephrite arc and none of them are in the manga whatsoever. The fact that Nephrite dies in a completely different way and the very next episode introduces his killer (Makoto) in a story almost entirely different from her manga debut is the natural evolution of the anime’s creative direction. In this context, is it really disrespectful (let alone sexist) for the anime staff to have simply committed to the characterisation of Sailor Mars they had already established for themselves and therefore, for the sake of generating new episodes and conflicts, had her entangled with Mamoru and Yuichiro?

It is entirely possible that Takeuchi had a clear cut idea about Rei’s attitude towards men/relationships, had intended for it to be the case very early on and informed the anime staff to that effect. They in turn could have been in a position to establish this as part of Rei’s character in the anime but actively chose not to because they felt a woman rejecting men/relationships in such a way was a bad thing that shouldn’t be allowed.

But, whilst that is entirely possible, without clear cut confirmation of that, I for one do not feel it is fair to presume bad faith on the part of the anime staff.

Thank you for reading.

*Which, from a business POV, makes sense as reading manga by its nature tends to be a more solitary activity compared to watching TV. Family members of the little girls Sailor Moon were aimed at would inevitably catch bits and pieces of the show from the glowing box in the corner of the living room and therefore might be inclined to watch it too.

**Yes, the side story ‘Casablanca Memory’ essentially revolves around this subject, but whilst that story was set during the Dark Kingdom arc it was created after it had concluded and is therefore not something the anime staff would have known about at the time.

***Indeed, that isn’t even clear 100% certain in Chapter 5.

Whilst Rei clearly expresses a negative opinion of men and relationships, she is not the focus of the chapter, Jupiter/Makoto is. And since it is an attitude that is exclusive to this chapter in the Dark Kingdom arc, only coming up again in later arcs and side stories, it basically doesn’t appear consistently enough for any reader to say with absolutely certainty that Rei hates men and rejects the ideas of relationships. It is merely the fifth chapter of the story and we haven’t even fully established the team yet. For all anyone knew, Rei might go on to have contradicted that opinion, or she might have been expressing from a place of immaturity given her age/inexperience with love and relationships. Almost as if it is a flipside to the ‘girls are lame’ attitude boys grow out of during puberty. Or again, maybe it was something they just figured might be a one off component of this one chapter she wasn’t even the focus of.

Regardless, it was very early on the anime had already established the idea that Rei and Usagi were quite similar and both interested in Tuxedo Mask, subjects that they leveraged to generate more filler episodes going forwards.

From a business/production POV they were not going to overhaul the character and revise the scripts/episodes they had already worked hard on to awkwardly readjust her to this particular character trait Takeuchi had given her for this one chapter that then never came up again.

#my essays #sailor moon #sailor mars #sailormoon #rei hino #hino rei #sailor moon 1992 #naoko takeuchi #sailormars

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