Luna's Whiskers

Sailor Moon manga nerd, multishipper, Mamoru and Shitennou fan.  

[smokingbomber]

festival season

[silvermoon424]

Queen Naoko Takeuchi spotted in 2026!! She looks amazing!! Naoko recently went to the 100th Shining Theater Shinagawa Tokyo live show and gave the performers flowers 💖🌹

Source:

[lynndylee]

Happy birthday Usagi 🐰

patreon | shop | links

[alevolpe]

Hi mom,

do you remember me?

[silvermoon424]

Naoko Takeuchi visiting the Kennedy Space Center in the 1990s and meeting an astronaut! She was visiting the Center to do research for her Sailor Moon side story, "The Lover of Princess Kaguya," which was later turned into the Sailor Moon S Movie.

Decades later, when a plushie of Artemis was spotted in the mission control center during the Artemis II mission, Naoko expressed surprise and delight:

“In the manga, he’s the little cat who sends instructions to the Sailor Guardians from the command room,” she said. “That was just a fantasy that existed only in the story, so to think that 30 years later Artemis would appear in NASA’s mission control, a place I’ve always admired, is incredible. I’m so jealous. Thank you for watching over humanity’s great achievement for ten days. You did a wonderful job.”

“I’m overwhelmed that a classic from 35 years ago is still being talked about around the world,” she said. “I’m so happy. It may have been an immature work, but I’m amazed to realize that classics can become timeless across generations. Manga, anime, live action—it’s such a blessing that this work continues to be shared in so many forms.”

[angelmagerose]

how to lose a guy in 10 days!! I had this idea of collaborating my two interests—romcoms and sailor moon!! This is my first post. Hope you enjoy!! 🎀🌙

[pattiemayigen]

Geeking when the Artemis plushie was spotted at the NASA's mission control center🫣

I know someone in there is a Sailor Moon fan!!

[radiobarf]

An Artemis plush being in the NASA Mission Control Room during Artemis II's journey is the sweetest thing and it makes me very weepy 💖

[silvermoon424]

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F6wobm5kwotsg1.jpeg they got artemis sailor moon at the artemis II control room i am crying real tears

SHUT. UP.

Dude is also wearing a Sailor Moon lanyard:

Random NASA guy, I hope you know every Sailor Moon fan is saluting you.

[sailormoonsub]

revieloutionne submitted to sailormoonsub:

Have you seen the Artemis plushie (perhaps Actual Artemis?) at the Artemis II launch???

OH MY GOD??!!!?!?!

[luna-whiskers]

Especially wild that Naoko never gets any credit for doing a nonbinary on purpose because she's gotten so much shit from the tumblr fandom for doing it at all

Like one of the many reasons why there's been a very loud, active contingent of manga haters in this fandom is because her version of Haruka can't be read as a cis butch lesbian the way that her anime counterpart can. The switching between masc and fem presentations is read as icky and wrong because it doesn't fit the particular western script for cis queerness that some people wanted

[luna-whiskers]

I don't wanna give the impression that this is a recent argument, btw. I wouldn't be speaking on this openly if I weren't confident that this discourse is long dead, because it's not like I'm interested in reopening that can of worms.

I was specifically reacting to the way that whenever queer content gets mentioned in this manga, it is often dismissed or spoken about as though it is a silly accidental quirk rather than something intentionally added by Naoko Takeuchi. And a fake anecdote about how she totally meant to make a character bisexual, but got confused and made her nonbinary by mistake, wouldn't have had people accepting it as fact if she weren't a female Japanese author.

This isn't about which version is better, this is about which version gets treated as intentional and thoughtful and nuanced, and which one strangely, mysteriously, does not.

[luna-whiskers]

“Crescent Moon Power Transform! Change me into a pretty boy idol!“

[luna-whiskers]

Especially wild that Naoko never gets any credit for doing a nonbinary on purpose because she's gotten so much shit from the tumblr fandom for doing it at all

Like one of the many reasons why there's been a very loud, active contingent of manga haters in this fandom is because her version of Haruka can't be read as a cis butch lesbian the way that her anime counterpart can. The switching between masc and fem presentations is read as icky and wrong because it doesn't fit the particular western script for cis queerness that some people wanted

[luna-whiskers]

Hi Luna! Hope you’re well!

Hi friend! It's been a while! My interests have shifted enough that I don't update this blog much anymore but I'm still around!

[luna-whiskers]

[prokopetz]

Based on the recurring discourse about whether historical sources are using this or that bit of queer terminology "correctly", I get the distinct impression that a lot of us aren't aware of exactly how recent the settled definitions of much of the jargon we take for granted really are.

Let's take "bisexual", for example. That's a nice, straightforward term – surely it's meant more or less what it means now straight from the get-go, right?

In reality, over the course of its 250-year history, the word "bisexual" has variously meant what we would understand today from the words "crossdressing", "genderfluid", "nonbinary", "intersex", and several more besides. It didn't settle on its present definition in popular usage until the 1980s, and some queer publications continued to use it in older senses –sometimes in multiple senses within the same publication – well into the 2000s. There are intersex people alive today who still identify as "bisexual" because they grew up with one of the word's older definitions.

(Given the fandom-adjacency of this blog, I'm sure many folks reading this post have heard anecdotes about how Naoko Takeuchi accidentally made Sailor Uranus nonbinary because she didn't understand the difference between being bisexual and being genderfluid; that's actually a pretty understandable mistake to make, as an author writing in 1994 was probably working from sources that used the exact same terms to interchangeably describe both of those concepts!)

Like, I totally get being on edge about careless use of terminology, but for older media it can often pay to ask: "was there actually broad agreement even within queer communities about what this word means at the time this media was made?"; for anything that's more than about thirty years old, there's a reasonably good chance the answer is "no".

[chuplayswithfire]

I would not say this is an accurate reflection of Sailor Moon and or Naoko Takeuchi's intentions with Sailor Moon, as the manga does state that Haruka has the soul of both a man and a woman and that she does not see the point in being specifically a man or a woman. it's specifically described as her strength and something that makes her unique....

[luna-whiskers]

Yes, the idea that Naoko Takeuchi "accidentally" stumbled into making a character nonbinary while explicitly describing that character in both masculine and feminine terms, explicitly having that character dress in both masc and fem clothing at different times, explicitly having the character use masculine styles of speech...

...while also very clearly expressing romantic interest in only women...

is very strange?

Additionally, while it's true that Naoko Takeuchi never explicitly uses the term "nonbinary," she also never explicitly uses the term "bisexual" for Haruka, or any other character!

Naoko Takeuchi also famously liked to play with gender fuckery all across her entire body of work. Many of her characters present as multiple genders (Three Lights, Amazon Trio) and even those who did not live their lives as multiple genders still often engaged in drag (Usagi, Minako, Zoisite).

And many characters who can be easily read as bisexual (Usagi) are no more inclined to engage in gender fuckery than Haruka, who is, again, portrayed as exclusively interested in women.

So again, the idea that she made a character nonbinary by accident due to a misunderstanding of a word is tremendously odd. Even if she lacked the vocabulary to explicitly define what she was trying to do in 1992 Japan (and we don't know that she didn't know the terminology of the day, only that she might have felt compelled not to be more explicit when writing about what was a children's manga in the early 90s), she clearly had a strong interest in the idea of gender fluidity and kept coming back to it!

To be frank, this sounds like one of the many inaccurate stories about Naoko Takeuchi that spun off from hearsay and mistranslation. And TBH, I see this kind of speculation that Naoko Takeuchi didn't know what she was doing with her own story (and by implication, anything cool or interesting was a complete accident) way more than I do with male authors. Nobody would suggest that Kunihiko Ikuhara wasn't acting intentionally when he put Utena in a male school uniform, even though Utena was (from his own words in interviews) inspired by Haruka and his time working on Sailor Moon.

[prokopetz]

Based on the recurring discourse about whether historical sources are using this or that bit of queer terminology "correctly", I get the distinct impression that a lot of us aren't aware of exactly how recent the settled definitions of much of the jargon we take for granted really are.

Let's take "bisexual", for example. That's a nice, straightforward term – surely it's meant more or less what it means now straight from the get-go, right?

In reality, over the course of its 250-year history, the word "bisexual" has variously meant what we would understand today from the words "crossdressing", "genderfluid", "nonbinary", "intersex", and several more besides. It didn't settle on its present definition in popular usage until the 1980s, and some queer publications continued to use it in older senses –sometimes in multiple senses within the same publication – well into the 2000s. There are intersex people alive today who still identify as "bisexual" because they grew up with one of the word's older definitions.

(Given the fandom-adjacency of this blog, I'm sure many folks reading this post have heard anecdotes about how Naoko Takeuchi accidentally made Sailor Uranus nonbinary because she didn't understand the difference between being bisexual and being genderfluid; that's actually a pretty understandable mistake to make, as an author writing in 1994 was probably working from sources that used the exact same terms to interchangeably describe both of those concepts!)

Like, I totally get being on edge about careless use of terminology, but for older media it can often pay to ask: "was there actually broad agreement even within queer communities about what this word means at the time this media was made?"; for anything that's more than about thirty years old, there's a reasonably good chance the answer is "no".