Hi!!! I just wanted to say I really like seeing all of your Sailor Moon opinions and writing <3
But I was hoping to ask if you like Usagi? I hope this isn't a rude question because it's not supposed to be, although I'm sorry if it is. You just seem to be really critical of her character, and I feel like overall I don't really see you saying anything positive about her. But like being critical of a character doesn't mean you don't like them, so I was just wondering!
Again, sorry if that's a rude question, I hope you have a nice day <3
Hey-ho✌🏾Don't worry. The question isn't rude at all; I don't think it could be worded more sweetly. First, thank you for the feedback. I am genuinely surprised that there is positive resonance with my Sailor Moon opinions. Appreciate it a lot, really. 💚💚💚
I do like Usagi. I can even clarify that I am not really critical of Usagi as a character. Especially in the 90s anime (which I am just imprinted on because I think I was still in kindergarten when I first experienced Sailor Moon, so that'll just stay my primary reference frame), Usagi gets to be a person. She whines, eats, cries, fails tests, crushes, sulks, forgives, gets jealous, gets overwhelmed, clings, matures, regresses, tries again, can be frustratingly obnoxious, inconsiderate, and blissfully ignorant. There is plenty to like there, and I do enjoy it when a character can cover the entire spectrum. Because Usagi does manage it, she actually works as a "quirky" character. I think that is something that Usagi holds over these more formulaic "relatable" Disney Princesses of the past and a half decade: Relatability without friction and honest potential to frustrate makes characters generic, interchangeable, and just flat. Usagi I can adore and still want to shake regurarily. However, since the franchise really hammers home the point that Usagi is pretty much Goodness incarnate, I find it a little redundant to preface my posts with, "btw, I think Usagi is a good person." The story already keeps insisting that she is love, hope, salvation, the answer, the future, the past, the queen, the mother, the ultimate self, the final decision, the one everyone dies for, the one everyone returns to, the one Chaos targets, the one Cosmos becomes, the one whose happiness stabilizes reality, that I just put my analytical focus elsewhere.
It is because I genuinely like Usagi as a character that I like to investigate the shadow the story keeps casting to hammer home that Usagi is Goodness incarnate. I think this narrative decision actively detracts from Usagi as a character.
Think about it. Not one, but two major storylines have the same premise for Usagi's arc: a future version of her reaches back to learn a lesson from her past self. That is a little frustrating, isn't it? Usagi’s development is not open. Her future is constantly reaching backward to ensure its own conditions. I did watch that Galaxy Cauldron movie, which was my gateway back into the hyperfixation after 10+ years, and while the immediate experience was nostalgia, my reflections keep circling ever since how absurdly narrow the cosmology gets.
Infinite potential, and somehow, the final debate is still Usagi arguing with Ultimate Usagi over whether existence should continue on Usagi’s terms. I don't know; it might be me, but I hope it is understandable why I think it gets a little absurd if the party arguing for terminating existence is the same person as the one deciding it should continue. What are we doing? Infinite potential, and somehow two major storylines serve as a child and a toddler version of future Usagi Interations and how her struggles of the future are defining the present and everyone else. Infinite potential, and somehow, even the villains have only one target. The lore keeps insisting that the menu of reality is rich and endless, but it only serves Serenity in different textures.
That detracts from Usagi. It also detracts from her relationships with the other characters, I think. Another thing I find frustrating about the Galaxy Cauldron movie is how every other Guardian gets like four lines of dialogue before they die. One by one. That is their contribution to the resolution of the conflict. Their job in this arc is to die. I apologize, but I have amotions about this. In the end, their bravery, their talents, their skills, their disagreements, their history, their strengths, their sacrifices, their joy, their pain, their lives, etc., are irrelevant to the resolution of the conflict. Even their bond to Usagi only contributes to the victory because it is motivational fuel to refine Usagi's conclusion and decision. Usagi gets choices (does existence continue? does everyone get a new life or continue their old?), and the rest are cast to be grateful. I think that bears the question: why did the story spend all this time telling us about bonds, teams, guardians, planets, stars, and possibilities if the final moral agency collapses into one individual’s self-dialogue?
My frustration with the narrative architecture extends to the villains. What do you mean, they are also just iterations of the same Evil Essence that is endlessly and exclusively fixated on its Counter Essence? Infinite potential, but we are just getting one Entity in beef with another Entity? It basically tells us that all the previous arcs weren't really about anything but a choreography of the same dynamic. You think you experienced meaningful conflicts, but, no, it is all the same in different costumes. Instead of each antagonist being allowed to represent distinct political, emotional, or cosmological problems the Sailor Senshi have to confront, they repeat one binary.
Sorry for the venting/rambling. As I said, I have emotions about it, but to sum up the distinction I'm trying to draw: "critical of Usagi" and "critical of the story machinery that makes everyone else furniture in Usagi's Metaphysical Monopoly." My criticism is structural, not individual. For me, Usagi becomes less compelling, less of a person, less impressive,, when the narrative turns her into the answer to every possible question.
HEY DON'T CRY. 8,008 SPECIES OF FROG IN THE WORLD PER AMPHIBIAWEB AND THE 8,000TH FROG WAS DESCRIBED BY TUMBLR'S OWN FROG SCIENTIST DR. Scherz, ET AL., PEACE AND LOVE ON PLANET EARTH ‼️‼️‼️
given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
WELCOME TO THE ORIGINAL ANIMATED GIFS OF THE INTERNET!
Way, way, way back in the day, in the 90s, this is how we shared episode or movie scenes for anime series we loved, or for scenes that never got brought over to the States due to censorship. These are super, super, super tiny in resolution and degraded hardcore, because, well, we had shitty dial-up internet connections so file sizes had to be small, and also because everyone was using 800x600 resolutions at the time, so they seemed much larger. If you could see what was going on, that was good enough back then lmfao.
Ya’ll should feel lucky you get some amazing high quality HD gifs these days.
I’d like to remind people of the process for how these were made back in their day. Some super, super, super lucky (or most likely rich) person owned a VHS to whatever video file format ripper of its time. Yes. VHS. Digital uploads for video did not exist yet. DVDs didn’t even exist yet. Like, people had to trade VHS tapes at conventions and flea markets, or with strangers online to obtain some of these tapes. If you had a big collection, you spent tons of money on shipping to get those tapes from your buddy you met on ICQ/AIM from Japan lmfao.
Fansubs and even raw videos were rare for their time for people to get their hands on. EPISODES ON VHS IN GENERAL WERE NON EXISTENT ON THE MARKET. Sailor Moon (like most other anime of the day) was just in syndication on TV. VHS tapes of the series to own/buy did not exist. You could not purchase them because they didn’t exist to purchase lmfao. Let that sink in for a second. Even if you wanted to own it, it didn’t exist. You had to know a guy who knew a guy in Japan that just so happened to be taping the episodes for his own personal use on his VCR while it aired. If he missed an episode that week? You’re screwed lmfao. Better hope somebody made an episode summary that week. This is why people started to trade tapes to fansub “distributers” in good faith that they’d get a translation out of it thereafter.
So some super lucky fan owned episodes of this show, then had to convert their VHS tapes to digital media. Then they had to painstakingly screencapture each image from that, and use whatever program at the time existed to sync up frames to play. I’m having a hard time even wrapping my head around the amount of money they had to have invested in a big enough harddrive to read the digital media… For example, in 97~98 I had a 1.5GB harddrive and that was considered top tier for the typical consumer. If clips, not episodes, but just minute long clips were just around 1~2MB (which was considered really big at the time), imagine how big an entire episode was???? This is of course before the encodes of today that made digital media as tiny as it is looking as good as it does. And 1.5GB is SUPER QUICK to load up on, especially when you’re not taking into consideration your OS and whatever programs you have installed.
So anyway, I digress.
Then this person makes them as tiny as possible so that when they uploaded them, their website server didn’t ban them from using too much space or bandwith lmfao. It was an insane task (that I wasn’t able to take part in, because, as stated above, ya’ll gotta have Benjamins for that). BUT it was god-send for fans who loved this type of stuff. MOVING PICTURES? SIGN ME UP. Since movie clips were impossible to find because nobody had a good enough internet speed or big enough harddrive to download them, everyone wanted super tiny easy to share images instead. If you had a gallery of this type of media, people went wild to your site. This type of stuff did not come cheap to host, and I know there were a few websites that were always offline because of the overload in traffic.
I know the first image was from Chibiusa.com. The others are from SailorMoon.org’s Sailor Moon Grep gallery (the first iteration that was free for everyone to go wild over, and then exactly as I described above kept happening, and the galleries went offline).
“For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”
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