1. Introduction
[1.1] The role of the wand in making magical girl anime is well-known, with some scholars summarizing that these shows appear as "25-minute advertisements" (Sugawa-Shimada 2019, 187) that "revolve around elaborately crafted toys" (Hartzheim 2016, 1059–60). Less commented on has been that not only the ostensible target audience of young girls but also other gendered people play with these toys. This makes good sense, as "magical trinkets" tend to "emphasize metamorphosis, transformation, and transportation [and thus] become symbolic tools that connect fantasy to reality" (Hartzheim 2016, 1064). For queer communities, there is something deeply affecting about the magical girl's wand; in this way, fandom becomes a mode of collective orientation toward "beloved objects" (Lowe 2020) that "help us find our way" (Ahmed 2006, 543). These objects appear as "mysterious […] in relation to the codes readily available" and become "a prime source of survival" (Sedgwick 1993, 3). We conceptualize a magical girl franchise as a vehicle of healing, with the toy as an anchor or link to a world of transformation. Bringing together our own accounts and those of others, we reflect on how the magical girl originally became a tool to heal misogyny. As it flowed out into the world, however, the magical girl healed children of other genders, too. We also zoom in on imaginative play, which disrupts models of the culture industry that position consumers as passive. In the examples below, we see not only watching and collecting but also art, dancing, and games (see Jenkins [1992]; Hills [2002]).
[1.2] What brings us all together is Sailor Moon (Bishōjo senshi sērā mūn, original anime 1992–97, manga 1991–97), a magical girl franchise including manga, anime, games, toys, and loads of associated merchandise. Central to this media narrative is the theme of healing through love—the very source of the titular heroine's power and a guiding principle in her distinctive form of feminist praxis. As bell hooks (2000, 209) writes, "Love heals. When we are wounded in the place where we would know love, it is difficult to imagine that love really has the power to change everything. No matter what has happened in our past, when we open our hearts to love […] we go forward with the fresh insight that the past can no longer hurt us."
[1.3] In this light, we consider the significance of Sailor Moon as a healing text—one that offers queer fans an outlet to explore their identities and to imagine a world rooted in acceptance and renewal. This intervention comes in the face of waves of critical commentary since Sailor Moon became globally known in the 1990s. For many, the titular heroine Sailor Moon and her Sailor Scouts are role models for girls, teaching them to be "consumers" and "commodities," and for a crossover audience of adult men, presenting them as "sexual playmates" (Grigsby 1999, 196–99; see also Yatron [2022]). Anthropologist Anne Allison summarizes the position that there are two desires: "One is to identify with the adolescent girl/hero," and the other is "lust for the Sailor Scouts as sex objects" (2006, 134). Puzzling here is the absence of queer commentary. Crucially, Sailor Moon and her partner Tuxedo Mask are often read as pansexual, with romances across genders (Gramuglia 2018). In addition, there are openly lesbian characters, bisexual alien opponents, and trans-analogous transformations that turn beautiful boy characters into women in the show. Indeed, more recent work by anime theorist Akiko Sugawa-Shimada notes the rise of magical girls and boys that promote "a type of possible male femininity" and "offer alternatives to normative masculinity" (2019, 184, 199).
[1.4] What if, we wonder, such developments are not anomalies, but rather an outgrowth of the queerness of magical girls? What if we leaned into Sailor Moon and its related toy lines as truly "subverting hegemonic norms" (Sugawa-Shimada 2019, 184) and doing so for girls and boys, women and men, nonbinary and trans people, and others besides? After all, as Sugawa-Shimada notes, magical girls have featured the power of "crossing borders of gender, age, and even species" long before Sailor Moon and ever since that landmark series, while simultaneously making room for "friendship between girls of different ethnicities/species" (2019, 187, 195). Why would this crossing and friendship appeal only to girls and women and not also to boys, men, and LGBTQIA+ folks? We concur with researcher Cassandra Yatron (2022, 19) that "Sailor Moon provides a queer space where fans can explore their own sexuality, which deserves more in-depth research." Recognition of the diversity of Sailor Moon fans is motivated by observations that, for example, Sailor Moon appealed equally to boys and girls, and adults made up at least 22 percent of the audience when it first aired in North America (Hoskin 2018). We introduce the voices of diverse fans of Sailor Moon who organize and share their stories online and through social media. We also draw heavily on the Sailor Moon Fan Club (2020–4), a podcast hosted by Victoria L. Johnson, a Black feminist and pop culture journalist who has interviewed over 110 fans with various backgrounds about their experiences of the show and subsequent careers. The activities of this large, intergenerational community have also been profiled as part of mainstream journalism, bringing to the public's attention just how important the Sailor Moon franchise has been.
2. Megan
[2.1] As I write this, I am working in my art studio in Australia's queer district, wearing a hot pink boiler suit. At my hip swings a symbolic glittering Hello Kitty heart carabiner with Sailor Moon charms. My pink and plastic aura is both queerly affective and repulsive. You see, I learned very early in life that when you are small, people are primed to hurt you. Like the vivid leering eyes on a butterfly's wings, you have to look bigger to make them think twice.
[2.2] But I must be honest: I am a femme agendered person, not really a woman and also not a man. To me, both masculinity and femininity are confusing and highly artificial constructs, and I struggled to follow them well. My favorite toys at age four were a pink ball, a Barbie doll, and a yellow monster truck.
[2.3] From a young age, it was evident that something about me was "wrong." In elementary and middle school, I found myself quickly ousted from groups of girls for being unable to play their games properly. I was such a cute little girl, festooned in ribbons—cute, apparently, until I opened my mouth. I also loved wearing cargo pants and tank tops because I wanted to be Tomb Raider and kick butt. I would strut around the place, imagining that I was considerably more athletic than I actually was. But, over time, my tiny body sustained a thousand cracks from stigma and bullying, splintering into a gigantic, yawning void.
[2.4] What saved me was the magic of the drawn line. Originally this began when I was an infant, watching an Australian children's show Mulligrubs. I was enchanted by an animated femme face on a brightly colored screen: just a pair of red lips and blue eyes framed with thick white lashes, floating in a pool of neon blue, talking in a weird and wonderful fashion. Molten, plastic, and strange.
[2.5] Eventually, this fascination with cartoon eyes transferred to drawing anime girl eyes. I came to learn of these eyes from Sailor Moon, the first anime I saw on television at age eight. Every time Sailor Moon transformed, her beautiful, big blue eyes would blink and shine in a pool of shimmering pink. At that early time, I desperately wanted the Irwin Toy action dolls, but their eyes were wrong. I got a cheap magical girl toy from the supermarket. She was somewhat balding and disheveled, but her eyes were perfect.
[2.6] I kept a notebook at the back of the classroom for when I was depressed, which was often. On every page I would obsessively draw fem(me) figures like Sailor Moon over and over like a ritual—until I almost died. The affective pull of the fem(me) icon was absolute, expanding to US cartoons such as Daria and Looney Tunes. They were humanlike, but not human. Fem(me) freaks. Like me. Through the drawn line, connected by my Winnie-the-Pooh pencil, we formed an intimate, knowing connection of strange solidarity.
[2.7] In the library at lunch, I read Sailor Moon fan fiction. I used to hang out with nerdy boys, but now they wouldn't talk to me anymore. With puberty, I was suddenly coded "girl" and "object," and I was defective goods. It was a combination of my autistic movements, severe acne, and glasses, exacerbated by my reluctance to affect a deferential fem(me) performance. My figure was rail thin and boyish, sexless.
[2.8] The ritual of the drawn line evolved. In a cultic fashion, I conjured my icons by printing out images of Sailor Moon from shrine websites and photocopying diagrams from manga drawing guides. I papered my bedroom walls with bishōjo, or cute girl characters, top to bottom.
[2.9] By the time I was sixteen, Australia had an influx of a very small selection of Sailor Moon toys, imported from the United States. I loved the shimmering satirical hot pink plastic of the "moon scepter." I displayed it on a shelf next to the Brontë sisters and philosophy books from the library. I collected the latest line of dolls and would stroke their hair and look into their creepy, porthole eyes. I would take one with me on holidays as my plus one.
[2.10] Eventually the magic of the drawn lines led me to a group of very sweet nerdy girls and boys who attempted to rehabilitate me. We all loved Sailor Moon and would share and swap wrapping paper, drawings, burned CDs of music. We very nearly lost our collective mind when we discovered that there was a Sailor Moon manga, with just a single volume sold in a local bookstore.
[2.11] Aside from my wand and my dolls, I got creative and made my own merchandise, using contact paper to create stickers and bookmarks. I videotaped the show every morning. I bought a weird knockoff ring for me and my closest friend so we would match.
[2.12] I was madly in love with Sailor Moon—small but fierce, full of conviction. I wanted to be her, I wanted to marry her, all at once. She was my girlfriend, my original princess. In my cargo pants and ribbons, I was going to save her, save me, save every fem(me) I could.
3. "Here comes Sailor Moon on her Moon Cycle," healing misogyny
[3.1] Despite criticisms of reproducing heteronormativity in her miniskirt, Sailor Moon has been heralded as "a feminist and queer magical girl series" (Yatron 2022, 1). Once we move past binary debates over whether the series is for "girls" or "boys," or framed by a "male" or "female gaze," it is clear that Sailor Moon gives "fans that span across ages, races, sexualities, and genders" a space to "enjoy and explore aspects of gender and queerness" (3). We further draw on researcher Kathryn Hemmann when she states that it is "limiting to consider the audience of all media properties […] to be a uniform group whose members all share the same gender and sexual orientation" (2014, 47). Noting its feminism in context (Morningstar 2026), Sailor Moon is perhaps even more remarkable for its refusal to situate transforming and fluid bodies into stable binaries that align sex, gender, and orientation (Hoskin 2018; see also Bailey [2012]). Rhea Ashley Hoskin (2018, 83), a feminist sociologist, argues that much of this feminist and queer content was "lost in translation" or censored for challenging "heterosexual congruencies."
[3.2] We also believe that transformative genderqueer messages were opened up and introduced in translation. For example, in 1996, Irwin Toy released a set of Sailor Moon dolls that in their design and narrative were a distinct departure from the Japanese equivalent. Trying to expand their audience to include boys, the dolls cast off their frilly dresses and instead became adventure dolls with a pink motorcycle. This bike has its own strange origins: Never appearing in the anime, it was a spin-off product developed for a failed US remake known colloquially as "Saban Moon" (Mona 2022). In this remake, the bike lifts off the road and floats in surreal galaxies of twinkling stars. The narration for the television commercial positioned Sailor Moon not as a passive plaything, but an action hero: "Queen Beryl has captured the Sailor Scouts. But her dreams of power are about to become a nightmare. Here comes Sailor Moon on her Moon Cycle. Now it's Sailor Moon's turn to dream" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgFvKHLOVlg). Sailor Moon makes her appearance with a close-up on her bike's shredding tire. She tears across the scene to the revving of engines.
[3.3] There is more to this Moon Cycle in the context of its reception and subsequent sacralizing. Historian and fan of Japanese lesbian media Erica Friedman writes, "[The] motorcycle is a code—this woman has been […] freed from society's constraints; […] she doesn't need your approval" (2022, 69). This clearly had real-world impacts. In her seminal study of Japanese lesbian media, By Your Side, Friedman recalls the emergence of a closed lesbian mailing list sparked by Sailor Moon. "lt.fan.sailor-moon developed as the Sailor Moon anime aired," Friedman states. "This group became a focus for series fans and a home for early Yuri [sapphic] fandom" (2022, 181; for more on homosocial relationships, see Yatron [2022]). The Moon Cycle recalls the fierce energy of Dykes on Bikes, who cruised towns protecting queer men in the 1980s (de Jong 2015; Canon ANZ 2022). Today, the ground-shaking rumbling of their machines in the queer streetscape is a symbol of fierce love and protection.
[3.4] Indeed, one of the most obviously sapphic characters in Sailor Moon, Uranus, has progressively given voice to a range of gender experiences. Once seen as a tomboy, Uranus is now often understood as a nonbinary figure (Morningstar 2026). Sailor Moon fan Beatriz Verneaux (2023) recalls that nonbinary "wasn't in my vocabulary until I turned twenty-three, but even as young as ten years old, I knew I wanted to explore the world beyond the lenses of my gender." For their part, queer BIPOC artist Odera Igbokwe reimagined Uranus in their Sailor Moon series. Igbokwe's BIPOC remixes exemplify what theorist Kimberly Hassel (2025) terms "Hot Girl Otaku Studies"—a mode of fan practice that reworks Japanese media through Black femme aesthetics to claim space within global fandoms that often reproduce racial inequalities. As researcher Sarah-Anne Gresham (2024, 97, 110) elaborates, the ambiguous racial coding of anime figures such as Sailor Moon can become a site of playful subversion, especially among Black fans who assert their bodily subjectivity "across edges and interfaces, where the racialized body and technology meet." Through these practices, characters—transformed into sites of embodied resistance and joy and destabilizing fixed categories of gender, race, and media origin—assert new queer alignments through affective and aesthetic play. For their part, Igbokwe (quoted in Johnson 2020c) interprets Uranus's figure through emphasizing "androgyny, and the masculine and feminine, the nonbinary combining." As a queer Black artist, Igbokwe recalls being "enthralled" by the world of Sailor Moon and dancing with their sister in the living room to the theme music.
[3.5] The powerful appeal of Sailor Moon, the characters of which became for many fans empowering "alter ego[s]" (Vice 2016), can be traced back to Takeuchi Naoko, the original artist behind Sailor Moon, and her discomfort with gendered expectations. For an article celebrating Sailor Moon's thirtieth anniversary, Takeuchi remarks, "Women still have the same low status and lack of freedom […]. Society is so rigid that women are forced to become strong" (Sailor Moon News 2023; see also Morningstar [2026]). In a manga industry with older men as gatekeepers (see Kinsella [2000]; Bednarski [2013]), Takeuchi's innovation lay in reworking the genre of comics for girls. These comics had been fostering their own voice to explore surprisingly progressive feminist and LGBTQIA+ narratives since the 1930s (see Welker [2024]). In what has been described as a riff on Power Rangers (Allison 2006), a franchise targeting boys with its superhero teams, Takeuchi burst into the girls' action field with not one but a large cast of princesses who were both beautiful and strong, assertive and kind, soft and resilient. While high stakes, conflict is mitigated through compassion, empathy, and understanding.
[3.6] This reflected Takeuchi's own outlook on the world at that time as a young woman making sense of the culture in which she had to operate (for more on Takeuchi's feminism, see Morningstar [2026]). Takeuchi reflects, "Because I was personally very independent, […] my characters also shared my traits, and […] the grand scale of the story […] reflected my own personal liberation" (Bednarski 2013). Sailor Moon presented itself as a text for girls both in Japan and abroad as its own form of "girl power" at a time where much action media had girl figures on the sidelines. Here, in Sailor Moon, the heroes "battle evil on their own" without "male leadership" (Sugawa 2015). The power is also forged into a form of radical love of its own, presenting the "nurturing magical girl" as a "superhero" (Sugawa 2015). With cross-gender/genre origins, Sailor Moon is both relationally and positionally "feminine" and "masculine," broadening her appeal. As researcher Nishimura Mari puts it (quoted in Nagaike 2010), constraints on gendered representations of women were at least partially destabilized after Sailor Moon, and this extended to exploration of queer themes by both professional and amateur writers. (The rapid growth of female/female-presenting character slash fiction attests to this fact.)
[3.7] The power and beautiful design of Sailor Moon's characters tangibly left an impact on a generation of queer girls, who were able to pick up on the queer coding of the show in spite of the initial censorship of these themes (see Friedman [2022]). Sailor Moon fan Joho (2022) notes the ways that it made them "feel uniquely seen and accepted, helping me love a part of" themselves that they would later "learn the words to describe […] as bi." Likewise, Sailor Moon fan Ghia Vitale (2020) recalls being six, mesmerized by the femme figures: "They were one of my first tastes of sapphic magic." Vitale recalls wanting a poster of the Sailor Moon cast in beachwear for her wall. How many thousands of others recognize themselves in this modest desire, which is part of enshrining characters? Clearly, we cannot divide desire so smoothly and authoritatively into wanting to "identify with" the heroines and "lust for" them (Allison 2006, 134; see also Grigsby [1999]), and this is in any case not reducible to a set of binaries such as male/female, adult/child, and real/fictional. Rather, we follow feminist psychoanalyst Setsu Shigematsu in seeing that "identifications are more oscillating and fluid, shifting and incomplete, moving among multiple contradictory (psychic) sites that are constituted differently depending on the specific history and experience of the subject" (1999, 136).
4. Patrick
[4.1] It's hard to say when it began. Maybe the early exposure as a kid in Alaska? Older brothers were certainly influential. But it wasn't until middle school in the Rocky Mountains in Montana that anime really became my thing. And there can be no doubt that the turning point came with Sailor Moon. It meant everything to someone searching for a softer, gentler gender performance.
[4.2] Not to say that I wasn't already soft. I was an overweight adolescent; emotionally, I was softer still, with people telling me it was weak and sickly to seek ways out of my own body. I was deeply uncomfortable with gendered expectations but tried to pass after being pressured into joining team sports at school. The opposite sex seemed an impossible other, something I wanted to be like and be with more than to approach for dates.
[4.3] Then came Sailor Moon. Whatever it was, this was it. Using money from my small business selling eggs and poultry to an organic grocery store in the nearby hub town of Missoula, I bought blank video cassette tapes from a local RadioShack to record broadcasts of the show. Not wanting to miss the first few minutes, I started leaving school early and ditching football practice to add to my Sailor Moon archive, which I watched and rewatched obsessively.
[4.4] I especially liked the parts where the main characters hung out and deepened their friendships—friendships that seemed destined by fate across time. Also important was that the protagonist, Usagi (aka Serena), despite all her flaws, was loved and loved fiercely. Seemingly everyone around her was part of the love storm. I thought of how amazing it would be to occupy such a position: to love and be loved as Usagi.
[4.5] Not only was Usagi flawed, which made her so very relatable, but she also gradually grew into her power. This power was not a path toward violence, but rather love and a desire to understand and heal her opponents.
[4.6] My shifting identification was mostly with Usagi, but I could see a little of myself in all the girls. Even just whispering those words to myself was a secret pleasure: "These girls are like me, and I am like these girls."
[4.7] As more people began to notice that something about me was "off," I withdrew and escaped to live and love on. With a newly minted driver's license and heavily used car, I began to visit Missoula more often. My small business had steadily grown with more chickens and even expanded to turkeys and ducks, and I bought videotapes of new anime at a store in the mall.
[4.8] I also purchased issues of Animerica and for the first time saw signs of a broader fandom. Exposed to a writer showing off an anime tattoo, I was inspired to stop by a parlor frequented by—for me, at least—intimidating men. Unable to ask for what I really wanted, which was an Usagi tattoo, I settled for Foghorn Leghorn. Later, I returned to get this self-insert character surrounded by the coded symbols of Sailor Moon and her Scouts. Now we could be together, always.
[4.9] Then came the pop-up store, that beautiful beacon of weebdom in the mall, which had licensed plushies, stickers, playing cards, and decorations featuring Sailor Moon. I bought them all, my room becoming a shrine, and when the store ran out of new options for me, a clerk suggested that I check out websites where sellers imported directly from Japan.
[4.10] Most special to me were the wands and brooches I purchased: transformation devices, which not only allowed me to low-key dress as Usagi but also to dance around in my room pretending that I could become a Scout and triumph against Queen Beryl and the Negaverse with big emotive eyes and an even bigger heart. It wasn't hard to guess that my modest collection was dwarfed by displays among fans in far-off Japan, but each item meant the world to me.
[4.11] They were used in my personal space, my hidden lair, with reckless abandon. When not on display, I played with them until they broke. I kept the pieces in a box in my room, and later in a storage shed, for decades after. Each shard was precious to me as a reminder of my time with, and as, Usagi from Sailor Moon. It was my own way of doing makeup in a conservative environment, as well as a way to make up my own world of beautiful fantasy.
5. "Rehabilitating those that have lost themselves," healing masculinity
[5.1] Research shows that manga/anime fans have crossed over gender and genre lines to produce and consume works that were not intended for them. In Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan, for example, it becomes clear that "male" fans of shōjo (for girls) media consumed across gender/genre lines in search of an "alternative" (Galbraith 2019, 21). All of this can and should be applied to men reading across gender/genre lines to consume Sailor Moon, which also occurs with different series in the anglophone world (e.g., on bronies, see Peck-Suzuki [2016]). Men's coparticipation in "girls' media," such as Garrett Sander and Mattel's Monster High, for example, has allowed them to take on their own playful kind of "camp, glam and flamboyance" that "destabilized gender binaries" (S. Austin 2016).
[5.2] Magical girl fan communities are similarly creating inclusive spaces for men to explore new masculinities. Rhett (@myster_rhett), a widely followed Sailor Moon doll collector on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, posts joyfully mischievous and camp meme clips. In one TikTok post (https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSDhQUtxX/), he animates a Sailor Moon doll to a sound bite from a Lady Gaga interview. Barbie: "You're so creative, where do you get your inspiration from?" Sailor Moon: "Um, God and the gays." In an Instagram reel, he sits in front of a retro television set playing a Sailor Moon transformation sequence, surrounded by a curation of his dolls (including a lineup of My Little Pony toys). "Me, an adult gay male, relating to a 14-year-old magical girl," he quips (https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOWYXvjFFPV/). Other fans write of acting out the transformation and healing ritual in their imagination or bedrooms: "Whether you're wearing their clothes or not, every Sailor Moon fan has tried a little Moon Tiara Action by throwing whatever's convenient at something else. Using your earbuds as the Venus Love-Me Chain, trying to start the World Shaking with Uranus's special move, or just trying to transform with [a character] pen, we've all tried it" (Bates 2024). Tried it in search of an alternative. "Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience," explains Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates" (2003, 146). This is amplified by the trauma of compulsory (hetero)sexuality, which would have it that all that male fans of Sailor Moon are after is a peek under her pleated skirt.
[5.3] Let's consider another story from a Sailor Moon fan. Once upon a time, there was a little boy who loved to dance. In church, when he looked to the sky and saw the leaping lights through the stained-glass window, he imagined the figure of Sailor Moon smiling down on him when he needed her most. Eventually, he grew up to become Ryan La Sala, author of gay fiction such as Beholder (2023). Recalling memories from his childhood, La Sala describes being entranced by the "rainbow wave" of love that flows from Sailor Moon's magic wands as "ultra-beautiful" (2019). Her powers were not just aesthetic. They carried rare messages of healing and love often absent from boys' media. "Sailor Moon's magic is not simply glittering loveliness, nor is it a softened version of justice," expounds La Sala. "It hinges on her ability to rehabilitate those that have lost themselves and would otherwise do better, if they could just find their way back to the light. It means that Sailor Moon, as a hero, discards no one to their inner demons." Through queer imagination, La Sala expresses a longing for what hooks (2000, 226) deems the "angelic," or "a time of connectedness and goodwill, to a time where we were heart-whole." Like the magic that La Sala details, "Love redeems. Despite all the lovelessness that surrounds us, nothing has been able to block our longing for love, the intensity of our yearning" (hooks 2000, 219).
[5.4] Like La Sala, many boys globally were enchanted by Sailor Moon's magic, which encourages us to consider how Takeuchi Naoko's creation might facilitate healing beyond girls and women. Takeuchi fought for women to be strong, but what might it mean to take on a feminism that also advocates for boys and men to be soft and caring and loving? Current literature on magical girls tends to reinforce gender binaries. While the "girl power" potential has been explored for girls and women, boys and men's coparticipation has yet to be earnestly examined; frequently, it is outright dismissed as misogynistic, if not predatory. While conceptual frames like these do importantly point to the ways that culture can energize, enable, and embolden bodies to violence, in truth anybody, any gender, is vulnerable to this toxicity relative to the culture in which they are situated (Close 2016).
[5.5] Reflecting on their boyhoods, many men who identify as cisgender and attracted to women report on the stigma that they experienced for liking cartoons like Sailor Moon as "sissy-stuff." Despite insinuations of predation—recall the discussion of infantilized "sex objects" (Grigsby 1999, 197–99; see also Allison [2006])—many are drawn to the show's kindness and friendships that they longed for. Alluring is "the positive message that it sends to both genders," reports one man in a Vice video about the appeal of Sailor Moon for kids of the 1990s (Vice 2016). "It also taught me quite a bit about love." Others take this line of thought further, critiquing the impoverished view of why men are attracted to Sailor Moon. "Just because someone likes an animated series featuring superpowered women in schoolgirl outfits doesn't mean that's why they like it," writes fan Ryan Bates (2024). It is past time to abandon the framing of "heterosexual male anime and manga fans, called otaku, […] portrayed as obsessed men who sexually fetishize women and girls" (Yatron 2022, 21). To close down gorgeous meditations on boys' and men's own lives and masculinities, to reflect on a softness that they want for themselves, is deeply anti-feminist. It is also harmful to these boys and men.
[5.6] Sailor Moon presents boys with something enchanting and magical that they might also be able to participate in with the characters. Sailor Moon fan Zeno Robinson (quoted in Johnson 2020a) recalls it as his first anime, always choosing a video cassette tape from the series when visiting the rental store. "They were just this group of girls who when they transformed they just got stuff done," he states. "They just had these transformation sequences that I thought were the coolest thing ever. I think looking back now, it's an example of how characters can be strong and kick butt without having to fit into the archetypes that accompanies those things." Another Black fan, Gui Dasilva (quoted in Johnson 2020b), recalls initially being uninterested in the show but over time becoming "enthralled." The presence of an all-girl cast provided young men with an imaginative space where both magic and school came together. "Sailor Moon felt really grounded because they're meant to be the real world," recounts Derrick Austin (quoted in Johnson 2021a). "I just remember thinking it was really cool that they had these cool magic powers, and that they also went to school and had friends and dates and stuff." A number of fans identified with certain Sailor Scouts, especially Mars, approaching them as an "aspiration" (Derrick Austin, quoted in Johnson 2021a; Evan Jones, quoted in Johnson 2020d). Tuxedo Mask, a male partner to Sailor Moon, gave some fans a way in as a friend and not an outsider (Gui Dasilva, quoted in Johnson 2020b).
[5.7] As suggested by the case of La Sala (2019), the transformative magic of Sailor Moon's wand also offered an emerging generation of men attracted to men ways to explore their identities and heal. This begins with a recognition that even Sailor Moon's male partner, Tuxedo Mask, is canonically pansexual; there are also compelling opponents who have an array of genders and sexual orientations, and they are not reduced to stereotypes or treated as "gross" or wholly "bad." "Almost thirty years ago, Sailor Moon was a pioneer in representation, with gay characters," writes fan Victor Miller (2020), "as well as bisexual, gender fluid and transgender ones, in such a natural way that, until today, it's rarely seen." Writer Anthony Gramuglia (2018) adds that Sailor Moon's queerness "isn't just a character feature, but rather the entire source of her power, her ability to feel love and affection for others regardless of gender," and regardless of whether one was an "opponent."
[5.8] Collectively, through the power of Sailor Moon's love, fans work together to bring her world of queer acceptance to life. Through the tangibility of objects and play, La Sala (2019) tried to reach the animated space, once reportedly trying to "leave the house dressed only in scarves, as homage to Sailor Moon's ribbon-festooned transformation." For poet and fan Derrick Austin, Sailor Moon was a secret treasure to navigate his Black queer fem(me) identity through characters whose femininity was celebrated in many forms (D. Austin 2016; Derrick Austin, quoted in Johnson 2021b). With the absence of hypermasculine male characters came a relief from the hypermasculine tropes with which Austin "failed to identify." At home, he was steeped in what he characterizes as "poisonous things":
[5.9] I learned foolish things like how it wasn't cool anymore to express passion for things you were interested in. […] Stop walking on the tips of your toes. I'll never forget one day my father told me I had too many female friends, and I should start hanging out with more boys. I don't remember ever being more hurt and angry and scared before. Why did I need to leave the company that made me feel safe and loved, not strange? Because I needed to learn how to be a man, meaning I needed to learn how to be a Black man, meaning, "If only you knew how scared I am for you, son, and how cruel the world is, and how I need to teach you all I know so that you can survive." (D. Austin 2016)
[5.10] Austin struggled at school as "an anxious, quiet kid, terrible at the kinds of things boys are routinely told they should be good at—sports, being aggressive, hitting on girls—and even worse, I had no interest in being good at them either" (D. Austin 2016). He felt trapped, double the target—Black and fem(me)—unable to figure out himself and his own desires. "Queer, even while nascent sexual desires fumbled, inchoate, I found myself closeted, walled-in really, both the prisoner and the bricks-and-mortar itself. I wore the masks and flat affects I needed to live. But at home, all it took were three words to let in some light and sweet air and—in my head at least—a glamorous costume change, Moon Prism Power!" Feeling kinship with the princesses, he "didn't have the language for why" he had "long felt attachments to the female characters in the media." As a child, huddled closely to the television, the "radical magic" of Sailor Moon reached out to him, fostering in his heart a flame he could hold on to; there with her, he could stay "effeminate […] in my heart, if not in the world." Through entering into the world of "women and their relationships with each other," Austin was able to learn that "masculinity isn't a rejection of femininity."
[5.11] Other gay and queer men offer similar accounts of how Sailor Moon provided an important lifeline to mitigate the trauma and violence of not fitting into mainstream masculinities. One interviewee (Vice 2016) comments on relating to Mercury, another of the Sailor Scouts, as a "smart, very shy" little boy. At school, he "dealt with homophobia," where the children would "sing songs about killing me." At home, his "parents tried to beat the happiness out of" him, calling him "horrible names associated with gay men." Trapped, frightened, and defenseless, he would "try to pass as straight as much as" he "possibly could." For him, safety and solace were to be found in the friendship he had with his sister. Watching Sailor Moon with her, he was able to witness Usagi "psychologically work through" and "experience some very traumatic events." He elaborates, "Through [the] lens of someone who's been through a lot of trauma, […] I didn't have the experience of friends, but Sailor Moon would always talk about how great it is to have friends and how wonderful, how good she was to them. I was always like, 'When I have friends, I'm going to be good like that to them too.'" Through Sailor Moon, little boys struggling with normative masculine cultures are able to play and dream of a future for them to rise and blossom into as adults. Here they found their own bravery and resilience, through the love that Sailor Moon offered them. As hooks (2000, 221) writes, "When we love, we no longer allow our hearts to be held captive by fear."
[5.12] Sailor Moon's negotiation of femininity and power was also important to transgender men in navigating their identities growing up. Sailor Moon fan Darcy (2022) describes how the series took "trans and non-binary representation to a whole new level," making the "anime way ahead of its time." Figures such as the Starlights offered gender-fluid points of identification through their ability to change between women and men, which offered "something fresh and different to the ensemble that opens the door to so many more conversations about gender and sexuality" (Mammano 2019). While gender-diverse characters play a key role, transgender men also rally together under the capacious love of Usagi. Alexander, for example, describes being drawn to the way that Usagi's suffering "made her even warmer rather than bitter," as well as the way that she "held no bias in her heart even for those who had wronged her" (quoted in Berlatsky 2013). For another transgender man, it was difficult for him "raised as a girl […] to find characters that reflected what society told" them that they had to be (Vice 2016). Sailor Moon stood out as "girly" but also a "strong person" with friends who "were equally as strong." To return to the characters most often identified as trans, the Starlights are not tokenistic. "Regardless of form […] they were the same people," one trans man explains. "That really helped me when I was going through the early transition process" (Vice 2016). How many thousands of others similarly found in Sailor Moon "a prime resource for survival" (Sedgwick 1993, 3)?
6. Conclusion
[6.1] Fans who are moved by texts such as Sailor Moon work together to share and circulate the magical girl's power of love to heal one another. In this spirit, we offer a final scene: journalist Taylor Antrim watching Sailor Moon with his daughter. For him, like many others before, watching is an opportunity for both bonding and reflecting. Despite having criticisms of the anime, this father sees potential in Sailor Moon. "I also relished the feeling of a series that offers Vivian no clear or reassuring messages about how to grow up," he summarizes. "That all strikes me as close enough to lived reality that I can forgive the idealized bodies and gender clichés. Though it's not all cliché. [...There] are guys with long flowing hair, earrings, and a kind of delicacy of bearing that scrambles expected tropes of threatening masculinity" (Antrim 2021). These delicate beings, often Sailor Moon's opponents, are queer characters who speak to viewers in complex ways. "When we saw that queer characters could be our friends, our heroes (and, yes, sometimes but not only villains), it showed an entire generation that being LGBTQ[IA]+ isn't something strange and 'other,' but just another version of the human experience," confides another journalist, Michael S. Mammano (2019). "It was many people's first step toward realizing that queer culture brings with it freedom and color, humor and beauty, that it's something to be admired and celebrated." So, too, with Sailor Moon at large, which brought girls and women, boys and men, and nonbinary, trans, and queer people together under its banner. Releasing her "rainbow wave" (La Sala 2019), Sailor Moon healed misogyny and masculinity alike. Across our differences, so many of us share experiences of joy and connection as the "Children of Sailor Moon" (Sugawa 2015).