Good evening everybody! This is Aifos coming to you alive from THE MOON! I cannot breathe, send help! Sailor Moon is a show I've wanted to watch for a very long time. I've always been a fan of the magical girl trope, and Sailor Moon is THE magical girl show. Pretty much any magical girl you find is going to be calling back to Sailor Moon in one way or another. Unfortunately, one thing has always gotten in my way. The price. Sailor Moon is honking expensive! To buy the whole series, you'd have to spend a honking $400 money! I was actually willing to bite the bullet, but thankfully, I lucked out, and happened to go to buy it right when a random sale hit, and I was able to buy the entire thing for $60 money instead! (side note, if you want to own Sailor Moon, that sale is still happening last I checked. $60 on iTunes. The movies, and Sailor Moon Crystal are on sale as well) So, I just finished up the first season, aka Sailor Moon (no subtitle), aka The Dark Kingdom arc. And, I quite enjoyed it! So, let's talk about it, starting with... [u]The bad[/u] The show wasn't perfect, obviously, and chief among its problems was probably the fanservice. There was a little bit too much of it for my tastes. Thankfully, though, it was rather tame, and with one notable exception, none of it really made me uncomfortable, it was more of a minor annoyance. There were also a handful of lines that were either poorly written or poorly translated, which led to a few weird scenes. They all mostly happened in the early parts of the show, and honestly they were more good for a laugh than anything else. My favorite example is when Luna--who is normally very serious about all this superhero saving people business--straight up told Usagi to murder a bunch of elementary school children, which I get the feeling wasn't supposed to be how that scene played out. There were also a lot of reused animations. I get why this is a thing, animation is expensive, but man, there were [i]a lot[/i]. Fight scenes often felt very samey, because half the fight was stuff you'd literally already seen dozens of times before. However, I always say, if you've got a good story, then the quality of a fight scene doesn't actually matter. What matters is the concept of the fight, and Sailor Moon is a great example of this. Because the fights... Aren't good. But, that's okay, because the rest of the show is good enough, that we end up invested in them anyway. I can't really take villains who kill their own henchmen seriously. Queen Beryl was probably supposed to be way more intimidating than she was, but her willingness to just kill any of her underlings that disappointed her just made her seem, like, kind of stupid? Like, man, are you seeing the effort the heroes are going through to beat your minions? Maybe instead of killing them when they escape, you can let them continue working for you so they can team up with your other minions later. Honestly. [u]The good[/u] My favorite part of Sailor Moon was definitely the Sailor Guardians themselves. They were all really well made characters, and I liked all five of them. Though they definitely followed the broadstrokes of the five man band trope, that trope is a trope for a reason, and the five man band (or five woman band, I guess) works. They had both a fun team dynamic, and were fun characters in their own right. I'm going to have to go with the boring, default answer and say my favorite character was Usagi, aka Sailor Moon herself. She was the goofy, somewhat inept hero who always managed to pull through and save the day somehow, and it was really fun. She always managed to make me laugh, too. My second favorite character would probably be Mako, aka Sailor Jupiter, who happens to be the resident tough girl, but who's also very caring and sweet. Definitely not a gentle giant, she won't hesitate to beat you up if you get on her bad side, and even when she's nice she's very pushy, but it was fun. Plus, the fact that literally every guy she meets reminds her of her ex is funny. I will say, I also really liked Naru, who was just Usagi's best friend, who had no super powers. Sadly, she ended up falling out of the plot as things got serious, though. Another thing I really enjoyed about the show was with a lot of these kind of double life shows, it feels like the slice of life stuff often serves as set dressing for the fights. Sure, the heroes are all trying to research some gorilla or something, but I mean, we're all really here for the big fight that's going to happen at the end, right? Not so with Sailor Moon! In fact, it kinda felt like the opposite, where the fight scenes mostly acted as a catalyst to cause whatever slice of life stuff was happening in that episode. I really enjoyed this. While a flashy fight scene can be fun, I'm always a believer that character drama is the real heart of any show, and by focusing on it instead of the fights, it made the show a lot better. One complaint you'll often hear leveled at the original Sailor Moon is that it's very repetitive, and I can't wholly disagree. As a monster of the week show, it does very much follow a formula. The Dark Kingdom makes an evil plan, the Sailor Guardians discover that plan, and thwart it by beating a monster, all the while some slice of life stuff is happening side by side. But, one thing I really enjoyed about Sailor Moon is it knew just how and just when to mix up the formula. Throughout the first season, the main villains are these dudes known as Four Kings of Heaven, and each one of them goes about things in a very different way. The first one, Jadeite, always tried to siphon off energy from large groups of people, and so his plans always involved trying to gather up large groups of people in a single place, or distribute cursed artifacts to as many people as he could. Then, once you're sick of that, we move onto Nephrite, who placed curses on singular people, causing their emotions to spiral out of control. Then, once you're sick of that, we move onto Zoisite, who threw caution to the wind and just went straight for his targets, plans be darned! And of course, each of the Four Kings (except Jadeite) all had their own subplots happening alongside them, though they're all rather spoilery, so you can read below to see what I think about those, which is also where I'll explain my opinions on the ending. Finally, the show was also just really funny. Almost every episode at least got a chuckle out of me. Crucially, however, unlike a lot of modern superhero comedies *cough* the MCU *cough*, Sailor Moon also knew when it was time to stop making jokes, and get serious. Despite being a comedy on a whole, its emotional scenes are completely devoid of humor, and this is a good thing. Not only does it let the scene have its full impact, the impact of the scene is heightened, even, by the sudden tone shift. It's great. Very good show. I'm glad I finally picked it up. I don't have anything else to say spoiler-free wise, but I should have a selected answer below with my opinion on specific story arcs!