For the love of Chibiusa!

I meet Steve one cold day in a little place called Ohio. Now what was I doing in a place like Ohio? There’s no real reason as what I was doing in Ohio but I know now that I would not wish to be there again if I can help it. Either way we hit it off, he is a good guy, charismatic with a typical up state New Yorker kind of attitude that made him funny. Steve is one of those all around kind of guys that while being over the top you can not help but like him and so we became friends.

One of our most common features is our like and interest in watching anime, it might seem trivial, it might even be stupid yet it is something that we just have in common. It does not make us odd, or weird or strange or even crazy (Which you could argue we are just naturally). It’s just something we like, something we enjoy and due to liking something that is seen as ‘odd’ from outside views is maybe why we became friends.

Either way we have similar taste. It also turned up that we had similar taste in what we watched growing up, most people even if they like anime or not have seen certain shows growing up, shows that have been marketed towards both Japanese youth cultures and American youth cultures. We might not know what these shows are called or what they really are about through the mass marketing of American cultural views through editing and voice changes but we enjoy them and sometimes we want to know more and see more like it and sometimes it is just another show we grow up laughing about. A certain show like this that me and Steve share a connection with and many people do is a show that was on during the 90’s and had great commercial success, Sailormoon. Now, Sailormoon was on a time when anime was just starting to break out on American television and people were beginning to notice it, this was during the time when anime was known as Japamation and was underground making it nearly impossible to get your hands on vhs that are now littering shelves in almost every video store around the nation. Here anime was something different and adult, titles were being targeted towards adults with their racy mix of violence and sexual themes that American cartoons did not even think to touch upon. Although it was hard to get your hands on yourself there was a sudden interest that picked up with the wave of shows like Pokemon where the fantasy children genre targeted anime was found to be a hit. This seem to create a certain boom which allowed shows like Gundam Wing and Sailormoon could be shown on the air. Maybe it had been the American version of Power Rangers that had done it for myself.

Although both me and Steve are interested in this genre our background vary also, I learned that as a kid Steve was not really turned away from watching any kind of shows. His mom did not try to shelter or control what he watched or didn’t watch. There was nothing he was not or banned from watching, unlike myself, growing up as a kid. He said that his mother tried to have him grow up in a house hold where nothing was really off limits.

It’s interesting that someone was given so much freedom to watch whatever he wished of popular culture, since he was not force to watch certain things. This might have been how he developed his interest in the show or this was the gateway to how he found out what it was.

Even though we share this common interest there are other things that make us different, while I was watching Power Rangers and Pokemon, Steve was watching Sailormoon, he found the show in 1995 when he was 8 years old. The show was on channel 11 for him at 6:00 a.m. where one episode was shown daily. He seems a little shy to admit that he watched every episode daily but then again I remember when I was 8 I would cover my ears at lunch so the boys I hung with would not give away the plot for the episode of Pokemon away. Since of course I had been to lazy to get up at 6 and watch the episode before school I made sure to catch it after school even if the plot had been spoiled. So maybe we are the same.

But as he was watching it, Steve told me he fell in love with it and still is to this day. That he tried to find out everything he could about the show with the invention of the internet. Of course with the popularity of Sailormoon there was t-shirts, dolls, stickers, even Christmas cd’s of the voice cast that came out in store across the countries. Rare as they might have been Steve admit to having every single piece he could get his hands on, even going to visit things called shrines which were dedicated to shows or characters of certain shows. In these websites fans could find stats of their favorite characters, images, gifs and much more to express their love for the show on the world wide web. This expression helped draw friends together allowing Steve to gain access to other fans around the country and partaking in certain fandom acts.

So I asked him, with watching the series at age 8 and the inventions of the internet it’s only natural that fans can get their hands on the original copy of the shows they love. Here fans were able to watch the original uncut Japanese version of the show where many would be surprised to know included such things as homosexual relationships, characters that dressed in drags, vulgar behavior, and death and rebirth being one of the shows major themes. With finding the uncut version of the show there are many things to happen, the show that people remember as a kid is either destroyed, or they in turn fall in love with this version of the show. Yet, Steve is an example of what a true fan is, someone who loves both versions. He told me he has every episode on dvd both of the English and Japanese version because they are separate, each being a part of his childhood and something he really enjoyed. So that makes both different and unlike each other because they hold a special part in his life.

Even though me and Steve’s histories are a bit different in our fandom for the show there are things that we both have taken from the show that are important to ourselves. We watched and saw the major theme of the show, of friendship and the importance of it to people. My favorite memory of the show is in the last season, during their final battle each scout gave up her life as a final attempt to save their friend Sailormoon because their friendship and the love for the people of earth was so important to them that they were willing to sacrifice their life for it and that the love of Sailormoon allowed each one to be re-born. It is these themes that drew us to it and we both agree that we got things out of it. That friendship could be seen and related to with our friends. Where Steve compared friendships to the character and cast of Sailormoon, or comparing people to certain characters in the show. That this show helped shape some of his view points at different things because of the themes that were presented in the show.

Even if it seems odd it makes sense also, how one show can bring people together or to shape the way they look at the world yet isn’t that a major theme in most of popular culture? Trying to either entertain or to show what someone’s beliefs are. These shows can bring people together and help develop connections as something as simple as a t.v. show.