Thank You, Sailor Moon

When Sailor Uranus, a tall, cute blonde girl who wore suits and drove fast cars like a badass, strut onto my television screen for the first time, twelve-year-old me immediately had a new favorite Sailor Moon character.

Uranus is an explicitly queer character from the famous 1990s anime. Her design in the original show is quite masculine, arguably blurring gender lines in an accidentally progressive way. But there is such a softness to Sailor Uranus, too. And we see this softness in her love for her girlfriend, Sailor Neptune.

Neptune is intelligent, elegant, and beautiful—and most importantly, she has green hair, which means twelve-year-old me had an even newer favorite Sailor Moon character.

Neptune perfectly balances Uranus out with her calm, collected demeanor. She’s prim and polite, but unafraid to be brash and even cold when she has to be. She has the femininity in appearance and personality that makes her so soft and loving, but she also possesses the ferocity and power of a true warrior and defender of the world she loves.

She’s the best. They’re both the best. And they’re very much in love.

Unfortunately, America censored a lot of Sailor Moon when it finally came across the sea and got adapted into English. For example, Sailor Moon’s name in Japanese is Usagi, which got localized and changed to Serena—which is really, really dumb for a reason I won’t delve into, because no spoilers for Sailor Moon in 2024—and was also just flat out racist.

The manga also had a surprising amount of queer characters for the time, and a lot of genders were switched to “fix that”, which is deeply unfortunate. Uranus and Neptune’s relationship in the original manga was straight up romantic, and America decided they couldn’t have that.

So in classic American fashion, they made them cousins instead—

—and decided to keep all the romantic and sexual tension.

All of that hilarity aside, seeing this explicitly queer couple as a child was mind altering. Everything seemed to click into place, to make sense. Of course a woman could love another woman; why not? Why did I have this perception of that as something abnormal, that couldn’t happen, that wasn’t real? I saw it right before my eyes.

And I understand it, too. I understand that I’d looked at other girls in my class the way Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus had looked at each other. I understood that feeling of lightness, of excitement, of elation when I talked to a girl I liked and thought was really pretty. I finally understood what made me feel so isolated and different from the people around me.

I felt absolutely seen, heard, and understood by this silly little anime about magical girls saving the world, more than I ever had before, more than I knew how to put into words. And it impacted me more than I ever realized.

Girls could love other girls, and that was real. I saw myself how real it was in those two beautiful girls, so different and yet so alike, and so perfect for one another.

Sailor Neptune inspired me so much. I realized that just like her, I could be beautiful and strong. I could be feminine and soft, and I could also be fierce and ruthless when it was necessary to be, and there wasn’t shame in being any of those things.

And just like Neptune, Sailor Uranus inspired me by being so authentically herself. She made me want to be myself despite what people may think or say. She kept her hair short, even if others mistook her or disrespected her for looking like a boy, because she wanted to. She took up “masculine” hobbies, like racing in fast cars, because she loved doing it; she loved the exhilaration of it. And she had a girlfriend that she loved, because she loved her. And that is what mattered most.

In other words, I don’t love Sailor Moon and its portrayal of a lesbian couple because it’s perfect. In fact, I love it because it’s not.

Even through American censorship and the whole cousin fiasco, even with the questionably homophobic English translations changed from the original Japanese manga, even from the constant attempts by the show to try to undermine Uranus and Neptune’s romantic relationship—to the two women, none of it mattered; all that mattered to them was each other.

Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus were unbothered, unaffected, and happily content with one another. They were so intensely in love, and absolutely no one and nothing, not even the animators or creators of the characters themselves, were able to stop them from loving each other. And that’s just beautiful.

Thanks so much for reading! 💙💚