Anime Expo 2014

Kill la Kill! Sailor Moon! Sword Art Online! Massive amounts of cosplayers packed into the Los Angeles Convention Center! Welcome to Anime Expo, the largest anime convention in the United States!

This was my first big convention, and I had tons of fun! Previously, I had only been to smaller conventions, so this was a huge leap for me. Because this was Sailor Moon's 20th Anniversary, I had to take time out of my busy schedule to celebrate my (gateway drug) anime.

Fighting Evil By Moonlight!

As Anime Expo approaches, and I finish up my first ever cosplays (Sailor Mercury from Sailor Moon and Shinji Ikari from the mecha anime Neon Genesis Evangelion) I feel as though I have to write a blog post about WHY I decided to dress up as a magical girl.

The original Sailor Moon anime, or cartoon show, aired in the early nineties in both the original Japanese and English dub cast. Aside from being important for establishing and popularizing nearly every single trope found in the magical girl genre, this show was extremely important for getting me interested in science fiction and fantasy, particularly the superhero genre.

Anyone who watches anime is familiar with how huge of an impact Sailor Moon has made on the genre, and even though the main audience was women it has inspired so many people all around the world with its music and story.

What makes Sailor Moon so great? Both the manga (comic) and anime are unabashedly girly.

The show features a 90's power ballad opening theme, which serenades to the viewer that Sailor Moon "fights evil by moonlight, but wins love by daylight."

It also features the classic transformation sequence, in which the girls with magical powers transform into their superpowered selves. The Sailor Scouts are regular middle school girls who are called into action to rid Earth of evil, and to do this they are awakened by their feline guardians. The girls fight crime, all have fun personalities, and while the show is silly at times, it gets unashamedly dark. For me, Sailor Moon and the Sailor Scouts showed me that any girl could be awakened to their magical powers, fight crime, and look great while doing it. 

Now, twenty years later, the show is being rebooted with a bigger budget, bigger audience, and new animation: 

The primere is this Saturday, and I hope to attend to pay tribute to the show that awakened my love of science fiction and fantasy. This show is so, so important to women in the genre. Not only for the importance of an all-female cast, but also the fact that Nakao Takeuchi, the writer, is a woman who has influenced pop culture so much. 

So thank you. Thank you for everything.