December 10th
Update
- Jay Navok
Caught in a web
A little over a month from now I’ll be able to count
myself as a Sailor Moon fan for 10 years. As I begin to reflect on this
decade, my understanding of my own fandom has begun to change. I don’t mean
that I’m more of a fan or less of a fan, I mean my understanding of myself
during that early time period has changed. Some things have become more
clear, some things have become harder for me to understand. Why I became a
fan I still comprehend, but I want to understand better the actions I took
after that. For me there were two major aspects of fandom in addition to my
appreciation of the show itself. One was of a more personal nature I won’t
discuss here, but the other was the onset of the internet. I’ve mentioned
this before but I want to look at it again.
Consider this. You become a fan of a TV series in the
80s. Transformers maybe. You like the show a lot, you buy its products, you
watch it regularly. You go to the movie. But how do you interact with other
fans of it? Even if newsletters or clubs do exist, how do you find out about
them? While there were circles in college academic clubs, it was very
difficult for the individual fan- particularly those of us who were quite
young- to meet and discuss about the show. Your fandom was limited to the
corporate dimension of watching and purchasing.
Then the internet comes in 1995. I, as a young
teenager, can punch the name of a show I like into Webspider and find
information about it I could never learn before. S and Super? What’s that?
Uranus and Neptune? Now you’re just making things up! I was able to download
the songs from the show before I had the CD soundtrack, engage in a growing
community of other fans, laugh at amusing pages like Daniel Ashbrook's
Sailor Moon Says:
Your Daily Alternative (which is where I learned about SOS, as I
recall), and view pictures and videos from this strange foreign language
version people said was the original. Heck, I still remember one of my first
posts to the SOS mailing list being something along the lines of "So this
Usagi person, that's Serena?" and e-mailing Ashbrook asking why the series
went back to episode one instead of continuing the four sisters arc. (I had
to look up the word "syndication," which was in his reply, in the
dictionary.) It's what first taught me that there's more to media than
changing to the channel you want to watch each day.
The Internet is the only place where taking art someone else
drew and writing "award" on it in MS Paint, the computer equivalent of
crayons, is considered an honor.
Over the course of the months things changed for me
from idle searching and browsing to joining the SOS mailing list when it was
developed (shortly after the campaign itself started) to even participating
in IRC chatrooms. While I’ve not used IRC since the late 1990s, around 96-97
I was pretty active there, particularly in a channel which some of the
Looney mailinglist members frequented, #supportsailors. Meeting the people
there and spending time discussing developments was a big deal, a revolution
in the way you were able to appreciate media. I was even able to get a tape
of episodes 197-200 (raw) just weeks after they aired; something that even
now remains important to me. (Keep in mind I’d not actually seen the Stars
episodes before that!) This is the internet media revolution in a nutshell,
and out of the coincidence of Sailor Moon airing at the same time the
internet was growing, Sailor Moon was really the first series where fans
could take advantage of that. (Companies taking advantage of the net
revolution didn't come around until the last few years, when they began
seeing the internet as a tool to engage the fanbase and began offering
previews and such for download.)
I’m not quite sure what made me plug the name of the
channel into Google a few nights ago but I did so and found something
interesting.
This is
a chatlog of a viewing of the last episode in February 1997, not of #supportsailors
(it’s #sailormoon) but it is mentioned there which is why it showed up in a
search.
I remember some of the screen names there, as these
were people who used the same names across the Sailor Moon web spectrum.
Panda is Brad Lascelle, who would relate to us lots of developments
regarding the series. Interestingly enough I contacted Brad several years
ago when we first began work on Warriors of Legend. He’s no longer involved
in Sailor Moon in any way but it was good to speak with him again, even if
he didn’t remember me. In the original conception we had of the project we
were not only going to look at the reality in fantasy but also the fantasy
in reality; i.e. cover the spread of the series across the globe, with a
chapter on the United States; specifically the confrontation between the
fans and DiC in 1996-97. Due to many shortcomings, the biggest of which is
time restraints, I don't think it'll be in WoL 2. But Lascelle was very
enthusiastic about the idea, offering a comment I’ll never forget on the
“rollercoaster ride” of those years.
As I glanced over this log, I see only echoes of the
past. Even though I knew some of these people and remember the amazing
revelations of episode 200 being discussed soon after it aired, it feels
less real now. A moment of Sailor Moon fandom, frozen, disconnected from
those who lived it and unfamiliar to those who have come long after it.
The one thread that remains, perhaps now a part of the
collective conscious of fandom, are the comments contained therein.
<^Selena> that ending sucked
<_Freefall> Kinda dissapointing
<Mako-Chan> Selena...can't help but agree with you...
<Panda> Selena: Don't tell me you were expecting something unpredictable.
Ah, cynicism and hypercriticism, the staple of Sailor
Moon fandom. While I actually like the anime ending, this part reads to me
like forum posts from the end of PGSM. It seems that fans change, but fandom
never does.
In contrast, the internet changes quite rapidly. Some
people don't seem to grasp that. Did you know that Warriors of Legend was
not the first unofficial English language Sailor Moon book? No, there were
others before us. Like this gem,
The Unofficial Sailor Moon Internet Guide.
Guess it was never updated!
The reviews of the book on Amazon are priceless,
especially the first one (click "See all 8 reviews"), which gives it 5
stars, writing, "Sailor Moon Fanatics Rejoice!" Yes, finally there is a book
that lists Sailor Moon websites. I cannot fathom how I would manage to find
them otherwise. God bless you Barrie Rosen.
If anyone has this travesty of tree pulp gone to waste,
please let us know, I'm always up for a good laugh.
The fact of the matter is that in the late 1990s when
this was published every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Jonathan Mays had a Sailor
Moon website on Geocities, Tripod, or Angelfire. I remember seeing news
reports commenting on how Sailor Moon was not only one of the most searched
topics, but also had more websites about it than almost anything else. When
we were sending manuscripts of the book to publishing companies we'd need to
show that there was still a fanbase to sell it to, and wrote in the
proposal, "An article in last December’s Washington Post (“We’re
Playing Their Toons,” 2/06/04) noted, “On the Internet, hits for the
Japanese anime character Sailor Moon totaled 3,335,000, compared with
491,000 for Mickey Mouse, according to Tokyo-based Marubeni Research
Institute.”"
Odds are most of those tons of hits are leftover 1990s
websites like Ashbrook's (although in all seriousness, his deserves to be
archived because it is, to me, a classic part of the English language Sailor
Moon experience) or Jonathan Mays' which I believe is still active because
he forgot the login to the account it's on.
Those echoes of the past are still around. The internet
and Sailor Moon grew up together, in the same way many of us grew up with
them. To me, they are inexorably intertwined, my understanding of the series
heavily influenced by the net, and my use of the net certainly influenced by
Sailor Moon.
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