 |
|
the how and why:HS! began life as a proto-Haruka and Michiru website, which never got published. Upon realizing that no one had (at the time) really addressed their relationship beyond a general "they're very close, wink wink, nudge nudge, it's so lovely" approach, while alt.fan.sailor-moon cycled through the usual flamewars fairly rapidly, I decided to gather together enough information for a few essays' worth of information. It was never intended to be very big. However, by the time I'd gathered together enough evidence to support the idea of Haruka and Michiru as a lesbian couple, Naoko said as much at the 1998 San Diego ComicCon. Furthermore, enough Uranus and Neptune shrines had sprung up that the effort seemed redundant. I had been taking an active interest in sex and gender issues again since moving to Toronto in late 1996, and began getting more seriously into Sailormoon at the beginning of 1997 as well. At the point where a friend sent me Pat Califia's Sex Changes and Kate Bornstein's My Gender Workbook, I'd begun collecting subtitled tapes and raving to anyone who would listen about how wonderful it was to find strong, deep and powerful lesbian characters in a children's show. I devote practically obsessive attention to my interests and read voraciously about them; it only stood to reason that, as I began once more reading sex-radical/ sex-positive feminist writing, I would begin seeing Sailormoon through that filter, especially as the subversive qualities made themselves evident. Zoisite. The Dead Moon Circus. The manga Sailormars ("in my high heels, I'll punish you!"). The question of whether or not to broaden the pages' scope was answered when I finally got my hands on a clip of the Starlights' henshin sequence; Ellen DeGeneres had recently come out on North American prime-time TV, and I thought: "We're getting excited about a drab- haired dyke's three-second kiss, but an instant sex change sequence in a show for 12-year-old girls goes unnoticed in Japan?!" We've already seen entire episodes get dropped and characters entirely rewritten, and we know that having subsequent seasons dubbed intact is a pipe dream. On top of everything else, because of gossip, mistranslation, lack of translation (S and Stars have been available raw for a couple of years now, but were only just recently fansubbed in their entirety), the censors of various other countries and just plain denial on the part of some fans, a lot of people are misinformed about exactly what goes on in the series. (Some of that gossip can be much more entertaining than the real thing; witness Prince Uranus!) So Hello Sailor! deals with the relationships, sexuality and gender issues in Sailormoon. This includes transgendered characters (ranging from Haruka to Fisheye and the Starlights), sexual orientation, age differences, romantic relationships, and more. (Due to the depth and breadth of the project, not everything will be available right away.) |
|
