I Wrote Sailor Moon Fanfiction

The first fanfiction that I ever wrote was for Sailor Moon.

I was eleven and had been writing stories for three years — mostly horror (zombies, vampires, and slashers) and fantasy (dragons, magic, and elves). I started watching Sailor Moon on Cartoon Network after school. It had ended its original run by the time I discovered it, but I treated it like it was brand new. I told my friends about it in class, wrote down the names of all the sailor scouts, descriptions of their hair colors and powers, and dreamed up epic battles, storylines, and misadventures. My sisters and I argued about who was the best (Mercury for me, Mars and Jupiter for them) and whether or not Serena and Tuxedo Mask would end up together. We did not have any Sailor Moon dolls or figurines so we could not act out our original stories, which we did with other toys like beanie babies, Barbie, and action figures, and my appetite for the characters and their world grew untended.

I had an epiphany one afternoon after finishing up a short horror story starring some of the kids in my fifth-grade class. I realized that if I could not wait for all the episodes of the show to be available at once and did not have the toys to play with then I could write my own stories. I did not know at the time that what I planned to do was called fanfiction, because I had not yet had my internet-awakening, but I immediately started brainstorming ideas.

In one sitting that evening, in a black and white composition book that was meant for schoolwork, I wrote a long (or what I thought was long as a child but was probably only fifteen pages) story about Queen Serenity and the final days of civilization on the moon. It was a very Superman-esque origin story where, to save her baby from destruction and gift mankind a powerful protector, Serenity fights off assassins to spend her final moments sending her daughter to Earth before their world collapses. It was the moon so it didn’t blow up or anything, but there was a Civil War between the Moon Kingdom and the Dark Kingdom that resulted in the destruction of all life. It was all very dramatic and melancholy (and mostly a reimagining of canonical events). It ended with a flash-forward to Serena meeting the cat Luna who I had written with an identically cynical attitude as Salem from Sabrina The Teenage Witch. I had seen some backstory about Queen Serenity before but did not feel satisfied that we had been told her story in full.

I planned to write a lot more but lost interest in it when my brother rented Resident Evil 2 and I realized that the second disk allowed you to play with the female protagonist Claire. I got completely lost in that for a long time and it heavily influenced everything that I wrote.

I lost that composition book during one of our many moves, but I held onto it for a while, glancing back over it once or twice. My mom liked it. Good moms like everything that their kids do. I didn’t know that then so I felt validated. My friends in class thought it was good too but I had a suspicion that they skimmed more than they read. That annoyed me.

My obsession with Sailor Moon is what led me to other childhood favorites like Tenchi Muyo! and Ranma 1/2 and into a devastating, spiraling love affair with Dragon Ball Z.

Once we moved to New York City and I was old enough to be trusted to leave the house on my own (13), one of my uncles told me whispered legends of hole-in-the-wall video stores that sold imported, subtitled anime tapes that were not yet released in America. I bought so many Dragonball Z movies on videocassette that my mother started asking me what was really on those tapes — like I was doing something nefarious. She came with me to the store once, saw a bunch of pornos on sale in a seedy corner, and then forbade me to go back. I did not listen, of course. I just started stashing my tapes under some clothes in the closet.

I was the envy of my classmates because I knew about future Trunks years before his origin story came to American audiences in English dub. I had all the best movies and categorized them by animation quality, which admittedly varied.

I became an unabashed weeaboo. But that’s a series of stories that deserve their own posts.

Japanese culture was a huge influence on my childhood, but the first aspect of it that I ever fell in love with was a charming little anime called Sailor Moon. I never wrote fanfiction for any other show.

This is a blog post that originally appeared on my site Metallically Black under the title I Wrote Sailor Moon Fanfiction.

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