Someone Is Uploading Sailor Moon and I’m Not Asking Questions

A YouTube channel called Panaceia was quietly uploading the German dub of Sailor Moon—almost daily, good quality, no ads. Was it legal? I winked. The point is that Sailor Moon was suddenly just there, free, in the version I grew up with, and the transformation phrase—Macht der Mondnebel, mach auf!—hit exactly the same way it did when I was ten and watching it after school.

There’s a specific pleasure in rediscovering something you loved before you were old enough to be embarrassed by it. Sailor Moon is ridiculous and earnest and entirely sincere about its melodrama, and it still is. Usagi trips over nothing. The villains monologue at length. Love conquers everything including death, repeatedly, without much explanation. It asks nothing of you except to believe it for twenty minutes, and somehow that’s still enough.