All of Them

I’ve watched this show so many times that I can recite the dialogue, but there’s still this moment in season two where something happens between Mamoru and Bunny that I can’t get over. It makes me genuinely upset, and I think about it at three in the morning sometimes, sitting up in bed wondering why he couldn’t just explain himself. Thirty years later and it still bothers me.

The thing is, I love every single character in this show. Not in a diplomatic way where I’m forcing myself to appreciate them—genuinely, absolutely love them all, even the villains. So the idea of ranking them feels impossible to me. Bunny’s my favorite, obviously, but there’s no second place. Everyone’s a first-place character.

I could tell you about specific episodes or scenes that matter most to me, but I’d end up listing all of them. There’s no filler in my head when it comes to Sailor Moon. Every episode is the best episode because they all have something that gets to me.

Part of it’s pure design and craft. The character work in this show—how each person looks, moves, speaks—is so precise that you can’t dismiss anyone. They’re all perfectly realized. But it goes beyond that. Sailor Moon understands something about how people actually are that a lot of other things miss. Everything in it works.

I want to talk about this show constantly. All the rankings and top tens I’ve read—none of them match what I actually think, but I read them anyway because I’ll take any excuse to think about these characters more. It’s not about proving anything. It’s just permanent.

You can’t rank what you love this much, but you can’t stop either, which means every list is just another way of admitting you’re obsessed. Some of them get it right anyway.