Sailor Moon is the poster child for the magical girl genre, a genre that’s often associated with a younger audience and “less mature” content. But what if I told you this particular magical girl series covered topics like genocide, human experimentation, incest, and many other similar ideas. Today we’ll be taking a look at the darker and weirder side of Sailor Moon and why this aspect of it seems to be so often left out of popular discussion.
To understand how Sailor Moon approaches these topics, we first have to take a look at what Sailor Moon actually is in relation to the storied history of magical girls. Magical Girls as an anime genre first came into existence in the late 1960s with shows like Mahōtsukai Sally and Himitsu no Akko-chan, and over the next two decades the genre would slowly accumulate more and more of the magical girl tropes that we know…
