My Hot Take on Sailor Moon S is a Sin and Cosine

[Dr. C]

So I’m writing up this blog series called a “Dub off” which is essentially watching Cloverway fun of Sailor Moon and the Viz version and making notes of which dub is better.

I love reading the comments online about how awful the cousin censorship was and like to overlook one thing about Viz...

THE VOICE ACTING OF THE VIZ SAILOR SENSHI ARE TERRIBLE

Just making a concise list here

Moon-Hate her

Mars and Mercury-so generic I can’t even identify the two

EDIT forgot Jupiter

Viz Actor is okay and non offensive but Susan Roman stays queen.

Venus-Better than Cloverway worse than DiC... does that make it a... half win?

Uranus and Saturn- Uranus is overall pretty similar and Hotaru I need to listen to more but overall I have no complaints so those are ties...

Neptune-A matter of personal taste. The voice actor in the Cloverway dub had a particularly serene and motherly vocal inflection that made her sound really mature and elegant. The Viz and Japanese present her as elegant but subtly snobby and arrogant. Preferred personality is kind of the game here.

Chibiusa/Rini-Viz wins... how hard was it to cast the voice actor of a little girl that didn’t sound annoying in the 99s? Lots of shows had that problem back then though so I can’t blame Cloverway but as a Canadian, having to endure Sugar everyday after school  on The Zone and watch this dub makes it SO MUCH WORSE because you KNOW she put ZERO EFFORT into her voice acting. 

Secondly, product of its time might seem “weak” but it’s true. No way children’s  television networks are going to piss off parents and thus advertisers with an overtly lesbian couple when DIC has marketed it as the little girl equivalent of Power Rangers. Cloverway got handed a really awkward bag in the first place. 

Thirdly, English fans need to stop holding Japanese parents on a pedestal and thinking they were so much more accepting. Sailor Moon SS and its gross departure from the Manga by all but excluding Uranus and Neptune was because of parental backlash. If you want to rag on an English dub company for censoring an entire season then fair is fair. It’s time to pull those little halos off of Japanese heads. You can say what about Zoisite but he was a VILLAIN and an ADULT. Being evil and gay scares little girls from the perils of homosexuality is not a hard extrapolation to make. So yeah... stop doing that.

Fourthly, Sailor Moon S is a dark season and the much needed levity from the unintentional comedy of trying so hard to dub away the lesbian that they accidentally created cousin on cousin incest is in my opinion, actually a breath of fresh air for the show. Now by no means am I saying I’m okay with the censorship. But things get really bleak here so when I can sit there and go... “Cloverway made them say what now? BWAHAHA”, I mean given the choice between my sexual orientation being represented and the gift of meta humor that keeps on giving, I will take exclusion and a belly full of laughs but that is just me. I appreciate the humor however accidental the Cloverway dub brings. 

Finally the minor alterations made outside of the cousins thing do make sense from a consumer. In one episode British people were redubned as French because English speaking people just aren’t going to appear exotic to Americans and no way are American parents going to find drunk Serena funny when their kids are watching that stuff. 

The end result is you have a dub with a generally superior voice acting cast that can get a bit kooky at times and you have a dub that as an inferior voice acting cast that stays faithful to the dub.

If we are going to keep an open mind here then let me give you a sneak preview of my blog...

Which dub do you watch? The answer is you should watch certain episodes in Viz and certain episodes in Cloverway to have the best viewer experience possible. When Viz is better it is usually MUCH BETtER and when Cloverway isn’t worse it’s BETTER. The issue is how adversely the censorship affects the dub. In other words, the two are like Sin and Cosine on a graph in quality of entertainment to me which I find hilarious.

If you are LGBTQ like myself I understand the beef with censorship truly I do. If it upsets you that much then by all means, go full Viz. My heart goes out to you but my ears (OMG that voice actor for Sialor Moon is TERRIBLE! MAKE IT STOP!) just happen to hurt a little more.

Edited October 10, 2019 by Dr. C