Sailor Moon

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Sailor Moon is a 1990s magical girl manga-turned-anime series written by Naoko Takeuchi, and was one of the gateway anime series of the early 90s when English-translated /a/ material began entering the west, alongside other giants of the era like Dragon Ball Z and Ranma 1/2.

It revolves around an ordinary Japenese high schoolgirl named Usagi Tsukino, who stops one day to rescue a cat from being bullied by a couple of little asshole kids. Said cat turns out to be a magical talking cat named Luna, and it recruits her as the first of several magic-empowered female warriors to seek out a missing princess, a quest made difficult because Luna initially doesn't really remember that many details about the princess, why she's looking for her, or what the deal is with the creepy monsters who keep showing up to steal human life-force.

This series is /tg/-relevant mainly because it's one of several popular late 80s-early 2000s anime to get licensed by Guardians of Order, either as setting splatbooks for Big Eyes, Small Mouth or fully marketed as "The Roleplaying Game" of their respective series. In fact, the Sailor Moon RPG was the very first splatbook that Guardians of Order ever did (1998), and was only the second RPG book they'd ever published after the 1997 BESM 1st Edition corebook.

The 'verse

The central conceit of Sailor Moon is that, in a lost era, humanity had a great civilization that stretched across at least the Solar System, a civilization that derived its powers from magic. The ruler of this solar empire reigned over everything from her homeworld on Earth's moon, but Earth, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto all had their own sub-rulers. The last heir to this empire was the Princess of the Moon, who was engaged to the Prince of the Earth. The two were very much in love, but of course there was trouble on the horizon; another woman loved the Prince of Earth, and she become so consumed by envy and jealousy that she sold her soul to dark powers (no, not those Dark Powers) for the magical might to take what she wanted. In a single night of slaughter, she overthrew and destroyed a centuries old civilization singlehandedly... but, ironically, she failed to get what she wanted, as the Moon Princess and the Earth Prince died rather than surrender to her will, using the divine artifact that was the central hub of her civilization to cast their souls an unfathomable distance into the future to be reincarnated.

The series proper begins when those reincarnations finally come of age...

The Characters

The Sailor Scouts

The magical girls who serve as our series protagonists, there are nine Sailor Scouts (or "Sailor Senshi" if you must be a weeaboo and use the original Japanese) representing the moon and the eight planets. They are divided into two groups; the Inner Scouts (Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter), who are Sailor Moon's best buddies and close confidants, and the Outer Scouts (Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Pluto), who are... well, not!

Sailor Moon: Our protagonist, and the reincarnation of the Moon Princess. You probably figured that out, but this was a genuinely shocking twist back in the day.

Sailor Mercury: A teenage genius with water powers.

Sailor Mars: A hot-tempered miko at her family shrine, fries bad guys with fireballs.

Sailor Jupiter: Tall tomboy with lightning powers.

Sailor Venus: Boy-crazy as you'd expect a magical girl associated with the Roman Goddess of Love to be. Ironically, she was the first Sailor Scout to actually awaken to her powers and so she's the single-most experienced magical girl on the team when they first form, having battled mundane crime as "Sailor V" before hooking up with Sailor Moon.

Sailor Saturn: The cutest little bringer of the apocalypse you might ever see. She was the Moon Kingdom's ultimate last fuck-you to any invaders, armed with the power to literally wipe entire solar systems from existence with a swing of her weapon.

Sailors Uranus & Neptune: The main representatives of the Outer Scouts, mostly remembered for being a; the Gay Ones, and b; the Screwups. See, Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune are the story's resident edgelords, being cynical, ruthlessly pragmatic and almost nihilistic; to them, the mission comes first and softer emotions are a weakness. Unfortunately for them, they're living in a magical girl world where the forces of love, hope and kindness literally punch monsters in the face, so they just end up looking like idiots when they try to be edgy. Case in point, they attempt to join the team of an arch-villain in hopes of assassinating her with her own super-weapon, even going so far as to murder Sailor Pluto (their best friend) and Sailor Saturn (their adopted daughter) to prove their loyalty. And then it turns out that the villain's super-weapon doesn't work on the villain herself. She literally calls them out on how dumb this plan was before she vaporizes them.

Sailor Pluto: The single oldest member of the Sailor Scouts, charged with standing guard over the Gates of Time, an epic artifact that lets users travel through or otherwise manipulate time.

The Hangers-On

Tuxedo Mask: Reincarnation of the Earth Prince, you might think he'd be a badass, but nope; this is magical girl show after all. He mostly just shows up in the nick of time to deflect an attack that would've finished off Sailor Moon, spouts a cheesey little peptalk, then flounces off again.

Luna: A magical talking cat who was once the familiar to the Moon Princess. She tries to act as the advisor to the Inner Scouts during their nascent days together, but she's really not very good at it, largely because her memory of the Moon Kingdom has more holes in it than a truckload of Swiss cheese.

Artemis: Luna's counterpart (and eventual husband), Sailor Venus' familiar. Unlike Luna, he does largely remember the Moon Kingdom, so he's initially much more competent than her.

Queen Beryl's Court

Queen Beryl: The witch who destroyed the Moon Kingdom all those centuries ago, and who has since sat on her ass doing nothing. She finally starts stirring during the events of the first arc to try and harvest human life-force to revive her patron god.

The Four Dark Generals: Beryl's personal henchmen, these guys were the closest companions of the Earth Prince in the lost era, and largely were to him what the Inner Scouts are to Sailor Moon. Ironically, the series' creator intended these guys to be the doomed former lovers of the Inner Scouts, but that never got depicted in either the original manga nor the first anime series - it wasn't until the "Sailor Moon Crystal" anime that this story-thread got plucked.