Sailor Moon Made Me Queer

Sailor Moon made me queer.

And I mean that in a relatively direct way. When I was a kid, I spent hours crawling the Kidz Bop website—which, at the time, had some social media and video hosting features. Kids could upload a video to what was essentially a super-regulated YouTube clone, post status updates to what was essentially a super-regulated Facebook wall, and chat with other users in what was essentially a super-regulated facsimile of actual DMs and PMs. I was enamored with the idea of making videos as a kid, but I would be too much of a do-gooder to lie and say that I was thirteen for at least another year or two, which kept me away from actual YouTube. I was an avid listener of Kidz Bop (on account of being too much of a do-gooder to listen to songs with bad words for at least another year or five), so it worked out.

I started by filming myself badly playing the melody of the Pokémon theme on keyboard—I couldn’t play with my left-hand yet, and I’m not certain that I even knew people could—or doing random skits with a friend. The plan was to be a Kidzbop Kid, though I was willing to accept Smosh-esque sketch comic as a suitable day job as I worked my way up. Surprisingly, neither worked out.

My interests would end up shifting more towards art videos, though, as I found people uploading their speedpaints, AMVs, and animations. I found this one girl, in particular, that I immediately understood as being the coolest user on the site. She’d upload these videos that she would draw in MS Paint and throw together in Windows Movie Maker. In one, a middle school girl underwent a brilliant transformation, engulfed in rainbows and sparkles and a low quality mp3 file in the background, until she emerged with a cute skirt and a pair of dog ears. This, I would learn, was her magical girl OC.

I was obsessed! I read through her page to find out more about this new genre, and found out her two favorite shows: Mew Mew Power and Sailor Moon. In a bid to impress her (and likely gain a few extra eyes on my own animated videos, because child me apparently understood the virtues of networking even when they didn’t know the first thing about drawing), I started watching both of them.