To begin with, any Tuxedo Mask parts have to be wiped away into a single Easter Egg fanservice line of dialogue, or a post-credits scene that never gets followed up on. But otherwise, the MCU’s take on Mamoru’s kind of character is actually pretty common. Sure, it’s one of the things criticized about the MCU, that the love interest that doesn’t get to do much and is lip-service important only, but is common nonetheless. And Sailor Moon’s various source materials pretty much agree: Mamoru is basically Jane Foster as the plot MacGuffin in the first half of Dark World.also sailor uranus and sailor neptune (and let’s say sailor ceres, round the team out) are state-sanctioned superheroes with the full backing and material support of either SHIELD or its Japanese governmental equivalent because Japan has to have its own version of everything. the sailor team has to use hardware- or thrift-store supplies for everything that isn’t covered by their magical gear, and the outers have professionally made superheroing equipment. when they show up to find and ‘neutralize’ Sailor Saturn, they have some other heroes with them, like say black widow and war machine, who report to them and thus serve as antagonists to the sailor team.
because the thing that makes the outers work as antagonists in S is that usagi looks up at them and goes “oh my God you guys are so cool, you have your lives totally together, I look up to you and want to be you because you are the apotheosis of what every kid thinks a Cool Grown-Up is”, and then finds the cost of having everything she aspires to, is giving up on the “childish” notion of hope that defines her
how do you do mamoru and chibiusa though
the core of what mamoru does and what he is is something that A: you cannot do in a movie and B: goes against what everything else is doing. oh and C: after season 1 the anime has absolutely nothing to do with him. but because usagi’s love for him is such a huge portion of her origin, you can’t ignore him – but what he does doesn’t work with anything else!
so much of what chibiusa is tied into totally breaks the world and cannot be made to play well with anyone else. you can cut that out and give her another origin (like queen serenity’s biological daughter fostered to queen beryl then flung forward in time) to be someone who emerges from a murky space with a relationship to usagi that pushes her into a relationship that is belligerent but close. but then she’s still not usagi’s daughter, which is surmountable, as they don’t act like a mother and daughter. without the authoritative “well my future self said this was a good idea and she seems pretty on the ball” thing to afford legitimacy, why would she ever get involved in any of this nonsense that might be dangerous? why would anyone let her?
And so, the chosen MCU solution for these “normie-type” love interests (Christine Palmer, Betty Ross, Jane Foster) is to quietly write them off with a single line of dialogue, or just to ignore them entirely, in the case of Ross. Even Pepper’s role is continually diminished and they take the time to de-power her, but that can point to a slightly less story-problematic approach to Mamoru. He gets some lip service plot importance at some point (wears the armor, one moment of wielding the sword before he gets smacked down), Usagi saves him, techno-babble explains why he can no longer manifest his powers, Mamoru from then on is just the supportive love interest figure who pops in for single scenes whenever the writers wanna get their Thin Man banter on.
The Flash did a time travel kid this season. I don’t watch the Flash, so I don’t know if it worked. The Young Justice cartoon had Bart Allen show up. You have the weirdness of River Song and Amy Pond. There were the future kids from Charmed. I think it’s doable, as long as Chibiusa only shows up for specific missions, rather than hanging around without a purpose. Not unlike Thor being on Earth, actually. He shows up, does a mission, leaves for Asgard. Similarly, Chibiusa has to show up with a purpose, complete it, and then return to the future. Part of what would make this palatable for the mainstream, though, is to never outright say who Chibiusa is, only have easter egg hints. To any audience not in the know, she’s just someone who brings exposition and stakes in the form of how well/badly the future is going.
Otherwise, you have the “comedy the hell out of this premise” MCU tactic, wherein the film is actually a (not so) subtle send-up of Back to the Future, set from Chibiusa’s perspective. So we get to see the senshi the way Spiderman Homecoming sees Tony Stark.I mean, Mamoru could be a spud, but people complain about the spuds, and Usagi would go after him rather than let him go off to Idaho to be with the other spuds on the spud farm.
Don’t cite Charmed as evidence a premise will work. That’s bad. That’s no good. That season made no sense (it had a very good ending, though). And Dr. Who is just nonsense from a continuity perspective, it can’t be predecent.
She can’t be Future Trunksing it and showing up from the future for missions, because this world has superheroes, any one of them is better than her at whatever her mission is, why is she doing it? It makes sense if she does it by accident once, not multiple times. But her entire presence in R is her not being on a mission at all, and her most important role in S is not related to that at all and would be vastly cheapened if it was a “mission” (because it’s to be Hotaru’s friend). If you just have a character who is from the future, and there’s no explanation of why or how (since you can’t do that), and they’re not even the most important thing going on in that movie, the audience is going to be irate. What is she going to look like, if the audience doesn’t already know?
OK, since this now seems to be reasonably central to the game being played here, I’m going to be a party-ruiner and ask:
My initial understanding of the prompt was “figure out what Sailor Moon would look like as a modern big-budget spectacle-heavy Save-the-Cat-savvy Western cinematic universe.” Apparently the prompt is actually “figure out what Sailor Moon would look like if it were jammed into the literal MCU.” And, like…why?
I understand the appeal of that first thing as an exercise in narrative wrangling and genre translation (which are indeed skills that ought to be exercised more often and in more places). My sense is that going from there to the second thing is almost entirely deadweight loss. It’s something you can more or less do coherently, in the sense that the Marvel universe is already such a thematic kitchen-sink clusterfuck that it’s not going to cause any more problems to insert yet another group of heroes with a totally orthogonal concept, but…it is in fact going to do damage to the Sailor Moon story, and I’m not seeing what the gain is. Sailor Moon stories and conflicts are built around the idea that magical girls are (a) unlike any publicly-known thing and (b) the best possible tool to deal with their associated problems and villains; also they have a very distinct narrative-aesthetic style. Saying “oh, yeah, Black Widow was there too” has basically no upside that I can see.