reincarnation is core to the elements of Sailor Moon, and vital for “I’m really secretly a princess of a magic kingdom but live in the real world!”
it’s also a huge source of problems as it’s used to spackle over characterization – Usagi is still Usagi Tsukino, normal person, for long after the other Inners become “I am so loyal to my mission to protect this person I’m going to die for her sake”, which is a huge contributor to them being burned up. they get all the characterization and knowledge they need from their past lives, and it makes them what Usagi needs, and they don’t approach things for their own reasons or by their own means.
you can’t do that in a movie because you can’t put that shit on the screen and you need them to be different. they can’t do things because reincarnation. it can’t be an answer but it could be a source of something
so in light of this: what does reincarnation mean? what is its thematic significance and how is the reality within the film built from it?
because like
the only villain who was there for and cares about the events of the silver millennium is Beryl and her henchpeople
everyone got reincarnated (you can say it was sailor saturn’ss doing this time, you know ahead of time)
and she has done a lot of work and effort to get all her memories back and has one hundred percent continuity of identity with Beryl of the past and all her old grudges and resentments
but then what does that mean? should knowledge of their past lives be something they fear?
With that framing, the easy answer is: reincarnation means forgiveness-slash-acceptance, a fresh start that nonetheless retains the lessons of the past. As opposed on one side to Beryl’s permanent grudges and inability to let go of what she has lost and on the other side to rootless isolation and those-who-forget-the-past-are-doomed-to-repeat-it.
That can actually be part of the Senshi’s problem at the start - they don’t like looking back at their memories of the Silver Millennium because the strongest ones are of the awful final days when the stress of everything being torn down around them brought out everyone’s most unpleasant side, they’re just working to find the Moon Princess because that’s how they deal with the problem of the Dark Kingdom monsters and after that they can drop it and never think about it and maybe each other again. Through the course of the movie/s and with Usagi’s encouragement they get to a position of “it wasn’t perfect but it was good nonetheless, and even though it’s gone and never coming back we can look forward to building something new which incorporates its best aspects.”
that’s the position they arrive at, yes
but, like
“I don’t know how to feel about my past life” is a struggle no person in the audience goes through
if that is their struggle in itself, then nobody’s going to be able to relate
it has to be analogous to something
that they start at “our past lives make us super cool and give us authority and the Silver Millennium is in charge” and end “our past lives are a source of inspiration and happiness but our lives are our own and the future is something we forge ourselves” has to be analogous to something normal people experience
The analogy I was trying for (though looking back I can see I wasn’t clear enough about it) is “living in the aftermath of tragedy and loss, once you have enough distance that it’s no longer immediately overwhelming”. That doesn’t work well with a starting attitude of ‘Silver Millennium means we in charge bitches’ which wants an analogy somewhere closer to “living in the shadow of former empire/squandered inheritance” (probably not hashtag-relatable enough) or “learning that the people/community you love so much did horrible things in the past” (which I think to work right needs more loading on the Silver Millennium’s Rotten Side than you want).
But I don’t think Sailor Moon is or should be about being traumatized. Loss, maybe (it always gets run back), danger and sacrifice, but the only time it’s about trauma is the last arc of the manga, and I am ethically obligated to spit every time I mention it. Crystal Tokyo may break everything about events and continuity and dramatic tension, but it does say something “After all of these things happen, there will be a happy ending where everything is great and everyone is fine.” It’s not a good idea to assure that before things look dark, but you should never contradict it. Nobody gets PTSD. Sailor Senshi are not child soldiers. The Silver Millennium was as good as it appears to be, unlike the predecessors of every other MCU hero.
And it’s not so much about “we in charge bitches” as “we’re working for something big and important and gain authority from that.” If I didn’t have to worry about how it fit with Beryl and I didn’t have to answer the question “what does the specific fact that you are a person who is reincarnated mean?” and it was just about Silver Millennium ties, I’d say it’s another aspect of growing up: when they thought the Silver Millennium was going to swoop in any day and they were doing things in line with what the Silver Millennium wanted and following their playbook with their ability to get bailed out of danger, then they were doing things because their parents said to and under their parents protection. Finding out no help is coming and they have no special authority to call upon and nobody will tell them what it all means because it must be something they make themselves, is when they do things because they have their own set of values and goals, not just because their parents told them to.
But that doesn’t work at all with Beryl, only kind of with Saturn, and doesn’t address “what does the specific fact that you are a person who is reincarnated mean?” Who is the person they remember, how much do they remember, that kind of thing.
The other option was reincarnation was ancestry-in-general, which basically makes Queen Beryl into Killmonger because she’s obsessed with wrongs done to her ancestry, and Usagi learns to take pride in one’s ancestors but not be obsessed with them. But American audiences would likely flip their shit at this if they figured it out, because they would expect “ancestry” to be a source of nothing but wickedness or victimization – it would be too dangerous a subject to touch. So I’d put it with the “maybes” if there is nothing more relevant to the idea of growing up.
…I was about to say that it sounds like you’re grasping for the concept of “heritage.” Which is pretty much what you say in your last paragraph, so, uh, here’s one independent voice claiming that you seem to be learning in that direction.
And I do think that playing with themes of heritage is culturally dangerous, but not in the way you’re describing. Americans certainly understand the idea of taking pride in your glorious heritage; they’re less sanguine about the prospect that you have to move beyond that identification.
(Which is to say, in very blunt crude terms – “downhome” Red Tribe norms support heritage identification for white people, woke Blue Tribe norms support heritage identification for everyone except white people, and so between them they capture almost everyone except the sector of liberal white folks who are inclined to feel guilty about themselves.)
But in fact I imagine that you could make this work just fine. “Modulated, critical acceptance of our past and its glories” is really not so far from a plausible consensus position. Especially if you keep the metaphor strong and let the reincarnations be actual reincarnations instead of straight-up heritage porting.