#i've just always been so annoyed by how jadeite is treated in the fandom lol

[nocturnalserenade]

I feel like I have to somewhat disagree with this. As someone who always loved Jadeite, as a character and especially as a villain, I too was always baffled at how underappreciated (and even actively disliked) he is in the fandom. Because yes, as you said he IS a fun and entertaining villain! I can understand not liking him but why in the world would you treat him SO poorly compared to the others? His schemes were so fun and over the top, his thing with illusions and disguises was cool (and it came BEFORE Team Rocket ;P), his interactions with the senshi’s team were pretty amusing and towards his last episodes you can even see a glimpse of respect for them (naturally I’m disregarding his infamous last line since it was so stupidly out of character and random), it would have been nice to have him around longer and maybe even getting close to some kind of pseudo-redemption before his death, although I don’t think he even needs it to be interesting. BUT, the potential to do something more with him was there.

That said, I personally think his Japanese voice was a pretty good choice for him actually, although I have to admit the quality of the Japanese audio in your video is so bad it DOES make it sound very cheap haha. I know it might be a matter of preference, but in my opinion him and Zoisite actually had the best VAs in the Japanese version among the Shitennou, not necessarily in terms of professionality, but in the sense that they perfectly matched their personality, which I think is more important than sounding as villanous as possible. Zoisite has a voice that perfectly captures his vain and sneaky personality for example, with its softness somewhat masking and emphasizing at the same time his vileness, and Jadeite has that smooth, confident voice with a touch of seductiveness in his tone, that fits very well with his schemes being mostly about charming crowds of people. He’s a deceiver who excels at luring people with beautiful traps that exploit people’s desires. So it’s more fitting that his voice would be that of a calm and calculated charmer rather than a cartoonish villain who is metaphorically screaming at the audience “I’m evil!! Don’t you want to punch me??” with every sentence imo, as much as it would obviously add to the fun factor. Either way, I am pretty certain fans aren’t disliking/ignoring him because he’s not enough "fun" or because his voice isn’t on par with the others.

I'll put the rest under a cut because it turned out embarassingly long and I don't want to subject my mutuals to my rants about Jadeite lol.

You know what Jadeite objectively lacks in the anime that most fans really care about, and that the other three have? A romance and a sad death, that’s it. Kunzite only has one of those so, unsurprisingly, even he is left way behind the other two who are the undisputed stars of the group, and he lives in Zoisite's shadow and often has to fight for last place with Jadeite. ;P

I think this lack of a "sentimental" aspect for his character is what makes people treat him so differently from the rest. Because if you take as counter-example other smaller shitennou-focused fan communities which give ALL the shitennou an important personal bond/connection, like those who pair them up with the senshi or those who focus on the shitennou's relationship with Mamoru, suddenly you will not find the same huge gap between Jadeite and the others in terms of appreciation. Outside of that, he's not only mostly ignored, but when he's not ignored he's either just turned into the joke of the group (best case scenario, maybe even in a kinda sympathetic way) or just criticized to no end. And all the bashing he gets is pretty hilarious in how little it makes sense and how out of proportion it is, when you really think about it.

Literally everything he does is wrong for the fandom.

He’s either too evil, or not evil enough, too incompetent, too boring because he uses “the same plans”, too arrogant, too bland, a jerk/misogynist for not reciprocating a youma's crush, a jerk/misogynist for his contempt for humans, a failure etc. You can't win, people just LOVE to hate him. Nevermind that he does more or less the same things the other three do at the end of the day. He has a preferred strategy of course, just like the others, and he doesn’t just mindlessly replicate it like fans make it out to be, he uses smart variations of it for every new plan, which mostly work out well for a good while, sometimes even for days, before he gets caught. The other three aren't much different. They often stick to a preferred strategy and they repeat it multiple times, sometimes regardless of whether it has actually proved successful or not. Their plans also inevitably fail when the senshi show up. They can all be ruthless and spiteful and full of themselves. They can be insensitive to the people who love them. They can be overconfident and stubbornly insist with ineffective plans over and over. Didn’t Nephrite keep using his “pick one single person whose energy is about to peak” plan a lot despite always ending up getting stopped as soon as the peak happens? And Kunzite kept repeating those princess-related events to attract the Princess/Sailor Moon even though they technically made little sense and never really helped him figure out the senshi's identities. They all had their screw-up moments and it's okay! They're the villains, they're supposed to fail eventually!

Yet you're always gonna hear “lol jadeite always recycles the same stupid/failing plans, what a loser!!” as if he was especially bad at everything he did. Even though those plans more often than not absolutely fulfilled their purpose. When the others do something silly/useless (even repeatedly), it's just bad writing instead, or there's some hidden good reason behind it (which is 100% fan speculation). After all this time of seeing this happen I've come to the conclusion that it's clearly just a bias. Because all of them have their successes, their failures and their silly moments, the only thing that changes wildly is the fans' interpretations of those things, based on which shitennou they're talking about. I think the other three get a pass for mostly anything specifically because they have that romantic/tragic arc that makes people empathize more with them, and take them more seriously and with a certain protectiveness no matter what, so their shortcomings/negative aspects are quickly justified/diminished and the good things greatly emphasized. With Jadeite it's the opposite and it always was basically fandom tradition to pick apart whatever he did or did not do for fun, because fans couldn't find anything entertaining to do with him except this.

Lastly, Jadeite has also been somewhat "held back" by the fact he was the first villain. Of course his plans seem to lack variety, it was the beginning and literally the only thing the Dark Kingdom needed at that point, up until his last 3 episodes or so, was collecting energy, so even if his schemes were all wildly different and fun, the goal was always the same and people perceive this as "he always does the same stuff" even though he doesn't really. It's literally his only assigned job and he's inventing 12million ways to do it really what do you want MORE lol. The first 13 episodes he's in were also the most light-hearted of the season, the stakes weren't high, the focus was on introducing the characters, blahblahblah of course it's less exciting than later on when a lot of drama and more serious shit suddenly starts going down. It was simply not possible to make a compelling and dramatic villain arc that early, without distracting too much from the main plot. So he got the least emotional and impactful character arc of the four.

Omg I'm writing too much. Bottom line is, Jadeite always got an unfair treatment from the fandom and my point (that I shamelessly and unnecessarily dragged out a lot lol) was simply that his voice is really the last of his problems, if it even is one. There's nothing uniquely wrong in how he was portrayed or voiced imo. It's just a fandom bias. He had his limitations of course, due mostly to how the story was structured, and the anime did do him dirty a couple of times, but come on, it's really not hard to enjoy him as a villain even with the little he got. Most of the fandom simply lacks a reason to be emotionally attached to him, and is biased against him by default, no matter what he does or how much of a cool villain he actually is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So I've always had a fondness and appreciation for Jadeite, the Starter Villain of Sailor Moon, but for a long time he was the least popular of the Shittenou (Four Heavenly Kings) by far. Only in recent years has he become more appreciated, matching and sometimes even passing Kunzite in many polls. For a while, I didn't quite get it: yeah, he's pretty nondescript in the manga and has a stock villainous personality in the anime lacking the nuances and dynamics with others that his colleagues have, but he's so entertaining as a villain! It's fun to see what variation on the same scheme and which thing to lure in humans he pulls, it's fun to see him dress up in disguises Team Rocket style, and it's fun to see him being such a smug asshole who ends up falling from grace and getting more and more frustrated as a result.

But now, I have finally identified the problem. His voice.

For years, the Sailor Moon fan community dealt primarily in the subbed original Japanese version of the 90s anime. And as you can hear above, Masaya Onosaka's performance is....not great. He was a fresh new voice actor at the time of casting (something not true of literally every other Dark Kingdom villains' casting) and it shows in the way he delivers Jadeite's lines. It's smug and villainous, yes, but there's no (ironically enough) ENERGY to it. There's no oomph, nothing that takes advantage of the material and elevates it into being something particularly enjoyable to hear. Fans saw Jadeite as just a bland villain because, well, he sounds like just a bland villain. Even his evil laugh sounds astonishingly half-assed!

Now, obviously Onosaka improved as a voice actor overtime. But his Jadeite sucked. Daisuke Kishio voices Jadeite in Sailor Moon Crystal, and he sounds better. He'd have to deepen his voice a little to be Jadeite from the 90s anime, but he's got the talent to do that.

The DiC dub of the 90s may be a butchery of the source material, but Tony Daniels as Jadeite...er, "Jedite", understood the assignment. He was also a fresh new voice actor but he knew that his character should sound like a campy, sneering supervillain and relish his wicked lines. He also did much better conveying a sense of desperation when faced with setbacks, defeat and ultimately execution. Those screams at the end actually sound real.

And then we have Todd Haberkorn, voicing Jadeite in the Viz dub of the 90s anime and its dub of Sailor Moon Crystal. He is, IMO, the absolute best Jadeite voice: not only does he make his performances for each version sound distinct (with the former sounding deeper, harsher and more villainous while the latter is higher pitched and more immature sounding which makes it easy to switch over to good once he's cleansed), but he is especially fantastic for 90s anime Jadeite. He sounds like Daniels if he toned down the ham while amping up the douche, making Jadeite sound like the kind of overconfident, pretentious, misogynistic jerk you want to deck in the face. And he's just as perfect at selling his anger and, in the end, his fear. He reads the same lines as Onosaka, but he gives them so much more character.

(4:12 is the best part, btw. I literally expected "Foiled again!" to follow. :P)